Policing on Behalf of the One Percent in Anaheim: Defund Communities and then Shoot the Little People

The Anaheim City Council in California has sidestepped an opportunity to help resolve tensions in the city after an unarmed man, Manuel Diaz, was shot dead by police last month, and local residents gathering to object were fired at with less-lethal weapons. A later protest at a council meeting on July 24 led to further confrontations when residents attempted to march to the police station.

The council voted down a proposal to create voting districts that would replace the current “at-large” system and help increase Latino representation. Hundreds of people attended the special meeting at the local high school on Wednesday, but despite residents’ heartfelt appeals for redistricting, mayor Tom Tait and councilwoman Lorri Galloway were outvoted by the conservative majority representing the affluent Anaheim Hills area.

The council voted instead to establish a “citizens advisory committee on elections and community involvement.” According to the OC Register, the vote angered many in the audience, who began chanting, “We’ll be back. We’ll be back,” as they left the auditorium.

The council lost an historic chance to restore equality in political representation. As the LA Times editorialized: “Replacing at-large elections with district voting wouldn’t solve the problem overnight, but it would be an important step toward greater civic engagement by Latinos and responsiveness by government. Yet the council had never formally considered such a change until Tait — acting before the shooting — put it on the agenda.”

The sharply divided council also voted down another ballot measure that would require a public vote on tax concessions to hotel developers, eliciting some boos from the crowd – and some yells of “recall.” Many in the Latino community opposed a $158 million tax break given to the builder of two luxury hotels earlier this year, seeing it as depriving their neighborhoods of badly-needed resources.

A number of speakers called for the setting up of a citizens’ police review board, as has been done in some other towns in California, and for a higher level of police professionalism. In an incident which dramatized the city’s polarization between supporters and detractors of police crackdowns on gangs in Anaheim, after Manuel Diaz’s mother made an emotional appeal to the council to provide more resources for children’s recreation in the area, to give them hope, she was interrupted by a man who cursed at her and shouted “You’re a horrible mother.”

A police press conference attempted to undermine the symbolism of Diaz’s killing by identifying him as a member of the Eastside Anaheim gang, following a Friday pre-dawn raid in the area that led to 44 arrests. Police claimed Diaz would have been arrested in the sweep had he been alive.

Local residents were suspicious of the raid’s timing. Ricardo Hurtado told the OC Register: ” I just think this community is being targeted by the police because we’re speaking out. This is all a cover-up. … They never expected this community to blow up like this.” Residents described officers in military camouflage knocking on doors and barging into homes. “My brother has nothing to do with drugs or the weapons that were found,” said Jose Castro, whose brother Eriberto Castro was taken into custody. “I want to know why they have him as a documented gang member.”

Anaheim police claim that local gangs have terrorized the population into distrusting the police, but community spokespeople say that the police themselves have created the mistrust through aggressive and trigger-happy policing.

The police also claim that officer-involved shootings are a response to a rise in violent gang-related crime. However, statistics don’t bear out a connection between police shootings and crime levels. According to an LA Times analysis of autopsy reports, a sharp increase in the number of people fatally shot by police in neighboring Los Angeles County during 2011 took place when the number of homicides in the area fell to historic lows.

In Anaheim this year, the city has recorded 13 homicides, five of them fatal police shootings. In comparison, there have been two other fatal police shootings in all of the rest of Orange County. The LA Times review continues: “In recent years, Orange County prosecutors have reviewed a number of other Anaheim police shootings and deemed them justified even when suspects had no guns. …

“In October 2008, Anaheim police Officer Kevin Flanagan was chasing four juveniles shortly after midnight. Hearing the commotion, Julian Alexander, a 20-year-old African American, came out of his home with a broomstick in his hand. Flanagan, believing he was being threatened, fatally shot Alexander. Prosecutors in March 2009 found that the officer acted within the law, saying that Flanagan had told investigators that he shot Alexander twice after the man raised the stick.”

The fact that law officers who shoot unarmed people appear to face no consequences, and the political demonization of immigrants as responsible for crime and gangs, reinforces a trend to the use of lethal force in poorer communities.

As they made clear in many speeches to the council, Latino residents want to be recognized as an equal part of Anaheim society, to be treated with respect. Aggressive policing denotes their exclusion from the rights of citizenship, and erodes residents’ trust of social authority. The Anaheim gang enforcement unit is perceived as an oppressive force entering the community to terrorize it – a “killing crew,” as it was described at the meeting.

In an academic study of policing after the riots in England last year, the authors conclude that police actions have to be perceived as fair and impartial to gain community support. “The fairness of police actions is important not only because it communicates status and belonging to citizens (in turn generating and sustaining legitimacy), but also because police unfairness encourages division and antagonism, eroding people’s connections to institutions and society (and undermining legitimacy). Furthermore, when the police lose their legitimacy in the eyes of the policed they lose their claim to the monopoly of the use of force.”

The protests against Diaz’s killing challenged the legitimacy of police violence in the city. While residents are generally supportive of actions to curb gangs and drugs, nothing has been done to alleviate their source in unemployment, poverty and bad housing. The lack of jobs and social facilities, institutionalized racism, and the control of the council by representatives of the white suburbs contribute to increased tensions within the community.

Residents are conflicted about outside groups coming in to support their protests, some viewing them as disrespectful of the community’s own efforts.

According to the OC Weekly, “two groups have made their presence known in the Anna Drive neighborhood, seeking to radicalize local youths in the aftermath of the tragedy: the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) and the … Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, Integration and Immigrant Rights and Fight for Equality By Any Means Necessary (a.k.a. BAMN) formed in 1995 in response to the UC Regents’ decision to ban affirmative action. … But residents interviewed by the Weekly were not happy with those outsiders trying to convert them to their views. ‘I was fine with them at first, but they took it too far,’ Mariano Macedo says of the groups, such as RCP, who were ‘swooping in’.”

Others welcomed outside supporters. Jaclyn Conroy, whose nephew Justin Hertl was shot and killed by police in 2003, told the OC Register: “It puts a tear in my eye that people from outside the area have come to support us. They’ve helped bring a national spotlight and that allows us here locally to talk to people about the problems we’re having with police.”

The inclusive principles of the Occupy movement have more to offer the Anaheim community than the prescriptions of left groupings for building a new political leadership. Anaheim is in fact an example of the effects of starving federal resources to cities and states in order to finance the continued subsidy of corporations and big banks. The important thing is to find ways of forging alliances between different groups in struggle and to create a new model of resistance that challenges the construction of a police state.

Anaheim Protests: Build a Powerful Alliance Against the One Percent

Police patrol the streets of Anaheim in camouflage uniforms and carrying weaponry

Now that protests over the shooting of two young Americans in Anaheim have died down, the community is taking stock of the situation. An open meeting of the Anaheim City Council on Thursday (August 2) did not resolve any tensions, but it gave about 75 local residents the opportunity to make statements before the council went into closed session.

