Occupy Oakland Shuts Down City
An estimated crowd of 10,000 Occupy Wall Street protesters took to the streets of Oakland in what activists call the nation’s first general strike since 1946.
Labor unions and teachers' organizations pledged support. Hundreds of teachers didn't show up for work, but the district was able to find substitutes and the schools remained open. Several businesses, including the Grand Lake Theater and Men’s Wearhouse, closed in solidarity.
Despite the longshoremen's union's efforts to keep the Port of Oakland open, maritime operations at the port have been officially shut down by protesters.
Also, while the day's events were peaceful, there were some incidents of rowdiness as windows were smashed, and graffitti spray-painted on some businesses. The Occupy protesters could be seen trying to stop those who were committing acts of vandalism, and even returning to clean up graffitti from defaced buildings. Mayor Jean Quan praised the protesters for their efforts towards keeping the event peaceful.
The businesses that suffered vandalism then became a sort of "tourist attraction" as people gathered to photograph the damage, and some even gathered shards of broken glass to keep as souvenirs.
At one intersection, two protesters were injured when they were struck by a Mercedes Benz. (Does anyone else see the irony there?) Witnesses say the pedestrians were struck intentionally, and became angry when the driver was released by the police. Neither of the protesters are said to have life-threatening injuries.
Then tensions escalated late Thursday after a group of protesters took over an abandoned building. Police cleared the building with tear-gas and flashbang grenades. Riot police then proceeded to raid the protesters' main camp, arresting between 30 and 40 people.
How long before someone finds the driver on Facebook? 4chan? Anyone?
Here's the face of the Mercedes boy who ran over the protesters in Oakland.
"Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
MB douche. Thanks for the link.
I find it very strange (ok, maybe not so much) that if someone throws a bottle at fully-armored cops, that person gets his or her skull bashed in.
But if someone runs over a protester in a MB, they get to go home without so much as a ticket. Double-standard anyone?
Before enlightenment - chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment - chop wood, carry water.
It certainly answers the questions of "who do you serve, who do you protect?".
the window-smashing, the fire-setting, and other such destruction is incredibly regretable. it will only serve to shift public opinion against the movement. i credit those that tried to stop the destruction, and those that worked to clean it up. breaking some bank windows, however good it might feel at the time, is a pointless exercise that undermines the effort.
thus, the OWS security committees need to address this issue, and the potential for violence increasing. if the various security committtees have not already made plans, they need to decide how they are going to handle this type of disturbance--and, importantly, talk about how to handle the more active anarchists, the agent provocateurs, and those that might just get swept up in to doing something unfortunate.
Best Damn Security Team evah! I couldn't find a clip, but I loved how they just lifted the disrupters out of their midst and put them out of the camp before they could start something, because they knew those people would show up and they were on the lookout for trouble.
me-oww!
Funny, that scene in Grapes of Wrath also popped into my head. I just re-watched that recently and it's starting to look very familiar.
I think we should all start studying up on the Depression era, I have a feeling those old skills are going to come in handy pretty soon.
"These people would be extremely peaceful if the agitators - the police - didn't show up," said a 25-year-old man in a bandana who declined to give his name.
He said the protesters' late-night actions had been "tactical. In other words, it was to make it bigger. There's an awe factor."
The protesters who were on hand for the clashes, though, were deeply split over what happened. Some scolded window-breakers and told them Occupy Oakland was supposed to be a peaceful protest. Whenever someone would light a fire, others would try to stomp it out.
"Violence is not a statement," one protester shouted after a man in a mask broke a clothing store window.
As protesters built one of the barricades on 16th Street, a nearby resident who had joined Wednesday's demonstrations walked up and began to take it apart. But whenever he moved a trash can or table or pallet, a man in a mask would put it back.
"What does putting trash in the street accomplish?" asked the neighbor, 35-year-old Tarrell Gamble, as a crowd confronted him. "This is somebody's property."
