The Reoccurring and Baffling Case of the Unscheduled Court Hearings & Subsequent Bench Warrants Issued Thereupon

Last week, I wrote about an Occupier whose charges—previously not pursued—were suddenly resurrected at an unannounced hearing. Had it not been for the fact that several other occupiers happened to be in the courtroom on the day of the unscheduled hearing when they heard their friend’s name called, that Occupier would now be facing several bench warrants for failure to appear.

It turns out that other Occupiers weren’t so lucky. Though its not yet confirmed, two other Occupiers who were arrested at OGP today, may have experienced the same scenario, but without the benefit or luck of having friends who happened to be in courtroom on the day the day of their mystery hearing. Both Occupiers were told, according to witnesses to the arrests, that they were being arrested for warrants—at least one was told that it was a bench warrant for failure to appear.

I’ll update this as soon as I’ve got more information.

Unpacking Homelessness on Move-In Day

On December 28, in the midst of Occupy Oakland’s continuing battle against the city and OPD at Oscar Grant Plaza, another kind of Occupation battle was taking place in Sacramento, largely out of sight of both activists and media. Homeless campers were experiencing another raid, as police cleared out their encampment. Despite the fact that Sacramento’s shelters are at full capacity already, the city nevertheless used anti-camping ordinances to clear the camp and scatter homeless people to the city’s doorways and park benches. The action by Sacramento’s city government and police parallels the cynical raids on homeless encampments throughout the last decade in Oakland and other parts of the East Bay.

The sensational focus on one Occupation, but not the other, borne of necessity, speaks to some of the artificial borders that have been set up in the mainstream Occupy conversation. After all, Occupy is often represented as a movement of middle class liberals, assuming a symbolic “homelessness” to bring attention to a small range of problems that have become the focus of attention in the last decade—the sub-prime crisis, the failure of elected leaders to address this crisis, the lack of substantive creation of job security and the completion of the co-opting of the Democratic party. For this reason, the active participation of homeless people in various Occupy movements—and especially in Oakland—became a cause of confusion and concern in the early weeks of the Occupy movement. Homelessness remains such an integral part of the American economic and social system, that few progressives or liberals even view it as a political issue.

But as a “homeless” Occupy Oakland movement prepares to take over an abandoned building on January 28, its worth unpacking homelessness to reveal its central–and consistently overlooked–position in the current discussion about foreclosures, embattled unions and corrupt banks that engendered the Occupy movement. Homelessness, in fact, can be seen as the final stretch of an economic road a diverse group of Americans are constantly being forced along. Some are now for the first time experiencing the first leg of that journey, seemingly unaware of their ultimate destination.

Homelessness is built into the economic fabric of our society. Most of the working poor traditionally live at the precipice of homelessness. Those paying 50% of their income in rent—in Alameda County, there are 34,000 such households—are under the constant threat of homelessness. Households earning double the minimum wage in Oakland, still fall into this vulnerable economic group, because Alameda County is in the top ten of least affordable housing markets in the US. That’s a condition due in no small part to the failure of political leaders to introduce meaningful rent controls for fear of tampering with the workings of capitalism.

All of these factors are exacerbated by other systemic failures of the American economic system. Those facing serious illness and overwhelming medical costs are emerging as a growing proportion of the homeless. And, of course, foster children leaving from group homes often have only homelessness to transition to, and the imprisoned transitioning from institution to joblessness often end up in the streets. Failing to implement meaningful rent control, programs to combat joblessness and adequately funding and managing social programs is the city and county’s own contribution to our homeless epidemic.

None of that is news to many. But since 2007, those more economically secure now quite suddenly find themselves converging into this grouping via alternate routes–a recent study indicates that between 10 and 20% of homeless shelter residents got there after a foreclosure on their home in the past few years. Foreclosure was almost unheard of as a cause of homelessness even four years ago. Tenants of foreclosed buildings—who may, or may not be in the vulnerable group of working poor renters—are in even greater danger of homelessness than their working poor counterparts, as they are evicted from their homes with little notice, and forced to enter an increasingly over-priced rental market.

After the city, county, state and federal government fail our fellow homeless citizens, they then criminalize them. This is most easily visible by the city’s ruthless prosecution of its state law and city ordinance to prevent homeless people from coming together as communities, bulldozing what were once-empty lots when they become productive and self-sustaining responses to the poor state of homeless and social services. Being homeless is essentially illegal, under California law and local ordinances, a fact that many city residents found easy to ignore until the Occupy Oakland camp put such issues on a magnified stage at the foot of city hall. Oakland’s city government website even provides a hotline number so that citizens can report the crime of homeless people helping one another build a community in unused space.

As we’ve seen with the hysterically violent police reaction to the Traveller’s Building and the Cathedral Hill Occupations, there’s no more critical an emergency to city and police than the take-over of unused property. The rapid mobilization is reminiscent of old Godzilla movies.

Doubtless, few occupiers actually believe they’re solving all of the city’s problems of the soon-to be and actual homeless. But in a microcosmic reality that existed for several weeks in the plaza, all of the factors associated with the precarious life of the economically marginalized were dealt with. Food and clothing, health care, emotional support and political capacitation were all at the service of surrounding communities: those facing imminent homelessness, those who may one day soon face it, and the homeless themselves.

Seizing an unused and forgotten building is, in one sense, a response to worsening weather and increased police repression—this rationale is not unlike the one that motivated the homeless throughout the decade to band together in intentional communities in various “tent-cities. But Occupation also acts as a public stage where the rapidly shrinking base of living-wage jobs, affordable housing, accessible libraries, schooling and health care—all of the factors that lead to homelessness—can be made an integral part of our 99% conversation.

Likewise, the fact that vital resources, like the hundreds of public and corporate owned buildings throughout Oakland, remain unused because of greed, city corruption and incompetence, becomes an issue that can’t be ignored. The real-world homelessness that Oakland residents face daily—and that Occupy Oakland now faces symbolically—is not an accident. Rather it’s the predictable outcome of a merciless corporate-political partnership that always looks to wealthy corporations to manage its social and economic structure; as the city and county offer no solutions to the foreclosure crisis, for example, political leaders look on as monolith corporations like Waypoint restructure communities from homeowners to hapless renters living in one-landlord company towns.

The abandoned building that Occupy rehabilitates on January 28 will serve as a living symbol of this escalating crisis, just as the empty hotel with its capacity to house hundreds taken over by the SF Tenant’s Union last night, put these same economic issues on the nightly news throughout California and the nation. Occupy Oakland’s new occupation–where social services, food and political space are provided for all–will point to the obvious solutions to that crisis.

The Case of the Disappearing Dynamite and Other Stories of the Ongoing Oakland Occupation: Update: Mysteriously Scheduled Hearings

Stay Away Orders:

At least two Occupiers have, or have been told they will receive, stay away orders from Oscar Grant Plaza. Ironically, these 300 yrd. stay orders given as condition of release on bail for protesters arrested for expressing their freedom of speech rights, also bar them from engaging in city hall, visiting their state and congressional representatives, or even visiting one of the many city agencies found in buildings adjacent to the plaza. The occupiers’ legal representatives are currently looking into amending the orders.

“1/4 stick of dynamite” Charge Mysteriously Disappears at Arraignment:

OPD spokesperson, Johnna Watson, seemed fairly confident she knew what she was talking about when she accused a protester arrested on January 7^th’s anti-repression march of carrying explosives. She claimed that OPD had found:

“…the equivalent of a quarter stick of dynamite — not an M-80 firecracker, Watson said, but a 6-inch-long explosive.

“I’d never seen anything like it before,” she said. “That’s not something that’ll blow your thumb off; that’s something that could easily kill you or take a body part off.”

With a weapon like that, you’d think that the city would want that person charged and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. But the “explosive” charge disappeared at the arraignment, though five other felonies were lodged. Either the city has a lax policy toward explosives that will take a “body part off”, or such an explosive never existed. The assertion, later proved to be baseless by the facts, is reminiscent of Watson’s previous claim that both Kayode Ola Foster, the young man shot and killed near the camp in November, and his shooter, were both residents at OGP. Later, once the suspect in the murder was arrested, it became clear that “Neither Foster nor any of the men charged were affiliated with Occupy Oakland.”

At this point, you’d be better off immediately disregarding anything you hear from Watson or read in an OPD press release [or the media accounts of such incidents that are based almost exclusively on the press releases].

Friends of Oakland Resident Call on Occupy Oakland for Support after Brutal OPD Beating and Bogus Charges:

Friends of Elizabeth Yanez have asked Occupy Oakland’s Anti-Repression Committee  to help in publicizing the brutal beating she received at the hands of police, and in finding legal defense for the outrageous five felony charges she faced at her arraignment today. Police claim that Yanez was drinking in public when OPD officers approached her and three female friends; its not yet clear what kind of threat Yanez appeared to present to police officers, who subsequently beat her and arrested her. Yanez is only 19 years old, and works in an insurance office to help her family out financially. This is the first time the Anti-Repression Committee has been approached by a community member for help in fighting violence and abuse of power from the OPD. The kind of police repression that Occupy Oakland has faced is simply a microcosm of the abuse that police visit on residents of the city like Elizabeth out of sight of media and activists.

Update:

Earlier today, an occupier’s court appearance date was shifted; a reality that was only caught in time because people who knew him happened to be in the same court doing hearing support for another set of cases related to Occupy Oakland when they heard his name called. Two charges–that had previously not been processed–were added to the docket, including battery on an officer. Had the occupier not been notified by those in the court room, and if they hadn’t intervened to get the hearing time pushed back a few hours so that his lawyer could contact the DA, three bench warrants would have been issued for failure to appear. It’s possible that there’s some rational explanation for why an extra court date was added, three weeks before the scheduled one, without any notification; but it seems there’s a more likely explanation that gels better with the kind of targeted discriminatory arrest and judicial process that Occupiers have been experiencing over the past month.

Its also important to remember that there’s a colloquial usage of “charges dropped” that even those of us who know better have fallen into. These charges for the most part have not been dropped, in fact; instead, they weren’t pursued at the time of their arraignment, which is a different matter entirely. The DA has a year in which those charges can be brought at any time; so many who’ve been arrested are living under the constant threat of prosecution and arrest while they continue their political activities.

Interview with Leila from the Kitchen Committee

A week or so ago, many people were horrified by video of riot-gear clad Oakland police rushing a woman fleeing on a bike, and then beating her as she fell off her bicycle. That woman was Leila, and that bicycle with its trailer has brought countless meals and supplies to Oscar Grant  plaza in the days since the second camp was destroyed. Despite being arrested twice for being in the plaza in the past weeks, and the beating she received just two days earlier, Leila also provided food at the police-ridden pre-dawn commencement of Occupy Oakland’s American Licorice Strike solidarity action several days ago.

Even before the increased brutality and repression of the OPD over the past several weeks, the work of Leila and other kitchen committee diehards like Toby, Marie and Josh, had greatly impressed me. It was another piece of the puzzle in the uniquely strong attachment that Occupy Oakland activists have to their ideals and work, and to nurturing the political space where the movement was born.

Here’s a transcribed interview I did with her several weeks ago. It’s been edited for length and comprehension.

__________________

HR:…how and when did you get involved with Occupy Oakland?

Leila: …so I was actually up north working, when I heard about Occupy Oakland starting, um, I came down a couple of times and sort of…I participated…

HR: when?

Leila: …within the first two weeks of the occupation, So I’d come down for the weekends, and  help, just kind of gather supplies…dumpster, collect donations, bring stuff here and then I’d go…and then I’d leave again, so I was gone for two weeks and then I came a couple of times during that time. And then basically, I…I was kind of just like, it feels really weird being up here working, when all of this shit is happening in my city, I need to just stop working and I need to come down here and be a part of it.

Basically the first day I came down, I got there that evening and I had heard that there was a raid [Oct. 25] and so then I showed up that afternoon and there was a crazy war scene. That morning, they got raided, and then that night at like six pm, we all came to march. This was the beginning for me as far as how intensely I wanted to participate, it really reflected a lot just being…just jumping right in and immediately getting tear gassed. I guess that was the beginning and I’ve been here ever since…

Leila: …the next day we were in camp again…

HR:…did you start working in the kitchen at that time?

Leila: was helping build things and get pallets and brought in some wood chips and then I was like…yeah, picking up food donations and kind of helping, cleaning up where I could. And that’s basically the first week where I tapped into the kitchen a little bit, and then got on some other projects, so it was kind of random. I was also trying to maybe do compost toilets for a while, and I was thinking about that and trying to get people encouraged to do that. I was doing sanitation for a little bit…

HR:…and then pretty quickly you got focused only on kitchen?

Leila: …yeah, cause I just consider the kitchen like a really core place for people to feel loved and protected and supported and it was kind of a big place of community as far as the kitchen crew was concerned. It was really easy to meet people in the kitchen. I found a direct home in the kitchen, really tight family, really beautiful people and it was kind of the core of making things comfortable and beautiful in the camp, as far as  I saw. I felt it was really important for emotional and physical well being, for everyone to support that. So yeah, within that first week I got into the kitchen pretty quickly…

HR: what was the second kitchen like? Was there a philosophy behind the first kitchen that people wanted to duplicate in the second?

Leila: Well, everyone was like, oh, the first camp, the first camp, the first camp was so amazing, oh my god. So I had really no idea what that meant, because when I had visited before I wasn’t really in the kitchen, and so basically that they were cooking there before, that was a big kind of difference. It wasn’t an actual kitchen, it was more like a drop off service center kind of place. We weren’t allowed to cook, and for some reason, we were really adhering to the fire marshal’s will. [We]  never cooked again…some nights we’d like to heat up water or food, but that was super random on the DL, we weren’t cooking all day thru. So basically, what it became was outreach to the community to tap in and participate by cooking elsewhere and bringing hot food. Which I actually think was kind of cool, cause it kind of isolated us a lot less, and a lot more people became aware and figured out how to participate in a really peaceful way, by cooking at their home and bringing food. So instead of us just cooking and us getting donations, we were asking the outer, exterior community to bring love and warmth to people. And I felt like that really helped us a grow a lot, so yeah, the main difference we weren’t cooking, we were doing a lot of outreach and doing a lot of organizing of um, cooked food. And tons of just making the kitchen space more efficient cause things were constantly coming and going, it was a kind of rapid environment…

HR:…How was it different from traditional soup kitchens or even Food not Bombs?

Leila: Even though Food not Bombs invites people to cook, its still an actually, its an isolated process in a lot of ways. And because it was all day, every day, come in and tap in, it was a  lot more participatory. People would eat and then go wash dishes. A lot of people would come and eat a meal, and then they would participate, or then they would offer to serve. Or they’d eat for a week straight without doing anything, and then they’d be hey, this is pretty cool, I’m actually getting into this; how can I help?

HR: Dishes were part of the kitchen?

Leila: The dishes were so important, and its kind of crazy because the whole time I never washed a dish. I was always going over there, like hey, can I relieve you? Should I was dishes? I have a half an hour. And they’re like, no, no, no I’m cool, you do what you’re doing, I got this. I’m totally into this.

HR: When the kitchen was over there [pointing to corner of Broadway and Fourteenth] during the first encampment, I used to love washing dishes over there, cause that was like the most public part of the camp, and so you would wash dishes and you would hear conversations and people would come in and out of the plaza, and you would just be doing something with your hands, and this whole mental thing…

Leila: I actually love washing dishes, but I never picked up a plate to wash. Because no one would ever let me. That was kind of adorable, and then a lot of people would come in and serve for a couple of hours and that was really great.

HR: Was it the same people every day? Or a shifting group?

Leila: No, it was shifting. There were about fifteen consistent servers and then there were completely random people, and then people at the camp that I would see all the time and then they finally came and tapped in and they really enjoyed it. So it was kind of really fluctuating, there was probably about like six solid kitchen people.

HR: You said, there was something special about the way the kitchen involved people when we were talking earlier.

Leila:  I just think its given people a really direct way to show their love and appreciation and its something that we’re kind of closed off to, and that we have trouble expressing, because we’re not allowed to express it. Or you’re a weirdo if you try to show people love in a lot of ways. It created this environment, where it was really trusting and people were really welcome to show their love, by giving, you know, feeding each other. Its a big thing. Actually I was just talking to someone about how now, like going anywhere you say hi to everyone, you look them in the face…I was definitely already kind of like that. But its only pushed me farther into this open space of…I’m completely able and willing to love you and nourish you. So I think it gave a lot of people that opportunity to do so. When we were serving people, they’re just like I love you, thank you so much. This is beautiful.

__________________

A conversation on the problems and differences of the 10^th and Mandela House leads to some commentary on difficult people in the second camp, and the difference between occupying an open space and a building:

Leila: I felt that there was about ten percent of the people [at the camp] that were a bit destructive and difficult to deal with, and I think that a smaller percentage of the ten percent were able to work through their issues and were able to help out and step into the kitchen and do productive things for the camp, but you’re still going to get, I mean, its a raw environment and you’re going to get those people that we don’t have the energy to figure out. I was willing to be around that in this open space, because its a raw environment and its a big pot of everything that is fucked up in this society and I think its really important for it to be out in the open, we’re like oh yeah, yeah, we’re feeding crazies, because there are crazies here in our city. And there are violent people in our city. The camp was productive, but I think it needed to be really raw and beautiful in that way…

People in the camp really wanted to be here because, you’re camping out in a raw space and its cold and its a little uncomfortable and its a little sticky. So, most of the people that were camping here were down for one reason or another. They were down to be present and they were down to participate, even if it just meant that their service was camping and being present.