The LA Times reported that speakers made “numerous calls for calm discourse to move past the violence and address long-simmering complaints in the racially segregated city.” Corie Cline spoke to the council about how her brother was killed by Anaheim police in 2007, and how she was taunted by the officer who shot him at a recent protest. Speakers also called for the hiring of a Latino police chief who would be more responsive to the long-standing complaints of the community about police harassment.

A public meeting scheduled for next Wednesday at the local high school is expected to draw up to a thousand people, but some pro-business elements on the council are pressing to cancel it on the grounds that it will attract outside protesters and get more adverse publicity for the city.

Local community leaders consider that changing council elections from an “at-large” system, where the whole city votes on all candidates, to district representation will make the council and the police more responsive to the needs of the Latino community. This is a view shared by the mayor, Tom Tait, who visited the scene of the fatal shooting on Tuesday.

Four out of five councilors live in affluent Anaheim Hills on the east side of the city. Martin Lopez, an organizer with Unite Here Local 11, which represents hotel, restaurant and airport workers throughout Southern California, told California Public Radio: “If these guys are not representing the Latino community, they’re not going to push the police to represent the Latino community. So when these guys go to our communities, they see them as the enemy, and that’s someone that they are there to protect.”

But there is a structural basis for the police crackdowns: Corporate Disney wants low-waged workers to cut the grass and change the bedsheets in its resorts, but it also requires “security” to stop visitors being scared away by riots. And the Anaheim Hills residents want the problems of poverty and violence kept well away from them.

Disney, the largest local taxpayer and employer, has wielded its considerable political strength to prevent affordable housing being built close to tourist areas. According to the New York Times, “In 2007, when a developer proposed a high-rise building with affordable housing, Disney spent more than $2 million to back a group called Save Our Anaheim Resort Area, which opposed the plan and successfully persuaded the city to abandon the idea. Since then, the group changed the verb in its name from ‘save’ to ‘support’ and has created a political action committee that funneled thousands of dollars to candidates, largely money collected from Disney and businesses near the resort, while Disney has continued to donate millions directly to candidates.”

Long-time councilor Harry Sidhu, a founder of the pro-Disney group, inadvertently expressed the basis of the opposition of white suburbanites to redistricting: “If they don’t elect their own people, you can’t say we are at fault,” he said. Sidhu’s othering of the Latino community is one of the major reasons local activists focus on achieving council representation.

The council recently voted to make major tax concessions to a developer building luxury hotels near to Disneyland. Instead of collecting a 15 percent tourist tax for every hotel stay, the city will allow the developers to keep the money for the next 15 years, a deal estimated to be worth $158 million.

Eric Altman, a spokesman for a coalition of community organizations, told the New York Times: “Throughout the city people are facing real problems with working poverty and struggling to get the resources and attention that others parts of town get routinely. There is the basic question of why is it in a city with those kind of resources can we have such extreme poverty?” Mr. Altman said the most recent tax deal is “essentially the city printing money” for investors in the resort area.

Gabriel San Roman commented in the OC Weekly: “… if district elections come to Anaheim and literally change the political landscape of the city, there will be challenges still. A platform of economic democracy and racial justice are key components in moving forward from its descent into becoming the Tragic Kingdom. After all, if hotels in the resort area are no longer massively subsidized in controversial so-called ‘public-private partnerships’ and the general fund is consolidated against such giveaways, will the Anaheim Police Department still consume a substantial proportion of it? That depends on a leadership class emerging with a new kind of politics.”

Occupy supporters coming from out of town had an awkward reception from the local community leadership. When occupiers arrived to show support for a prayer vigil for victim of police shooting Manuel Diaz on Sunday evening, they were stopped by Anna Street residents acting as stewards. According to the OC Weekly, “Wanting to keep the event peaceful, they asked Occupiers to put their signs down before joining the vigil. Most were eager to oblige. But a young girl in a Hello Kitty backpack was none-to-pleased. ‘Thank you for coming from different parts of the world and almost getting shot,’ she fumed sarcastically.”

The local leadership were not enamoured with this patronizing attitude nor with the Occupy supporters’ tendency to jeer provocatively at the police.

Earlier in the day, the Somos Anaheim coalition had organized a silent march to protest not only the officer-involved shootings but also the violent riots of the previous week. Occupy supporters held a separate march which aimed to reach Disneyland but was headed off by police horses and a militarized SWAT team, weapons drawn.

The OC Weekly gives this eyewitness report: “Unlike at previous protests, there were no projectiles thrown at the cops. Instead, many demonstrators looked visibly scared. ‘Are they going to shoot us?’ one person asked. Police issued no orders to disperse, instead repeating their demand that protesters stick to the sidewalk. But more than 100 of them sprinted down a side street; they were followed by officers, who quickly surrounded them.

“Atef Nadal, an Anaheim resident who ran with the group, said that Latino residents started to come out of their homes, offering water and support, even hosing down some of the sweat-drenched protesters. ‘They were throwing their fists in the air and showing they were sympathetic with what we were protesting against, which is police brutality and harassment in Anaheim neighborhoods,’ he said.

“As police moved in on the demonstrators, prepared to make arrests, residents screamed at the police, ‘Leave them alone!’ and, ‘Go home!’ Within moments, officers put away their batons, apparently acting in response to an order from superiors to back up and mount up.”

Building these kinds of alliances across ethnic divides is not easy, but if successful can be extremely powerful.  For example, Gabriel Thompson gives an account in Alternet about a recent union organizing drive at an Alabama poultry factory employing many immigrants. A previous attempt had failed because of the union’s failure to build bridges between Spanish and English-speaking workers.

Thompson writes: “… my neighbor was a Guatemalan named Dagoberto who had organized, in one day, a 500-person march through town in support of immigrant rights. This was the kind of leader—unafraid and widely respected—that an organizer would kill for. But Dagoberto had voted against the union in 2006. ‘To be honest, I didn’t really know what a union was,’ he told me. ‘I never even saw anyone from the union.’ I would speak with dozens of immigrants who expressed similar sentiments. …

“This time, [Randy] Handley [a union organizer] and his organizing team, which included Jose Aguilar, an immigrant from Honduras, were quick to build bridges within the diverse workforce. Organizers took care to hold bilingual meetings and translate all documents, and set up shop at intersections around the plant. … ‘This time, we made sure that the Latinos understood what a union is all about,’ says Aguilar. ‘I told them, the union is you. You’ll fight and negotiate for a contract that will protect you’.”

As the Latino community in Anaheim becomes more experienced in political struggle, the inclusive and pluralist message of the Occupy movement will resonate with it. Likewise, Occupy supporters must learn the history of struggles in Anaheim and join with the community in a movement of alliances. This will take a big step towards creating a new kind of politics that unites Americans against the one percent.

Challenging Racial Profiling: Trayvon Martin, Occupy Wall Street, and Social Justice

The Trayvon Martin case is currently being tried in the media, with op-eds galore which begin by decrying a rush to judgment, then express their own judgment through their presentation of the facts. The police department is trying to justify its failure to charge George Zimmerman with any crime by releasing selective information about the killer and his victim, while Zimmerman’s family and attorney are alleging that Martin attacked the shooter – a story that is not borne out by witness and video evidence which show Zimmerman unharmed.

