Is Occupy Oakland as Bad as They Say?

Progressives / Communists / Socialists and Anarchists - institute segregation and a thuggish looking Police Force

yeah Bush the Patriot Act and Fox News are the Problems .....

Is Occupy Oakland as Bad as They Say? *


Much ado has been made about recent media reports describing Occupy Oakland as a cross between Lord of the Flies and Animal House. The leftist magazine Mother Jones was furious about the negative coverage, deeming it “The Right-Wing Media Assault on Occupy Oakland,” and attempting to debunk the bad press. But Big Journalism lashed back with an article entitled MotherJones: Truth To Unflattering Reports On OWS.

Out of curiosity, I decided to check out the scene for myself to settle the matter.

This protester had the answer: Behead all the evil capitalists.


Many in the crowd, such as QPOC (Queer People of Color, for all you ignorant facsists) called for the death of capitalism in a more generic sense.


Some of the speakers addressing the rally wanted to go “the full Lenin.”

One thing quickly became apparent to me: Occupy Oakland at first tried to create a completely anarchistic rule-free social utopia — but as the days and weeks pass, the Occupiers are inescapably re-creating society from scratch, and before long will have all the same rules and customs and problems that they tried to abandon. (All of this is entirely predictable, I might add.)


DRUG USE and COMMERCE

Everywhere I went, I encountered people taking drugs — mostly marijuana. Many of them were understandably camera-shy. But this guy stood right on the main walkway and puffed away on a drug pipe.

DISGUSTINGNESS

The City of Oakland issued an eviction notice the day before the rally, citing sanitation issues, garbage, rats and other hygiene problems at the encampment. The protesters announced that they simply wouldn’t budge, and the city temporarily caved in, so for now the standoff continues, though the eviction notices are still taped up around the plaza. But as far as I could tell — yes, the city has a very good point. The place was pretty disgusting.

INTIMIDATING “INTERNAL SECURITY” TEAMS


Occupy Oakland has agreed by consensus to not cooperate with the Oakland Police Department under any circumstances. But as the law-breaking and nuisance behavior within the encampment started to grow, the evolving mini-society found it necessary to appoint its own ersatz police force. Basically, the scariest looking guys, and/or those guys with with strongest authoritarian urge, have assumed the role of internal policemen. As many reporters have discovered, these guys really really do not appreciate having their picture taken, so I could only get a few surreptitious shots. In this scene, someone had found a large Bowie knife in the camp and turned it into these two Occupolice, who set about scanning the crowd for the potential owner, ready to wreak justice on anyone who broke the “no weapons” law consensus agreement. They communicate with walkie-talkies.


There also seemed to be a possibly separate “rally security force” consisting of guys wearing Black Panther buttons on their berets.

SEGREGATION

But not all is rosy in this new society. Some of the very worst customs already banned from our existing society have re-emerged at Occupy Oakland. One of the ugliest of these is segregation.


The encampment has already fractured into a series of micro-neighborhoods, just like a real city. But at Occupy Oakland, where you are permitted to live is determined by your gender and/or racial or sexual identity. Here, for example, is a roped-off “gated community” reserved exclusively for female, gay and transgender residents.


Elsewhere are tents with a “minorities only” rule.


And lest you might be so naive to think that these rules would only ever apply to the Occupy camp, and not to the city at large should the Occupiers ever take over, be aware that one of the Occupation’s many demands is to “Stop White Gentrification in Oakland” — which would mean the establishment of new laws preventing white people from moving into certain neighborhoods.

Yes, my friends, the Occupy movement has made segregation trendy again!

* all text quote is sprinkled liberally in typical Zombie fashion between many pictures

manifesto from Occupy Oakland

Dear Oakland

Occupation is nothing new. The land we stand on is already occupied territory. The United States was founded upon the extermination or indigenous peoples and the colonization of their land, not to mention centuries of slavery and exploitation.

…

The idea of redistributing wealth must not only be directed towards the “1%” but to all of us as well.

The problem isn’t just a few “bad apples.” The crisis is not the result of the selfishness of a few investment bankers; it is the inevitable consequence of an economic system that rewards cutthroat competition at every level of society. Capitalism is not a static way of life but a dynamic process that consumes everything, transforming the living, breathing world into objects and profit. Now that the economy has consumed every aspect of life, the system is collapsing, leaving even some of its former beneficiaries out in the cold. The answer is not to revert to some earlier stage of capitalism, such as the economic boom of the post-war years; not only is that impossible, those earlier stages didn’t benefit the “99%” either. To get out of this mess, we’ll have to rediscover other ways of relating to each other and the world around us.

Police can’t be trusted. They may be “workers,” but their job is to protect the interests if the ruling class.As long as they remain employed as police, we can’t count on them, however friendly they might act.
…

Don’t assume those who break the law or confront the police are “outside agitators.” A lot of people have good reason to be angry. Not everyone is resigned to legalistic pacifism; for some people self-defense is a necessary part of their everyday life. Police violence isn’t just meant to provoke us, it’s meant to hurt and scare us into inaction. In this context, resistance is crucial.

Assuming that those at the front of clashes with the authorities are somehow trying to instigate a violent situation is not only illogical – it delegitimizes the spirit it takes to challenge the status quo, and dismisses the courage of those who are prepared to do so. We all experience the effects of power differently under capitalism, and the ways in which we struggle against it will reflect that. The goal should not be to compel everyone to adopt one set of tactics, but to discover how different approaches can be mutually beneficial.

…

The occupations will thrive on the actions we take. We’re not just here to “speak truth to power” – when we only speak, the powerful turn a deaf ear to us. Let’s make space for autonomous initiatives and organize direct action that confronts the source of social inequalities and injustices. An occupation of public space is not an effective political act in and of itself, it must move beyond this to become a staging grounds for actions that disrupt business as usual, and it’s up to all of us to take the initiative to see this through.

Occupy. Block. Strike. Take Over.

See you on the streets!
-The Oakland Commune

[BOP]

Have they developed their own cute little salute...er, greeting?





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