Thousands @OccupyOakland #J28 Protest, Police respond with Kettling & Tear Gas; 300 Arrested

January 29, 2012 - theCORPORATIONblog
By Jennifer Slattery

(image via Twitter credited to GlennShootsPeople's Flicker account)

Violent police clashes again rocked the city of Oakland January 28th (#J28) as Occupy Oakland protestors attempted to occupy a vacant building. Their announcement, via a letter to the Mayor referring to the action as Move-In Day, declares their intent to use the building:

“As a social center, convergence center, headquarters, free kitchen, and place of housing for Occupy Oakland. Like so many other people, Occupy Oakland is homeless while buildings remain vacant and unused. For Occupy this is in large part because of yourselves, having evicted us twice from public space that was rightfully ours. For others it is because of the housing bubble, predatory lending, the perpetual crises of capitalism, and far reaching histories of imperialism and systemic violence.”

By the end of a long day of marches and failed occupation attempts, three hundred people, from a crowd that swelled at times to 2,000, were arrested. Much of the corporate media reporting on the start of the violence points the finger squarely at the protestors who are alleged to have begun the violence by pelting officers with rocks, bottles and even Improvised Explosive Devices. The claim that peaceful protestors used IEDs is on it’s face false and inflammatory, as first hand accounts and live streaming video footage of the event seems to show that protestors only threw some debris as a reaction to being pelted with explosive percussion grenades, rubber bullets, and tear gas canisters:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=sFaviIoy4rg

Via Occupy Oakland’s twitter feed:
#OccupyOakland #OO OPD claim they ordered us to disperse, after blocking us in & arresting us. Chanting "this is a hostage situation."

"For their first attempt at a kettle, the cops charged the group with police lines from the front and back. They ran towards us aggressively. Us being 1000+ peaceful marching protesters. The group was forced to move up a side street. The police moved quickly to surround the entire area; they formed a line on every street that the side street connected to. Police state status: very efficient. They kettled almost the entire protest in the park near the Fox theater. AFTERWARDS, as in after they surrounded everyone, they declared it to be an unlawful assembly BUT OFFERED NO EXIT ROUTE. Gas was used, could of been tear or smoke gas."

Similar claims that law enforcement "had to deploy gas in order to stop the crowd and people from pelting us with bottles and rocks." after the violentclearing of the original Occupy Oakland camp had to be walked back, because there was no evidence that any such violence by Occupy had occurred:

“Oakland PD's Chief of Staff, Sgt. Chris Bolton conceded that the department was unable, at this time, to substantiate claims made by Jordan that gas was deployed in order to protect law enforcement personnel from violent demonstrators, despite the Chief's unqualified claim that evening that "the deployment of gas was necessary to protect our officers and protect property around the area and to protect injuries to others as well."
Instead, Bolton softened Jordan's initial claim. The sergeant described it as "the Chief's preliminary belief.”

The claims of the Oakland PD are especially hard to swallow after internal emails show that interim police chief Johnson lied to paint Occupy Oakland as a crime problem in order to garner support for their actions:

“In the days leading up to the Nov. 2 march on the Port of Oakland, city leaders warned about the drain on police resources.

When Jordan received an update that crime was actually down 19 percent in the last week of October, he wrote an email to one of Mayor Jean Quan's advisers.

"Not sure how you want to share this good news," he wrote. "It may be counter to our statement that the Occupy movement is negatively impacting crime in Oakland."

Police and the city said Occupy has had an ongoing impact on their ability to respond to crime.
In all of the emails there was not a single one written by Quan.”

Indeed it seems that the Interim Police Chief is not the man to solve the problems plaguing the Oakland Police Department. The Oakland PD is now facing a Federal Receivership in March. While several cities have had to have Federal Monitors installed, this would be the first time in United States history that a department has been completely turned over to Federal control. The Federal Judge ruling in the case expressed his astonishment that the OPD is continuing using controversial and violent tactics in the face of reforms demanded almost a decade ago that still have not been implemented:

"The court remains in disbelief that Defendants have yet - nine years later - to achieve what they themselves agreed was doable in no more than five years," U.S. District Court Judge Thelton Henderson wrote.”

This may be the only way to correct the course of a police department that has long since gone off the rails and has not found the leadership from the Police Chief or the Mayor to make the badly needed reforms.  As the San Francisco chronicle noted:  

“It's a step away from surrendering responsibility for the city's police to federal management. If the city doesn't clean up its act - which doesn't look likely given all the other crises Oakland now faces - the judge made it clear that receivership will be the next step.”