The polarization of public opinion and the family’s demands for justice has laid bare the role of endemic racial profiling in the case. Zimmerman had channeled the gated-community imaginary connecting neighborhood burglaries with groups of youth in hoodies and so automatically found Martin suspicious. After the shooting, narcotics and not homicide officers were sent to the scene; the officers initially accepted Zimmerman’s story at face value since the victim was a black youth in a hoodie, and routine homicide evidence was not collected.

The lead detective on the case, Chris Serino, did not believe Zimmerman’s story, but was overruled by the police chief and state district attorney because of their interpretation of Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” law. Jonathan Capehart pointed out in the Washington Post that: “Serino didn’t believe Zimmerman’s version of events and recommended a manslaughter charge. But he was overruled. And according to a report from Joy-Ann Reid of the Grio yesterday, the decision came from atop the law enforcement food chain: the state attorney. A source with knowledge of the investigation into the shooting of Trayvon Martin tells the Grio that it was then Sanford police chief Bill Lee, along with Capt. Robert O’Connor, the investigations supervisor, who made the decision to release George Zimmerman on the night of February 26th, after consulting with State Attorney Norman Wolfinger – in person.”

The Sanford police have a history of systemic racial discrimination, which led to Lee’s appointment six months ago to clean up the force. Lee himself was forced to step down in the aftermath of public reaction to his refusal to charge Zimmerman. Interviewing NAACP president Ben Jealous about Lee’s ouster, Amy Goodwin of “Democracy Now” asked: “what happened after Trayvon was killed, when he’s laying on the ground, and the police come, and George Zimmerman is standing over him, as witnesses describe, the police didn’t drug or alcohol test George Zimmerman. They drug and alcohol tested the corpse of Trayvon. … Then his body was taken to the morgue, where it sat unidentified for—it laid unidentified for two days, when the police had his cell phone, could easily have identified who he was. He was talking to his girlfriend as this was all taking place.”

Jealous replied: “This is why this chief has to go, because the reality is that if you’re a chief, and your officers come – are called to a scene where a man has killed a boy, and no arrest is made, no evidence is gathered – no attempt to, you know, check the hands of the shooter for powder burns or anything else, powder residue, to gather the clothing of the killer for DNA evidence or anything else, or to otherwise gather evidence from that scene – and then no one attempts to contact this boy’s parents, to track them down, to pick up the cell phone and call the last number and say, ‘Who does this belong to?’ and then no one arrests the shooter and begins an investigation, and weeks go by, and a sense of safety that was already tenuous in this community – you were called here to rebuild – erodes more and more and more, there’s a certain point when there’s nothing that you as that chief can do to fix it, and you’ve just got to go.”

The rapid spread of protests in support of Martin’s family throughout the U.S. highlights the widespread use of racial profiling in major cities. “Stop and frisk” tactics have led to stepped-up police harassment and criminalization of black and Latino youth in New York, in particular. In an echo of the protests around Trayvon Martin’s killing, The LA Times reports, “marchers in New York City held a demonstration to demand the arrest of a New York police officer for fatally shooting an unarmed teenager after chasing him into his family’s apartment. The march Thursday night in the Bronx, where 18-year-old Ramarley Graham lived, was the latest rally in what protesters say will be a relentless campaign on behalf of the teenager. ‘We will get justice, because I’m not going to stop. A mother never lays down,’ Graham’s mother, Constance Malcolm, told the crowd.”

Ryan Devereaux in The Guardian notes that the NYPD is now facing a federal class action over the expansion of its stop-and-frisk program into public housing. “The plaintiffs include several mothers and their teenage children. They claim the program regularly leads to unwarranted stops, harassment and trespassing arrests in their own buildings and the buildings of their friends and family. … NYPD data indicates that between 2006 and 2010, the department made 329,446 stops based on suspicion of trespassing, representing 12% of all stops. Out the total number of stops 7.5% have led to arrests. In 2010 the 10 precincts with the most arrests [predominantly African American and Latino communities] accounted for nearly as many stops as the remaining 66 precincts combined.”

The Guardian was the only major newspaper to report Wednesday’s successful Occupy protest against fare increases on the New York Metro, which the movement has connected with police criminalization of youth. “An Occupy Wall Street-affiliated group has claimed responsibility for chaining open more than 20 subway gates in New York City, in an action intended to highlight issues surrounding the public transit system. … Chains and padlocks were used to hold emergency gates open on the F, L, R, Q, 3, and 6 lines. Signs resembling Metro Transit Authority notices were posted on the subway walls that read ‘Free Entry, No Fare. Please Enter Through The Service Gate’, while activists above ground urged passengers to ride for free. … [Occupy supporter José] Martín said one of the motivations for Wednesday’s action was to highlight the number of minorities arrested for fare evasion. ‘One of the driving motivations was the criminalization of black and brown youth through the NYPD quota system,’ he explained. ‘A lot of Occupiers have been going to jail for the last six months and finding themselves in jail cells with black and Latino youth who are often there for nothing more than fare evasion, thrown in cages for such a tiny violation and then often forced to lose their job or get in trouble in school’.”

Police racial profiling of black and Latino citizens is a political strategy aimed at containing the consequences of increasing social polarization, but an accumulation of abuses has eroded the ties between police and communities. It’s what underlies many unlawful police killings of individuals, young and old. Another aspect of this strategy is to suppress expressions of political protest outside the official two-party system, such as the Occupy movement. The growing public anger at the police in the Trayvon Martin case signifies that communities across the nation no longer accept them as protectors of public safety and are demanding justice.

OWS and Trayvon Martin: America Will Not Be Satisfied Until Justice Rolls Down Like Waters

The coincidence of the Occupy protests with the growing national movement of outrage against the failure of Sanford, Florida police to arrest the killer of Trayvon Martin has called into question police authority and undermined the NYPD push to criminalize dissent. Despite violent nightly skirmishes from Monday onwards, the NYPD was not able to oust the occupiers from Union Square, and on Wednesday evening “hundreds poured into the square at 6 p.m. for a rally for Trayvon Martin, the Florida teenager hunted down and killed for being black. Trayvon’s aggrieved parents, Tracy Martin and Sybrina Fulton, spoke at the rally, dubbed The Million Hoodie March, which drew 1,000 hoodie-wearing supporters who sported the same apparel that Trayvon’s killer, George Zimmerman, found ‘suspicious’ as he stalked the 17-year-old through a gated Sanford, Florida, community. … Around 7:30 p.m., the rally became a march, commanding 6th Avenue and easily overwhelming the considerable police presence.”

