    
Jack Foley
New member
Username: Foley
Post Number: 137
Registered: 01-2010
| | Posted on Sunday, October 30, 2011 - 04:38 pm: | 
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OCCUPY OAKLAND
“Stop the tear gas.”
--Mayor Jean Quan’s daughter in a text message to her mother.
“Look what happened to Rome.”
--A protestor.
I know Jean Quan, the mayor of Oakland. She’s an old Leftie—was part of the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley way back when. Her husband Floyd recalled the FSM at her victory dinner: he said, "On strike, shut it down." That's exactly what the Occupy Oakland people are planning to do to Oakland next Wednesday. By calling in the cops—who obviously did a terrible job--Jean firmly placed herself on the Fascist side of the great divide. "All right, we are two countries," wrote John Dos Passos in his great book, USA. I wonder whether Floyd remembers what he said at that victory dinner. The Occupy Oakland people have set up their tents again. Will the mayor learn from her mistakes and do something to help them rather than staging another pre-dawn raid? Probably not. Hard for a politician to say, I was wrong. But she was wrong. And she has made herself—and Oakland’s elite—the object of opprobrium from progressives throughout the country. Michael Moore arrives today!
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In a public statement, Jean Quan tried to be “accommodating” and hoped that everyone would “unite.” But she told Occupy Oakland that they can't camp overnight. Zip goes the accommodation. The tents, the “occupation” is the whole point, the symbol of the movement.
Occupy Oakland will of course attempt to camp overnight. What will the mayor do? Call the police in again? Injure someone again?
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Jean Quan is a person who has done much good work and deserves support on many levels. Though she has personally apologized to the seriously injured Scott Olsen, I think the mayor’s major problem at the moment is that she really doesn't understand the situation she's in—or the nature of the protest Occupy Oakland is making. She should attempt to work with the protestors, allowing them to have their tents and their “occupation.” That way she could have some influence over what happens. (Santa Rosa’s City Manager Kathy Millison—no doubt profiting by Quan’s example—has ordered police to allow camping outside City Hall, at least for a few days.) By telling the protestors they can't have their tents, Quan’s attempted “accommodation” becomes just another ploy for her to assert power. And they have the upper hand in this game. Her foolish, expensive police action means that if she does that again she will look doubly bad. And, as they used to say and are saying again, “The whole world’s watching.” A friend writes, “I'm starting to wonder if it's even POSSIBLE to govern from the Left. Some very talented, good-hearted people have sure been crashing & burning of late.” This incident is a sad indication of how far Jean Quan has moved away from the politics of her youth. "On strike, shut it down" is now what people are saying to her.
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Oakland City Councilmember (District 2) Pat Kernighan writes,
By the second week the encampment had become a dangerous fire hazard for the people staying there, not to mention a health hazard from people defecating all over the place. The people who were residing in the encampment on Frank Ogawa Plaza refused to talk with or cooperate with City staff about how to make the encampment safe for the people staying there. The residents of the encampment included people in fringe political groups, chronically homeless people, and others who refused to take responsibility for keeping the place clean or safe. They had open flames from candles and barbeques right over the hay which covered the entire site, not to mention propane tanks in the mix. The place was a conflagration waiting to happen. There were a host of other issues, including the refusal of the campers to allow paramedics into the camp, even when campers called 911. The City Administrator very reasonably believed it was a life safety issue and decided the campers must be evicted since she couldn’t get any cooperation from them.
Some of the media coverage and much of the internet reporting of the police evicting the campers was one-sided and inflammatory. Many reports left out the fact that the police gave the campers the opportunity to leave the camp voluntarily, which a lot of them did. The ones who resisted pelted the officers with rocks, plates and bottles, but still the eviction happened without anyone getting hurt.
Looking back with 20/20 hindsight, the City should probably not have had such a large and visible police presence at the Tuesday night protest march. The sight of all those officers in riot gear set a confrontational tone. However, given the recent history of the Oscar Grant riots, the Police Chief had good reason to think it would be prudent to have a large force available. At the first Oscar Grant protest, the police took a more passive approach, only to have the march turn into a riot where small businesses were vandalized all over downtown. OPD took criticism for allowing that to happen, so they have staffed up for subsequent demonstrations. The unfortunate truth in the Bay Area is that no matter how just the cause and how reasonable the majority of marchers, there will always a small group of anarchist provocateurs who show up to instigate violence.
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Note that Councilmember Kernighan does not address the question of whether there were people within Occupy Oakland that were working to solve the problems she names. And why should “a small group of anarchist provocateurs” merit “such a large and visible police presence”?