HR: What do you think of the action to occupy an abandoned building? Do you see working in both the plaza and the building at the same time?

Leila: I do, but it really depends on what happens with the building, I definitely want to. I’m also working on a lot of garden projects, and there’s a lot of side projects and weird shit I’m sort of assisting people in. And I want to support the plaza, and I think there are a lot of cooks that help here too, so if I disappeared, I don’t necessarily feel that it would be the end of the world…

__________________

Leila was one of the primary people who spearheaded a GA passed action after the second raid, to create a monument garden symbolic of the philosophy of the cam. The garden was destroyed only hours after it was built.

HR: What was the philosophy behind the garden project here in the plaza after the second camp was destroyed?

Leila: This is basically a central space for symbolic communication, I view the plaza as just like a way to show the world what we should be doing, what we have the right to do and what we’re willing to do. There was a fantastic plan of making this entire space an edible garden for providing food. So I think symbolically its really significant to have it in the center of your city.

HR: Was it an act of civil disobedience?

Leila: It basically was, because we knew it was going to be torn up. I didn’t know how soon and I thought I would be able to protect it,  but what happened is that I ran up just as they were destroying most of the boxes and I sat next to that last little bit.

HR: I remember seeing some of that on a live feed. You were really upset.

Leila: Well, it sucks cause I was actually in communication with public works at the time. I had talked to a cop the day of that action day that we did it. And I was like, if you guys want to discuss anything, have a dialogue, if you want to tear it down, please contact me first, so we can move it or decide what we want to do without you guys just completely being disrespectful to the community. This is very peaceful. So I had open dialogues with a lot of different people, so I just felt really fucking shat on, because I had actually made an attempt. And actually, that was the day where I was like, fuck communication. These people [police and city administration] are not looking out for me at all. I was completely open to all of it. I was just like, it’s pretty obvious: if they don’t want to listen to me, they don’t want to listen to anyone.

HR: Do you feel like it radicalized you?

Leila:  Yeah, a lot. It’s just this little garden box. If they really feel like it shouldn’t be here, they’re going to call me, we’re going to work it out.

American Licorice Post Mortem, Update: Video of Police Escorting a Delivery Truck Past the Picket Line

A lot of Occupiers who went out to support the strikers of Baker’s Union Local 125 were excited to be in the picket line, working toward an achievable short-term goal with that long-mythologized Occupy-hating community, “working folks”. The excitement was mutual. The striking workers, –many of them Latinos–were happy, if not curious, about their new allies and there was a general atmosphere of camaraderie. For several hours, beginning at 4 am, I and others put our bodies in front of “scab-mobiles” and confronted the odious security drones of Huffmaster, perhaps one of the most obnoxiously vile companies on earth.

The police presence was insane. Over a dozen squad cars, and an armored vehicle literally illustrated every anti-capitalist rant ever formulated. Nothing is more important to the city, county, state and federal government than the welfare of corporations. When low-wage candy workers form a picket line, city and county will send police to escort in the bosses; just as, when port workers go on strike, the President sends out the paramilitary Coast Guard to make sure that grain shipments enrich corporate bosses.

Workers new to striking, and on uncertain terrain legally, went from elated at the sight of a cavalry of activists, to abject despair when they saw the extent of political and institutional support their opponents enjoyed. Their hearts were broken when they watched the Union City Police Department literally working for the owners of the American Licorice Company. Subsequently, enough workers knowledgeable in the operation of the licorice making equipment crossed the line to make further struggle by the others, moot. A vote was had, and the decision was made to accept the original contract.

Later, when they resumed their positions, they learned that there had been almost nothing in the warehouse–the picket had been working. They’d been perhaps only days away from victory. But there were just too many forces arrayed against them; in addition to the help from police, and Huffmaster stormtroopers, the company was paying some workers to strike with the others, and relating intelligence back to management.

These double-agent strikers had even attended the liaison meetings between Occupiers and the workers. The company had plenty of money–even enough to pay ethics-deficient employees to literally do nothing–but not enough to cover paying for health insurance.  Part of the conditions of return was an amnesty  banning reprisals from the union or workers against the spies.

It was a humbling and tragic experience for workers and the solidarity activists who joined them. But it was also a first cautious and–on its own merits–successful, step towards the focusing of Occupy power for ongoing and aligned struggles. It won’t be the last.

[a very minor disappointment was that I had just started my fake Huffmaster twitter account]

*this post was written at Oscar Grant Plaza

Update: JoeyMRB sends in this video that shows police escorting a delivery truck through the strike and picket line. You can see Newark and Union City police badges here–there were also Fremont cops and Alameda County Sheriff’s there. It’s obvious that direct action by low wage workers is a dire emergency that requires a multi-agency response. I wonder if Homeland Security funds went into this.

Two Issues; Only One is Important

There was a lot of bullshit at the “fuck the police march”. I think throwing bottles from behind, and doing other childish hijinks and disappearing into the crowd is the height of immaturity. What’s more, its difficult to believe that with all the antagonisms people of color in our group rightly have against police after lifetimes of abuse, its almost always young white people doing this crap. Seriously, I find the fake, tough machismo bullshit, the costuming, the fact that these people only lead the crowd when they manage to get in front of its retreat is one of the most grating and annoying thing I’ve ever witnessed. This isn’t an issue to me of violence vs. non-violence—I hate that asinine conversation, with its disregard for physical, mental and economic violence from authorities and its hysterical preoccupation with property damage and shattered glass. Rather, this issue is of silly posturing and directionless strategies vs. intelligent use of diversity of tactics to further goals.

That all being said, its not anywhere near the most important issue. Nothing matches or excuses the brutality of the police. OPD beat protesters and shot sub-lethal rounds at people who had assembled non-violently using the acts of a few as pretext. Police must know that the people they’re attacking are almost never the ones that hurt their feelings, frighten them with their ominous kerchief masks and dark clothing, or stain their uniforms with soda from a bottle broken harmlessly against their kevlar.

After the march, I saw one of the OG kitchen people at the plaza; he’s been an integral part of the camp from the beginning. His arm–in a sling–was likely broken from baton strikes he received when he saved a friend and fellow kitchener from beating and arrest from the police. Incredibly, these two occupiers then brought a gigantic stock of cast-off muffins and pastries from a local bakery to feed people at the plaza. THEN they went to Highland. As much as such people have been the heroes of this movement, they are also the ones who’ve experienced the most danger, violence, intimidation and incarceration from this brutal police force.

You can hear Leila tell her story about what happened on Oakfosho’s livestream at 53:28.

 

Misinformation, Disinformation and African-American Lynchers

Several news sources and articles, as well as the OPD Press Release dated January 3^rd, 2012,  have misstated the facts surrounding recent city and police actions at Oscar Grant/Frank Ogawa plaza.

For the record, here are some facts to counter some misinformation caused by lazy mainstream media reporting:

1. The Tipi Vigil was the product of a general assembly proposal that passed through the GA. But the permit was not something that the GA agreed on. On the day that the vigil committee tried to establish the tipi in the public park–which is constitutionally protected activity–police physically prevented it, grabbing the tipi polls out of the hands of the committee members. Facing arrest and failure of the vigil idea, the committee members opted to negotiate with the city on a permitted vigil. This was not voted through the GA, and was not discussed with anyone outside of the vigil committee. Despite this, the permitted vigil has been integral to the continued occupation of the plaza.

2. The permit established an area around the tipi in which certain activities were banned. None of the activities that the city claimed had occured in its press release were in the area around the tipi. Other activists and citizens trying to occupy the area by other means should not have influenced the conditions of the permit. Mainstream local media has a tendency to take the city’s claims as fact, without bothering to ask witnesses and permit holders if this was the case.

3. The vigil committee associated with the tipi is not Occupy Oakland’s legal team. Occupy Oakland does not have a legal team associated with it. The National Lawyer’s Guild and other individuals have—as they do with many activist organizations—provided legal aid when arrests during protests occur. No legal strategy around the tipi has been voted for by the GA.

And now to clear up the Disinformation:

1. The city and police have used discriminatory and possibly illegal and unconstitutional means to “clear the plaza”. Previous raids have targeted Occupy Oakland activists, and have resulted in arrests for such crimes as having a blanket and other property in the plaza. One of those arrested, Marcel Johnson, received felony charges once jailed, and now faces decades in prison.

2. The city’s claims of what occurred prior to mass arrests on Friday, December 30^th are contradicted by witnesses at the scene, who claim they were cooperating with officers by clearing stored items themselves. Despite their obvious efforts to comply, police began to arrest members of the group. It was police that incited a riot.

3. The Oakland Police Department is also inaccurate when it lists the charges of arrestees on December 30^th. The press release states:

“…charges included: “attempting to free those arrested from police officers through force;”

The charge, however, has an uglier and absurdly inappropriate name. “Lynching”, section 405a of the California penal code, was created to combat white mobs that lynched hundreds of African Americans throughout the country in the early 20^th century after their arrests. And, even more absurdly, one such protester charged in the 12/30 arrests with lynching, was African American. Its no surprise that the OPD didn’t want to boast of their grossly distorted view of justice, nor their cynical parsing of the law and kept the actual name and code for the felony out of the media’s reach.

Why an African American Can be Charged with Lynching in Oakland:

Working on the media committee of Occupy Oakland , I can say with certainty that the media is quite likely to print whatever they read in a city press release without checking the facts or getting another perspective from groups involved. When I spoke to a Chronicle reporter yesterday for example, I asked him if he knew anything about the previous night’s arrests. He replied that he only knew so far what the police had told him; but he had already been standing around the protest that was forming for at least half an hour, if not longer. He’d apparently made no move to find other perspectives.

The confusion and misinformation that proceeds from the media-“official sources” dynamic, speaks equally of a dishonest city agency and a lazy and power-invested local media. That can be the only reason why a scandal has not yet broken out over the fact that an African American standing in the middle of a public plaza was arrested and detained in a county jail for a law that was meant to protect African Americans from murder.

The most fundamental basis of the Occupy movements is that no permit is required to assemble and peacefully bring grievances to the public sphere. The constitution does not limit freedom of speech rights based on how nice protesters are, whether they smell good, or are well-liked by local businesses. It does not regulate the amount of time they can spend in “peaceable assembly” nor whether they’re allowed to sleep during this time. It doesn’t recognize the city’s role of creating wealth for rich elites. Most importantly, its inconceivable that the framers of this right did not mean it to be used exactly before the halls of political power as it has been with Occupy Oakland.

There can be no more appropriate use of the right to assembly enshrined in the first amendment, than an assembly before City Hall that lasts as long as it takes to make elected leaders and their corrupt cronies listen to the will of the people—be that hours, days or even years. Indeed, this right is so obvious and integral to a functioning democracy that its also a right guaranteed by the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 20. It’s a right we celebrate when it occurs in other parts of the world such as the Middle East, the African continent and the Balkans, but become strangely ambivalent about when it comes to our own shores.

Occupy Oakland activists like Naomi—now jailed—who used her right of assembly and free speech by protecting the symbolic occupation of the plaza through civil disobedience, and with the placard, “the first amendment is my permit” could not have been more correct. All the perverse and draconian machinations of the city and police won’t remove that right, though they may destroy several lives in the process. Those rights belong to everyone, and each such injury is an injury to everyone.

If the OPD’s charging of an African-American with “lynching” to suppress his right to free speech doesn’t make Americans see that, I’m not sure what will.

Update on Occupiers Arrested Last Night

An UPDATE on OO Arrestees:

Naomi, Svend, Knowledge, Dominic, Adam, Bunny, Stephanie, Diana & Nneka have all been charged with misdemeanor obstruction (148) [they’ve added a second misdemeanor for Stephanie] and will be arraigned tomorrow morning at 9am in Dept 107. Bail is set at $5000 for all of them except Stephanie whose bail is $10,000.

Ali has also been charged with an additional felony. His arraignment is
tomorrow at 2pm in Dept 112. His bail is set at $15,000.

Chris has also been charged with 2 additional felonies. His arraignment is
Monday at 2pm in Dept 112. His bail is set at $25,000.

Sean has also been charged with 1 additional felony. His arraignment is
Monday at 2pm in Dept 112. His bail is set at $30,000.

Let’s flood the numbers below with calls and bring as much pressure today as we can so that they drop charges tomorrow morning. Get everyone you know to call…

Nancy O’Malley (Alameda District Attorney): (510) 272-6222

Jean Quan (Mayor): (510) 238-3141

Deanna Santana (City Administrator): (510) 238-3301

Howard Jordan (Chief of Police): (510) 238-3076

Insane Priorities in an Impoverished City and a Troubled Time

Enthralled with the beauty and community of the new 247vigil at Oscar Grant Plaza last night, I let go of all worry of a police raid. There was an almost holiday spirit of giving and sharing; everywhere you turned in the South End of the plaza people were laughing warmly or having intense political and philosophical debates. The energy was contagious and strangers who’d never visited the occupation stopped in to find out how to get involved. The GA was the most communal and fulfilling I’ve witnessed to date. When I left at 10 pm or so, I didn’t have a worry in the world. There hadn’t been any police presence, and it seemed like we had dodged the bullet. I didn’t have any illusions. I knew we would face the police again with days. But it seemed like we had won this round.

I debated for a while after I heard about the raid whether to go down. I’m frankly pretty tired of riding my bike from my Fruitvale neighborhood back and forth to the camp and wanted an early night of sleep. But I went anyway and joined the large group that had gathered around the courthouse. I got a flat tire on my bike, and had to return early if I was going to catch a ride with a fellow Occupier. When he dropped me off, he looked at this disgusting spectacle that sits right in front of my house and said, “My god, Omar, you live in the third world over here.”

While the OPD repress constitutionally protected dissent, crimes that really do impact city residents go unchallenged. These are, of course, violent crimes, such as the robberies, assaults and murders that are to varying extents a regular part of life in my Fruitvale neighborhood. But there’s also this incredibly easy to deter crime, that goes completely unchallenged and that poses great dangers in a neighborhood full of children:

This dump zone has been here since December 27th, complete with a rotting garbage and an aquarium full of thick broken shards of glass. It’s not only against the law–and not just ordinances, but state laws regarding dumping of hazardous waste–but the sign explaining that is right next to this dump zone:

Police are rarely seen on my street, though it is one of the premier dumping grounds for unscrupulous contractors and evicting slum lords. They do make sure to destroy freedom of expression structures, where activists feed the hungry and engage in constitutionally protected speech, create media, art and discourse,however.

And as last night’s raid demonstrates, the city and OPD do it with a great deal of vigor, economic investment and planning. The guy sitting at the desk, posing a danger apparently to society by using a laptop in a public place, was one of the people targeted and arrested in yesterday’s raid. He’s still in jail, and won’t even be arraigned until tomorrow. The woman sitting in the tipi  is also at this moment in Santa Rita. The woman to the left wearing the parka is in jail as well, as is the woman at the far left of the photo wearing the red hoodie, seemingly posing a threat to the residents of Oakland by having a quiet conversation on the steps of Oscar Grant Plaza.

People in the city have complained about the city’s priorities for decades now. Occupy Oakland is also complaining about it. If you want to live in a crime-addled city full of garbage that focuses millions of dollars of police work on preventing and destroying constitutionally protected speech–and that will shell out even more money in the successful lawsuits brought against the city that are sure to come–make sure you support OPD Chief Jordan and the City Adminstrator’s office’s vendetta against Occupy Oakland.

Occupiers Face Harrassment and Poor Treatment in Jail, Part 2

Now that many of the arrestees from December 30^th have been released, we’re hearing disturbing stories of targeted harassment against Occupy Oakland activists. Occupiers have all shared similar details; they have had the letters OK put on their wristbands, a practice apparently not being done to other detainees. According to several detainees, they were held in a hot, unventilated paddywagon for several hours before being processed—they were not told the charges against them, nor where they were being taken. Once in Santa Rita, they were segregated from general population in a way that mirrors “gang-related” procedures.

There’s also been disturbing stories of psychological and physical abuse—constant jeering and mocking from correctional officers. One of the constant themes has been sleep deprivation, in terms of making noise and turning on lights at all hours, as well as the joke [and possible action] that CO’s would be taking photos during strip search and posting them on the internet. The Occupy Oakland activist known as Shorty, a diabetic, was deprived of his insulin for the entire period of his incarceration, with consequent and possibly dangerous health effects.

Finally, Alex, a young African American man—who was arrested for the now infamous, absurd and offensive crime of “lynching”–was pulled back into possession just as he was being released. According to other activists, correctional officers grew angry at the fact that he seemed happy to be released, and told him that he was being taken back into custody. Alex has other legal issues that complicate his current imprisonment, but the psychological torture involved in this treatment is unacceptable.

Four Occupy Oakland activists remain in jail: Khali, Alex, Truth and Momo for various charges not related to their initial arrest. The system criminalizes people of color, but it also creates immense barriers for their participation in civil disobedience. Notably, no Occupier currently in jail is charged with an act of violence related to their participation in the Occupy movement, though at least one has experienced violence at the hands of correctional officers.

