#Occupy - VOICES - Nov 6

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How I Got Off My Computer And Onto The Street At Occupy Oakland
Lili Loofbourow, The Awl
When I heard the “We Are the 99%” slogan, I worried. I am movement-skittish. I don’t like being spoken for. Anytime I hear the language of political clichés, whether about “workers” or “job creators,” my ears shut down. I know those vocabularies, and I don’t agree with the worldviews that produce them.

So I didn’t go to Occupy Oakland during the two weeks it was a camp in the Frank Ogawa/Oscar Grant Plaza. My partner, who doesn’t share my qualms, went frequently. He would come home and tell me about what he’d seen: the media center powered by an electricity-generating bicycle, the daycare center, the full-time kitchen, which fed all the members of the camp, many of them homeless. He told me about the library and the tiny “community garden” of potted plants. He told me how interesting it was to watch this small impromptu community struggle, not only with the police and with the city, but also, because it refused to shut anyone out, with the problems that characterize Oakland itself: mental illness, health and environmental issues, poverty, racial tension, need.

I listened with enormous interest, but I still didn’t go. At the risk of making this too much about me, I need to make my beliefs and reasons clear, such as they are (and were):

• I do not believe the police are evil.
• I do not believe in utopian societies.
• I distrust extremists of whatever stripe.
• I believe inflammatory rhetoric shuts down rational thought.
• I was (and remain) afraid of nighttime Oakland—the desperate Oakland that Occupy Oakland insisted on caring for and actually living with.
• I am lazy, prone to migraines, and unwilling to be cold, wet, uncomfortable and in constant danger of arrest.

In short, I’m a moderate: small, fearful, skeptical, selfish, with privilege aplenty. I have health care through the university, where I’m both a student and a teacher. I’m half-Hispanic, but I scan as white. I’m a not atypical Bay Area type: liberal, taxpaying, cautious, law-abiding (maybe to a fault), trying to hang onto the things I have. I have an iPhone, for heaven’s sake.

… At the moment when I understood that the police were pulling on their gas masks and I couldn’t see what was happening, I got what was already obvious to so many: if I wanted to see the reality of Occupy Oakland, teargas, flash bangs and all, I couldn’t rely on the ordinary channels. They weren’t working. They’d run out of gas. I needed to go to Occupy Oakland. With all my reservations, resistance, reluctance, and inertia.

So I went.

The General Assembly took place at Oscar Grant Plaza (née Frank Ogawa). I was one of the 3,000 people spilling out of the Plaza. (The green spaces had been fenced by police.) The people I spoke with were warm, yet also distressed, strained. One woman said she’d voiced her concerns to two police officers at a coffee shop earlier that day. They told her she should go speak to the Chief of Police. When she asked that they stop joking, they said they meant it: the Chief of Police was giving a press conference across the street. They asked her, in all seriousness, to speak to him. So she crossed the street, found the press conference, and spoke to him.

As the crowd got bigger, the organizers made sure to keep aisles clear so that people could move back and forth. I watched as the fences the police had erected around the green space came down. Too quickly, at first. There was a chance people could get hurt. The crowd booed the group that took them down too violently. Dozens of people came forward to make sure it came down safely, then stacked the fences into a neat, organized pile: …
(28 October 2011)

Anthropologist Graeber Turns Radical Side Loose in Zuccotti Park Protest
Drake Bennett, Bloomberg
David Graeber likes to say that he had three goals for the year: promote his book, learn to drive, and launch a worldwide revolution. The first is going well, the second has proven challenging, and the third is looking up.

Graeber is a 50-year-old anthropologist — among the brightest, some argue, of his generation — who made his name with innovative theories on exchange and value, exploring phenomena such as Iroquois wampum and the Kwakiutl potlatch. An American, he teaches at Goldsmiths, University of London.

He’s also an anarchist and radical organizer, a veteran of many of the major left-wing demonstrations of the past decade: Quebec City and Genoa, the Republican National Convention protests in Philadelphia and New York, the World Economic Forum in New York in 2002, the London tuition protests this year.

This summer, Graeber was a key member of a small band of activists who quietly planned, then noisily carried out, the occupation of Lower Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park, providing the focal point for what has grown into an amorphous global movement known as Occupy Wall Street, Bloomberg Businessweek reports in its Oct. 31 issue.