While police massed at the square in the aftermath of the demonstration, they remained on the defensive: “500 cops, accompanied by dozens of paddy wagons and arrest vehicles, surrounded the park – there was so much manpower that they stood shoulder-to-shoulder as they ringed the square – and pushed the protesters back onto the public sidewalk area in what was the largest show of police force since the November 15 raid on Liberty Square. But the show of force was thankfully just that, and though white shirts patrolled the crowd and provoked the occupiers, the paddy wagons and NYPD arrest bus remained empty. “

Last Saturday, March 25, hundreds more occupiers marched to protest the violent arrests the previous week and to demand the resignation of the NYC police commissioner, Ray Kelly. According to the Guardian: “Organisers framed Saturday’s action as a critique of an array of NYPD tactics that tend to disproportionately target low-income communities and people of colour. Protesters repeatedly pointed to the department’s widespread use of street-level stop and frisks and the surveillance of Muslim communities as examples of failed NYPD policy.” An example of this practice was the violent arrest of Mesiah Burciaga-Hameed, a 16-year-old activist from Oakland, who briefly blocked the path of a police scooter. According to The Occupied Wall Street Journal: “Despite her change of heart, she was quickly snatched from the sidewalk by officers who dragged her, hysterically crying, from her friends. … Burciaga-Hameed’s arrest was consistent with the random yet systematic targeting of women, teenagers and men of color for arrest, a pattern noted by many who were following the four-hour march on Twitter.”

The continued assertions of popular sovereignty in Occupy’s rhetoric and direct actions have been revitalized by the demands for justice in the Trayvon Martin case. The ouster of the Sanford police chief, following a motion of no confidence by the city council, showed a potent demonstration of the public’s power to push back for accountability from law enforcement, a movement that continues unabated.  The protests against arbitrary police actions have spread through the country like the Occupy movement in its initial days. In Chicago, hundreds of people rallied in the Loop and Daley Plaza to show support for Trayvon Martin’s family. “It’s not just about this protest,” Jazmin Barnett-Birdsong told the Morris Daily Herald. “It’s about all the protests nationwide. It’s about unity and solidarity. We as a country, we think justice should prevail.”

The mass nature of the movement means that hundreds of incidents where police have racially profiled African-Americans and Latinos have accumulated to the point where communities no longer believe the police are serving justice. Rallies were planned for Pittsburgh; San Francisco; Houston; Atlanta; Indianapolis; Baltimore; Philadelphia; Detroit; Memphis, Tennessee; Iowa City, Denver, and Sanford itself on Monday where 500 people crowded into the Sanford City Commission. Outside the meeting, several thousand people carried signs, rallied and marched in Martin’s support. “We’re not asking for an eye for an eye, we’re asking for justice, justice, justice,” said Tracy Martin, Trayvon’s father. More than 2.2 million people have added their signatures to an online petition demanding an arrest in the case. Several Miami Heat players took the basketball floor on Saturday with messages such as “RIP Trayvon Martin” and “We want justice” scrawled on their sneakers, after posting photos of themselves wearing black hoodies on Twitter.

When Martin Luther King famously said, “We will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream,” he was speaking about civil rights in the 60s. But the words encompass our 2012 reality.

The Black Bloc Cyclops: Enabling, not fighting, Government Psyops Against Occupy

An article by Chris Hedges in Alternet criticizing the black bloc as “the cancer in Occupy” has created a stir among anarchist sympathizers.

Susie Cagle replies that anarchists are inspired by struggles in places like Greece. Their critics, she says, portray property destruction “by perceived black bloc ‘hooligans’ as a discrediting force in the movement, even while they understand the role of focused property destruction at, say, the Boston Tea Party, or in the International Longshore and Warehouse Union’s struggle against EGT in Longview, Washington.”

To conflate property destruction by individuals with a mass movement of protest in Greece or anywhere else is a remarkable piece of historical confusion. Anarchists believe that by recreating the image of other struggles across the world, they can create a movement in America. However, this only satisfies their own egos and alienates potential supporters of the Occupy Movement.

Ms. Cagle writes approvingly that “On November 2, an autonomously organized anti-capitalist black bloc marched through Oakland, destroying windows and other property at banks and, allegedly, strike-busting businesses such as Whole Foods. … That march resulted in the Oakland police calling in mutual aid, but it did not result in a discrediting of the national movement; tens of thousands still marched on the Port of Oakland hours later.”

What she omits from this story is that the black bloc members were a small minority of the marchers on that day, and that after the success of the thousands who marched on the Port of Oakland – despite the black bloc, not because of it – the occupation of an abandoned building by a small group led to a violent confrontation which overshadowed the day’s action. At the time, Colonel Despard quoted a critical letter from a non-black bloc anarchist, “Thousands of citizens took to the streets and shut down the 5th largest port in America. You burned some garbage and broke some glass. Thousands of people took to the streets and marched on banks to shut them down. You painted some walls. Thousands of people made headlines by organizing successfully a massive general strike that drew attention from the entire world. You made headlines by throwing rocks at the police, who incidentally didn’t show any use of force, who were in fact not even a significant presence, until your actions.”

Ms. Cagle herself makes the best argument against individualistic black bloc tactics: “A full plastic water bottle lobbed at police in full riot gear, whether it hits one of them or not, is enough to legally warrant the shooting of less lethal, rubber-coated steel bullets at a crowd. Occupiers, of course, threw more than just water bottles on January 28 – glass bottles, bricks, lawn chairs – but police, according to their own statements, sustained no injuries beyond two small cuts and one bruise. …”

In other words, throwing objects at the police is completely ineffectual and only serves to give them legal justification for firing their rubber bullets. But anarchists turn up their noses at legality; they don’t want to fight a political battle, using the provisions of the First Amendment, to win over millions of Americans to their cause. Chris Hedges is right to point out the absolutist arrogance of anarchists on this point. “The Black Bloc movement bears the rigidity and dogmatism of all absolutism sects. Its adherents alone possess the truth. They alone understand. They alone arrogate the right, because they are enlightened and we are not, to dismiss and ignore competing points of view as infantile and irrelevant.”

They are motivated by ideological purity, not by any kind of concrete evaluation of the situation the Occupy movement is in. Another anarchist supporter, Kevin Carson writes in self-justification: “The state is simply a group of human beings cooperating for common purposes — purposes frequently at odds with those of other groups of people, like the majority of people in the same society. … The state is nothing but an association for armed violence on the part of those who make money at the expense of other people. … The state is by far the greatest concentration of organized violence, and it almost always employs such violence for evil purposes — whether at Tahrir Square, Hama, or Oakland.”

Are not Social Security and Medicare also functions of the state? Shouldn’t we fight to defend Social Security and Medicare? Carson’s simplistic nineteenth-century definition of the state excludes organs of mass persuasion like TV and the press, or the creators of ideology in universities and think tanks, and assumes the impossibility of political pressure placing limits on state intervention. If the state were such a monolithic entity in support of capitalism, why is it that the super-rich have spent literally billions of dollars to push for legislation in their favor at the federal and state level? It’s clearly important for them to reverse state-imposed limits by agencies like the EPA and the IRS.

Carson quotes Andy Robinson, a professor at Cambridge University, who critiques news coverage of the Occupy movement. “There’s no mention of the fact that police have repeatedly, violently attacked Occupy protests which consisted simply of sit-downs and camp-outs. … The fact that police use violence routinely and with impunity is not mentioned.  In fact, police violence as such (as opposed to excessive brutality) is treated as uncontroversial.” Official lies by politicians and cops, Robinson argues, are a “psyop designed to conceal their own repeated use of violence.”