Masked men shouted and swore at Gamble, and one protester briefly put him in a headlock. They accused him of being a police officer and said, "Let's give it up for the hall monitor."
"Everybody's so tough with a mask on," Gamble said as he continued to try to clear his street, without success.
After two women escorted him away, Gamble said, "The protest is supposed to be about corporate greed. It's not about trashing the streets of Oakland."
Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/...
"3 protesters barely on our property chained to a...drum...not causing any problems so I told the guys to just monitor them and let them freeze."
Shocking document revealing Fed attack on Occupy Portland 11/6/11
I do suspect agent provocateurs. I was at Occupy Oakland in the morning. They had organizers all over the place, counseling non-violence. They didn't want to see an escalation again that would result in another Scott Olsen-injury. No one was wearing all black. Although a few wore V for Vendetta masks, most of the people that I saw in the early part of the general strike were open, peaceful and very much committed to non-violent protest.
I don't know where that anarchic bent came from, but we have video of regular protesters trying to stop them.
We also have video of Oakland PD infiltrating as well. The main organizers are very aware of this and have been working very hard to keep the message focused and peaceful.
All I offered was a headline agreeing with Samson. The rest was just something I cut and pasted. From an online version of a newspaper. Unedited.
"3 protesters barely on our property chained to a...drum...not causing any problems so I told the guys to just monitor them and let them freeze."
Shocking document revealing Fed attack on Occupy Portland 11/6/11
I'm just giving you my impression from being there.
"Violence is not a statement," one protester shouted
violence is a statement, but not the statement that OWS should be putting forth. hence the power of false flag-type attacks, or any other violence inflicted on persons/property by whomever, to hurt the movement. good on members of OWS to attempt to intervene.
violence runs counter to the basic message. this type of violence signals a type of powerlessness, yet the OWS movement is dedicated to spreading the message that it is we, the 99%, that hold power. and if we stand up together and make our voices heard, we will be able to have a transformative effect on the country. on the other hand, violence signals the idea that the OWS movement is a fringe movement, requiring masked raiders to destroy inanimate objects, and hopes nothing more than to be a thorn in the establishment's paw.
anger should be channeled into more constructive outlets, stuff other than breaking shit.
The mainstream media is.
I was there for hours and hours yesterday, it was a totally peaceful protest form all the areas I was in.
The same 20 or 30 all-black-clad, short-haired, police-boot-wearing, masked "anarchists" show up at every major progressive event and try to derail the movement by acts of vandalism and violence. They are obvious provacateurs. Or, why are they not also doing this at Tea Party rallies, etc?
And by the way, this was not by any stretch of the imagination only 20K people. More like 40K minimum, up to 75. HUGE.
I have a bit of problem with that. Every time there is a riot such as the post Stanley Cup, fiasco in Vancouver or the G20 in Toronto one hears people claiming that it is police false flag operations or some other organization inciting violence that is the cause but that is manifestly not true. I'm not saying that false flag operations or provocateur don't exist but in the bulk of cases it just isn't so. I wouldn't care to speculate in this case given the previous over reaction by the Oakland Police but it seems to me you'd need more provocateurs than protesters to generate the mayhem that was seen at Toronto for example.
Hasa Diga Eebowai
i would be curious to read an investigation into claims of false flag operations. i have seen some videos exposing the such, i believe from the g20 when it was in pittsburgh. and there has been other instances where agent provocateurs have been exposed.
but, other times, when it was pretty much assumed that there was a false flag operation, it turn out not to be the case--one case being the battle in seattle. i was so resistant to this claim that it took seeing an interview with the former 'head' of earth first, who admits responsibility, for me to accept that.
claimed as evidence:
pittsburgh
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KPFC7THiKho
toronto
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TbLU9tdDwxo&fe...
quebec cops (ignore the bill o'reilly intro)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MaeuV2RNL3o&fe...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=St1-WTc1kow
vancouver
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YyhsY26PQmQ
there is a ton, as you could well imagine, of vids out there. some pretty damning.
