Where Ferguson and Occupy Meet...

I watched the coverage of the Ferguson uprising on MSNBC and a lot of what I saw the police doing looked disturbingly familiar to the police riots I experienced when I participated in Occupy Oakland. There were flash-bang grenades, bean-bag projectiles, rubber bullets and plenty of tear gas. The sound cannons were new “toys,”  for our militarized boys in blue.

When I was arrested, as part of a mass arrest in 1991 following the Rodney King excessive police force incident, the cops had little access to all this weaponry. They simply surrounded around the 400 people peacefully participating in the protest, handcuffed us and hauled us away. Today what cops are engaged in is more like a live staging of World of Warcraft.

Let me state unequivocally that racism plays a huge role in out-of-control policing in this country. There exists a rampant, unbridled fear of young, black males in our society. Beyond that, the government and its enforcement arm are tremendously afraid of resistance of any kind and invest everything they have in crushing rebellions before they can spread and take hold. This has been of utmost importance since the economic collapse of 2008.

Sure, the NSA and its defenders will say that heightened security dates back to the September 11^th attacks of 2001. But why then has the collection of metadata increased to a loud crescendo at this point in time. Why are racism and all forms of ethnic hatred being constantly and continually promoted just as labor unions, job security and workers’ rights and the right to a living wage are being hammered into non-existence?

It's a simple divide and conquer tactic to perpetuate capitalism. The existence of a cheap, disposable underclass is the foundation that buttresses the wealth of the one percent. Those in power are especially afraid of young, black males but they are afraid of all of us. They know they are sapping our life-blood both as low-wage workers and as an unemployed poverty class.With the highest incarceration rate in the world, the USA is now rounding up folks who can't pay their bills, thus reinstituting debtors' prisons. Economic inequality here has reached an all-time high and that's not going to change anytime soon. The bottom line is:  as long as WE are at each other’s throats, THEY are safe. The second we begin to rise up, they beat us down with ten times the force required to do so.

Racism is a real problem but it is not a "black" issue. It is an American issue that affects all of us. “We must all hang together, or assuredly, we shall all hang separately.” That quote is from Ben Franklin at the signing of the declaration of independence. And he wasn’t including women, everyone considered "non-white," immigrants, non-landowners and a whole host of others. But he still has a point. We can all learn from his mistakes and try to do it right this time!

The World on Tuesdays

Things happen every day in the world that working people know nothing about. For example, now that I have been retired a couple of weeks I've discovered that my town, Berkeley, has a big farmer's market on Tuesday afternoons. Seventeen years of missed Tuesdays, can I really account for that? Clearly, many folks fill cafes and stores every week day. They must be either unemployed or work odd hours.

Tuesdays are full of other wonders as well. Elections invariably take place on them. Yesterday was an example of this phenomenon. The despicable Scott Walker won out easily over the recall efforts thereby demonstrating the devastating impact of Citizens United and just what money can purchase in our increasingly no-holds barred plutocratic society. The corporations and the 1% outspent the now-decimated unions and progressive groups seven to one. The senate Republicans also managed to block the Paycheck Fairness Act a followup bill to the Lily Ledbetter legislation that would mandate equal pay for women.

It's hard to know what will come next. The repression against the 99% has been largely successful. There seems to be only a small percentage of Americans who are capable of independent thought. The splintering of the various subgroups and caucuses is evident to those of us who are still active. Old prejudices keep rearing their ugly heads. I have every intention to keep on keepin' on but, as you can probably deduce, I am quite depressed at this juncture.

On another subject,  retirement is solidifying as a reality for me now. Sunday, the Emu, better known as my somewhat domesticated partner Deborah, threw me a retirement party with fabulous cuisine and even more fabulous friends. Thirty-two people of all genders and orientations filled the tiny cottage and yard. The one thing they all have in common is that they live large, not in the sense of consuming material goods, but in the sense that they all have hearts and minds that stretch far beyond the limits of a circumscribed life that revolves around the nuclear family. The second thing they all had in common was that they are my friends, a simple fact that makes me eternally grateful. I want to thank all of them for their warm wishes and support!

Sexism Must Die!

It's undeniable that the Republicans are waging war against women. But just how are women faring in other political communities, for example that of the 99%? Has sexism been defeated in the sixty plus years since the emergence of second-wave feminism, dated roughly from the popularization of Simone De Beauvoir's book, "The Second Sex," first published in 1949, but translated into English and read widely for the first time in the fifties.

I wish I could report back that the Occupy Movement is free of sexist bias, but honestly, I can't. It is undeniable that many young women, as well as young gender non-specific types, are stepping up with competence and assuming power, but an alarming crisis of self-esteem and bias still persists in the meetings I have attended. Women are still hesitant to speak up and will undercut their statements with phrases like,"I don't know that much about this but..." There is often a preponderance of males in meetings and when it comes to stepping up to summarize goals and lead groups, men still dominate the proceedings.