There is a psyops war going on, but the anarchists don’t want to fight this war. Otherwise they would recognize that black bloc activities assist the state’s psyop campaign to isolate and destroy the Occupy movement. We do have democracy in America, not a police state, and governments claim legitimacy for their actions by reference to the popular vote. Treating the state as always and everywhere engaged in violence against the people is an ideological justification for abstaining from using legal methods of struggle aimed at winning over the American people, who are the basis of popular sovereignty.

The Secrecy of Direct Action: A Trojan Horse in Occupy Wall Street

Nothing could assist the state more in its aim of denigrating the Occupy movement than black bloc tactics, which encourage anonymous provocateurs to create havoc and tarnish the rest of the movement. The debate over “diversity of tactics” taking place among occupiers confuses the issue. What needs to be clarified is whether the aim of direct action is to build a mass movement, or allow a small group of activists to substitute themselves for the people they claim to represent.

Looking at the state itself, it’s clear that the police have refined their tactics in order to control their media representation, following the political consequences of earlier attacks on occupations. Online videos of police pepper-spraying women in New York and firing rubber bullets at protesters in Oakland evoked a huge public reaction and gave the Occupy movement a national following.

In Washington DC last Saturday, in contrast, police were careful to avoid violent confrontations, saying they were not evicting protesters but were merely enforcing an existing ban on camping. The occupiers, however, were in no doubt what was happening. “This is a slow, media-friendly eviction,” Melissa Byrne told the Guardian. “We’re on federal property, so they have to make it look good.”

The Washington eviction followed a carefully planned protocol where police claimed to be merely enforcing regulations, held bad-faith negotiations with protesters, then declared the area “closed” and used metal fences and shields to physically force occupiers out of the park. The police were well prepared for the eviction: the Washington Post noted “dozens of officers, a patrol wagon, an arrest-processing tent and a cherry-picker truck used to remove the Guy Fawkes mask that had been placed over the face of Civil War general James B. McPherson’s statue.”

According to the same article: “Protesters and police at first interacted in good humor Saturday as they negotiated taking down the big, blue ‘Tent of Dreams,’ which protesters had unfurled over a Civil War statue Monday. But relations grew tense as the day wore on and police began clearing the park of several truckloads of bedding and trash. At one point, dozens of officers pushed back the crowd with riot shields so they could erect more barricades.”

Much was made of the presence of rats and unsanitary conditions, reinforced by the image of park workers in yellow or white hazmat suits dumping bedding. In other words, part of the operation was to depict the protesters as unclean, lazy scroungers, as a rabble without purpose or constitutional rights of assembly.

The police are now ultra-careful because control of images by the mainstream media has been undercut by activists livestreaming police actions and posting YouTube videos. So it’s disturbing that a livestreamer was attached by a masked individual on the Occupy Oakland support march held in Manhattan the previous week.

The Gothamist reported: “From the march’s beginning at Washington Square Park, an unusual amount of masked protesters along with the heavy scent of booze contributed to a heightened state of volatility. The instances of projectiles being thrown were met with scorn, outrage and chants of ‘This is a peaceful protest’ by a majority of the protesters. When a can and a bottle were thrown on 14th Street, the crowd was stunned into silence, as New York’s Occupy Wall Street protesters have largely shied away from the more aggressive tactics used by their mask-donning West Coast counterparts. When a masked man began punching the camera of a livestreamer, other protesters urged the police to arrest him.”

And it’s more disturbing that spokespeople for OWS wouldn’t defend the livestreaming journalist.  According to the Gothamist, “That man is Tim Pool, a well-known if extremely divisive documenter of Occupy Wall Street. Pool records everything he sees—including protesters releasing the air out of the tires of NYPD squad cars during the eviction of Zuccotti Park. … Patrick Bruner, Occupy Wall Street’s former ‘official’ press spokesman, told the Voice that he was ‘very uncomfortable’ with Pool’s actions, and shines his light into Pool’s lens whenever he trains it on him.”

The Guardian reported Bruner as claiming: “It wasn’t a random individual attacking Tim Pool. It was an individual attempting to make it so that he could no longer film someone who didn’t want to be filmed. [Occupy] never filed for a permit. Nearly every action that we do, on some level, is illegal and when you have someone documenting it in a way that doesn’t respect an individual’s privacy or their right to choose whether or not they want to be filmed, that puts people in danger.”

Bruner’s remarks are specious: there is a big difference between the illegality of asserting the right to protest, where permits are an arbitrary police restriction, and attacking property, which is a clear violation of laws most people accept. Pool vigorously defended himself in the Gothamist: “… it does offend me when people say I’m putting them at risk. If you throw a bottle at the police, you’re putting people at risk. When two innocent people who were doing nothing get arrested because you threw the bottle, that’s putting people at risk. I’m going to hold those people accountable.”

The Indypendent commented: “Those who had been at the afternoon’s Occupy Town Square beforehand might have seen this coming. Members of OWS’s Direct Action Working Group—which oversees the planning of most marches and other actions—gave an impromptu teach-in about the idea of ‘diversity of tactics,’ which was in many respects insightful, but ultimately became an apologia for undertaking, or at least tolerating, what might be construed as violent actions. The villains of the presentation, perhaps even more so than police, were those within the movement who denounce or try to stop others who want to do such things. They were described as likely to be sexist and racist for trying to insist on nonviolent discipline.”

It seems that the eviction at Zuccotti Park has changed the dynamic within the activists of Occupy Wall Street, and that protesters’ frustration with continuous police harassment has encouraged some of them to adopt the tactics of the black bloc.

Michael Greenberg observed in a recent essay: “The [police] crackdowns scare away less hard-core supporters. Actions now routinely involve a diminishing group of three hundred to five hundred demonstrators or less. Some activists I spoke with preferred the smaller, more concentrated quality of the actions, partly, I suspect, because it gave them the elevated feeling of being the street fighters, the incorruptible ones, the keepers of what is pure. Skirmishes with police could be seen as proof that they were a bona fide threat to the system.”

The Village Voice also noted: “Last night’s episode speaks to an ongoing tension within Occupy Wall Street, as many protesters and organizers embrace radical transparency, while others — especially those involved in planning direct actions — see a need for secrecy and strict security culture to protect the movement from the government infiltrators almost everyone agrees must be within the movement. Bruner warned that the ongoing police crackdowns against occupations from Oakland to New York only serve to encourage protesters to protect themselves with increasing secrecy and Black Bloc tactics.”

Patrick Bruner may only be speaking for one group of activists. Other occupiers would differ, like Ted Hall who told the Guardian he believes Pool is helping Occupy face facts: “We have people within our movement who are doing things that the vast majority of people in this movement would not agree with. The vast majority of us are not going to agree that releasing the air out of the tires of the cops is going to do anything but agitate them, and they have guns.” Occupy should focus its energy on playful, creative actions planned and executed with transparency, Hall contends. … “Our strengths are not in secrecy. Our strengths are in transparency,” he adds. “Anything that’s secretive is going to attract instigators and undercovers like a moth to a flame.”