Can I request that we are kind to those subs who agreed to work on Wednesday? I hire subs for a private school (not in Oakland) and they are dedicated teachers who cannot find work; they need to keep their hand in to keep their certification and if they turn down jobs they are less likely to be called. I'm sure many of them were conflicted about this.
and substitutes just wait for their phones to ring. It's a hard life.
She was taking our order at a restaurant.
"Someday somebody related to some of these sufferers, these victims, these collaterally damaged souls, may try to kill you. And I have to tell you, I think you’ll have it coming." - Christopher Cooper
Protesters also briefly occupied a foreclosed building that had housed an organization that helped the homeless community. Yesterdays actions in Oakland are a huge inspiration.
The best coverage was, not surprisingly, in the foreign press.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/nov/02/o...
Shit Hitting the Fan...?
I hope.
Lower the retirement age.
(Does anyone else see the irony there?)
Depends on the age of the Mercedes. There are 25-year-old MBs bought by people for cheap because those cars have very solid engines that last a long time. Don't assume that just because a car is expensive when it's brand new that it's ALWAYS going to be so. Once the style goes out of fashion, the value can drop a surprising amount. (My dad sold salvage cars for years so I'm familiar with some of this stuff.)
There's always free cheddar in the mousetrap, baby. - Tom Waits
Has the video of it happening, as well as the aftermath. A shiny new car driven by shiny people with too much money and not enough heart.
Agent Provocateurs are out in Oakland causing property damage. If we expose Agent Provocateurs, their tactics won't work as well. Same with false flag terrorism. Expose it and it ends.
"Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
I believe the violence was caused by a small minority or outside group of protestors. I hope the leaders or groups of leaders of the Occupy Movement condemn the violence............ Violence is exactly what the Authorities and the Media want...... It's hard to Bash, Gas, and Arrest, Peaceful Protestors.......(IT LOOKS BAD!~!~!~!) ........................." Peaceful Protest a Dangerous Idea"...................
I heard someone describe Congress as a bunch of prostitutes. That statement is slanderous to all prostitutes and should be stricken from the record.
was the former travelers aid society, which provided services to the homeless ... their public funding, however, was cut, and the building was foreclosed upon
"Agent Provocateurs are out in Oakland causing property damage".
Could be, but I doubt it. I've lived within 60 miles of the Golden Gate bridge all my life, and can assure you there is a small, hard core group anarchic shit disturbers that call Oakland home. And by small, I'd estimate that they comprised maybe 1% of yesterdays assembly. That same crowd also considers the beat down by the cops last week as their own victory. They dig that type of action.
and are only capable of doing a tiny fraction of the damage that the one percenters have done to this country ... but the fraudsters and war criminals haven't been gassed, beaten, and shot ... the fraudsters and war criminals haven't been marginalized and deprived and denied a voice in their country's government
40 of the assholes in black breaking windows.
And let's estimate a crowd of 40,000 which is actually low by my visual estimate (and I was there, it looks more like 75K in the pictures online).
That makes it .001 percent. Not 1 percent. Not 5 percent.
Frankly, ONE violent asshole is too many. They are no better than the Mercedes driver, IMO.
and my point was that, no matter how many violent assholes were in the crowd, their capacity for damage pales by comparison to that of the 1 percent
do i wish that every last person on the streets of oakland yesterday had remained non-violent? absolutely! and that goes for the police ... but i refuse to add any validity to the attitude of the msm and the snooty, falsely-righteous fucks sitting in the halls of wealth and power that "the rabble" cannot be trusted with their full-blown rights of speech and assembly, that they need curfews and barricades to keep them under control
when all the assholes in congress and the white house (past and present) and wall street and the chicago board of trade and banks and boardrooms around the world are called out for being evil and dangerous and held to account under the law, then i'll say "let's get the anarchists" (assuming that the assholes in question were, indeed, anarchists and not just provocateurs)
till then, i don't personally think that things like the rule of law and property rights have very much value ... not because of anything that a handful of thugs at the bottom or our society have done, but because of the rampant, unabashed lawlessness at the top
Wall Street Forces moved right back in.