It would be wrong to call Graeber a leader of the protesters, since their insistently nonhierarchical philosophy makes such a concept heretical.
(25 October 2011)

#Occupy and Transition: resources for creating lasting change
Transition US
Like our friends at Transition Voice and Yes Magazine have written, there are many things you can do to be part of this growing movement—and only some of them involve sleeping outside.

In many #Occupy gatherings in cities across the country, people are gathering for teach-ins and sharing skills to build this movement. Here is a digest of some of the articles and resources that we’ve found insightful in thinking about how we can be bold in our next steps and combine our Transition thinking with this new surge of momentum around change. Consider this a virtual, self-guided teach-in that starts now! (And by all means, post a comment below to add to this list)
(November 2011)

How The Occupy Movement May Be Off-Base, and How It Can Evolve
Jan Lundberg, Culture Change
The Occupy movement is by and large preoccupied with most wealth being hoarded “on Wall Street” in the hands of “the 1%”. While it’s true statistically that the money is there, what will ultimately prove to matter more to the “the 99%” is access to healthy land that can support life and human subsistence. When the total financial meltdown hits, it won’t be the money in digital accounts that matters, but productive land that is held privately or in common.

Power as people commonly perceive it is not on Wall Street. Neither is the power in Washington, D.C. The 20th century saying goes, “political power comes out of the barrel of a gun.” But this is also a short-sighted analysis that ignores the future — for a world of 7 billion people on a collision course with sustainability. So, where is the power and wealth today really at, and can a transfer of wealth for equitable redistribution — if that were indeed possible — really transform people’s lives positively?

What folks in “poor” countries have always understood is that their power and survival lie in possessing their own land. Land reform in many parts of our increasingly crowded world is a burning issue. Many people live and die for the struggle for their right to live on their ancestral lands. A movement in the U.S. for the masses to take back the land from the few is inevitable.

Better late than never; many decades have passed during which the importance for consumers of being close to the land was greatly diminished. Real wealth, the land, was given up for wages and cheap petroleum’s technology explosion. Population growth has happened so fast that a new generation didn’t know it was inheriting a world less and less free and no longer abundant in life-giving resources (“ecological services”).

But as the sun sets on the system of vast, false monetary wealth and on the oppression it has wielded, nature may first wake us up rudely, before people in the U.S. can go about land reform. If so, after societal and possibly ecological collapse, there may be quite a bit of land available and to share after the population has diminished sufficiently in size. This was the case in Europe after the 14th century plagues took their toll. However, in no way should such drastic “solutions” be pursued.

“Occupying” the heart of cities today does mean something in today’s world of artificial environments, material culture, and middle class values. But instead of occupying the cities, the movement should be about running away from cities. Instead of occupying Wall Street, run away from it: abandon it, abandon the system, abandon consuming, and embrace simple living on the land. This ought to be the prime goal, rather than a stampede today or tomorrow. When, though?

Why “run away” and focus on healthy land, you may ask?
(4 November 2011)

What’s the Black Bloc? And why is it important for the fate of the Occupy Movement?

For the past three weeks, I’ve been obsessed with the Occupy Movement at the moment. I think it’s the most significant development of the year — together with Arab Spring and the Indignados protests in Mediterranean countries.

The Occupy Movement has struck a chord with the “99 percent.” Occupy Oakland, for example, saw somewhere between 5,000 and 25,000 people out in the street during the General Strike Wednesday.

I was struck by the presence of the black clad groups that appeared in the midst of the demonstration to trash stores, break windows, etc. These are the Black Bloc, a phenomenon which first appeared in the 80s and has been with demonstrations across the world ever since.

How the Occupy Movement deals with the Black Bloc is critical for its future, I think. The following links provide some background.

-BA

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2011/apr/01/anarchists-anti-cuts-march
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/mar/31/black-bloc-anti-cuts…

http://www.zcommunications.org/throwing-stones-through-windows-is-not-a-…

http://theamericanmuslim.org/tam.php/features/articles/the-black-bloc/00…

http://www.carolmoore.net/sfm/

http://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/jonathan-moses/in-defence-of-bla…

http://www.zcommunications.org/black-bloc-a-misguided-tactic-for-june-30…
http://www.newleftproject.org/index.php/site/article_comments/black_bloc…

http://www.zcommunications.org/losing-my-religion-my-night-with-the-blac…

http://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/owen-jones/black-bloc-%E2%80%93-…

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-201_162-57319036/is-black-bloc-hijacking-occ…

http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2011/11/04/18697383.php

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405297020371620457701621426449252…