I lived in Oakland during the time of the  Oscar Grant murder and subsequent protests, and personally throw my support behind this action to get the department functioning for the people again. Even in basic everyday interactions, the civility required by the men and women on the force is lacking. This is creating a gap between the police and citizens that endangers all, and the department has had more than enough time to right it's own ship.

Occupiers across the country are mounting solidarity actions today (#J29) to show support for Oakland. The Rise Up Festival announced in the Move in Day letter is confirmed to still be on for today, according to Occupy Oakland’s twitter feed. The group is also asking for supporters to donate as much as they can to the Occupy Oakland bail fund.

The Shocking Truth About the Crackdown on Occupy

Friday, November 25, 2011 by the Guardian/UK

The violent police assaults across the US are no coincidence. Occupy has touched the third rail of our political class's venality

by Naomi Wolf

 

 

US citizens of all political persuasions are still reeling from images of unparallelled police brutality in a coordinated crackdown against peaceful OWS protesters in cities across the nation this past week. An elderly woman was pepper-sprayed in the face; the scene of unresisting, supine students at UC Davis being pepper-sprayed by phalanxes of riot police went viral online; images proliferated of young women – targeted seemingly for their gender – screaming, dragged by the hair by police in riot gear; and the pictures of a young man, stunned and bleeding profusely from the head, emerged in the record of the middle-of-the-night clearing of Zuccotti Park.

But just when Americans thought we had the picture – was this crazy police and mayoral overkill, on a municipal level, in many different cities? – the picture darkened.

The National Union of Journalists and the Committee to Protect Journalists issued a Freedom of Information Act request to investigate possible federal involvement with law enforcement practices that appeared to target journalists. The New York Times reported that "New York cops have arrested, punched, whacked, shoved to the ground and tossed a barrier at reporters and photographers" covering protests. Reporters were asked by NYPD to raise their hands to prove they had credentials: when many dutifully did so, they were taken, upon threat of arrest, away from the story they were covering, and penned far from the site in which the news was unfolding. Other reporters wearing press passes were arrested and roughed up by cops, after being – falsely – informed by police that "It is illegal to take pictures on the sidewalk."

In New York, a state supreme court justice and a New York City council member were beaten up; in Berkeley, California, one of our greatest national poets, Robert Hass, was beaten with batons. The picture darkened still further when Wonkette and Washingtonsblog.com reported that the Mayor of Oakland acknowledged that the Department of Homeland Security had participated in an 18-city mayor conference call advising mayors on "how to suppress" Occupy protests.

To Europeans, the enormity of this breach may not be obvious at first. Our system of government prohibits the creation of a federalized police force, and forbids federal or militarized involvement in municipal peacekeeping.

I noticed that right-wing pundits and politicians on the TV shows on which I was appearing were all on-message against OWS.

Journalist Chris Hayes reported on a leaked memo that revealed lobbyists vying for an $850,000 contract to smear Occupy. Message coordination of this kind is impossible without a full-court press at the top. This was clearly not simply a case of a freaked-out mayors', city-by-city municipal overreaction against mess in the parks and cranky campers. As the puzzle pieces fit together, they began to show coordination against OWS at the highest national levels.

Why this massive mobilization against these not-yet-fully-articulated, unarmed, inchoate people? After all, protesters against the war in Iraq, Tea Party rallies and others have all proceeded without this coordinated crackdown. Is it really the camping? As I write, two hundred young people, with sleeping bags, suitcases and even folding chairs, are still camping out all night and day outside of NBC on public sidewalks – under the benevolent eye of an NYPD cop – awaiting Saturday Night Live tickets, so surely the camping is not the issue. I was still deeply puzzled as to why OWS, this hapless, hopeful band, would call out a violent federal response.

That is, until I found out what it was that OWS actually wanted.

The mainstream media was declaring continually "OWS has no message". Frustrated, I simply asked them. I began soliciting online "What is it you want?" answers from Occupy. In the first 15 minutes, I received 100 answers. These were truly eye-opening.

The No 1 agenda item: get the money out of politics. Most often cited was legislation to blunt the effect of the Citizens United ruling, which lets boundless sums enter the campaign process.  

No 2: reform the banking system to prevent fraud and manipulation, with the most frequent item being to restore the Glass-Steagall Act – the Depression-era law, done away with by President Clinton, that separates investment banks from commercial banks. This law would correct the conditions for the recent crisis, as investment banks could not take risks for profit that create kale derivatives out of thin air, and wipe out the commercial and savings banks.