 

City’s Increased Repression of Oscar Grant Plaza Vigils Producing Ironic Results, Updated:

Shortly after police raided Oscar Grant Plaza for the second time, an intrepid, but disparate group of campers began to organize themselves autonomously to maintain a presence in Oscar Grant Plaza. On the night of the raid itself, some OGP campers scaled a tree and—over the next week or so—erected a series of platforms that allowed one or more people to continue to occupy the plaza out of the reach, literally, of the police. A small group of former campers also coalesced in the area around the tree as support and protection for the tree sitters—some began to stay day and night.

At the same time, the group of lay and ordained faith practitioners that had come to constitute the Interfaith tent submit themselves for arrest on the morning of the raid in an act of civil disobedience. Soon after they made a commitment to continue the occupation symbolically with a 12-6pm presence—they would do so with a canopy in the plaza, a sort of interfaith tent in exile. Similarly, shortly after the raid and dispersal of the 18^th and Linden camp in West Oakland, a series of vigils that soon became permanent, began at the camp—including a daily info table maintained by the members of TAC that had recently been expelled from the 18^th and Linden property. Eventually these anchored themselves to a permitted religious expression vigil, designed to create a toe hold in the plaza. Despite the fact that they enjoy the least protection from the wider supporters of Occupy, those carrying out the vigils have been the most vulnerable members of society; they are the poor and the homeless and many of them are people of color.

Needless to say, all of these tenuously connected and concurrent iterations of occupation caused some level of consternation to the OPD and city; minions of the city administrator were sent into the plaza on a near daily basis to pick at and harass the disparate vigilers. This was never more than a minor Shakespearean set of scenes, in the form of citations mostly of the interfaith tent, forcing the removal of their canopy, citing a fictional precedent that no canopy had ever been allowed in the plaza. The Interfaithers replaced the canopy with a large umbrella. The umbrella too—an obvious threat to the city’s authority, made more dangerous by thesheer absurd cascade of city actions that it seemed poised to trigger–would soon be targeted by the police and city, but it has remained in daylight hours, despite continued citation. A police force and city still reeling from widespread criticism of their brutal tactics in previous raids, seemed somewhat hesitant to remind the residents of the city of their capacity for brutality.

No longer. Police began ramping up their harassment of the vigilers soon after the Port Shutdown Action of December 12, beginning with an early morning raid and destruction of the tree sit that ended in its destruction. In the aftermath, police began to put pressure on the interfaith group’s umbrella—in which the now somewhat infamous reading of biblical city ordinance 9.16.010 was used to apparently outlaw the free use of umbrellas in the plaza. Concurrently, OPD soon began to put more pressure on over-night vigilers. Soon after police began enforcing their new umbrella law, they told over night vigilers that their belongings would be seized if they were not picked up off the pavement by a certain hour—those picking them up at that hour would be cited. The novel idea that anything placed on the grounds of the plaza was either a structure or a potential lodging violation became the police mantra for any question about the legality or consitutionality of police harrassment.

Three Ocupiers were arrested on December 20 for alleged crimes as dastardly as reclaiming items from a receptacle, and sitting on a blanket that had previously been identified as contraband. Those arrests terminated in inflated felony charges on one Occupy Oakland activist who remains in jail.

Nightly repression continued, police accosting the plaza often to remind people that bundling up in a sleeping bag, holding an umbrella or putting it on the ground, or laying down was illegal. The visits slowed in the week or so before Christmas. But in the aftermath of a 24 hour binge of police crackdowns on Mandela Parkway—and the resurrection of the tree sit soon after–police apparently received word that it was time to lower the hammer on the plaza. A police raid on the plaza on December 30 was more like a police riot, with made up charges, and aggressive and violent random targeting seemingly focused on people of color. It seems quite clear that police were sent in with an agenda to cause havoc, target individuals and make arbitrary arrests with inflated penalty charges measured now in years, not in hours, days or fines. Most charges appear likely to be dropped as of this writing—misdemeanor charges have already been dropped.

As disheartening as this increased repression seems, I think there’s at least two upshots. One, the key to occupying is occupation. Two, the city is on the run. Despite a lack of support from the public and even Occupy Oakland itself, the ongoing occupation has been key to maintaining the politicized space liberated by Occupy Oakland on October 10, 2011. That politicized space has been the site of continued struggles against the police, on one level. But more importantly, its been a method of representing as hollow the liberal protestations of city council and mayor that they support the Occupy movement and dissent in general. Forcing city administrative liberals to admit their penchant for brute force solutions to inconvenient expressions of freedom of speech has for the past months, forced more and more liberals off the couch and into the streets. That’s why, no matter how many times the death of Occupy Oakland is pronounced by concerned hyper-liberals hoping the movement will die before it forces them to admit they have no interest in substantive change, Oaklanders still come out for demonstrations against police repression of the movement.

Remaining visible, and occupying, even in lull times where there is little support, has been the key to keeping this tension with liberal hypocrites–and the subsequent dissent that it engenders–alive. The city’s attempts have scaled up as the occupation has revealed itself to be more vigorous and durable than the city can manage with conventional means, prompting citations, harassment and increasingly inventive juridical calculations that switch up trumped up misdemeanors racked in the defense of blankets to hysterical felonies perverted from the original intention during the Jim Crow era.

As occupiers have noted, each time OPD officials have descended on the plaza, they’ve claimed they have a directive to sweep whenever it appears to look like an encampment again. Each time they bring down their brutal weapon of repression and imprisonment, more activists come out to the plaza—those both reactivated and activated for the first time. Each time, their strength allows the plaza to look more like an encampment. The city, anchored to a hammer that sees everything as a nail, has no other response but inaction in the face of legitimate and constitutionally protected protest, an option it rarely chooses for long.

Despite the claim by some that the continuing and myriad occupations of the plaza don’t help the movement—and even hurt it—those very occupations are working in lock step with larger, coordinated actions to build a movement that remains at the vanguard of occupy by occupying. That is, after all, what this movement is supposed to be doing in the first place.

Update:

Dave’s comment below is well worth reading.

Update 2:

As many know by now, yesterday the city revoked the permit of one of the vigils, which had been granted to Occupy Oakland members who had negotiated it autonomously and not as an official action of the General Assembly. In a testament to how tethered the various vigils–also autonomous, but without permits–are, all members of these groups joined together to come up with a practical plan to defend against inevitable police repression. Without the legal requirements of the now-revoked permit, all the vigilers were able to join forces–including the interfaith group–and consolidate their vigils into one political act at the South end of the plaza.

Despite the worry that the lack of permitted protection would be the instant death-knell of all of the vigils, the revocation of the permit has actually made the vigils stronger and more visible. So far the new 247ogp vigil has survived through the night in clear defiance of the police claim that it would be cleared by evening. Moreover, as of midnight January 4, the city has dropped its absurd lynching and other charges–including the lynching charge against Alex, an African American man who remains in jail due to other issues–on all the activists arrested on the 30th.

This is all a clear testimony to everything I just wrote, and something city hall would do well to take note of.

Occupiers Face Harassment and Poor Treatment in Jail: Other Occupiers Also Being Arraigned

Tiffany Tran was arrested during a police raid of Frank Ogawa/Oscar Grant plaza this weekend, along with over a dozen other occupiers and bystanders. She was charged with an absurd felony–lynching–which criminalizes even touching or comforting someone once they’re in the physical custody of a police officer.

I spoke with a friend of hers who is in contact with her tonight, and he told me some disturbing details of her confinement at Santa Rita Jail. Tran claims she wasn’t told of her arraignment date, nor even the charge nor its severity until she spoke with a legal representative from the NLG yesterday–two days into her detention. She also said that she’s the only one from Occupy in the housing unit, that she is alone in her cell, and that correctional officers have been standing in front of her cell and harassing her, the guards told her that they were going to take photos of her and sell the–for example, according to Tran one line of ridicule has officers claiming that they will take her photo and publish it online. She says its obvious that she’s the only one being treated that way in the housing unit.

The dangers that Occupiers will face in jail have been obvious. Khali, an Occupier arrested on December 16, now faces felony charges added during his imprisonment which represent the possibility of years, if not decades, of possible incarceration. Truth, another occupier, is still in jail due to previous incarceration. Occupy Oakland, which has, since its inception been a welcoming home for a diverse group of activists, also counts some of society’s most vulnerable members as activists–especially those who’ve been dealing with an unfair society and justice system for the majority of their lives. For this reason, we can’t forget about any of our activists once they’re arrested, or make assumptions about light charges or lawful treatment.

Tiffany Tran will be arraigned tomorrow. OO and her family and friends are calling for people to pack the court room, and/or call the District Attorney.

Wiley Manuel Courthouse 7th st, Dept. 112.

District Attorney 510-272-6222

Mayor Jean Quan 510-238-3141

Information on Khali’s trial, along with a number for the Pleasanton District Attorney is available on the link in the body text above. Contact is also available there for Truth.

Update:

Occupiers including Alex, Brian and others are also being arraigned with charges as varied and absurd as lynching, inciting a riot, obstructing an officer. Arraignments will be held at 9am and at 2pm in the same courthouse for as many as a dozen occupiers arrested over the last week. Please direct your calls to DA and/or mayor for all of our activists.

There will be coffee served outside the courthouse by Occupy Oakland.  For everyone except cops.

Bringing the Noise to the OPD

While not the most exciting image in an action in which fireworks were shot into the night sky beside the jail, it does get the message across.

More Arrests at OGP, Update, at least four more arrested earlier, Update 2: ten out of eleven remain in jail

This is a quick synopsis of a police raid that occurred on vigilers at OGP today at approximately 2pm.

At around 12pm, police arrived at the tree sit and began to arrest people in the vicinity. No reason was given. These people are known in the camp as:

Leila

Josh

Momo

Around the same time, at 12pm DC Jeffrey Israel of OPD told vigilers that their area was taking on “the appearance of an encampment” people needed to clean up, and have the area organized to avoid arrest and citation. Vigilers conferred as a group, cleaning and organizing. But they also pointed out that property had been taken without compensation in a previous raid last week.

According to witnesses, property had still not been given back. At around 2pm, OPD Lt. Harrison, arrived, the same officer who led raid before. Witnesses say that Harrison claimed that he was now leading the operation, and that everything would have to be cleared or people claiming their items would be arrested.

Vigilers then began to take possession of their items. The food table was moved off site. Officers then began to arrest vigilers and others present. Those arrested are known in the plaza as:

Carly:
Shorty:
Khalid:
Alex:

Update:   These people were also arrested earlier, according to other witnesses.

Hamza:

Brian:

Tiffany:

And one other who’s not identified as  yet.

According to witnesses, those arrested had done nothing apparently illegal, and no reason was given for their arrest. WItnesses asked for the cause of arrest, were told to talk to the public information officer, who also refused to answer questions Shorty is a diabetic and needs medication, according to witnesses. The interfaith tent and tree sit remain, and were not subject to arrest.

The Egyptian Women’s Solidarity Rally continues as scheduled.

Update 2:

As of 12am December 31, only one person arrested at OGP today has been released. Approximately ten others remain in jail under various charges, including “inciting a riot”. They’ll probably remain in jail through the holiday weekend, until at least Tuesday, when we’ll know more.

We’ve been looking at video from the melees today, and as usual, it reveals cops aggressively and violently pushing occupiers and bystanders, and slamming targeted individuals to the ground, where they’re humiliated and brutalized as they’re handcuffed. The almost entire male police force seems to take a special pleasure in pushing women around from what I saw.

Looking at the circumstances surrounding each arrest, it appears that many individuals were targeted–either deliberately, or at random–and were not actually engaged in any offenses at all. A police official would simply point to an individual and command police to arrest them, though they appear to be doing nothing different than the people standing next to them. I’ll post edited videos when they’re available.

Boilerplate End of Year Piece: The Four Factors that Made Occupy Oakland the Occupy Game Changer

People like End of Year retrospectives. So here’s mine on Occupy Oakland, highlighting what I think were the game-changing features of the movement that have made it arguably, and according to many, the vanguard of nation-wide Occupy.

The ‘Open’ Camp: From the evening of October 10, the camp at Frank Ogawa Plaza/Oscar Grant Plaza was open to all who wanted to join. Donated tents assured that the homeless and poor had an equal shot as their camping aficionado counterparts up the class chain to occupy. Over time the open nature of the camp was at once the most challenging, and most vibrant aspect of the camp. The open nature of the camp also made it attractive to residents of surrounding communities; even if they didn’t camp, the fact that the diversity of camp dwellers was so distinct and unusual, encouraged the curious to hang out at the margins, where they inevitably engaged in often life-changing discussions, heated arguments, and heart to heart truth-seeking. No observer who’d encountered the camp could leave without feeling as if they’d just experienced something exceptional and unique. I think this led to the vanguard leadership the camp quickly assumed.

The Revolutionary Kitchen: As the camp grew, a new dynamic occurred within one of the nascent and ancillary elements. Food, of course, was important, but unlike Occupy Wall Street and other occupies, which made a national meme out of delivered pizza, Occupy Oakland almost immediately began cooking its own food with a steady, and soon, unceasing, supply of provisions. Within days, the kitchen committee had made the decision to cook 24 hours a day, or as close to that ideal as possible.

The effect that this had on the camp and surrounding community is hard to exaggerate. Over the next weeks, dozens, perhaps hundreds of people who never slept at the camp, and may never have had any interaction with it whatsoever, were invited to enjoy a [often] delicious meal and share a conversation with an eclectic mix of the city’s politicizing, political and apolitical at all hours of the day and night. The sense of entering a new phase of social and political development–not seen, if ever, for decades–was palpable and intoxicating.

Moreover, as many have observed, the kitchen was not just a charity soup kitchen, nor even similar to the admirable work of Food not Bombs. The open camp may have perhaps acted as a spore-like meme–a matrix that affected the growth of everything connected to it, stressing: openness, lateral gravity, and decentralized planning. The staff varied from day to day, as did the type of food, and even the configuration of the kitchen and its also central dishwashing station—so that from one day to the next, it was a completely different entity. Sharing the cooking, the meal and the community growing around it, as well as the cleaning up created a sense of spiritual fulfillment—yes, as hokey as it sounds—that went far beyond politics of any kind. On more than one night I was lost washing dishes for hours in the luke warm water—melting into the conversation, music, street sounds, lights, and mingling humanity around me. Like many, I had to be forced out of the dishwashing station to make warm for new people. Because the sensation was so singular and fulfilling.

No Negotiations with Police/City: Novel structural elements like the kitchen were a product of the binding and relentless ban on cooperation with the city and police. Its likely no kitchen at all would have been possible from negotiations with police and the city, because city codes arbitrarily outlaw open flame cooking in Frank Ogawa plaza, though its legal in every other park in the city. Whenever the city tried to co-opt Occupiers with emissaries from Quan-related groups, they found it nearly impossible to herd them back into meetings with Quan, regardless of whatever status they had. And all such meetings had with the city surreptitiously posing as official Occupy Oakland encounters were heartily condemned by the General Assembly with a quickness. Police entering and exiting the camp at will wouldn’t have had much problem arresting campers and confiscating items from campers, harassing them with a withering and daily barrage of petty ordinances—the same kind of legal hounding that actual homeless people face every day and which drives them from one place to another.

The ban on police from the camp created an immediate hardship. But like so many other hardships created by structure of the camp, it was also a hidden blessing. Those who had never considered their interpersonal relationships as being products of political paradigms were forced to do some soul searching about how to deal with the mildly and radically problematic among them–as well as mental illness, class antagonisms, sexism, racism and just about every other societal fault that people are prevented from experiencing at levels of crisis by a reliance on police. Those who were used to only theorizing about such ideas were forced to put them into action, not just with like-minded people, but with people from radically different backgrounds.

It was difficult, but it also inculcated a new perspective on behalf of many, who, for the first time, perhaps, began to question all aspects of their social relationships.

The Hybrid Autonomous/GA Action Model: As cranky fixture Gerald bellowed last night on the stage, the GA, despite being every bit the often petty bread and circuses political theater of reputation, is the life’s blood of the Occupy movements. The GA represents the distinction between top down political and non-profit organizing and a truly open structure. It’s the one forum where all Machiavellianism, secrecy, invisible leadership and all the rest are forced to come to some accounting. I was there the first day, and no one took the rally at then Frank Ogawa Plaza seriously until the GA began. The investment of thought and effort necessary to come to decision making, creates and created emotional investment. And it continues to bring people back to run their own affairs in the intersecting shadows of Clorox, the Tribune building and City Hall, constantly making use of the political space liberated by this unprecedented movement which would, with no further political use, have devolved back into the greatest barrier that exists between Federal Building employees and 12^th street BART entrances.

The GA has been responsible for two historic mass mobilizations, the likes of which have not been seen in the Bay Area for at least a decade, if not longer. And those actions, for several weeks, filled the plaza with new faces and energy—many people who hadn’t been a part of Occupy Oakland before, and didn’t become members afterward, but have and will continue to identify with the group, and come out for the big actions.

But despite all the complaints about the rigid and confining GA, Occupy Oakland has been constantly invigorated and amplified by autonomous actions as well; in the first weeks, marches occurred almost daily, unsanctioned by city or group, bringing attention to everything from prisoner’s rights, police violence, lack of education funding, queer issues and  anti-patriarchy. After the first camp raid, impromptu street demonstrations were common, with hundreds, if not thousands, marching through the streets to the jail at 7^th and Broadway, jamming the streets, with the police helpless to do anything but direct traffic for the protesters. And when it was time to replant the camp after the first and second raid, no one made a proposal to tear down the fence; but it did happen.