Still the Most Inspiring Idea Around: Occupy Wall Street

The national media embedded itself in a police propaganda assault on Occupy Oakland, Saturday, after 400 protesters were arrested. They were trying to occupy unused buildings in search of a new home for the movement’s daily activities: meeting, serving food, and providing a place for people to stay.  Mayor Jean Quan condemned the local movement’s tactics as “a constant provocation of the police with a lot of violence toward them” and blamed “one faction using Oakland as their playground.”

The fact that the notoriously violent Oakland PD initiated the confrontations was left out of the story. BagNews pointed out that prejudicial photos of unidentified protesters burning a U.S. flag taken from City Hall became part of the media’s lead narrative, while others taken a few moments earlier, showing an occupier pleading with them not to burn it, were spiked.

Establishing the actual order of events on Saturday is important to counter the police justification that the demonstrators arrived with the intention of provoking violence. Eyewitness accounts make it clear that while a small number of protesters threw objects and pulled down fencing, this was only after marchers had been attacked with tear gas and other crowd-control devices.

The New York Times, for example, gave credence to the police story by just reporting “clashes” between protesters and the police: “The clashes began about 3 p.m. on Saturday when protesters marched toward the vacant Henry J. Kaiser Convention Center and began to tear down construction barricades, and the violence extended into early Sunday. The Oakland Police Department said in a statement that the crowd was ordered to disperse after protesters ‘began destroying construction equipment and fencing’.”

Kevin Army, an OpenSalon blogger, gives this important eyewitness corrective from the march: “The day began with a rally at noon at Frank Ogawa/Oscar Grant Plaza. I asked many people if they were planning to enter the building. Almost everyone said they were uncertain, they would wait and see how things were going. There were about 500 people gathered. …  After a few blocks, we came across police blocking off certain streets, herding the protesters through Laney College. By this time there were over 1,000 protesters. It was becoming clear that the police knew where the protesters were going; the secrecy was in vain. I ended up walking around and taking a different route, as I had promised myself I wouldn’t get arrested or hurt. I learned the targeted building was the Henry J. Kaiser Convention Center, and I proceeded there with caution. The Kaiser Center is vacant and is not currently in use.

“As I watched the larger group moving toward the building, it looked like a trap. Very soon after the protesters arrived at the Kaiser Center, the police fired tear gas into the crowd. Those of us standing two blocks away could taste it. Later, when I spoke to people who had been at the front, everyone said they Occupiers had done nothing to provoke the tear gas other than arriving at the building.”

Alternet published an account drawn from internet broadcasting of the event. “A livestream offered by Occupy Oakland’s Mark Mason and Chris Krakauer showed protesters approaching the Henry Kaiser Convention Center in the early afternoon, where they were greeted by skirmish lines of police clad in riot gear. At one point, Mason, narrating as he moved through the crowd, could be heard saying, ‘uh-oh, some people are throwing things at the cops,’ before moving away from the front-lines. Later, an Occupier visiting from Los Angeles told Mason of confronting one of the protesters who had thrown an object at police. ‘That’s just stupid, you know,’ said the young woman. ‘And she threw it from the middle of the crowd, which just puts people in the front in danger.’ … But OPD’s large-scale use of force against the mostly peaceful crowd visibly escalated the tension. ‘There are fucking kids here!’ one activist could be heard shouting on Mark Mason’s livestream. ‘What’s wrong with you fucking people?’”

Omar Yassin, a member of the group’s media committee, told the New York Times that the vandalism against construction equipment and fencing was “not something I would have done. But I do understand that people were enraged by the brutality that they had already seen. There were children in that crowd; there were families in that crowd.”

After the police had dispersed the first march, the protesters regrouped. Kevin Army’s account continues: “When it was time to begin the second march, the crowd was probably back down to about 700. The group remained remarkably upbeat and determined. We arrived at the ‘alternate’ building, and got herded away by the police. So people marched around, continually getting corralled and surrounded. I stayed behind, and the friend I was walking with noticed police coming at us from both directions. We decided to get out as it looked like a bad place to be. Our only exit was toward the police. On our way, an officer told us to turn around. I held out my homemade press pass and said we just wanted to leave. He told us we couldn’t and said, ‘You chose to be here.’ … There was a wire fence on one side of the Occupiers, and some of them pushed it down and everyone escaped across a vacant lot. They ended up in front of the YMCA on Broadway. I heard reports that some protesters entered the building and ran out the back. A large group in front of the Y got surrounded by police. Many were arrested.”

The New York Times account confirmed this: “Most of the Oakland arrests occurred late Saturday, when large groups were corralled in front of the downtown Y.M.C.A. on Broadway.  Joshua Hewitt, 20, of San Leandro, Calif., said he was arrested as he attempted to follow the police instructions to disperse but was caught between two rows of officers.” In a statement on Sunday afternoon, the police said the marchers “invaded” the Y.M.C.A. This was contradicted by Caitlin Manning, a film professor and Occupy supporter, who told the NYT that “protesters had been invited into the Y.M.C.A. to escape being boxed in on Broadway, but ended up being prevented by the police from leaving through a rear door.”

In line with police tactics at December’s Occupy evictions, journalists were also arrested. Mother Jones reporter Gavin Aronsen found himself kettled with the other protesters outside the YMCA.  “I displayed my press credentials to a line of officers and asked where to stand to avoid arrest. In past protests, the technique always proved successful. But this time, no officer said a word. One pointed back in the direction of the protesters, refusing to let me leave. Another issued a notice that everyone in the area was under arrest. I wound up in a back corner of the space between the YMCA and a neighboring building, where I met Vivian Ho of the San Francisco Chronicle and Kristin Hanes of KGO Radio. … As I waited in line to be processed and transported to jail, Ho approached me with an officer who had released her from custody. The two explained to my arresting officer that I was with the media. ‘Oh, he’s with the media?’ the officer replied, although I had already repeatedly told him as much and my credentials had been plainly visible all night. He appeared ready to release me, until a nearby officer piped in, without explanation: ‘He’s getting arrested’.”

Illegal victimization of peaceful protesters and journalists was repeated at a support demonstration for Occupy Oakland in New York City on Sunday night, where twelve marchers were arrested. The NYT CityRoom blog reported: “… on Park Avenue, a man wearing dark clothes and wearing no visible badge grabbed a woman by the arm and threw her to the ground. Uniformed officers arrested her and a second woman as other officers blocked the lens of a newspaper photographer attempting to document the arrests. As they were led away in handcuffs, the two told onlookers that they had done nothing to deserve being arrested. The woman thrown to the ground identified herself as Jessica Lemmer, 21, and said that the man in the dark clothes had thrown her down after she told him not to push her.” The NYC marchers were on their way to an empty former school building that had housed the Charas/ El Bohio Cultural and Community Center before the group was evicted ten years ago by a developer who had bought the building at a city auction.