No 3 was the most clarifying: draft laws against the little-known loophole that currently allows members of Congress to pass legislation affecting Delaware-based corporations in which they themselves are investors.

When I saw this list – and especially the last agenda item – the scales fell from my eyes. Of course, these unarmed people would be having the shit kicked out of them.

For the terrible insight to take away from news that the Department of Homeland Security coordinated a violent crackdown is that the DHS does not freelance. The DHS cannot say, on its own initiative, "we are going after these scruffy hippies". Rather, DHS is answerable up a chain of command: first, to New York Representative Peter King, head of the House homeland security subcommittee, who naturally is influenced by his fellow congressmen and women's wishes and interests. And the DHS answers directly, above King, to the president (who was conveniently in Australia at the time).

In other words, for the DHS to be on a call with mayors, the logic of its chain of command and accountability implies that congressional overseers, with the blessing of the White House, told the DHS to authorize mayors to order their police forces – pumped up with millions of dollars of hardware and training from the DHS – to make war on peaceful citizens.

But wait: why on earth would Congress advise violent militarized reactions against its own peaceful constituents? The answer is straightforward: in recent years, members of Congress have started entering the system as members of the middle class (or upper middle class) – but they are leaving DC privy to vast personal wealth, as we see from the "scandal" of presidential contender Newt Gingrich's having been paid $1.8m for a few hours' "consulting" to special interests. The inflated fees to lawmakers who turn lobbyists are common knowledge, but the notion that congressmen and women are legislating their own companies' profits is less widely known – and if the books were to be opened, they would surely reveal corruption on a Wall Street spectrum. Indeed, we do already know that congresspeople are massively profiting from trading on non-public information they have on companies about which they are legislating – a form of insider trading that sent Martha Stewart to jail.

Since Occupy is heavily surveilled and infiltrated, it is likely that the DHS and police informers are aware, before Occupy itself is, what its emerging agenda is going to look like. If legislating away lobbyists' privileges to earn boundless fees once they are close to the legislative process, reforming the banks so they can't suck money out of fake derivatives products, and, most critically, opening the books on a system that allowed members of Congress to profit personally – and immensely – from their own legislation, are two beats away from the grasp of an electorally organized Occupy movement … well, you will call out the troops on stopping that advance.

So, when you connect the dots, properly understood, what happened last  week is the first battle in a civil war; a civil war in which, for now, only one side is choosing violence. It is a battle in which members of Congress, with the collusion of the American president, sent violent, organized suppression against the people they are supposed to represent. Occupy has touched the third rail: personal congressional profits streams. Even though they are, as yet, unaware of what the implications of their movement are, those threatened by the stirrings of their dreams of reform are not.

Sadly, Americans this week have come one step closer to being true brothers and sisters of the protesters in Tahrir Square. Like them, our own national leaders, who likely see their own personal wealth under threat from transparency and reform, are now making war upon us.

© 2011 Naomi Wolf

 

Author, social critic, and political activist Naomi Wolf is the author of The New York Times bestseller The End of America (Chelsea Green) and, more recently, Give Me Liberty: A Handbook for American Revolutionaries. Wolf’s landmark international bestseller, The Beauty Myth, challenged the cosmetics industry and the marketing of unrealistic standards of beauty, launching a new wave of feminism in the early 1990s.

Why I’m Joining the One Percent

Forget the Occupy Movement

by BRIAN J. FOLEY

I marched with Occupy Oakland last Saturday, but I’ve had a change of heart. I’m joining the One Percent.

The One Percent have fun. They have jobs and money.  Or just money, because when you have a lot of money, you don’t need to work. They live in houses, not tents.

The One Percent have a government that actually  listens to them.  Lockheed needs a war to sell goods and services? Coming right up! Former Homeland Security Head Michael Chertoff wants to sell some porno-scanners? Get in (a very short) line –  or no line at all if you’ve bought that exemption from TSA screening!  Taxes too high? The One Percent’s government will lower them for the rich. Too many 99 Percenters declaring bankruptcy? The One Percent’s government will just make it harder for them.  Bought toxic, mortgage-backed derivatives? Don’t worry, your government will bail you out if you’re in the One Percent.  Bought a toxic mortgage? It’s your “responsibility,” if you’re in the 99 Percent.