And the first two campers who set down their tents didn’t wait for a proposal to reoccupy OGP. They set down and cajoled and advocated for the birth of the second camp, without support or even the faintest assurance that their efforts would bear fruit. Thanks to them and those that joined them, Occupy Oakland rose up again within a number of hours—though things could have very well ended there, or with a final hurrah at the General Strike and Port Closure of November 2^nd.

Since then, autonomous actions, despite failures, have kept the idea of occupation alive in the TreeSit and Snowpark; on the Lake with Aquapy and at  18^th & Linden; with Causa Justa at 10^th and Mandela and at 20^th & Mandela. The Tree Sit, the Interfaith Vigil and the 247OGP, in fact, are arguably responsible for the continuing Occupation–the foot hold on the political space opened up in the plaza may have died in the Winter’s chill otherwise. Whenever there are arrests at an Occupy action, such as today’s at the 10^th and Mandela house, activists have rallied around the plaza—still occupied, even without tents—as their spiritual and tactical base of operations, and even simply to console one another after a brutal day. Though vigilers have lacked support, they haven’t need it, or permission to continue, either.

But its important to note, as many vigilers argue, the 247 and Interfaith would’ve had a much harder time, if not for the vigil approved by the GA, which remains today in the form of a Tipi and information table at the plaza, sustained by the tireless Oakland Occupy Legal committee.

Like an ecosystem, all of these factors have come together to make Occupy Oakland a flexible, vibrant and die-hard organization.

There’s not much else to say this year. Its cold out, and we’re getting our asses kicked this week, and some of us are at a low ebb and wondering where to go from here and how much of our lives to invest in that trajectory. But we’ll be back, as they say.

Update:

Just an hour or so after I wrote this, the occupiers from the 10th and Mandela house who were arrested earlier today, and their supporters, rallied back to the camp, where they’ve apparently founded a new tree sit in the very same tree where the old one was constructed. There’s also apparently some tents set up underneath. Again, the power of autonomous action keeps giving this movement wings, even when all seems lost.  Here’s a photo from @BellaEiko

Update 2:

I’ve also started a twitter list of Occupy Activists who also Tweet. I hope that it will be useful to people who want to know what’s going on in various occupations around Occupy Oakland, and, as always,  in the plaza itself. With a talented group like this, actually experiencing events as they happen, and with the tools of the internet at their disposal, there really is no point in relying on–or letting–journalists tell our stories for us. We can do the job faster and more accurately and with our biases and motivations in the clear and as obvious as anyone can imagine.

Also; here’s a photo gallery of some of the photos I took this year thru camp and un-camp.

Jack O Lantern and Anarchy Light in the Waning Days of the Final Camp

One of Many Occupations of the Intersection of 14th and Broadway After the First Return

Returning to the Camp 2.0

GA on the Second Return

Day One, GA One

Day One, Tent One

Night One

Kitchen 1.0, On Day Four

The Camp on One of its Heydays

Short Lived Fence, Unable to Withstand Power of Returning Occupiers

Liberated Green Zone at 19th & Telegraph

“Occupying Oakland, That’s Exactly What We’re Doing”, Update 1, Update 2, Update 3

There had been word for the past few days of a “secret camp” being established by the Tactical Action Committee. I don’t feel like I need to know everything that’s happening in OO, so I was content to see where this was going, enjoying TAC’s tweets about it. Whatever the ostensible plans for the “secret camp”, a visit by police today prompted a public call for more campers to create some human density and security in the new encampment and so the impromptu unveiling.

The new camp has been dubbed Zion Cypress Triangle—representing the symbolic biblical paradise, the historical name of the neighborhood, and the shape of the lot. I spent an hour or so there this evening, and I found it to be aptly named; it was a surprising oasis of soft light, shadow and dim traffic sounds blossoming in an angular wedge between Mandela Parkway and Peralta Street. The graffiti is spectacular, but neat, and there’s an idiosyncratic set of barriers on one end of the lot that create an almost fun-house environment. There’s about a dozen tents and campers at the moment, and that may double in the next day or two.

The camp is TAC’s brainchild, the heart of which remains the trio of exceptionally tall young men who achieved some fame during their complicated and frustrating establishment of the short-lived camp at 18^th and Linden.

The Committee has learned a few things since then, holding down the living-area portion of the historic foreclosure occupation they share with Causa Justa just a few blocks down the street. They noticed the triangle of barbed wire and graffiti in their neighborhood and began investigating at the assessor’s office. According to Chris M., an original member of TAC, who I talked to the first night of the 18^th and Linden occupation,  their research showed that none of the five parcels that constitute the lot are owned—not by private interests or city.

There’s also no tax history for the lot, according to TAC, and neighbors say that for at least a dozen years, there’s been no use or ownership. Remarkably, from a capitalist-bureaucratic perspective, the lot does not seem to exist. Hence, the albatross of unclear ownership and undecided sponsorship that created so many problems at the last West Oakland occupation, has been eliminated. With no middle man, or woman, to complicate the matter, it is now just an issue between the camp and the city authorities.

No one can predict the ultimate legal designation of some of, or all, the lot at this point. A portion of the lot, for example, is apparently a section of Peralta that would, in an Escher-esque turn, connect the street to Grand if it wasn’t cut off by the fence. Earlier, police didn’t seem to know what to make of the situation, and while some businesses in the area may be currently dissatisfied with having occupiers in the neighborhood, its not clear what anyone can do about it. Only time will tell, and TAC and the campers are fine with those odds for now.

Staking a claim in this real estate netherworld, the Tactical Action Committee and allied pioneer campers plan to hold down the camp for as long as possible—the ultimate goal is to have a winter occupation. They’re starting with a simple set of rules barring loud noise, antagonism towards neighbors and drugs and alcohol. And they’ll be using a consensus driven decision making process for the limited needs of the camp itself, ultimately bringing decisions and report-backs back to the GA proper on a regular basis.

Chris told me that he thinks that the camp will be a good compliment to the other Occupy Oakland iterations: the GA-spawned plan to occupy a large building; the city-permitted tipi vigil at #OGP; the unpermitted interfaith vigil and 24/7-OGP vigil; and the ongoing foreclosure defense occupations like 10^th and Mandela. As Chris says, the goal is, after all, to “occupy Oakland”.

Update:

Information at the Assessor’s office appears out of date, and while there may be private ownership of some portions of the land at Zion, others appear to be owned, or recently owned by the city. A call to the assessor’s office earlier indicates that even they are not sure who owns what–there’s at least one parcel in the triangle that may be owned by the city.

Update 2: @Bayreporta answer the call to do research and found out when the remaining portions of the lot were given to the developers in question, in 2009. The maps at the assessor’s office weren’t updated to reflect the change in ownership, or the change in the property’s numbered parcel designation. The parcels featured on the map do not, as TAC indeed said, technically exist as a registry. Nor do the portions that are marked city actually belong to the city.

Update 3: One last word about the property. TAC looked at outdated maps on the Assessor’s website that contain now non-existent parcel numbers. These were even more confusing because after the land was purchased by the firm that currently owns it, the city still retained ownerships over parts of it until just two years ago–that explains how a section of Peralta veers off of the main street and into private property and why the word “city” dots the map currently available at the Assessor’s website. For those not familiar with the slow pace of the Assessor’s corrections to existing maps, its understandable that TAC would actually think that they were looking at accurate representations of ownership, i.e., that non-existent parcel numbers meant a lack of clear ownership.

The truth is that they can be forgiven for thinking that for another good reason; because for fourteen years the lot did lack clear ownership. For fourteen years, the lot belonged to the city in name only. Underdeveloped, and as forgotten as the amputated city street subsumed within it–just another place for graffiti bombers to ply their trade. While it changed hands to private developers six years ago, it continues to be a useless blight on the struggling neighborhood–one assumes because the owners are waiting for it to one day become valuable. TAC can be forgiven for coming to the conclusion that the triangle was a ghost-plot belonging to no one. For a decade and a half, it legally was, and for the last six years it has been in every sense but the juridical classification.

Christmas at OGP

Khali and Truth, Two Original OGP Activists in Jail and Need Support

I also wanted to highlight the situation of Truth, an original occupier who’s been in jail on an unrelated charge stemming from a probation violation. We speak in the abstract of the dangers for people of color, poor and disenfranchised from participating in civil disobedience–Truth and Khali represent the concrete realities. The complexities of being poor and of color in this country present great barriers of police repression combined with the legacies of choices made in an environment lacking options, for people of color turning their focus for the first time towards political activism. The dehumanization of people who are considered native to the prison system by its judges and wardens is revealed by the command given by Judge to bailiff during today’s hearings when it came time to bring a new group in from solitary confinement: “switch the bodies.” But these ‘bodies’ are our friends, our comrades, our peers.

You can contact Occupy Oakland’s Anti-Repression Committee for further details or to get involved.

Truth:

One of our comrades, Truth, was arrested the evening of the General Strike. He now is still in custody due to a probation violation. The Anti-Repression Support Committee would like to encourage everyone involved in the Occupy movement to stand in solidarity with him through this rough time. Truth is (as he put it) “an occupier for life!” and was with us from day one of the occupation of Oscar Grant Plaza until his arrest. We just received a letter from him and he has expressed that he wants to hear from and see fellow occupiers and was overjoyed to know we hadn’t forgotten him.

Here’s a few suggestions on how to get Truth’s back:

1. Go to his courtdates, give him a wink and the evil eye to the judge and DA (who’s trying to give him a year! F-that.)
NEXT COURTDATE: January 31st at 2pm at Rene Davidson courthouse (note this is a different courthouse than the arraignments!) on 12th and Oak street. Department 11.

2. Write him letters! 
HIS ADDRESS: Eric Benard #AWK373
550 6th Street
Oakland, CA 94607

3. Visit him. He’s at North County Jail (aka Glenn Dyer Jail) which is on 7th Street and Clay.Visiting hours for Truth are Fridays 12:00 3:00 – you must sign up for this visit between 9:30am and 2:00pm, and Sunday 8:00am – 11:00am – sign up times are from 7:15- 10:00am. Each visit is 30 minutes and Truth is allowed 2 visits per designated day. When you sign up to visit you must present a valid form of identification and his PRN number #AWK373

4. Truth’s NLG attorney is looking for witnesses to his arrest. Did you witness his arrest? Please get in touch with the National Lawyers Guild if you think you did, or if you have video or pictures of his arrest. If you’re not sure do not hesitate to check with the NLG. Call the hotline: 415 285 1011

Khali:

Occupy Oakland is facing increasingly brutal targeting by Oakland Police Department and City Hall. This has ranged from issuing citations for having “structures” like umbrellas in Oscar Grant Plaza or parking tickets to community members dropping off food and supplies, to daily forms of police harassment and raids on Occupy Oakland.

Last Friday December 16, OPD conducted a raid targeting Occupy Oakland during which they confiscated all of the personal belongings of the Occupiers maintaining our vigil at Oscar Grant Plaza. In the course of forcibly taking the blankets, food and belongings of our community, police arrested three members of Occupy Oakland on baseless minor misdemeanor charges. Although Occupy Oakland was able to raise money to bail out two of these individuals that evening, due to a violation hold we were unable to bail out Khali who was then forced to remain in Santa Rita Jail for four nights until his arraignment on the following Tuesday.

At the arraignment, we waited all day for Khali’s hearing because the District Attorney had yet to file any charges (even after four days of incarcerating him). With only minutes before closing the court for the day, the DA announced that charges were being filed and that the paperwork was being drafted and was on its way. Khali’s attorney, Dan Siegel, had only minutes to look over the charges before the hearing began, at which time he requested that Khali be released until his next court date given that he was being charged with very minor misdemeanors. The District Attorney opposed this request, arguing that he couldn’t be released because he was homeless and had no residence on record.  Khali immediately notified the judge that he did have a residence and provided the address. It was then concluded that because the staff that could confirm this residence was gone for the day (it now being minutes before closing the court room), Khali would have to remain in jail until his next court date.

Bail, however, was set and Occupy Oakland immediately began the process of posting it. With all paperwork ready to go, we waited for Khali to be transferred back to Santa Rita Jail so his bail could be posted. Shortly after 8pm, we were notified that Khali could no longer be bailed out because he was now being charged with a felony count of assaulting a correctional officer. We have since found out that this alleged incident occurred upon his arrival back at Santa Rita Jail (at the very time we were placing numerous calls to staff at the jail regarding posting his bail). Khali’s bail for this case has now been set for a staggering $580,000.

We don’t yet have all the details about this alleged incident of assault at Santa Rita, but do know the following:

-   Khali was originally arrested on minor misdemeanor charges but because of a violation hold he was incarcerated for 4 days before any charges were formally filed.

-   While most people would have been released from jail and asked to appear for a future court date given the minor nature of the misdemeanor charges, the DA extended Khali’s incarceration because of the county’s assertion that he is homeless.

-   We are concerned for Khali’s health and physical well-being. He has shown up for every court appearance with severely bruised, swollen eyes and it’s evident that he is suffering physical abuse.

-   We are also concerned for Khali’s mental health. He is on medication prescribed by a psychiatrist and we have learned that he has not been given his meds, nor even received medical evaluation since his arrest. It is clear during his court appearances that he is suffering enormously from having his medication withheld.

-   We have learned that the alleged assault occurred upon his arrival back at Santa Rita when guards were placing him in solitary confinement. It is unclear why the decision was made to place him in solitary confinement (prior to any alleged assault) given that he was only being charged with minor misdemeanors and was in the process of being bailed out.

Khali’s situation is a particularly brutal example of OPD’s targeting of Occupy Oakland. He was picked up on minor charges which, after four days of incarceration and withholding of his medication, have morphed into a violent felony charge that could now lead to a long prison term. They are sending Occupy Oakland a message, and they’re doing it at the expense of Khali’s health and freedom. As a community, we need to stand by Khali and show police and the District Attorney that we will not allow them to continue to target and brutalize us.

PLEASE call the Pleasanton District Attorney’s office and express your concern regarding Khali’s (Marcel Johnson) case: (925) 803-7171

This hearing has been been postponed until 1/9/12 at 9am.

For Khali, an Occupier, Updated

Its hard to write about people in one’s life; its easy to move too far towards hagiography, and even easier to accidentally smear someone’s reputation or portray them unfairly. There’s a beautiful story I learned last night about Khali and another camper—who ironically was in jail for the past month and was only released yesterday on Khali’s arraignment day. But I just don’t feel I can fairly broadcast it. I haven’t asked permission of the people it would affect most. Its enough to say that it speaks of the power of the social and political space that was created at #OGP, and that still survives, as long as two or more people share the liberated space there.

Like many of us, Khali is a difficult and complex person. His presence at #OGP reminds me of how much we take for granted as political activists, how often we forget the real people around us, and how fraught with ideological pitfalls is the real terrain of the social justice struggle. Khali Occupied before there were Occupiers, when #OGP was known as Frank Ogawa Plaza, a lonely and unfriendly wasteland for the homeless and disempowered. I think much of the conflict that Khali experienced at the camp was a product of the very legitimate antagonism he once felt [and perhaps still feels to a lesser degree] toward campers, who, perhaps in his view, arrogantly usurped the role of the marginalized.

That being said, Khali stuck around. After the last camp was destroyed by police, he continued staying in #OGP, watching over the small group of Occupiers in the interfaith community and various vigils. His arrest last week was indelibly linked to this political activity. Khali could have slept anywhere in the plaza, or elsewhere. But he’s always chosen to be part of the community there, knowing that doing so exposes him to arbitrary arrest, and that he’s a particularly vulnerable target. When police attacked the vigil keepers at #OGP last week, trying to, as City Administrator Santanna allegedly stated, “clear the plaza”, Khali was also arrested. His offense? Sitting on a blanket on a bench while waiting for a ride, according to witnesses.

While others were released on bail, Khali’s complicated past kept him in jail. At his arraignment, Occupiers found that an extra charge of felony assault was added which presumably occurred somewhere within the system over the past week. Khali’s bail was set at an offensively high bar—nearly 600,000 dollars. That’s far beyond the ability of Occupy Oakland, or its allies, to meet, unfortunately. No one knows what will happen to Khali now. I find it heartbreaking that after his own journey through a difficult life, and conquering his own demons, when he finally had the chance to—like so many of us, me included—live a life of meaning and importance to society, he could spend even more of his life incarcerated instead.

Khali’s one of the OG Occupiers now, an integral part of our movement. We need him and miss him.

We’re trying to fill the courtroom on Friday morning for his preliminary hearing to show him that we support him, that we won’t forget about him. And to show the local justice system that we consider him a political prisoner and that we don’t turn our backs on members of our movement, no matter the hardship they’re placed in.

Please fill the court room on the day of his hearing, Friday 9 am, December, 23.

Gale Shenone Hall of Justice 5672 Stoneridge Drive,
Pleasanton, California 94588

From Pleasanton BART:
Take the Dublin/Pleasanton line to the Pleasanton BART station. The courthouse is about one mile from BART. On foot, go east on Owens to Hacienda Drive and turn right. Turn left on Gibraltar and turn left on Stoneridge Drive. The courthouse is on the right in the Hacienda Business Park.