A Workers Assembly meeting I attended this weekend was about two thirds male to one third female in composition. This probably occurred because union membership is skewed to favor higher paid, better jobs, which are primarily held by males. This is not to imply that women are silent at these gatherings. Women my age (fifties and sixties), for the most part, don't seem to have problems speaking out. Some younger women are taking leadership as well. But more pervasive overall patterns of discrimination and even self-suppression are apparent and more difficult to erase.

Last night I attended a second small meeting of an Occupy spin off that was a small group of boomer males with only a couple of women. A very articulate woman took notes at the last meeting and she was drafted again, somewhat against her will, as note-taker at this one. Of course, that was after all the males refused to volunteer and their gazes turned toward me. I replied, just as the men had, that I didn't have a laptop or know stenography either! I didn't address the gender bias because I was caught off-guard. I thought we dealt with this in the sixties when we women walked out of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) because we didn't want to be secretaries and coffee fetchers.

I guess the more things change, the more they stay the same. The fact of the matter remains; this prejudiced behavior is unacceptable and it will only serve to undermine our movement. At this point I'm trying to pull together a presentation of sexism and homophobia that both young and old can understand. The very lifeblood of our movement depends upon it!

May Day in Oakland--Protest and Repression

New Oakland Police Tank

Bloodlust on the part of the O.P.D. began just after noon in downtown Oakland when the boys and babes in blue trotted out their latest toy, a tank-like armored police vehicle. This early afternoon show of irrational force included flash-bang grenades, tear-gas and warnings to get off the streets and into the Plaza and served mainly to infuriate all present who care about freedom of speech and assembly.

The group proceeded to City Hall under this armed escort battalion. The central theater of protest then moved to the Fruitvale neighborhood where thousands of people were lining up for the 3pm March for Dignity and Resistance. The group was animated, diverse and dedicated. The march was long and full of music and drumming. We stopped for a rally in San Antonio Park before proceeding into downtown Oakland at about 6pm. Police behaved themselves perhaps due to crowd size and multiple witnesses from porches and windows.

Black Block protesters were present as well with their flags and shields and masks. The only vandalism I witnessed was when one member threw a rock at a Fox News van. If I'd been younger, I'd probably have done the same. The TV news, of course, was loaded down with the evening skirmishes between police and marchers. We had already left by the time the night heated up.

Demonstrations like these, while gratifying, can no longer be the focus of the 99% Movement. Now, we have to get serious and do the hard work of organizing and mobilizing behind the scenes if we are ever going to see real change in this country. They can roll over us physically but they can't stop our resistance. To quote Emile Zola, "The truth is on the march and nothing shall stop it."

Occupy and the Leadership Conundrum

The fact that the Occupy Movement doesn't have leaders is one of the best things about it as a grassroots movement. It's also something that may prove problematic as it moves forward into a future where the encampments are no longer a mobilization base for struggle. Having some leaders,  a steering committee or something similar, is going to be needed eventually especially if an entity, like a new political party, is going to emerge.

But it's true that the concept of leadership brings with it its own set of problems. When actual people are selected to embody a movement, it evolves from an all-encompassing, nebulous idea to a tangible reality. A leader, even a slate of leaders, cannot possess all qualities the 99%.

They each will have an age, a race, a gender and sexual orientation. The very act of selecting leaders is exclusionary by definition and the one thing the occupy movement has successfully avoided is alienating any one segment of the 99%. Once a leader or group of leaders are elected, appointed, self-selected, drafted, cronyism has the opportunity to germinate. It may be subtle but it appears to be human nature, not just in politics.

Look at the capitalist workplace. Studies have shown that managers tend to employ and surround themselves with people most similar to them. That's how empathy works in this rat-race culture. The more someone's character traits and values match your own, the greater your ability to identify with both their struggles and accomplishments.

Still, while consensus and absolute democracy may work fine in small groups, they can't function on, say, a nationwide scale. Leadership will be a key issue in organizing and one that will have to be grappled with sooner or later unless a truly innovative and radical structure can be formed. I have no idea what that would look like but within an upheaval where everything is new, anything is possible.

This is What Authoritarianism Looks Like

The repression is coordinated, systematic. The rulers are small and centralized, often comprising an elite body of the privileged. There is massive and widespread corruption and free speech is actively discouraged, often with inappropriate and disproportionate displays of force. Subjection and submission to authority is its key premise designed to silence all vocal opposition to the status quo.  

Whether or not this repression emanates from the Homeland Security Department or more locally at the city, county and state level, this is authoritarianism we are witnessing in both the highly orchestrated destruction of Occupy encampments throughout the country and the brutal force martialed against unarmed, non-violent demonstrators.Oakland mayor, Jean Quan admitted to being part of a conference call with the mayors of 18 cities. This systematic effort to quash a nacent political movement doesn't have to be federally mandated to qualify as the machinery of organized suppression. Authoritarianism isn't quite fullblown facism but it is a major way station along that slippery slope.