In her District 4 newsletter of October 28th, Oakland City Councilmember Libby Schaaf writes,
These are difficult times for our country. Many people can't find work, families are losing their homes, and there is great frustration about our political system. Thousands of people in cities across the country have joined the Occupy Movement to express their frustration and to make their voice heard. Occupy Oakland has an important message not only about political and economic injustice, but also about how individuals can collectively act and make a difference. While a small handful of protesters clearly acted irresponsibly, the central message of the protests resonates with many of us.
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The issues being articulated in the Occupy movement are, as my son Sean rightly points out, quite different from the issues being articulated in the 1960s. Yet the strategies are strikingly similar—and the strategies suggest that, despite the differences in specific issues, the deepest objects of protest are the same and are in fact the same throughout the world. We live in a society of spectacle, of image, in which much information is communicated by what things look like, not by what in fact they are. What does the image of armed police in riot gear descending in the early morning hours on a group of young people asleep in their tents look like—especially when the young people are there to protest a situation which almost everyone agrees is inequitable and out of control? Al-sha'b yuridu isqat al-nizam (“The people want to overthrow the system”). “Be the change you want to see in the world.”
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This is a poem by Oakland-based poet Adam Cornford:
OCCUPY EVERYWHERE TOGETHER
Occupy Wall Street
Occupy Wall Street and the Loop and the Financial District and the City of London and the Bandra Kurla and the Paseo de la Reforma and the Nihombashi and the Pudong and the Bankenviertel and the Paradeplatz and every other ganglion of the parasite clamped with its million hooked lips over the aching skull of the world
Occupy Tahrir Square and the Puerta del Sol and the Piazza di Spagna and Liberty Square and Trafalgar Square and the Place de la Concorde and the Akropolis and Red Square and Alexanderplatz and Tiananmen Square and Ogawa Plaza and every other place where just popular government’s parchment promissory note has crumbled and expired
Occupy capitols and parliaments and palaces and national assemblies and all their cupolas and halls and corridors and expel the designer pimps of profit and pollution and cover cold marble symmetries with hilarious hand-lettered shouts and outrage banners and warm loud angry imperfect bodies of democracy
Occupy the offices of bankers and landlords and hedge fund managers and the offices of the CEOs of global retail chains and mining corporations and oil companies and arms manufacturers Occupy their networks to uproot their file systems decrypt their secrets Occupy their publicity and power-wash their corporate faces to reveal the rotting flesh Turn their quarterly reports into collapsing towers of zeros
Occupy the net and the web and the social media and the blogosphere and the infosphere and all the other virtual villages and suburbs and malls Make all Power’s secret cities into naked cities all its invisible cities into visible cities Occupy all the hidden cities and forbidden cities and public squares and gated communities of the communiverse
Occupy the public parks and the public lands and the sliced and shrunken wilderness against the belching backhoes and graders Occupy the public schools against the soft-spoken reasonable graders and backhoes of fake equality leveling minds like the tops of small wild mountains Occupy the public universities and chop off the money tendrils of parasitic partnership crawling through labs and research centers
Occupy the factories hells of boredom and injury teach the robot cutters assemblers presses new dances for making new rhythms for need met with utility and grace Occupy the fields industrial carpeting of chlorophyll machines in sterile gray nutrient and give the old nutritious cruciforms and grasses back their alliances their intermingling in live dirt as intricate as skin
Occupy language as it scrolls and crawls and winks Power’s festering poetry in shiny pixels and screen-head voices all around you Clean it with brisk brooms of incredulous irony and wire brushes of collective scorn Occupy language and above all wash it with our imaginative tears for all the misery and death it has been tortured and neutered into concealing
Occupy the seven parts of speech and the rhythms of long and short phonemes along the trail of the sentence winding or straight Occupy hypotaxis and conjunctions to build a commonwealth of words where beauty clarity and purpose move again together in one body electric like blood its red sign and figurations its nerves and syntax its conjointed bones
Occupy your bones and stand them up like tent poles for your sweaty skin Occupy your blood so it circulates the iron-tasting oxygen of truth Occupy your nerves so they carry news of the soiled wind and the stolen ground and the ragged multiplying multicolored banners of solidarity Occupy your hands and close them on other hands to know them and bear them up bear them up bear them up
Occupy. Everywhere. Together. Occupy! Everywhere! Together!
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And these are some interesting websites:
http://weroccupyunited.com/post/12048830842/micheal-moore-speaking-now-at-occupy sf
http://peopleslibrary.wordpress.com/2011/10/22/occupy-wall-st-poetry-update/
http://www.bopsecrets.org
http://www.dailykos.com/ “Look at the first picture in Cairo. Tahrir Square folks rallying for Oakland. That is really amazing.” |