Update:

You can call the DA today and make your voice heard on Khali’s case. His legal name is Marcel Johnson and the DA’s number is 925 803 7171. You can find out more about the case here.

Sympathy from the Devil

I owe someone a slice of pizza.

Last night, after the rush and exhilaration of taking the City Hall chambers–shutting down Council President Reid’s attempts to limit each person’s speech to one minute instead of the normal two, and making him eat his words about having police escort us all out–an OG Occupy Oakland member warned me that the media would make a mockery of the night. I disagreed, and put a pizza between us as wager. As soon as I arrived home, I found that he was absolutely right.

Though I’d seen Alan Wang of ABC 7 and Matthai Kruvila of the San Francisco Chronicle sitting in what appeared to be the best seats in the house in the front row of the chamber, they must have fallen into some kind of extra dimensional black hole when it came to accurately note the onslaught of diverse voices that spoke—not only against the Orwellian legislation proposed by de la Fuente and Schaff, but in favor of present, past and future shutdowns.

These included the very voices of labor that media are fond of suggesting are opposed to Occupy Oakland’s actions. And it wasn’t just rank and file members—which the media, international union offices and city hall dismiss regularly in ironic fashion as being unrepresentative of union interests—these were heavy hitters from the establishment administrations of the very locals affected most by the shut down. First among the speakers, and among others labor voices were: Marty Frates, Secretary Treasurer of Teamster’s Local 70; Richard Reed Vice President of ILWU Local 10; Joe Keffer, representative of SEIU Local 1021 and Betty Wilson-Jones, President of the Oakland Education Association.

This was an overwhelming response from organized labor in favor of Occupy Oakland and the kind of actions that the group represents. But Wang’s story barely mentioned it, preferring instead to fashion a narrative out of the momentary and quickly forgotten disruption of Port Director Omar Benjamin’s remarks, claiming that the meeting then “fell apart”. Of course, nothing of the kind occurred—the meeting continued in the same [admittedly raucous] fashion with several more supporters of Occupy Oakland speaking.

Its important to note that this was not only a public referendum on the wisdom of de la Fuente’s Municipal Patriot Act. Every speaker, including union members, clergy and OO supporters  were outraged at the continuing toxic atmosphere created by Mayor Quan and other city creatures’ anti-OO propaganda—an atmosphere in which such proposals thrive with deadly vigor.  Journalists like Wang have been critical to the success of the city’s propaganda campaign against the city. I’ve spoken to Wang before [at the first port shutdown], and he really does believe himself to be a fair minded journalist, a statement that actually makes me feel sorry for him.

Matthai Kruvila’s story was somewhat more detailed and less insulting to frontal brain functions, but it also strangely missed the overwhelming voices of institutional labor  that lined up just a foot or two away from him and repeatedly brought up the potential—and repeatedly denied—role of the port as a money generating engine of growth for a city in dire economic straits. Its an issue that has untapped potential to up-end the Occupy/Port story from one where petulant hippies prevent sympathetic truckers and union members from going to work, to one where a city suffocating in poverty and lack of opportunity is prevented from using its own wealth to crawl up from the hole its leaders buried it in.

Neither journalist mentioned this, though it was a point brought up by one institutional voice after another at the mike. Its been a large part of the rationale detailed in countless speeches and writing about the port shutdown, but its been repeatedly ignored by reporters for reasons no one can fathom.
___________________
I’m not a journalist and I was sitting in the back row, but for me there were two notable narratives of the evening quite different from those chosen by the above-mentioned journalists.

The first flows from the complete loss of control over the meeting by Council President Reed. Reed went from a misguided attempt at limiting comments to one minute, from their normal two, to impotently crying out for the police to escort out the crowd. A police officer behind me shifted uncomfortably from one foot to another, but literally ignored him. It was a microcosm of the potential fate that all such leaders now face as Occupiers across the nation stage one spectacle after another highlighting the manifest power of withholding the “consent” in the “consent of the governed” formula. Reid soon gave up, petulantly sulking in his Captain’s chair as supporters of civil disobedience and freedom of political speech read him the riot act.

Reid really didn’t understand that the limitations he placed would be a product of agreement, and that without that agreement, he could do little but call in state violence to do his political work by other means. This is a graphic illustration of the intersection of Occupy-Government-Police that has characterized the last several months of American politics.

The second narrative involves the so-called progressives on the council, and it includes another aspect of the pizza conversation. As I noticed, and the pizza-winner confirmed, there is something about sitting in dialogue with a counterpart that invites a desire for reciprocal understanding. I think this dynamic is in operation in all facets of human communication, and is understood best by self-made salesmen [of which my father is perhaps the most skilled I've ever met]. When people in opposition meet in an clear-speaking venue, one likely alternative is that they will find common ground, understanding, and yes, sympathy for one another’s viewpoints. This, as I’ve noted countless times is the special ingredient of the Occupy Oakland movement, embodied in a living camp where a dozen kinds of misunderstandings and antagonisms met on equal footing on an hourly basis.

But the dynamic is quite different when one of the parties is vested with a much greater level of power than the other. The difference between meeting on a field of grass and walking up the marble steps to the chamber of power to stand before seated individuals makes this dynamic a dangerous and unfruitful one. Because who couldn’t feel sympathy for Nancy Nadel, as she expressed frustration at not being treated like a progressive friend of the Occupy movement? Nadel is actually a nice person—I met her when I canvassed her house as part of my short-lived census job a couple of years back and she was very personable. Likewise, Brunner seemed pleasant enough.

The reality, however, is that such nice folks are locked hand and foot to a system designed to negate the needs of poor and working class people. It is a system based on servicing the needs of the wealthy and powerful, and its why, if left to the management of the city, issues like the disposition of the port’s wealth will always fall into the same kinds of greedy fingers represented by the unctuous chamber of commerce and huge conglomerates and corporations.

Moreover, nice folks like Brunner are twice-tied, hemmed in by a need to believe in the progressive bonafides of a Democratic establishment that consistently supports ever-more heinous policies and legislation. It was, for example, shocking—there really is no way to put this—to hear Brunner complain that Occupier’s were forgetting their progressive political allies like Barbara Boxer. Boxer, who, just days ago voted in favor of national legislation in the National Defense Authorization Act that allows total suspension of civil liberties and the perpetuation of Guantanamo logic—a blackhole of lawmaking that makes de la Fuente’s proposal look as if it was submitted by a toddler in an over-sized Darth Vader costume.

As much as such liberal politicians want to believe that they’re on “our” side, they’re not. Because the Occupy movement is about halting business as usual politics and institutional frameworks—about leading rank and file from every institution onto a field of grass, taking institutional privileges away, and building something new from the soil beneath their feet.

The most powerful action that people like Brunner can undertake—the only actual meaningful act, as I yelled to Brunner after she brought up Boxer—is to quit their jobs and join the people. They won’t do that, because they don’t want to change business as usual politics, but simply use their position to make life a little nicer in the meantime and to continue their career-goals as leaders. They’re never going to address issues like the one about where the port’s money goes, or how to actually help truckers the other 363 days of the year when Occupy Oakland is not oppressing them.

They’d like to convince us to not make them look bad in public, to tone down rhetoric, and to feel ashamed if someone breaks a window. They don’t want to negotiate, they want to convince us to be manageable and amenable to their needs. Though OO may from time to time occupy a chamber and stand on the same expensive carpeting, that’s totally not going to happen.

Of Umbrellas and Justice

Vigil people and the OGP Interfaith Community dealt a powerful, if absurdist, blow to city hall and OPD today. In their attempts to find any way to suppress political expression in the shadow of city hall, police made the mistake of expressing a local ordinance as a prohibition on umbrellas. Such one dimensional brinksmanship seems to have been the best the city administrator could come up with to foil attempts by interfaith occupiers at creating a public religious expression using a canopy. With the obvious shortcomings of this strategy, Occupiers have had no shortage of ways to “flout” the law, by using umbrellas in the park. Stupified police are doing their best to pretend that there is indeed some prohibition on umbrellas, and even gave out one citation today, before the Pythonesque character of their policing method forced them to hang their head in shame elsewhere.

Later, Umbrellaed-Occupiers visited the city administrator’s office with a multitude of questions about the discriminatory practice of the law. Answers were few in coming.

If you’re traveling in, or to, Oscar Grant/Frank Ogawa Plaza, and are wondering about the legal status of carrying an umbrella, please contact Arturo Sanchez for clarification:

Email: ASanchez@oaklandnet.com
Phone: (510) 238-7542

Police Harassment of Occupy Oakland Members Continues in Oscar Grant/Frank Ogawa Plaza, Update

Continuing harassment from the previous night, police arrested two to three people—one apparently for sitting on a blanket in the plaza. Police also apparently confiscated a food table, which has been for weeks offering free food to the hungry in the plaza.

While the vigil itself operates under a permit, actual use of the park remains a hotly contested issue, as police, under the orders of the city administrator’s office, enforce several absurdly expressed city codes, applied in discriminatory fashion. Rights of public use once taken for granted in the city are apparently no longer available to members of Occupy Oakland, or their supporters—many of which, at this point, remain the core of working class and poor people of color from surrounding neighborhoods.

The recent arrests and harassment should be of concern to any one who regularly uses or passes through the plaza. If you have questions about how to safely use the park without risking arrest make sure to call Arturo Sanchez:

Email: ASanchez@oaklandnet.com
Phone: (510) 238-7542

Update:

I just talked to Ali, one of three people who was arrested this afternoon. we told me that the altercation started when he tried to retrieve some items from Department of Public Works bin where they had been discarded. He was surrounded by police, who tried to restrain him and dragged him toward the paddy wagon. As a way to pacify him, he was told that he would only get a citation, but he was arrested anyway, and taken to jail where he was charged with resisting arrest with five thousand dollar bail. The community put together bail and he was released on bail after midnight. Khali remains in jail on unrelated charges.

Update 2:

Alex in comments adds his perspective on the attack on the food table:

I was at Ogawa/Grant plaza today when the arrests happened, and was actually one of the people carrying the food table. It was not taken by city workers or police.

The police showed up and told everyone that there could be no free-standing structures other than the approved vigil table, or they would be confiscated. A number of us didn’t want the food or the food table to be trashed, so we picked it up and started walking with it, so it would no longer be a free-standing structure. Other people followed to carry coolers, water, boxes and other food supplies, and we started marching around with the food. A few officers told us that if we set the table down we would be cited. When one of the women helping carry the table asked what we would be cited for, she was arrested. The table never touched the ground and the rest of us carrying it decided to move it offsite so it would not be wasted.

While we were waiting for a car to pick up the table and food supplies, DPW came by with a cart full of belongings to throw in a dumpster. One of the workers saw a suitcase and sleeping bag and didn’t feel comfortable throwing away what might be someone’s only belongings. We asked if they could set the belongings aside, so we could pick them up on another trip. The one worker gave us the suitcase and sleeping bag so we could return it to its owner, and we thanked him. When we asked about other items like folding chairs that were being thrown in the trash, another DPW worker yelled at us, “Sort it out once it’s in the dumpster, I just want to finish my work and go home!”. We managed to save a few other items, but not many. The owner of the car was going to return to the GA today, so that people can get their stuff back, but mainly it was just food table items.

Umbrella Insurrection at Oscar Grant Plaza

Illegal Structures at OGP

Photo by Enrique

When police looked for a code that makes physical presence in OGP illegal, they decided on a novel interpretation of a local ordinance. On three separate occasions police officers claimed that standing still with an umbrella in the plaza makes you a structure and such novel umbrella-human hybrid forms would be subject to citation and de-umbrellafication. Police also threatened vigilers that their property would be confiscated if it was left on the ground for any amount of time. Yes, this is everything you’ve ever heard about discriminatory application of the law.

As protest, occupiers arrived with umbrellas, fully flouting this new code.

Here’s the somewhat biblical sounding code in question:

City of Oakland Municipal Code 9.16.010–Public Grounds

Any person who shall enter upon any of the public squares, waterfront or submerged lands or any other lands, belonging to or held by the city, and dig up the earth, or deposit any earth, rock or other substance thereon, or shall erect or attempt to erect any building, wharf, or structure of any kind, by driving or setting up posts or piles, or in any other manner appropriate or encumber any portion of the real estate belonging to or held by the city, unless such person shall have first obtained property authority so to do, shall be deemed guilty of an infraction.

Its quite clear that this ordinance outlaws any human presence in a public place when it coincides with an inanimate object in any configuration; it seems to go so far as to suggest that occupying any physical public space is grounds for an infraction. The fact that people every day use Frank Ogawa Plaza in numerous ways that both encumber, and in which they accidentally or on purpose fashion their bodies into structures, makes the current application of the law conspicuously discriminatory.

West Coast Port Shutdown. Oakland, Part 2: Occupy Oakland’s Unstoppable Revolution, Updated

Over the last two months, Occupy Oakland has seemed to take the express lane to national level visibility and de facto leadership of the Occupy movement. An open camp at the seat of city power, in tension and without negotiation with city hall, marked a unique movement from the start. The openness created the matrix for a mass movement of the poor, marginalized and forgotten, with new political paradigms created outside of the academic and political mainstream. The tension led to a certain actualization of that potential, culminating in uniquely brutal and nearly fatal police repression that exposed the limits of police violence in a government that requires the fig leaf of consent. With every brutal repression, more liberals and apolitical people have been radicalized, both in Oakland and the nation, bringing out tens of thousands to unsanctioned protests, where before there were only hundreds.

There were also limits to this strategy and the structure that made it possible. The camp is gone now, and the people that lived in it, perhaps, for the time being too exhausted to replant it. But this has left a perplexing question for many occupiers, both old and new. What happens to a mass movement predicated on an openness based in a public access and presence when it loses its tether to the physical world? The GA remains, of course. Unlike its reputation as a clown show of jeering white male anarchists [a sometimes accurate description] it is more open to co-optation than any organizational structure I’ve seen to date. For whatever reason, attendance has dwindled, and the opportunity for any group to gain a discursive foothold there, through consensus, must be some kind of great secret at this point, because it remains surprisingly unexploited. The GA still remains an important venue for directing a large number of people in continual public action. The struggling vigil-type actions, which have continued since the destruction of the camp in the form of the tree sit and the OGP vigil, have, in one way or another, been connected to the GA and their open structure and “mass” character.

There’s also a concurrent move towards cadre actions, where unwieldy tactics such as foreclosure defense, which up till now remain a tactic that can’t be planned openly in the GA, move through social networks and in-loops. Whatever efficacy they may have, foreclosure defense is not a mass movement, it does not invite in poor communities–rather it services them in a traditional way [though, there are ways of making it mass that have yet to be discussed seriously].

At the other end of this spectrum, the movement’s “mass” actions have relied on existing networks in labor and community organizations. This brand of “mass” actions allow day-of participation, but the planning still relies on plug-in, and that phase, though at least rooted in working class communities, still can keep out the vast majority of Oaklanders who’ve never been politically active and are not members of unions and other organizations. Left out of this mix, of course, is a vast untapped reservoir of unorganized and struggling labor, ignored in every political and social context in this country.

This all leads me back to what’s remained so special about the encampments as a nexus point for joining the skilled, and unskilled, the connected and disconnected, the privileged and the forgotten. Without the participation of the latter in those dichotomies, we go back to what’s comfortable and traditional—closed off cadre actions and affinity groups, or short-lived mass actions that emerge only from institutional organizing. These may be even more effective than before, and certainly more radicalized; but they’re not a substitute for a participatory mass movement. That is, if it’s a mass movement we want.

_______________________

Now that that’s out of the way.

Yesterday’s 20 hour port closing marathon action was glorious. Liberal haters like Andrew Leonard, Chip Johnson and assorted local quasi-anonymous twitter-empowered city hall-servicing nobodies, will be pulling out all the stops today with an insincere tidal wave of concern for the putative working class victims of anti-1% actions. But yesterday’s unprecedented coordinated port closure was a victory, not just for them, but by them.

From the moment we arrived at the port around five thirty am, to the point that the last die-hard protesters left in the wee hours, truckers everywhere in the port loop were cheering us on for the most part; industrial horn-honking echoed everywhere throughout the port. From the very beginning, local Teamsters and Longshoremen rank and file supported the strike, despite the claim from the 1%-aligned international union offices in Washington DC that they did not support the action. Though truckers independently organized to speak for themselves in support of protesters, and against slave-labor conditions, media more often than not ignored solidarity. Of course, that’s not the story the media came to get. Once they got hold of the truckers meme, local media convinced themselves they were a trucker’s advocacy group, bravely supporting their interests against the protesters seeking to bring attention to their plight, while guaranteeing their right to work in an obscure and dangerous low-paid perpetuity. Don’t thank the media; that’s just their job.

Of course, there’s half a dozen more no-brainer arguments for why the port protests have been a good idea–drawing attention to the fact that the port makes billions in profits but does little to enrich the city is the unqualified best,  in my opinion. Beyond those, for me, the best argument for why the port action was a success–and why it should be repeated despite the naysayers–was in the beauty of the mass action that made it possible. The question is not whether Occupy Oakland is popular with “workers”, or any other group. Indeed, its quite possible that they think we’re every bit the stinky, hairy, all-caucasoidal trust-funded hippies the false media narrative of the past three months suggests.