Another reason to join the One Percent is that the One Percent have their own media mouthpiece — more like a bullhorn.  The One Percent funded those meager Tea Party protests, and the One-Percent-owned Media covered them religiously.  And I mean religiously: the media proclaim stuff about the movement that defies reality, such as how The Tea Party was a really big, grass roots, populist movement, and that it wasn’t racist.  The Tea Party hate Obama for his “socialist” policies, not his skin color.

I also like how the One Percent-owned media have covered the Occupy movement. They treat the Occupiers as oddities, like circus animals — Cirque du So What?  Paid-off pundits talk about the First Amendment with the “No way, this archaic language can’t really stop OUR OMNIPOTENT GOVERNMENT from doing what it wants, can it?” To find out if the New York City Police honored Occupiers’ First Amendment rights, CNN asked … a former New York City Police Commissioner, who assured viewers that the New York City Police honored those rights (ridiculous and so-pre-9/11 as those rights may seem!).

The One Percent don’t have school loans or credit card debt. When they get into financial trouble, they get bailed out by the Big Government they claim to hate.  They get saved and protected from The Market they claim to love.  They changed the rules that kept their businesses from getting too big, and when they ended up failing, they got deemed “too big to fail.”  And at the same time, the One Percent get to say they are looking out for “the little guy” on Main Street!  Unlike they Occupiers, they get to say that without getting their mouths, eyes, and nostrils filled with pepper spray.

And no one ever dares call the One Percent “traitors,” “anti-American,” etc.  No, they’re “patriots” who ask what their government can do for them,  not what they can do for their government.  No one ever says, “Bailing out Banks to save us from socialism is like fucking to save virginity.”  That would be rude, and no one is rude or even slightly impolite to the One Percent.

Except the Occupiers, who get battered by police for their rudeness.  In fact, the One Percent get to have police beat down Occupy protesters and pepper-spray them for no reason, and without fear of getting into trouble.   Police pepper-spray defenseless students in front of hundreds of out-in-the-open cameras. Lesson: If you can’t join the One Percent, you should at least work for them.

If an Occupier ever tried to defend himself and/or toted a gun, police would shoot him to death.  But Tea Party guys get to bring their guns to protests and to make not-so-vague allusions to shooting President Obama.  They never had to worry about copscrushing their skulls or pepper spraying them!

So I’m joining the One Percent.  A friend said I’d regret joining and quoted Three Dog Night, who sang that one is the loneliest number.  No, it’s not, not when you’ve bought off the government and the news media.  In the United States, 2 + 2 = 5, and 1 > 99.

Out of Control Oakland Police Dept

Occupy Dallas Raided & Shut Down in Nationwide Crackdown

It's far from over.--jef

 

City Manager orders raid of OccupyDallas camp
by Michael Prestonise • November 17, 2011

 

Police officers in riot gear raided the OccupyDallas camp early Thursday morning after City Manager Mary Suhm rescinded the agreement with protesters and ordered evictions.

Members of the camp who have been protesting for over 42 days were given no notice from the city before police strategically surrounded them.

In an excessive show of force, mounted officers on horseback trotted onto the scene while police sport utility vehicles lined the streets. Jonathan Winocour, the lawyer working with OccupyDallas, was sent a fax at 11:46 p.m. from the City Attorney’s office informing him of the city’s intention to forcibly remove the peaceful protesters. Minutes after Winocour relayed the message to protesters, the members of the media were warned to leave by police loudspeaker. They were relocated across the street while the police loudspeaker issued a statement to the remaining OccupyDallas members. The protesters were given 20 minutes to collect their personal property and vacate the park.

After the 20 minute deadline had expired, police officers carrying shields lined the sidewalk and began moving into the camp. They searched each tent before arresting those who had chosen to stay. In total, 17 protesters were arrested for refusing to leave the park.

The raid on the camp comes less than 24 hours after Winocour met with city officials who assured him that there were no plans to evict the protesters. Protesters were warned by members of the media that police officers were being briefed and prepared for the raid on the camp. OccupyDallas advisor Glynn Wilcox was shocked to discover that City Manager Suhm failed to notify Mayor Rawlings and the members of the City Council of the police action. The raid comes on a day which has been planned as a National Day of Action across the country.

+++++

Police Crackdowns on Occupy Protests from Oakland to New York Herald the "New Military Urbanism"

After a wave of raids across the country in which police in riot gear broke up Occupy Wall Street encampments and arrested protesters, Oakland Mayor Jean Quan acknowledged in an interview with the BBC that she participated in a conference call with officials from 18 cities about how to deal with the Occupy movement. As police forces violently crack down on protests across the United States and Europe, we look at the increasing influence of military technology on domestic police forces. Stephen Graham is professor of Cities and Society at Newcastle University in the U.K. His book is Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism.