"About a dozen demonstrators, following up on Wednesday's general strike when thousands of marchers shut down entrances to the port, had set up the barricade early today at the port entrance near Third and Adeline streets.
The president of the longshore union said many workers expected to start at 3 a.m. hadn't shown up, but that the 8 a.m. shift was headed to work.
Richard Mead, the president of International Longshore Workers Union Local 10, offered the protesters a hot breakfast if they would clear the roadway and allow the port to resume operations. He also told them that employers would dock workers' pay if they didn't show up for their jobs.
"The longshoremen have to go to work, the port is going to start to turn," Mead said, adding that he supported the protesters' message.
At about 8:45 a.m., the fence came down.
Kimberley Schroeder, 24, Oakland, one of the protesters, said there weren't enough people to form a line that would allow the ILWU to recognize a community picket.
"We need more bodies," she said. "We need to regroup and figure out how to effectively form a barrier for the longshoremen."
Truckers were happy to be rolling again.
"We're losing money, I need to support my family," Ghermai Ogbe, a trucker who lives in Oakland, said as he waited for the entrance to open."
Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/...
"3 protesters barely on our property chained to a...drum...not causing any problems so I told the guys to just monitor them and let them freeze."
Shocking document revealing Fed attack on Occupy Portland 11/6/11
It was fine to do it as a one-day protest to make the point, but by trying a half-assed attempt at a blockade with not enough support from the unions, they will only fail.
The port is not the problem, it's the banks. It's Wall Street.
Innocent Bystander: Right you are.
In a real sense, too, the Oakland yahoo/schmucks are allies of the 1%. They bring disrepute to the righteous Wall Street protests.
By getting shot in the head with gas canisters and hit by cars?
the organizers are wrong about their claims. A general strike is when a large number of workers, possibly even a majority in a given jurisdiction, go on strike. It is not a general strike when a relatively small number of people, workers or not, try to prevent a lot of other people from going to work. Whether or not these disruptions will achieve any positive effect remains to be seen but they certainly don't constitute a general strike.
Hasa Diga Eebowai
I was at the WTO protests in Seattle when a bunch of anarchists started busting windows with crowbars. We surrounded them and they got in a circle with their crowbars. I tried to get the Seattle police to come arrest these people that were thirty feet away and threatening violence and breaking windows... The Seattle police would not budge from their "police line", making all of us the enemy.
The Corporate Occupation of the United States
Our corporate controlled government (through corporate lobbying and election funding ) is out of the peoples control. People want government control back. Makes sense to me... I feel US corporate capitalism (corporatism) is a type of economic fascism: To have a corporate being where the chain of command eventually muddles all responsibility to any human being. These corporate beings are running your life and controlling your government. (Enough to really make an individual mad and protest.) The corporate being does not exist, and when it comes to face it's corporate responsibility, it is a piece of paper. That is plain and simply wrong. Restore capitalism to individual responsible chains of command, or this struggle will be lost. (This also includes corporate lobbying and corporate election funding, being outlawed; and a new form closer to individual control is established.)
Please Sign the petition to amend the Constitution for revoking corporate personhood at:
movetoamend.org
January 20, 2012 – Move to Amend Occupies the Courts!
Move To Amend is planning bold action to mark this
notorious date — Occupy the Courts — a one day occupation
on Friday January 20, 2012, of the Federal Courts, including
the Supreme Court of the United States and as many of the
89 U.S. District Court Buildings as we can. Inspired by Dr. Cornell
West, who was arrested on the steps of the Supreme Court last
month, Move to Amend will lead the charge on the judiciary which
created — and continues to expand — corporate personhood rights.
http://open.salon.com/blog/kennspace/2011/10/...
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