OO’s power is in recalibrating what people THINK they believe about their lives, about possibilities, about activism, about their economic relationships. And most importantly, about the people they share their lives, work and city with. I’ve felt this myself even within the organization itself.

The past few weeks have been a brutal time for Occupy Oakland. With the loss of the camp came a diverse set of trajectories in which to continue, and a diminishing of the solidarity felt by the camp denizens, its protectors and developers. Some have chosen specific forms of activism that have taken them away from visible occupation—foreclosure defense, as I mentioned. Others have tried to maintain the link to  the plaza with toe-hold actions, such as the vigil and the tree sit, but have received little support. The GA has shed attendance as the accumulation of separate actions, the cold of winter and simple fatigue take their toll. And, of course, the Decolonize vs. Occupy schism was a disheartening detour of wasted energy and emotion.

But the problems are beyond even such real and understandable physical conditions and realities, in my view. Without the camp, internet connectivity has become the focal point of organizing and discussion, fostering misunderstandings, misperceptions, increasingly bruised feelings and divisiveness. It is the literal dehumanization of the movement, as people move away from the hard, but productive work of forging physical bonds, to the deceptively easy, but ultimately unsatisfying and confusing process of decision making in the ether of cyberspace.

In my case, at least, I’ve been at a loss to describe who was in this movement with me—a cacophony of muted texts by unknown screen and birth names replaced the hundreds of faces and voices I had come to know at the camp. Without the gravity of Oscar Grant Plaza between us, we began to drift apart from each other, and with that drift has come alienating dissipation. Worse, those that have never existed in cyberspace began to disappear from the terrain of our Online Occupy Oakland, existing in an alternate dimensional OO with different schedules, different concerns and even slightly different physics. During the camp days, there were indeed schisms, disagreements, self-segregation; but you could see them all. They were there before you, they required mending, they could not be ignored, and they were addressed in a tumultuous, impossible and eternal conversation about who we were, what we wanted, and how to get there.

But all of these problems that we’ve accumulated over the past few weeks evaporated when our bodies and minds met in a new real world forged by our presence in the city’s streets. Stupid, interminable fights that I’d been locked into with numerous people over the last two or so weeks evaporated, cleansed by the power of coming together as a living organism with one intent and ten thousand rationales. No enmity of mine survived the day; even someone who I really thought I was about to come to blows with two days ago happily apologized to me, and I to him.

What I like to point out as amazing each time Occupy Oakland has yet another successful mass action, is how little any of the pre-existing ideas of what’s possible, who we are and what we should do, matter. People may, in their ever day, wonder what the hell those OO people are doing; why they’re camping, vigiling and sitting in trees; when they’ll come up with a list of demands; and why they’ve hurt Mayor Quan’s feelings. But the sight of thousands of people moving through the city like a spontaneous life form–as a diverse ONE, chanting, playing music, laughing, supporting one another, in joyous awe of their own collective power—I think touches the heart of all that come into physical contact with it.

The power of people organizing in ways that are not predictable, nor allowed, is in itself a cognitive, spiritual, human revolution. It’s a herd of bicycles orbiting freely in an intersection;  it’s the wonder you feel when you get in front of the crowd a few hundred feet and see what you’ve been a part of, and will be a part of again; its occupying completely the space you’re not allowed to be in, and inviting in those voices telling you you’re not allowed to be there. Its shared existence in time and space as a form of power that few organized forces can hinder. It’s a revolution that can’t be stopped now that its begun. We keep proving that every time we do this.

Update:

Someone mentioned a BBC interview I had done the day of the action. Here it is ; it starts at 17:37 for some reason BBC’s World Today doesn’t archive permanently, so its only up for a few days. I’d had two hours of sleep that day, and I think you can hear it in my voice. But I pretty felt a pretty hefty level of emotional excitement as I always do at OO actions. Its because I’m a cynic, who always thinks its going to be a disaster, and then is moved by the level of support that keeps turning out.

News guy makes some smarmy remark about “scaling wire fences” in intro. It should either be ignored, or laughed at, but not taken seriously.

West Coast Port Shutdown. Oakland, Part 1

We did it. We met at West Oakland Bart at 5pm, dozens at first, then hundreds. I left with the first wave of bicyclists, sandwiched in a series of buses carrying protesters to various berths in the port. At first it was unclear whether there’d be enough people to even hold our berth; but then the rest of the buses began to arrive, and we secured our berths with ease. My sleep-starved body longing for caffeine, I went out in search of coffee, but intersected instead with a human wave on seventh–all the marchers that had left after us. Hundreds perhaps thousands. Somehow I ended up in the berth with all the OO alumns, and it was reunion bash for a little while.

The rest of the protesters occupied three or four ports together, and held them for long enough for the local ILWU to call the day. To be honest, I didn’t even think a hundred people would come out at five in the morning to march a mile and stand around in the cold and rain for five hours. But thousands did. And that was just the first half of the day.

Now, collapse. Later, part two.

Human Shields at the West Coast Port Shutdown

Chip Johnson has another OO hatchet job in his column today, blaming Occupy Oakland for the city’s budget woes and adding the attendant claim that OO hurts the people of the city. It’s been a familiar refrain as the port shutdown—an unprecedented strike against corruption and misplaced priorities—has geared up, and as Oakland has led the way in several regions including the gulf coast.

The position may seem attractive to some liberals and progressives who want substantive change, but were hoping that the Occupy movement could deliver it by magic, in silence and without effort. Now that municipal reactions throughout the nation have forced liberals to choose sides—between empty rhetoric from age-old establishment enablers, and actual action from the so-called city-harming radicals—the movement appears less palatable to some.

The agreement on the harm that Occupy Oakland does probably has a lot to do with the media’s clarion call over the past months of Occupy actions to see Occupiers as a lot of hippies and trust fund revolutionaries shattering the collective and symbolic windows of financially debilitated cities. Its a fantastical and absurd view of reality that may satisfy people who want to pretend that they woke up yesterday to find their cities and states on fire, but shouldn’t confuse anyone who’s had their eyes open for the past decade.

For years, corporations and their corrupt government cronies have positioned their underpaid workers between their coffers and the threat of mass actions. Arguments typical of that tradition have emerged, for example, around the most vulnerable members of the Oakland Port ecosystem, truck drivers. They’ve been described as near indentured servants, working without benefits and for fixed salaries against traffic and the clock. And this is true. Port spokespeople, the media, and even liberal supporters of the occupied movement, have bemoaned the effect on these non-union workers by the previous port shutdown. Its a message that fits in well with recent communiques [and even personal “missions” to OO committees] from the ILWU international office in DC, arguing that the Occupy Port Shutdown is an unauthorized attempt to force ILWU workers into an illegal strike.

These arguments obscure reality, allowing corporations, their city hall minions and institutional union leadership to make human shields out of the vulnerable corpus of low paid, and under represented workers. Using this gambit as a way to deflect criticism of their own policies and behavior should resonate instantly as an intelligence-insulting hoax. The idea that corporations that effectively bar union representation and create a life of indentured servitude for truckers are not responsible for the misery such workers endure–but rather it is two month demonstrations suddenly causing them to experience insecurity and poverty–is absurd.

Likewise, the city and port management’s claim that the day long actions rob the people of vital resources and trade is also laughable. As Michael Siegel notes, the city is obligated to use port profits on the city’s welfare. But the city allows the port commission to regularly find new ways of investing the money in the port, while city schools and other priorities shutter their doors one after the other—vital services that would be saved with even the merest scraps from the billion dollar generating capital engine of the port.

And while the ILWU has been more militant than most unions, its clear that like every other institution that exists today with a claim of representation of popular will, they are aligned first and foremost with the welfare of the 1%. Calcified elections and representation schemes open to gaming by elites in distant capital offices do not represent the will of union membership; rather, they represent the exhausted logic of settling for the least of evils available. The claim by unions that their members are locked into boilerplate contracts cast in iron before many were even born, is typical of the kind of thinking that has kept a flailing labor colossus on its back for generations.

And, of course, it has become conventional wisdom that “labor” itself, exists only when it is unionized, and that all of the sectors ignored by unions for generations are somehow not deserving of that empowering seat at the table. The argument that tiny administrative bodies claiming to represent less than 10% of the working population are in charge of charting the economic landscape for the other 93%, is itself everything that our Yanqi Autumn movement emerged to protest.

But for some odd reason, all of these arguments work! The city’s liberals and centrists don’t, in fact, blame unscrupulous corporations for keeping truckers in poverty–they blame protesters working toward social justice for that. They don’t blame the city for squandering port funds that could revive a city budget in dire straits due to years of corrupt mismanagement—they blame protesters seeking an end to crony capitalism, instead.

And of course, protesters thus criminalized, are made into easy targets of violent police reprisals. If, in fact, these meddlers are responsible for hurting union and non-union working people, then by all means, the city should exercise a rough hand in controlling them. Because our very well-being as a city is at stake! They are hurting our corrupt structures’ ability to throw us ever-diminishing scraps while they run our cities out on a rail and into the sea.

It doesn’t matter that Occupy Oakland is composed of the very union members that the city and police claim to be protecting; that an army of non-union labor and jobless Americans have, for the first time, joined their ranks in a solidarity prevented by traditional top-down union organizing. All of that must be ignored.

Its then an easy task for OPD administrators to claim they have no other recourse but to fire sub-lethal ammunition into large crowds—this same uncontrollable municipal emirate that’s squandered the city’s money in corrupt overtime schemes and civil judgment pay-outs for their uncontrollable brutality and ignorance of the law and civil liberties.

It’s that absurd. Not sure why, then, there are so many people who believe it.  Perhaps it’s easier for some who’d rather ignore the Occupy movement until it goes away to pretend that they’re the villains, than actually put their theories of social justice to the test.

Word versus Action

The main event at yesterday’s first ever 2pm GA was the “decolonize” proposal—anyone who was in the plaza between 3 and 6 knows that much. But the story of who was right, wrong, too loud, or too disrespectful is probably more complicated than that immediately reveals. I know I eventually went off the grid—you’ll note in my recording of the GA that there’s no clear end to the spectacle. I’m not sure I made it to the end. My mic was kicked over all through the day as well, for some reason. First time that’s ever happened. To be honest, I’ll take a step out there and suggest that was due to the over all feeling of disrespect that some people were encouraged to bring.

From my own perspective, I have very complicated feelings about the idea of occupation. In the first place, the term is a legal construct that came into wide circulation after World War 1 and has been used in various capacities to obscure colonization. Colonizers, in turn, before the second decade of the 20^th century, were never shy about what they were doing. They colonized, they called it colonization. In later years, the term occupation has become popular in describing the process of colonization in academic circles, because of its resonance with the Palestinian conflict, perhaps. Its a euphemism for the reality of what imperial countries do, part and parcel with the discourse of human rights and humanitarianism that grew up around Wilson’s dogma of the World War 1 era. Because the word does not imply anything sinister in itself, suggests a temporary situation, and a lack of ultimate goals, it is useful in obscuring ethnic cleansing and colonization. It is a word for a transient phenomenon by design, it does NOT mean colonization, any more than invading a country is liberating it.

The rage to me, then, is surprising, given the tame nature of the euphemism, and its multi-faceted usage–from work to describing the human content of a porta potty– and its relatively recent use to obscure colonialism. For my part, though I lived in an occupied country; many of my father’s side of the family live in one; and was even banned for ten years from entering one by the occupier, it never occurred to me that there was any connection between the words. In my opinion, some groups in the bay area have created a connection between the word “occupy” and racism, despite the fact that various political activists have used it for decades in positive fashion, and they’ve convinced others to assume the dynamic as one to one and inherent. That being the case, of course, it obviously means that anyone who doesn’t see it that way has a “colonized” mind and is a “dupe” as one woman called me. This was the attitude that was brought to the plaza by many of the people who had specifically come to back that proposal, but did not come to discuss the other nine proposals on the agenda that day.

The assumption of the narrative of Occupy = Oppression was made most problematic by the intervention of the “white allies”–their own term. Despite the characterizations, Occupy Oakland is made up of a large poc contingent; many of them are poor, some homeless. Being lectured by white allies of another –and one assumes, ‘superior’–group of color, highlights the utter stupidity of the endeavor placed before the GA. The straw that broke the camel’s back for me was the self-proclaimed “Jewish white woman” who took the stage and used her involvement in pro-Palestinian activism as the connector between her struggle and that of Native Americans—claiming that those involved with the occupy movement couldn’t likewise be involved in Palestinian solidarity.

It was an absurd generalization, one not backed by the Arab students who had brought the AIPAC protest proposal, who said that they had never heard an Arab student voice a problem with the term. To be lectured by a “white ally” on how Arabs and Palestinians should feel about the word “occupation” because of HER experience with the issue was bad enough. Not nearly as bad, though, as the person claiming that the “divisiveness” we were experiencing as a product of disagreeing was a product of colonization. That is–and will stand for some time as–the most senseless, racist and offensive thing I’ve heard at the GA.

I wasn’t the only one who responded to this condescension about anyone who didn’t see the occupy word as a symbol of oppression with increasing anger as the day wore on. A woman who was sitting next to me, who also identified as a Native American, was angry at both that reality, and the fact that the facilitator had told everyone at the beginning of the GA that the last step of the day was “to go home” instead of participating in the 24/7 vigil. She left the GA in disgust.

Running Wolf, a Native American who was one hundred percent down with the proposal on Thursday, when I talked to him about it last, was fuming–stomping around the crowd beseeching new faces to get involved and stop talking. Several other people who’d been on the fence at the beginning of the GA—and one person who assured me she was standing aside—voted against the proposal at the end. A person of color who got up during the con period said it best when he complained about the manipulation that was going on, and that he would not use his ethnicity as a point of argument.

The biggest problem for the incoming group was that they had bought into their own hype about the name, their purity of purpose, and the necessity of their dubious mission. They really did believe that people of color outside of their discourse were turned off by the name and saw it as a barrier to participate in the organization. They really did think that they would encounter an all white privileged group whose ignorance on the subject of imperialism required a stern three hour series of lectures from the group and its “white allies”. They really felt entitled to enter the GA and vote on their first day of participation and change its name. Most importantly, they believed that their perspective on race issues was the only legitimate one. All of these assumptions were based on shaky logic.

Occupy Oakland could be more diverse, of course–but it is nevertheless quite diverse. And many people of color in the group have no interest in this discussion. Indeed, I talked to three self-described Native Americans in the last three days who weren’t bothered by the word at all. Another Palestinian American who has been involved in the Occupy movement confided in me that he thought the resistance was a product of thinking about that one issue too long.

On the issue of their goal to strike at colonization and become more inclusive, the actual events were even more comically ironic when juxtaposed against the rhetoric. Three young African American men held up their Occupy Oakland sign, upset that they were being told that they had colonized minds for backing the movement. This was the same sign they affixed to their brief occupation at 18^th and Linden. They were roundly chastised; incredibly some members of a Native American group tried to block them with their own banner, though the name of the organization was still Occupy Oakland at the time. I already mentioned the fact that the “decolonize” contingent was given a choice about whether to hear a short proposal on shutting down AIPAC on Monday, and they declined to let it be heard. That seemed to be the theme of the day—a group of people so enchanted with their own discourse about words, that they were unable to see how their discussion was preventing actions meant to achieve the very goals they claimed to be backing with their efforts.

The issue of whether the word Occupy means one thing or another, outside of the dictates of academic discourse, really is one of personal taste. But the issue of whether changing the name would make the movement more diverse and/or radical is an easy one to answer. Occupy Oakland shut down the port, and is preparing to shut it down again. The movement has suggested to mainstream people that they they don’t have to pay attention to police when told to get back on the sidewalk. Its demonstrated that a group of people can hold on to a space for months, even when told what they are doing is illegal. Occupy Oakland bucked the trend of other occupy movements, inviting homeless people into participate as fully fledged members—most of these, of course, people of color. No name change necessary on that one.

The beauty of the camp that I have described in my writing for months now, was in its open nature. It was open to any person, but the people that accepted that invitation most readily were poor and homeless people of color—including indigenous people, African Americans and Latinos–who make up a good deal of the participants still today. They weren’t people who ever cared about the occupation vs. decolonization debate, unfortunately, so they apparently don’t count when we talk about opening up the movement.

Still Clearing Up Some Rumors

Though I’ve written several letters of correction to the author of the blog I’ve mentioned in recent posts, Tequila Sovereign, she’s inexplicably elected not to publish them. Rather, she published her own correction in her letters section, which gets even more things wrong. Now she says I’m not in the media committee at all, but that I still wrote the OO Forum post in question. The existence of this Forum post is also up for some debate–its not linked. Anyone on the web team can corroborate that I’ve never created a user account to post there. Again, even if I had, using the Forum to air an opinion is not an abuse of the power of privilege at OO. Its rather the opposite, because that’s a forum made for public use! Indeed, one of the proposal bringers just published something there yesterday.

Of course, all this is about the Decolonize proposal, which I’ve been quite clear about elsewhere; I think its a bad idea in many regards. There’s no evidence presented that changing the name can do any of the things the proposal writers claim. There’s no evidence or argument that the name itself is a barrier to working class and poor people of color from joining the group [as evidenced by the fact of the recent formation of a committee called "Occupy the Hood" that will be involved in Tuesday's foreclosure actions]. There IS a great and proud tradition of the oppressed and labor, Occupying, spaces associated with their dispossession, including the inspiring occupation of Alcatraz Island by indigenous people.In the case of Alcatraz, occupiers used the word Occupy, and did so proudly.