"What the Occupy movement is so powerful at is demonstrating that by occupying public spaces around the world, and particularly these extremely symbolic public spaces, it’s reasserting that the city is the foundation space for democracy," Graham says.

Oakland’s General Strike

From Radical Past to Radical Present

by NIKOLAS KOZLOFF

 

 

As an undergraduate at University of California, Berkeley in the late 1980s, I did not visit the nearby city of Oakland very frequently.  For the most part, I was ensconced in my own student circles and, to the extent that I got involved in politics, it was the local campus activist scene which drew me in with its focus on Central America and U.S. counterinsurgency efforts in the region.  To be sure, Oakland had a radical tradition going back to the 1960s and the Black Panther movement, yet by the time I was in school that era was already a distant memory for many.

If there was any doubt about Oakland’s radical stripes, however, then yesterday’s general strike will certainly dispel any such notions.  Galvanized by tumultuous developments over the past several weeks, in particular a nasty police crackdown on a local “Occupy” encampment, activists moved to effectively shut down the city by carrying out a general strike no less.  Activists were particularly incensed by violent police tactics including use of tear gas and even grenades.  During nighttime unrest, an Iraq war veteran was hit with a projectile and suffered a skull fracture.

Spurred on by the need to end police brutality, defend schools and libraries against local closures, and put an end to overall economic inequality, Occupy Oakland called for a day of action in which the circulation of capital would be blockaded, students would walk out of class, and various occupations would be staged around the city. Oakland is particularly important to commerce as the local port is the fifth largest in the country, and though union officials did not authorize a strike many longshoremen voiced support for Occupy’s efforts.

The Unusual Weapon of the General Strike
General strikes are practically unheard of in the United States.  Indeed, the Oakland unrest marks the first general strike in the country in 65 years.  One notable exception to this pattern of labor docility was the Seattle general strike of 1919, which in my estimation holds profound historic lessons for anti-capitalist protesters in Lower Manhattan.  For the most part, however, U.S. labor has shied away from such confrontational tactics, and this has posed a great tactical dilemma for the left according to veteran organizers.

Over the past month or so, I have puzzled over the fact that most of the organizing and political activism has centered upon New York, which is a little unusual.  On a purely personal note, I have always been struck by the contrasting political cultures on the east and west coasts.  As a New Yorker observing the local scene in the late 1980s, I was taken aback by the greater militancy of protests in Berkeley and San Francisco.  In contrast to the Big Apple, where people were isolated from one another and seemed obedient and deferential towards the authorities, Bay Area protesters were less willing to play ball.

It is now Oakland, however, which has come full circle, providing a crucial missing link in the Occupy movement within the Bay Area and indeed farther afield.  Peer a little closer and it’s not too surprising that the city should be in the radical vanguard.  With its long and checkered political past, Oakland has been a path breaker in many ways including class struggle, women’s rights and racial justice.

Local Oakland Boy Jack London
It was the celebrated writer Jack London (1876 – 1916) no less who inspired future generations.  A local Oakland boy, London was a member of the Socialist Labor Party and to this day his presence can be vividly felt in the city.  Currently, Jack London Square is one of Oakland’s great landmarks and a symbol of the city’s maritime history.  Situated in front of a natural estuary leading to San Francisco Bay, the site lies at the heart of Oakland’s port operations.  As a boy, London spent much of his time on this very waterfront, later taking up an adventurous sea-faring life as an oyster pirate.  And it is here in the square that local residents continue to honor London’s heritage by observing the general strike.

Though he is most recognized for masculine adventure stories and such works as Call of the Wild and the Sea Wolf, London also penned political fiction like the Iron Heel, a futuristic, distopian story about America in which corporate interests are on the ascendant.  In the Iron Heel, London sought to consolidate his ideas concerning the working class and its struggle against the so-called shadowy “oligarchy.”  The central protagonist of the book, a socialist named Ernest Everhard, witnesses the fall of the American republic and goes into underground resistance.  A highly influential work, The Iron Heel exerted an impact upon George Orwell who went on to write two of the 20^th century’s other great political novels, 1984 and Animal Farm.

Through Everhard, London was able to project his own political predictions for the coming decades.  In 1937, Trotsky wrote “Jack London already foresaw and described the fascist regime as the inevitable result of the defeat of the proletarian revolution.”  In the Iron Heel, London presciently anticipated the growing power of money in politics.  Portraying capitalism as a “monstrous beast,” London foresaw Reaganomics and the rise of the Republican far right.