Police brutality is steadily increasing in response to the growing Occupy Movement. The pepper spraying of UC Davis students followed closely on the heels of the baton beatings on the UC Berkeley campus. Countrywide the police response is intensifying in its brutality. The viral video of police pepper spraying young students sitting in a peaceful row on the quad at UC Davis is just another appalling example of this trend. Watching the students with linked arms huddled in the onslaught of this totally unprovoked chemical attack is a radicalizing experience in and of itself. Learning later that those who refused to separated their  were sprayed in their faces and down their throats, causing people to cough up blood and be hospitalized, is simply a horrifying scenario in which Guantanamo Bay comes home to roost.

The footage of this travesty is strangely moving as well. It harkens back to sit ins in the American South during the Freedom Rides when simply by sitting at a lunch counter, protesters were subjected to coffee and food being poured over their heads. They sat still. They endured. And ultimately they triumphed.

In the recent uprisings in Cairo, CS gas, a potent form of teargas that induces vomiting and possible coma with prolonged exposure,  and rubber bullets are the main weapons of choice by the police and military. A number of protesters have lost eyes to rubber bullets, including one man who lost an eye in a battle but returned only to lose the other one in a subsequent street incident.

In the USA, we haven't arrived at that level of repression in this round of protests. I was a student at Ohio State University in 1970 the year the National Guard fired live ammunition at anti-Vietnam war demonstrators killing four. That same year two students were murdered by police in a women's dormitory at Jackson State College in Mississippi. So, not only can it happen here. It has.

After the pepper-spray incident when UC Davis chancellor Linda Katehi walked out to her car, the path was lined with hundreds of silent onlookers bearing witness to one of the many knowing and naive accomplices who are institutionalizing oppression by claiming ignorance or just following orders. Either way, it is our constitutional right to democratic expression of dissent that gets sprayed, beaten and trampled upon.

The Unstoppable Power of the Small

The Banquet of Life

The power of the small and numerous over the few and mighty has been the stuff of legend since the Liliputians first organized to overpower Gulliver in 1726. Today this saga is playing at towns and cities everywhere thanks to the Occupy Movement.

This past Wednesday, November 16th a few hundred protesters stormed a Bank of America in the San Francisco Financial District and began their occupation. They even put up a tent. When the police came they arrested 95 people and had to lead them out individually to the cheers of the crowd outside. After all, if you're willing to face arrest why not go out with a bang instead of a whimper.

Yes, tent cities can be dismantled and people can be hurt and arrested. But those facts don't tend to deter folks from exercising their right to free speech. In almost all cases what they accomplish is the polar opposite: a larger more determined army willing to put their own personal safety on the line for a greater cause.

Think of the 1% and their lackeys as a stately group of picnickers settling in on a manicured lawn. A bountiful spread of elegant food is spread out a lovely blanket before them. Then imagine an ant colony beneath that blanket. Once the trail is laid to that food those pesky little creatures keep on coming. You can brush them away, spray them, even crush a few but there are more colonies and nests all over the property. And their communication is sure and fast.

It's true, the 1% retain the option of moving their picnic indoors. But the power of the small can cause significant and perpetual inconvenience and disruption. Because there are always more where we came from. All we have to do is simply keep on coming.

Occupy Foreclosures!

Winter is coming. The mainstream media is predicting the end of the occupy movement. The tents at Zucotti  Park are covered with snow. Even if folks took shelter inside, I wouldn't see that as the end of anything. It isn't necessary to live outside to build a movement. But it does constitute an opportunity.

The USA is now saturated with foreclosed, bank-owned properties that are just sitting vacant attracting vermin and crime. These residences were stolen by corrupt banksters, often with not even so much as possession of the mortgage note of origin. In cities all over the country the occupiers are trying to take back some of these properties for use by the growing homeless (houseless) population. In Oakland, the cops moved in around midnight on strike day, November 2nd, when a small group entered and attempted to take possession of a warehouse. In San Francisco, some distressed properties in the Tenderloin are being considered for the same thing.

In hard-hit cities like Detroit and Cleveland, homes are being razed en masse or sold for a dollar a piece to anyone willing to take them off the bank's hands. Urban centers are being literally overgrown by vines and weeds. As Robert Frost said, "Something, there is that doesn't  love a wall." Or a ceiling or a floor.

It is too late to give back these homes to the victims of this massive scam. But we are able to do the next best thing. We can provide shelter for those who have none. One of my favorite signs on marches is one that reads, "Robin Hood was Right." But, in this case, giving back doesn't require stealing from anyone, just the repossessing of ill-gotten  loot that was expropriated from its rightful owners.