Despite the fact that anyone with even a passing knowledge of how OO works, and the details of events over the past couple of weeks, would find Tequila Sovereign’s account absurd in the extreme, at least one of the people who’ve brought the Decolonize proposal linked to the post on a social media platform.

While I can’t say for sure what’s motivating this blog post and the author’s resistance to correcting it–it could indeed be a staggering ignorance of OO based on a lack of involvement–not posting my correction is just bad faith advocacy. As anyone can see, I allow all rebuttals here in my blog. The fact that I’m referred to [weirdly] as “the Palestinian Man” on the media team makes my identity quite clear, since I’ve brought up my ethnicity in relationship to my opinion of the word Occupy [it would obviously be hard not to]. So this is really inexcusable.

As I’ve said, my efforts in the public sphere have been focused on discussing the merits of the proposal. Nothing else. Word of the existence of the original proposal began to circulate long before the first form of it–which was based narrowly as an argument strictly about some Ohlone people’s response to the word Occupy–and I was happy to argue about the merits. I’ve been a little shocked at how offended some people are that they are actually required to use logic, evidence and reason in a debate. Seriously, I’ve been around the block, but I’ve never seen anything like it from people claiming to be progressive.

Note: Author has now inexplicably removed her own correction as well. I’m here, Tequila Sovereign, contact me either at the email account I used to post my corrections, which uses my real name, or here.

Mystery Canopies Appear Through Time and Space at OGP, Despite Being Banned by City of Oakland

Ever since the last police raid that destroyed the camp at Occupy Oakland, the Interfaith Committee has continued to challenge the city’s authority to stifle free speech actions. Interfaith members braved arrest in an act of civil disobedience on the night of the November 15^th raid;  they returned to the plaza in the ensuing weeks. The interfaith committee challenged the city’s ordinances by keeping their canopy up during the day, celebrating the spirit of the Occupy Oakland camp by counseling community members, running their ‘free store’ of free items, providing smiles, warmth and conversation.

Interfaith Canopy in the Days Before City's Revisionist Canopy History

Reluctantly, and without granting that the city’s right to stifle freedom of expression, the interfaith group has respectfully taken down the canopy at night in response to a police order to do so. The city maintained that the interfaith community could keep their canopy up during the day, but had to bring it down for a curfew beginning at 10pm. It must be stressed that these decisions seem to have no basis in city law; nevertheless the city gave the impression that it was trying to be ‘reasonable’.

But the city changed its mind shortly after it allowed an Occupy Oakland vigil to have a symbolic Tipi structure during the same hours in an adjacent part of the plaza. According to people present at the scene, in the subsequent days, Assistant City Manager Arturo Sanchez suddenly recalled that the city had a long standing, unwritten, but nevertheless historic policy banning shade and canopy structures in the plaza. Sanchez told surprised Interfaith members that there had never in the history of Frank Ogawa Plaza been shade structures in the plaza [except in the area where the Tipi now stands during day hours]–there was a “precedent” of not allowing them. They were forced to take down their canopy.

Interfaith Canopy Gone into the Memory Hole, Along with Historical Record of Canopy Structures in the Plaza

With the possibility in mind that Sanchez was experiencing a false set of memories, perhaps brought on by the stress of helping to stifle free speech in Oakland wherever it rears its head, intrepid Occupy Oakland members took to the internets and in very short order found a series of odd images:

Phantom Canopy Appears Behind Marathon Participants in 2010

Another Set of Ghostly Shade Structures Haunts the Ampitheater

Candy and Shade, An Odd Combination Given the Restrictions at the Plaza

Many are wondering how Sanchez will square these images of the ostensibly banned phantom canopies appearing at random through time and space at Frank Ogawa Plaza, most recently just last year. The photos represent a clearly discriminatory application of city policy–almost anything and everything is allowed shade structures except political free speech events. Its clear that the city is attempting to prevent the precedent of constitutionally allowed structures facilitating free speech in the plaza now that it has been forced to allow the Tipi. Quan and her administration fear a proliferation of structures promoting freedom of assembly and speech in the plaza.

Perhaps the lesson for Sanchez will be: when making off the cuff Orwellian proclamations, its important to remember that the city does not yet have a memory-hole system. Though I’m sure they’ll start working on it soon.

[photos provided by Phil and Geekeasy]

A Blast from the Past, Occupy Oakland Day 8

I found this from one of my early posts about Occupy Oakland, an eternity ago.

“…That’s not to say there aren’t other problems. A scuffle last night showed the power of confusion and emotion among a very small group to disrupt an entire community, and it brought up serious questions of how to manage a community without state or outside intervention, which is an ongoing and thorny conversation amongst many groups at the encampment from what I’ve gathered. But another way, I think, of looking at it is as the price to pay for taking complete responsibility for one’s community.

In a neighborhood, when people get into serious mess, others often don’t involve themselves. Despite the fact that its their community, they delegate the authority of problem solving to outside professionals who don’t live in the community, or they simply ignore it. Its easier to do that, it depersonalizes issues. But it also shuts people off from each other. Their problem-solving and interpersonal skills decrease as a result. Watching people try to deal with a potential fight last night, was like watching someone rise out of a coma and begin to learn to use their extremities again, of dealing with each other one to one. That is not only a valuable skill, but a cognitive structure worth acquiring. Its difficult, but we’ve gotten used to ignoring the difficulties in our community, or delegating the solutions to others, both locally and nationally.”

I hope we don’t forget that the revolution wasn’t in what we said, or in our GA, but in what we did.

Clearing Up Some Rumors and Stating Things Clearly

The Rumors

An article at a blog has some incredible inaccuracies about OO and me. I’ve written a letter to the author; whether or not the inaccuracies are simple ignorance or actual mendacity will hinge on whether its published. In the meantime,  I’m going to clear up those things here:

I do only a few things with the media committee at Occupy Oakland. We have a system of channeling press requests. When the camp was active, it was of some importance for foreign and non-local media, so that we could channel media to people interested in talking to media. When there was no one who wanted to speak to media, we could make sure that SOMEONE spoke to them. As there is no camp at the moment, this job is even more important. So another thing I do is ask people at GA’s if they would like to be on our interviewee list–this list has contact info for people who do like speaking to the media, who have a point of view they’re itching to talk about in regards to the subject, and who are on various committees and have specific knowledge of events or what not. I sometimes talk to the media as a member of this committee, but not a maker of media for it; I make that clear in all interviews. I am not a spokesperson for OO. At this point, there are a few media outlets that sometimes contact me outside of the media committee because they’ve already spoken to me, and ask to talk to me again.

I’m not a site administrator. I’ve never posted any content to Occupy Oakland’s website in its forum or anywhere else. Though anyone can post to the forum there, its not something I’ve done. I talk enough at my blog and on my twitter account. I firmly believe that we make better media on our own, when we state our own points of view about this diverse movement, rather than speaking as one voice on a website purporting to capture that diversity.

 

Stating Things Clearly

My blog has turned into a single issue advocacy forum, yes, that’s true. That’s because when I became involved in the camp at Occupy Oakland, I saw a vast potential for breaking out of the box that has trapped the left for the past several decades. That box is created by a focus on left wing institutions, Democratic party strangleholds on action, class-based barriers that prevent people from all ethnicities from becoming involved in self-organizing political action.

Left wing institutions are good at organizing people of color into a certain ideological way of entering politics. Its an ideology rooted in electoral politics and top down labor organizations, and it creates a self-fulfilling prophecy where mainstream working class people of color are constantly routed back into tame demonstrations of only a fraction of their power. Academia does the rest, creating an imaginary world of discursive territory, where endless fights about the power of words are given the look and feel of action. Together, these two poles harness the power of the working class and poor, and pour it out into a useless political and discursive system that will never address inherent disparities of income and social position. If we are to have lasting social change, I firmly believe that it will come from the poor and working class, and many of those are people of color.

The game-changer of the camp was its open nature and its capacity to involve people immediately in a network of work and discourse. That openness was also one of its greatest weaknesses. There was no filter, anyone could come. Some people came into the camp with less than stellar rationale for being there, and then were won over by the community. Others weren’t, or haven’t, and became anchors around the camp community’s neck. But all that’s worth it. Some people have described the camp as a sort of utopia in the making, and I think they may be talking in anarchist terms of a classless society. That’s fine.

But for me, that utopia was in allowing the poor and working class the right and ability to discover political truths and relationships of capital on their own, to come to their own conclusions. During this process, they could start immediately participating in a process to address their conclusions. Some of those people were white; but the vast majority of poor and working class people that became part of the Occupy Oakland community were and are African Americans and other people of color from all over Oakland.

With the camp gone now, it seems like a hollow echo of a dream. Once we all were here, in a gigantic block long community struggling in the shadow of the Clorox complex, City Hall and the Oakland Tribune. We shared food, work. We fought and discussed. We talked about difficult issues openly-racism, genderism, violence, love, respect, rage. It wasn’t always easy. Actually, I think it was never easy. And not many of us are or were angels.

Some of us still go back there every day and night. Some never left at all. There is Running Wolf, tree sitting for weeks in an incredible demonstration of stamina and force of will. There are the vigil activists struggling against city hall and the police in their own backyard, daily contesting the power of municipal buildings to declare what is appropriate expression of free speech. There are the interfaith people, who’ve never given up, though police forced them to take their canopy down in a show of discriminatory application of the law.

And the rest of us, who go there daily and nightly to attend meetings for the port shutdown, community outreach brainstorming, discussion forums, and the General Assembly. We took the most unused and useless park in the history of Oakland, and turned it into a dynamic and churning engine of political discourse and action. That construct was so strong that it refuses to die–no matter how many thousands of gallons of water Mayor Quan dumps into the swamp she’s created on the site where once a living forest of humans stood. Like haunting ghosts, we won’t go away, we’re still there. We still Occupy.

Blame Bankrupting Overtime Costs on the City and OPD, not Protesters

An Associated Press story about the cost of police overtime in relation to suppressing the Occupy movements has been making the rounds this past week, and has influenced punditry and populace alike. Not surprisingly, Oakland is singled out in the story along with New York city where the respective police forces have been known also for spectacular brutality which has hospitalized several protesters—at least two with life threatening injuries in Oakland.

All reporting has a frame. The mainstream frame is constructed of data points provided by privileged sources aligned with the establishment. Those data points are reported diligently by media without fact-checking or research. In Oakland’s case, this is why vague assertions by the Chamber of Commerce that large scale business has pulled out of occupying space in downtown Oakland due to the Occupy protests is parroted diligently by media as fact, without any kind of fact-checking. And why privileged voices seeking to reinforce this narrative feel perfectly comfortable now attributing this statement as a fact, since it appeared in media reports.

This is why Mayor Quan’s assertion of violence and sexual assault in the plaza during subsequent occupations has achieved the status of researched fact; it has appeared in the media. This is why a police press release that claims that both shooter and victim in the murder that occurred in the plaza last month were residents of the camp entered the narrative no questions asked.

Of course, it’s a constant battle to contest these “facts”, to insist that evidence be provided when they are posed. As problematic as accepting the primacy of those data points, however, its even worse to consider the frame as a useful construct that informs the public on crucial issues. In this case, if our concern is police over time, then there are more fruitful places to place that frame then the overtime generated during occupy protests.

For example, the Oakland Police Department has been for years—and still is—a massive black hole of over time requests. In 2007, the OPD spent 26 million on overtime. There were no “crises” created by the need to violently and decisively crush the popular right to freedom of expression in that year—that was just business as usual. Its just another example of the OPD and the Oakland Police Officer’s Association, gaming the system for the benefit of its elite of police officials who often constitute the highest paid city employees. The over-time costs generated in 2007 alone represent half of the current budget deficit.

This year, after years of humiliating exposes and pressure from various city agencies, the OPD has managed to cut its overtime expenditures in half, to a projected thirteen million for the 2010-2011 fiscal year.  Even if this 3 million is added to the cash pile of largesse, just where did the other ten million dollars of over time come from? No one seems to care about that in the media.

But that’s not the end of it. As a KTVU reported last month, Oakland is the number one payer of police abuses lawsuits in the bay area at the tune of $58 million. Think about that. San Jose has over double the population and spent only 8 million. San Francisco with double the population spent half that amount. Ironically, the city budget deficit is 57 million dollars.

It would not be hard to argue that over-time expense and lawsuits alone bankrupted the city. The last month has given us a slow-motion view of how these heinously high pay-outs were generated. First, a culture of violence and abuse, specific to Oakland’s police, generates the lawsuits. Considering only the case of Scott Olsen, one can only wonder how much Oakland tax payers will have to pay for the suffering he experienced at police hands. Then add a culture of misplaced priorities, where crime prevention and public safety take second place to free speech stifling errands from the mayor’s office.

While a murder of eight people yesterday remains unsolved, 8 police officers spent their day preventing the erection of a tent—arguably a speech and religious freedom act protected by the constitution. When police physically prevented activists from establishing their protest vigil at Oscar Grant Plaza, a teepee symbolizing struggles of both indigenous people and campers such as the Bonus Marchers, they spent money and resources to prevent a constitutionally allowed, peaceful demonstration. They then also moved to tear down the Interfaith tent adjacent to it. When I asked police who were taking the tee pee poles out of Running Wolf’s hands each time he tried to set them up, what city ordinance or code they were referencing, he was very honest: “I don’t know the code”. His exact words.

In a city with 109 murders where mass murderers remain on the loose, that’s what police downtown were spending the taxpayer’s money on–to enforce laws that were product of their own guesswork. This is a police department that regularly follows procedures invented on the spot by its officers, with varying outcomes of brutality and violations of human rights. The results are invariably lawsuits, such as this one where police illegally strip-searched law-abiding young African Americans using a city code that was a product of their own brutal imagination.

When we move our admittedly institutional frame to ask questions about costs to city taxpayers from police actions, lets talk about where the majority of that money went first: lawsuits generated by violence and ignorance of the law; and extortionary overtime procedures which have only recently seen any kind of attempt at control from the city. Then we can move on to extra three million spent to prevent the exercise of freedom of speech.

Interview with Phil Horne of Occupy Legal Committee on the Occupy Oakland Vigil

Phil Horne is a civil rights lawyer and a member of the Occupy Legal Committee–a group which grew out of the legal support team for Occupy SF, and evolved to also focus on issues for Occupy Oakland and the Occupy movement in general. Horne was drawn to Occupy Oakland, because it was an “amazing place”, an attempt at a “utopian” community. After the first raids of both occupy locations, and others, the group began discussing possibilities of legal defense of the occupation movements based on freedom of expression—so-called 1983 cases.

Out of that series of discussions, the OccupyLegal committee was born, with the goal of re-igniting the Occupation movement with the ostensibly constitutionally-protected vigil. The vigil would be, in some sense, an “occupation” with tents, and a human presence, but without the “dwelling” which had been ruled non-protected speech in Supreme Court precedents. The committee decided that Oakland would become a sort of test case for the concept. The difficulty in that test will come in whether police understand the legal concepts involved and are actually aware that there is constitutionally protected speech that transcends their idea of law enforcement for city code violations.

The vigil that begins today is the first step in that test.

Phil has been a movement lawyer for several years, and is also the attorney in a whistle blowing case representing Sean Gillis, the firefighter who exposed negligent care by the Oakland fire department that may have contributed to the death of Oscar Grant.

I spoke with Phil during a lull in the GA on Sunday about the origin of the vigil idea, his involvement and attraction with Occupy Oakland, and his career as a movement lawyer.

[The interview was about a half hour. This transcript  has been edited for flow and space.]

_________________________________

HR: Tell me a little about your background

Phil: I’ve always been a movement lawyer. I’m San Francisco’s activist lawyer, basically I’m the only one because what I like to do is take cases where there’s an emotional reason. I feel people have suffered some kind of wrong, so I want to correct it. I often use the media in the movement to achieve things. Or to take cases that will help the movement. So I used the press to expose [for example] bad land lords in the gay community that were gay, that were evicting people with AIDS.

… I got a bleeding ulcer, I almost died, I lost thirty pounds in thirty days. You know, you realize what’s important, and when you first get recovery, you’re like I got to keep this in my brain the whole time, cause I know its really important now, and I know what life is about and everything, and its not about, can I make this BMW payment. So I started reading and  studying more radical thought. Because I believed that there was more truth in that.

…I went to Occupy San Francisco and I was doing a lot of educating of people on what the federal reserve was, how the banks work, how bank and war go together. There’s an interest on war loans, there’s a huge amount of money being made on war loans by the banks. Debt is perpetual money for the banks, they don’t have to do anything, they just get money.

…but I have to say nothing was like when I first came to Occupy Oakland, it was like…I mean, it was just such a wonderful experience. [I arrived] before the first raid, the Sunday before. It was like a utopian commune, it was like the Paris commune, Oakland commune, they say…I mean, it was amazing, it was like, this is exactly what I want the world to be. I also think it was really powerful to have the kitchen right in the front. This is what’s important, the kitchen is important.

HR: Tell me about the committee that you’re on. Did it grow up out of Occupy Oakland, or another Occupy?