What stands out from the accounts is how even those with reservations about certain forms of protest remain committed to the Occupy movement’s goals. Kevin Army conveys this eloquently in the conclusion to his report: “Right or wrong, I knew I was marching with people who care, who care enough to risk being assaulted by the police, to risk arrest and injury. Some might look at that and think it’s insane. I think insanity is looking at how things are these days and doing nothing. I’m open to other ideas. But for now, Occupy is the best idea around. Even when it’s a mess, and things don’t go right, and I’m not sure what I think, it’s a great, inspiring idea.”

Occupy Wall Street and Plutocratic Fear of Pluralist Democracy

The Occupy movement, in a few short months, has brought to the surface the tension between the ideals of the American Dream and the reality of bank debt, unemployment, and state suppression of protest. Its struggle has highlighted the fact that, no matter what administration is in power, the state has relentlessly been assigning to itself powers that subordinate civil rights to its own interests.

This process cannot simply be blamed on the response to 9/11, because the swift passage of the Patriot Act created the opportunity for the political elite to implement long-desired extensions of executive power. In fact, the creation of a Homeland Security bureaucracy amplifies and connects with changes in the relation between federal, state and local government that have taken place over years.

While government now claims legal justification for the assassination of U.S. citizens; indefinite detention; arbitrary justice; warrantless searches; secret evidence; war crimes; secret court; immunity from judicial review; continual monitoring of citizens; and extraordinary renditions, the actual power of the U.S. internationally is restricted by military defeat and economic recession. The rhetoric that justifies its draconian power grab is that of fighting terrorism, but the real target is domestic dissent.

Jonathan Turley, a professor of public interest law at George Washington University, writes in the Washington Post:  “While each new national security power Washington has embraced was controversial when enacted, they are often discussed in isolation. But they don’t operate in isolation. They form a mosaic of powers under which our country could be considered, at least in part, authoritarian. … These new laws have come with an infusion of money into an expanded security system on the state and federal levels, including more public surveillance cameras, tens of thousands of security personnel and a massive expansion of a terrorist-chasing bureaucracy. …

“An authoritarian nation is defined not just by the use of authoritarian powers, but by the ability to use them. If a president can take away your freedom or your life on his own authority, all rights become little more than a discretionary grant subject to executive will. … The indefinite-detention provision in the defense authorization bill seemed to many civil libertarians like a betrayal by Obama. While the president had promised to veto the law over that provision, Levin, a sponsor of the bill, disclosed on the Senate floor that it was in fact the White House that approved the removal of any exception for citizens from indefinite detention.”

Commenting on Turley’s article, Glenn Greenwald wrote in Salon.com: “Overwhelmingly, the victims [of civil liberties assaults] are racial, ethnic and religious minorities: specifically, Muslims (both American Muslims and foreign nationals). And that is a major factor in why these abuses flourish: because those who dominate American political debates perceive, more or less accurately, that they are not directly endangered (at least for now) by this assault on core freedoms and Endless War …”

Using racial and class divisions to manage the political consequences of social polarization has been a long-term strategy. Paul Kantor of Fordham University argues that from the 1980s on, public policy decisions were devolved to state and local government as the federal government retreated from social safety-net policies which assisted the urban poor. The result was urban development plans that physically separated the poor from suburban dwellers. In short, “territorial segregation by government to limit social conflict has become the major means for managing social polarization – indeed, it is at the core of America’s contemporary regulatory state.” [2007:53]

“The barriers that protect downtowns come in various forms, such as shopping centers, entertainment districts, and tourist enclaves. Perhaps the most comprehensive barriers have been built in Atlanta and Detroit, where a large proportion of downtown office workers commute to the sealed realms of the Peachtree Center and the Renaissance Center. In both these structures, workers drive into parking garages and then enter a city-within-a-city where they can work, shop, eat lunch, and find a variety of diversions after work. They never have to set foot in the actual social community of the city.” [55]

“Other aspects of segregated development as social control arise from efforts by city governments to ‘militarize’ and privatize valuable urban spaces to defend them from poor resident populations. This includes the use of bonus zoning laws that reward developers of high rise buildings for including essentially quasi-public mini parks, atriums and other boutique settings patrolled by private security guards who keep these areas free from people who do not shop or do business there. It also includes changing street furniture to discourage loitering, walling off commercial neighborhoods from nearby slums with roads, parks and other public infrastructure, and beefing up law enforcement efforts to focus on quality of life offences and otherwise discourage contact between the visitor class and residents who appear out of place.” [57]

The Occupy movement has subverted this social segregation with occupations that brought together all sectors of society experiencing the effects of recession, and it is notable that the strategy of devolving the maintenance of social order to local government failed; it became necessary for Homeland Security agencies to coordinate police tactics on a national scale. The local agencies were unable on their own to manage the political fallout from the violent clearing of occupations in places like Oakland and Denver and had to be subordinated to the command structures established after 9/11.

However, centralization also narrows the social base of the state and makes it a factor in the rapid polarization of American society. While the rich resist taxation, the economic base of the state is shrinking; police and military funding come into direct conflict with funding for social programs. The coming struggles by the 99 percent over social entitlements will sharply pose the role of the state in aggressively defending the wealth of the social elite rather than maintaining the social compact.

Occupy movement’s vibrant energy versus Republican craziness

Prominent newspaper columnists have become despondent about the prospects of the Republican party selecting a politically-responsible presidential candidate. The primaries have become a televised circus – or rather pantomime, with Newt Gingrich as the dame and Mitt Romney as the principal boy.

Paul Krugman writes: “Think about what it takes to be a viable Republican candidate today. You have to denounce Big Government and high taxes without alienating the older voters who were the key to G.O.P. victories last year … you also have to denounce President Obama, who enacted a Republican-designed health reform and killed Osama bin Laden, as a radical socialist who is undermining American security. … the fact that the party is committed to demonstrably false beliefs means that only fakers or the befuddled can get through the selection process.”

E.J. Dionne agonizes over the influence of the Tea Party politicians who control the party. He points out the cleavage between the Republican party establishment and the extreme rightwing fantasies of their constituency. These are the crazy ideas of rightwing billionaires, of whom there is a history in US politics going back to the 1920s – and the more pragmatic conservatives can no longer keep them under control.

His commentary reads: “The Republican Party’s core electorate has changed radically since 2008 — and even then John McCain won the nomination against the wishes of many on the Republican right because the opposition to him was splintered. … There is talk of the ‘Republican establishment’ swooping in to save matters, and things certainly seem ripe for a draft write-in campaign for some new candidate. But the Republican establishment, such as it is, is essentially powerless. It sold its soul to the Tea Party, sat by silently as extremist rhetoric engulfed the GOP and figured that swing voters would eventually overlook all this to cast votes against a bad economy. That’s still Romney’s bet; yet his failure to break through suggests the right wing will not be trifled with. Republican leaders unleashed forces that may eat their party alive.”

The more sophisticated conservatives want to continue to extract relative surplus value from business activities, and so would prefer to keep the middle class more or less in thrall while the underclass is kept out of sight. The Republican extremists don’t care about the middle class: they want to appropriate the savings held in trust for the rest of society in order to preserve the value of their fortunes – a financial zeal that threatens the political subjection of the 99 percent through crushing First Amendment rights.

