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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 15th raid;  they returned to the plaza in the ensuing weeks. […]

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 […]

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 […]

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”, […]

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 […]

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

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 2nd General Strike; the November 19th […]

The Brief but Influential Life of Oh-Oh Three-Oh at 19th & Telegraph

Certainly, those who claimed that the move to 19th and Broadway Telegraph was a tactical error will think they can claim the high ground today as the OPD throws away yet another set of tents. But the reality of the day of actions on Saturday is not such a simple story. Rather than lend credence […]

Avoiding the PR Trap at 19th & Telegraph [w/audio of 11-18-11 GA]

When I heard about the 19th/Telegraph location as a possible new camp site, I was skeptical. The issue of residential neighborhood was foremost on my mind, although I actually didn’t think the school—Oakland School for the Arts—would have a problem. Kids spend almost all of their time IN a school, not in the neighborhood around […]

“I’m on a Boat!”: Occupy Oakland Navigates in Unknown Waters

A weird energy enveloped the plaza on the last night of Occupy Oakland 2.0. The infrastructure of the community was quickly deconstructing, for one thing. The kitchen had been partially dismantled to save key components for the future. Largely abandoned, it had stopped serving food. Police foot patrols were symbolically inching their way toward the […]

What Violence Isn’t

First, let’s make sure that we begin talking about Occupy Oakland not merely as the local chapter of Occupy Wall Street. Occupy Wall Street wasn’t a local phenomenon, it was organized by people in Canada, had buy in from people around the nation and found New York supporters along the way to becoming a national […]

Oakland Councilman Ignacio de la Fuente’s District: A Free Dumping Zone Update: More Garbage, New Heap Adjacent to Mattress

Yesterday, Oakland City Council member Ignacio de la Fuente called a press conference along with three other council people to demand the immediate end of the Occupy Oakland encampment at Frank Ogawa Plaza. It was, no doubt, a hilarious spectacle. Politicians–who know they can call a press conference in the lobby of city hall any […]

Giving Voice to the Voiceless, Just One of Many Services Occupy Oakland Offers the Community

Monday night, shortly before the General Assembly, a distraught stranger took the stage and began speaking to the crowd about his experiences, apparently just hours earlier, in foreclosure proceedings that took his family home. At first, I think, he seemed angry at us all–and you may be able to hear me say in the recording […]

Businesses and Protesters Occupy a New Oakland Downtown

The General Strike of Wednesday November 2, 2011, was an epic day for Oakland. But what would have gone down in history as one of the largest ad hoc mobilizations in history was later derailed by an outrageously violent police response to the occupation of a building adjacent to Frank Ogawa Plaza and concurrent vandalism […]

Occupy Oakland: Hugs Are Also an Option

On a warm Sunday afternoon in Ogawa plaza, there’s a salsa class going on. Just a few feet away, a labor organizer is giving a workshop on the Occupy movements and the labor rank and file. Little kids are given space to play and express themselves creatively in the children’s tent. Across the camp by […]

What Could the Homeless Possibly Have to Protest About?

One of the more instructive issues to emerge from Occupy Oakland has been that of an artificial dichotomy between homelessness and occupation-activism. Like the idea of non-traditional activists from communities of color holding their ground alongside anarchists, socialists and liberals, nothing has panicked both city officials and supporters of the OWS movement more than the […]

Occupy Oakland Day 11: From Crisis Comes Dancing, Beatboxing, Resolve, Community

I planned for a leisurely but fulfilling evening of washing dishes at Occupy Oakland last night. I’d enjoyed doing that the night before, feeling the hum of activity around the O-O kitchen and welcoming center, sharing impromptu conversations with people as they brought their dirty dishes and cookware up, watching over the city street before […]

Assembly Line News and Popular Movements

In 2000 I was in Ramallah when the Intifada al Aqsa broke out and I would go daily to the clashes. Stone-throwing seemed to be a kind of heritage building exercise. In the short term, it was mostly useless, since it rarely inconvenienced Israeli soldiers, much less harm them. What I’m saying is, I threw […]

Occupy Oakland, Day 10: On Rejecting the City’s Request to Return to Invisibility

Aaron Bady’s great post on Occupy Oakland today, brings together some of the things I’ve been feeling. The fact that there is a large homeless and/or unemployed population in Oakland,  is made visible by Occupy Oakland. It also shows that the same people want to help themselves and each other and construct a better society when […]

Unions and Community Organizations May Not Be New Additions to Occupy Wall Street After All, Updated: Response from Michael Kink

I wrote last week that the union-community group coalitions that have sprouted up throughout metropolitan areas in the last year or so had so far been working in parallel and in disconnect with OWS. That may [or may not] be true, but I wanted to add a little bit more information to that. I was […]

Fake Fears About the Palestinian Authority, Statehood and the International Criminal Court

A lot of the confusion surrounding the Palestinian Authority’s bid to be recognized as a state by the United Nations is a logical outcome of the sporadic, inaccurate and biased reporting of the so-called peace process over nearly two decades. Like almost everything about the conflict, this has caused the mainstream public to take one […]