Phil: I came along [to Occupy Oakland] with [my roommate]. I was already working as the assistant to Belle Star, legal counsel for San Francisco Occupy. When I came here,  I was amazed by Occupy Oakland. Within a couple of days, the first raid had happened and Scott Olsen had been shot and everything. I think a lot of people within the legal committee started to wonder what we were going to do about this…

…I started coming to Occupy Oakland a lot and lost touch with Star. Then she sent me an email saying, you’d better come to the lawyer’s committee. Well by that time some of the big people in freedom of expression issues–its called section 1983 law suits–which are lawsuits basically against police officers for violation of constitutional rights…the 1983 people had expressed an interest in going to Belle’s legal committee. But in the beginning it was me, a legal secretary and a bankruptcy lawyer, and Belle Star didn’t’ come…that was the first meeting. The second meeting was where we had the all stars–and that’s what we’ve got now–we’ve got people who’ve actually done relevant work in San Francisco and the Bay Area. So anyway, we’ve got these great lawyers and we sat around talking…I was very concerned about Oakland, I said, we have to get something together for when the next attack on Oakland happens…

…when the lawyers got together,  we all talked about what the strategy should be and we agreed to do research and we spent the next week all doing tons of research on what was allowed, what wasn’t allowed in these types of protests. Could sleeping be allowed? And we had a couple of meetings and we came to the conclusion that we should do a vigil. I argued that it should be Oakland.

HR: Did you all want like a test?

Phil: We wanted something that would set a minimum bar, so it was like as long as we do this, we can be there. So we said, let’s look at all the cases…it was really the maximum, like what’s the maximum we can do safely, like rock solid, its definitely safe. So that if they act on that, then we get a restraining order, and then we get a precedent started, so we can build on that. Once we get the precedent, like okay, this is allowed, we get, more people to do exactly whatever that is…

HR: Do you expect the police to actually honor the first amendment rights to do the vigil?

Phil: You know I wasn’t sure. Every time, I’d go back and forth. I think, there’s no way Mayor Quan’s going to come down on Occupy Oakland again., cause Scott Olson’s been shot and almost killed, and she’s been embarrassed everywhere around the world. And then she does it again, and then I think, oh, there’s no way she’ll do it a third time…there’s no way, she’s going to do it again. And she does it again…

Then I think its not going to happen here. Then I hear a security guard [in the plaza] say, say to one of the other security guards, if you see anything put up, take it down. So then I think, oh great, one of the security guards is going to take down the tent

HR: What’s the constitutional basis for the vigil. Are there any precedents? Where did you start looking for the constitutionality?

Phil: The main case is Clark vs. Community for Creative Non Violence, in nineteen eighty four, a decision written by Supreme Court Justice White, who was kind of a centrist, a little bit conservative, but a centrist. Basically they found that a camp across the street from the White House was expressive. It would be more expressive if the tents had writing on them and were actually part of the expression. They said that the city could impose a reasonable time, place and manner restrictions, but basically the decision focuses on the sleeping, its the sleeping that transforms it, in their mind, from first amendment to dwelling. So the city could then ban the sleeping.

HR: So vigil is defined by no sleeping…

Phil: A vigil is defined basically by continuous expression, so basically you have to be leafleting, you should be picketing, you should be walking, you should be moving…

HR: The definition comes from that decision?

Phil: Yes. Its the Clark decision that most people would view as the primary case. We’ve also read dozens of cases about this, very carefully and talked about them…

HR:…there’ve been other cases that have used Clark and won?

Phil: Yeah…the Trenton case, where the occupy in Trenton was defended by the ACLU and successfully. That case is not particularly persuasive in this context, because in that case, they had a park that didn’t ban the activity that they were arrested for, and the officer acted on the instructions of. this non profit…

HR: What they were doing was legal in the first place?

Phil: There was no legal basis for the police to take their action…Here , the Interfaith [members of a group formed during the original Occupy Oakland occupation, made up of interfaith groups] people are being told they have to have a permit.

HR: They don’t have an actual basis for making that determination?

Phil: Right, and he [the police officer] actually went over to them after I gave them the vigil flyer for Tuesday. So a lot of this–people who are not lawyers, they have no idea what the law is. Yeah, they say, well, you better go out there because, you don’t want them to set up a precedent with Interfaith, cause then they’ll be out there with a vigil.

HR: In this context, police have said no tents on the lawn. Is there a legal basis to prevent tents on the lawn?

Phil: The thing is, its a very complicated question, cause the thing is, is there a basis? Well, that means is there a law? Is there a law? What’s the interpretation? Is the law enforced? The law has to be enforced neutrally, you can’t decide on some expression, not on others. If anybody’s allowed on that lawn, it would seem that occupy has to be allowed on to that lawn.

HR: If the lawn is used by public, then the vigil can happen on that lawn…

Phil: Right…

HR: On the day [the porta potties were taken by police], could they have been allowed?

Phil: Well, under Clark, you can have structures and tents and tables, as long as they’re part of the demonstrations, so port a potties are obviously support [for] the demonstration, they’re part of the demonstration. They are essential to the demonstration. We’re humans, we need to go to the bathroom. Even if there is a law that requires [a permit], I’m sure they’re not enforcing it against other people…

HR: So you could argue that they’ve been selectively enforced to prevent this particular freedom of speech event.

Phil: Right, its discrimination based on content of speech…

HR: So this is an area of law in which basically nothing is certain, and that’s why some of the answers you’re giving me aren’t definite?

Phil: Well, law is not an exact science, so when people ask lawyers, well, give me advice on this, you have to say well, this is my best understanding of the law, but it depends on you know, the judge got a full night’s sleep…whether the judge has a dog in the race and it can be very hard to predict. In a situation like this, you have cases where no case is exactly the same as the same as the next as far as what the factual particulars are. So you have to make an educated guess, there’s no appellate decisions on porta potties, so you really have to guess, you know, what exactly does this fit under?

…the other thing is when you’re saying something to a reporter as a lawyer, you have to be careful what you say. You don’t want to explain some of the nuances, you want to leave that to see if Quan’s lawyers’ going to figure this out.

Serious Questions About OPD’s Ability to Oversee Freedom of Speech Events

Occupy Oakland has had some rough times lately. Two at first wildly successful–and then frustrated–occupations. And, of course, a lot of negative press and pressure from the city and its corporate bosses. A Thanksgiving feast for the public held today in the amphitheatre of Frank Ogawa Plaza—as OO called it, a Day of Gratitude—was meant to be a healing and community building experience. The same kitchen committee with their unquenchable political philosophy of feeding the hungry managed the event for friends, strangers, and comrades alike.

But then the police came and ruined all of that in a disgusting display of disorder and out of control violence—that is the actual hurting of human bodies, not destruction of property. All of the witnesses I talked to today described a similar scene, part of which can be seen in this video edited by activists at Occupy Oakland.

There’s some necessary background that can’t be seen in the video. As part of the feast, OO ordered a pair of porta potties to be delivered to the site—a large number of people were expected and on a holiday surrounding businesses are closed, so that makes sense. When the company truck entered the north end of the plaza to deliver them, police intercepted and tried to force the driver to go back. A group of attendees at the gratitude function went over to see what was going on—there was some understandable rancor. There is nothing very controversial about a porta potty; but then again, there was no legal reason to block the porta potties, so tempers flared.

While in statements Mayor Jean Quan has claimed that no structures will be allowed in the plaza, the resolution passed last night to carry out a 24/7 vigil in the plaza, is based on a reading of the law which indeed allows structures in the plaza for the purposes of a vigil. The interfaith committee is currently holding a vigil in which they are allowed a tent by police—police claim that the tent must be taken down at night, and the interfaith tent is complying, but its clear that the police themselves don’t understand the legal basis for freedom of speech in the plaza and that this is, at best, an arbitrary “concession”, based on little more than uninformed judgement call.

One of the OO participants who presented the vigil proposal last night, a lawyer and member of the National Lawyer’s Guild, tried repeatedly to show police officers the legal foundation for allowing the porta potties at the start of the altercation, he received a hand in the face, and was ignored. Had police simply conferred with him, this brutal event would have been avoided. Despite the fact that not allowing the porta potties in the plaza contradicted the logic behind the previous permission to allow tents during the day—a ‘structure’, like the porta potties—police continued to block and try to turn back the truck.

In the video, a police officer attacks a bystander—who I only know as Rasta, a fixture at the camp since the early days, who’s become an integral part of the OO community. There is no provocation apparent. It’s a simple assault by an armed police officer. Once the attack proceeds, other police officers join in—you can see the police officer who initiated the attack grabbing Rasta by the hair, and others holding him down in the most aggressive and violent way imaginable. Recall, that in this very video no attack from Rasta is visible, and as witnesses corroborate, there was no physical movement from Rasta. The officer reacts, other officers simply join in violently without question.

But they don’t only attack Rasta. As you can see, once the police officers have given themselves the greenlight for violence, anyone that gets in their way is fair game. The young woman getting shoved right after the altercation begins is the facilitator that you hear in the recording I made of the GA last night [of chicken-nuggets fame], who I can assure is one of the sweetest people you’ll ever meet. Throughout the video, police shove and strike people repeatedly. Ignorant of the law, its a literal wilding against people using the park in a completely legal manner.

There are two important take-aways from the Thanksgiving Police Riot. First, this may finally quell the discussion of “violence” versus “non-violence” in relation to Occupy Oakland. What you see in this video is the very definition of violence. Indeed, this–and the more extreme versions that we have seen before at the hands of the very same militarized organization—is the most critical area of the spectrum of acts that fall under the broad term “violence”. In another video, which I saw on cam at the plaza, and which I hope to have access to soon, police appear to hit a bystander as they drive away–a middle aged, or elderly woman. What is incontrovertible is that police visit violence on bystanders and activists alike with no provocation of any kind. The standard meme of the past month, that actions on the part of protesters produce an “understandable” violent response from police, is untenable.

Second, but of crucial importance, this incident [as well as others] brings up serious concerns about the OPD’s ability to oversee political events based on understandings of constitutionally allowed free speech, such as the vigil which OO will soon begin in the plaza. A team of constitutional lawyers have vetted the vigil plan not only for Occupy Oakland, but for all occupations throughout the country that are experiencing similar repression. Occupy Oakland will be carrying out this constitutionally protected vigil in the coming days, so its obvious that the city must do something to reign in police before then. Perhaps its time the city educate itself about the constitutional rights of the residents it has sworn to protect.

GA Can Also Stand for Getting off your Ass, Updated 1, 2 [Tuesday Evening]

A New Camp in West Oakland Grows in the Night

I made a joke earlier about Occupy Oakland’s General Assembly being a clever device designed to make occupiers so frustrated with bullshit that they would actually go out and do things themselves. That’s an exaggeration, of course. The GA has been responsible for some unequivocally fantastic things: the November 2^nd General Strike; the November 19th Rally and March that led to the new, brief, but important occupation at 19^th and Telegraph; and the solidarity march with Egyptian activists struggling to overthrow a US funded Egyptian military dictatorship. But anyone who listens to the recordings of the assembly I make every night could be forgiven for thinking the GA sometimes reaches Olympian levels of frustrating wankery. The assembly varies wildly from effective and cheer-worthy, to the epitome of left-wing masturbatory debate, politics and time-wasting.

But because of the way that Occupy Oakland works, autonomous actions are inevitable, encouraged, and indeed, in this case, the heart of this movement. With Occupy Oakland, when the march or rally ends, people keep on resisting and protesting by simply coming back to a living occupation, which in itself, is a constant affront to the city and state’s authority and control over public space. Each second of the occupation reminds elected officials that there’s no real authority behind their control. When enough people surround an encampment, there’s nothing the city can do to enforce its own laws short of a violent response that inherently deligitimizes its claim to consent of the governed. This reminds everyone that all laws exist at the whim of the people, not the government. That presents a new frame of possibilities that exists outside of electoral politics.

The Occupations that have and are serving as place holders for the movement while it gets a new home are the product of autonomous action [I would even argue that the failed Traveler’s Building occupation was an important occupation that reminded people that the movement is dynamic, rather than static]. Running Wolf’s tree occupation overlooking the former camp continues, a product of his own eccentric imagination. The Snow Park occupation was carried out autonomously, and continued until just this morning, outlasting Ogawa and the brief one at Nineteenth and Telegraph. Meanwhile, Snow Park occupiers barely had enough time to nurse a hangover of cynicism and depression before Chris M., a young occupier, and a few others, presented the new plot at 18^th and Linden.

Chris, who lives in West Oakland, had already put in the research. He’d seen an empty lot in the area, and, inspired by the anti-foreclosure occupations he’d heard about in Georgia, started digging around trying to find information about the owner. Discovering that it was in foreclosure proceedings, he went to the assessor’s office, found the information of the owner and discussed the idea of occupation with her.

Though she’s not a great supporter of the Occupy movement, or the idea of occupation,  she invited Chris and others to come and do what they could to prevent the foreclosure out of simple desperation.

While there is a committee that formed at OO to do just this kind of foreclosure defense, 19^th and Linden happened outside of it and organically, a product of Chris’ footwork and populated by newly evicted Snow park occupiers, like Ryan. Ryan, who’d been occupying Snow since its inception, was sitting on the lawn this morning when Chris and others arrived and told him and others about the new occupation on a foreclosed property. Later, Chris and other new occupiers presented the occupation at the GA, followed by a mild rebuke to the sitting members of the assembly to “get off their ass” and start doing likewise. By 10 pm, there were thirty bodies ready to hold down the lot.

While the occupation is apparently legal, Ryan worried about the police and city using similar tactics as they had in Ogawa, making lists of infractions to create an argument for their eviction.

But many things will be different here. The new camp already sports a central entry point—a hole in a chain link fence—which allows a certain level of control over who enters the space [not necessarily good, in my opinion, but more manageable]. The camp has been deemed drug and alcohol free. Outreach to neighbors has already begun, with much positive feedback, especially because the purpose of the occupation is such an obvious crowd pleaser in a part of town that has been experiencing a long and withering assault on African American property ownership for years. And many of the issues that plagued the camp—such as the ban on open flame cooking—are perfectly okay in a backyard [and yes, there’s no good reason for that].

Meanwhile, at the GA, clever forms of re-occupying Ogawa have been broached and are only as far from happening as an occupier “getting off their ass” on the amphitheatre steps and doing it. Those steps are pretty cold right now, anyway.

Update 1 :

Some media outlets are now reporting that Gloria Cobb, the owner of the property claims she didn’t give permission for the group to occupy the lot. Given what I wrote here, based on the recorded conversation I have with Chris, its possible that Cobb gave very broad permission for an action to save her property, not realizing she was greenlighting an occupation. That’s suspect, though, since the name of this group is Occupy Oakland. Cobb may now have changed her mind about the occupation as well. Or there may be a misunderstanding of some other kind. I’ll try to keep informed about how this is working out.

I also spoke with Chris this morning around noon, and he says that the police have not been called, and that the relationship with tenants remains strong and positive.

Update 2: As the Chronicle reports, Cobb did indeed seek police help in evicting the occupiers and they elected to leave before being evicted around 10pm this evening; there was no force. Its not really clear why or whether there was some kind of combination of misunderstanding, exacerbated by an unexpected rain of media and municipal attention. I visited the camp around 6pm, shortly before the police raid. The camp was doing more than fine and the group was very disciplined, eager to avoid some other problems that emerged at previous camps where a tone was not set in advance. The center of the space remained open, with tents surrounding and close to one another. The gate had been opened, the hole in the fence blocked. While there was an open policy of letting anyone in, and campers were being encouraged, the fence was to lock at 10pm to prevent security problems; no drugs or alcohol either, and quiet time at 9pm.

A kitchen had been set up on the north end of the property and I was happy to see some familiar faces manning it from the old kitchen committee at the plaza; the new kitchen was a collaboration, apparently, between the occupation crew and the original kitchen committee.

I was writing all this up a few minutes before I heard about the raid, and I noted at the time that the odder outcome would be “if the new camp wasn’t facing extinction every four or so hours.” Funny, depressing, true.

It certainly doesn’t make any sense; Cobb will lose the property on December 11th. Though the odds of the occupy crew making a difference in her foreclosure fight weren’t good, it was certainly better than the certainty of losing the property she faces, as well as the imminent eviction for the tenants in the adjoining home. There are dozens of such properties in the neighborhood, however. It won’t be hard to find another, and the lesson learned will be to make sure to find a rock solid partner.

Also, it looks like Occupiers are about to re-occupy the plaza using a loophole that allows 24 hour peace vigil, with tents, so long as there’s no sleeping. The issue had been brought up about three times independently at those “useless” GA’s by Running Wolf proxy, and then by a legal advocate. Recent experience tells me there’s still a lot of time for that to go south, but we’ll see.

In the meantime:

Earlier, I rode by and took a photo of the lot that used to lie invisible and untouchable behind a pointless chain link fence that surrounded the large majority of public space on 19th and Telegraph.  Now that the fence is gone, the lot actually resembles an un-manicured and humble city park, a green space for people to play soccer in, although there is a large set of gashes where city public works drove vehicles through. It would be difficult to argue that it looked better before, or was a more useful component of the community. I propose some Occupy events: Occupy Soccer, Occupy Dog-run, Occupy Box Garden.

The New Occupy Oakland Memorial Park