Obama is a conduit for the calculations of the rational elements of the state to maintain governmental power, but is caught between the extremism of the Republicans and the pushback of the working class. He is vainly trying to achieve “balance” by a small increase of taxes on the rich combined with large cuts in entitlements – an orientation that could have succeeded in other circumstances, but won’t work today because the crazed refuseniks of the Republican right won’t cooperate, even though he saved Wall Street for them through the bank bailout.

The gulf between the political establishment and mainstream America is shown by a study cited by In These Times, which found that 45 percent of U.S. residents live in a household that lacks economic security. The survey’s conclusion makes clear the middle class has been hollowed out: “That nearly 40 percent of the nation’s adults and 45 percent of adults and their children lack basic economic security incomes suggests that the nation’s economic middle is not very broad and may not, in fact, exist.”

Another report, based on stories from 1200 members of citizen groups, described three broad themes: frustration at hiring discrimination, emotional and financial distress, and despair about the future. This was illustrated by the story of Molly Wasserman, who lost her successful job track when she moved from New York to Ohio to care for her mother, who was ill with cancer. “I just don’t understand what happened to this country,” she said. “I don’t recognize my place in it any more. More and more of us are marginalized, ignored or happily forgotten because we’re not working. … What exactly is a person supposed to do who is not being hired? Are we just supposed to die? Are we supposed to commit suicide? Are we supposed to die, homeless in the streets?”

By capturing the political imagination of Americans and taking on board the struggles of different social groups suffering the fallout from the bailout recession, the Occupy movement has been able to bring together individuals facing impoverishment and turn despair into a vibrant resistance to the abuse of authority. Evicting the occupations has simply channeled the movement outwards to seek new alliances and joint campaigns.

CNN reports that “Occupy Wall Street and other housing activists are heading to neighborhoods hit hard by foreclosure Tuesday … Among the actions expected to occur is so-called foreclosure defense, where protestors try to stop police from evicting residents of homes that are being foreclosed upon. … Protestors in New York are expected to march to Brooklyn’s East New York neighborhood, an area that has been hit hard by foreclosure. The demonstration, which will be led by New York Communities for Change (NYCC), will end with the protestors occupying a foreclosed home that has been vacant for several years. …

“Max Rameau, an organizer with Take Back the Land, said his organization has been taking these actions for years but it has gotten a boost from Occupy Wall Street. He expects a large turnout tomorrow. ‘We think it’s going to be huge because of the energy of Occupy Wall Street,’ he said. ‘The size and scope will be considerably bigger because of that’.”

Bringing on the Big Thaw: The OWS/We Are the 99 Percent Lights Desire for Justice and Freedom across America

No American can claim to be immune from poverty today, and that creates the possibility of forming new alliances across racial and class lines to fight back against the one percent. That’s why, as Juan Cole pointed out, Congress “has been pushing weird acts that only benefit authoritarian politicians and some billionaire corporations recently, and which are wholly injurious to American liberties.” This includes a senate bill to allow the military to arrest U.S. citizens anywhere in the world, including within the U.S.

These bizarre anti-American laws speak to the rewriting of the constitution by the Homeland Security establishment. This has empowered the police to create so-called “frozen zones” to confine the press and prevent them from witnessing what actually takes place when occupiers are evicted. The authorities have conducted an ideological war against the occupiers through manipulated press stories to neutralize public opinion, and have coordinated the control of non-mainstream media press to make sure that public sympathy isn’t regenerated by more images of police using disproportionate force to punish nonviolent protesters.

In Washington, Occupy K Street-DC erected a plywood building on Saturday night for General Assemblies, teach-ins, and winter shelter. Although the prefabricated structure was designed by architects to be safe and have the legal status of a tent, police arrived on Sunday morning and gave the occupiers one hour to dismantle it. When they refused, the police started to make arrests, put up metal barriers around the building, removed the media to a spot where they couldn’t observe what was happening, and used horses to push back the crowd. Hundreds of supporters continued to rally at the scene late on Sunday, as the police continued to arrest those standing by and on the structure.

Linked to the eviction of occupations is an orchestrated circumscribing of constitutional rights. When Occupy Wall Street supporters marched to protest an Obama fund-raising event on Wednesday evening, they were penned into an area within sight of the Sheraton Hotel where the event was being held. According to the New York Times, when Obama was due to arrive, “[NYPD] officers informed demonstrators that the area had been designated a ‘frozen zone’ until the president’s departure: They were not allowed to leave their enclosure, bound by three lines of barricades and a Chase bank.”

“Frozen zones” also made their appearance at last week’s evictions of Occupy Philadelphia and Occupy LA.  In These Times blogger Alison Kilkenny noted, “During the raid of Occupy LA, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa issued a midnight press release that included the line, ‘During the park closure, a First Amendment area will remain open on the Spring Street City Hall steps.’ The statement alarmed many individuals, including some journalists due to its creepy Orwellian language. … In mid-November, journalist Josh Harkinson reported on being alerted about the existence of the ‘frozen zone’ when he attempted to cover the eviction of Liberty Park.”

Kilkenny quotes an observer at the Occupy LA raid who described how the media “were treated to a display of courteous policing and nonviolence by the police. Even I was impressed by the police. The operation was smooth and efficient and tactical. Then the pool media was divided from the regular media, and kept in the inner circle. They were not present to witness the brutality and violence enacted by LAPD officers who were kettling and running after protestors in order to beat them outside the park and mainstream media attention. LAPD smoothly kept MSM from witnessing this, and tried to control other media by constant kettling and dividing of the crowd.”

The Occupy movement is continuing to spread its message of “We Are the 99 percent” across the country despite the official narrative that it is finished. A reporter marching with Occupy protesters from New York to Washington observed: “There is the Occupy shown by the news media, defined by police clashes and a lack of hygiene — images that tell non-Occupiers that the movement is leaderless, chaotic and on its way out. But as the marchers passed through towns large and small, and ordinary Americans came out of their homes and businesses to give food, money and words of support, it became clear that this movement isn’t going away.”

Not only are protesters refusing to be intimidated by militarized police attacks, but also their message has stuck: the concept of the “99 percent” has been reflected in workplace strike struggles and the rhetoric of some Democratic politicians. On a visit to the U.S., novelist Arundhati Roy praised the protests for “reigniting a new political imagination” which also revealed the nervousness of the political elite.

What seems to be motivating the concentrated state action against a mere handful of occupiers is the symbolic nature of the occupations, which subverts the ruling elite’s narrative. The occupiers took over public spaces to assert popular sovereignty against the laws of property ownership that make people indebted to landlords and banks. They made homelessness visible – many Americans are on the brink of it – and were a permanent focus for different groups within American society to work together on social problems despite their differences.

This is a major achievement and a massive blow against the divide-and-rule ideology of the plutocrats which depends on maintaining racial and class antagonisms. They have tolerated the idea of civil rights as long as it was agreed these didn’t apply to the poor, who could be kept out of sight or imprisoned. The Occupy movement can’t solve all the problems of society. But the plutocrats are on notice: despite frozen zones, the American people are awakening from the cryogenic sleep of the last thirty years. We are bringing on the Big Thaw.