In an echo of today’s Occupy movement, London warned that the poor can only achieve a level playing field by uniting against the 1% who have inordinate access to the world’s wealth and resources.  Though the oligarchy kills strikers and citizens, Everhard endures as a kind of personification of the working class ideal.  “Far be it from me to deny that Socialism is a menace,” London once remarked.  “It is its purpose to wipe out, root and branch, all capitalistic institutions of present-day society.  It is distinctly revolutionary, and in scope and depth is vastly more tremendous than any revolution that has ever occurred in the history of the world.”

Today, London’s great granddaughter Tarnel Abbott continues to walk in the radical footsteps of the notable American writer.  During the recent Oakland police disturbances, she wrote “It is true that Jack London is my ancestor, he is my great grandfather, but more importantly, he is a working class hero and a visionary. I looked at the Jack London oak tree in front of City Hall and felt possessed by the spirit of the great man. I thought of him standing there on his soap box making socialist speeches and getting arrested because he didn’t have a permit. I thought of him writing Revolution, The People of the Abyss and The Iron Heel. I felt that I was witnessing the Iron Heel of fascism being challenged. I knew that I too had to resist it.”

London’s Radical Heritage
If he had lived to see the day, London would surely have been proud of his great granddaughter as well as Oakland’s militant and combative post-war labor movement.  In 1946, shortly after the end of World War II, workers gathered in Oakland’s streets to support the struggle of women department store employees.  The move formed part of a larger national strike wave designed to ensure that demobilization did not serve to erode workers’ rights.  The epicenter of the Oakland strike, which quickly developed into a general strike, was none other than Latham Square at the intersection of Broadway and Telegraph Avenue, which today serves as an organizing point for the Occupy movement.

Very soon, the strikers instructed all stores except pharmacies to shut down.  A carnival-like atmosphere took root in the city with couples dancing in the streets, and Oakland was effectively shut down when 100,000 laborers joined the effort.  What distinguished the Oakland general strike from other labor unrest was that it spread from the bottom up without much evidence of official union leadership in the streets.  In this sense, the events of 1946 are reminiscent of today’s Occupy movement, which is not being formally directed by the rank and file [indeed, since the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act one year after the 1946 Oakland general strike, unions have been barred from participating in strikes “in support of other workers,” though to be sure many local unions endorsed Occupy’s actions within the local vicinity].

Though certainly impressive, the general strike unfortunately collapsed after just 54 hours, called off by a wary and conservative American Federation of Labor.  In the end, the city promised to stop sending scab delivery trucks to businesses where workers had been on strike, but female retail clerks didn’t get any of the concessions they had sought.  Nevertheless, four labor candidates were elected to Oakland’s city council in 1947 and the strike had important psychological and symbolic consequences. Put simply, labor demonstrated that workers were willing to take big risks and rebel against top down control, even going so far as to essentially take control over the city itself.

Oakland’s 1960s Legacy
Though the 1946 strike was an important forerunner of the Occupy movement, it would be a mistake to view recent disturbances in the city within a strictly labor perspective.  Judging from some recent online videos, Oakland’s Occupy activists are fairly diverse in a racial sense, perhaps more so than the Occupy Wall Street crowd.  In this sense, what is happening in California harks back to the previous activist wave of the 1960s.

Founded in Oakland in 1966, the Black Panther Party played an important role in furthering the growth of black liberation movements.  Guided by Oakland’s earlier socialist politics, the Panthers espoused revolutionary goals and called for a radical and, if necessary, violent transformation of society.  The movement was founded by Bobby Seale and Huey Newton, who had met as students at Merritt College in 1962.  Their friendship was solidified by a desire to tackle issues such as racism, police brutality, housing discrimination and inferior quality of education.

By the 1960s, Oakland had changed dramatically in a racial sense.  Though numerically small in the early twentieth century, Oakland’s black population had always displayed a tradition of radical political organizing.  In the 1920s, for example, the city had one of the most active chapters of the UNIA or United Negro Improvement Association, an organization headed by the infamous Marcus Garvey.  Later, Oakland served as the headquarters of the powerful Sleeping Car Porters Union.  Though the city was overwhelmingly white in the early 20^th century, World War II accelerated the pace of change by drawing in new workers to the shipyards and defense industries.

By the 1960s, the growing black population had grown incensed by the overwhelmingly white dominated city government and cases of police brutality, which all served to spur on the likes of Huey Newton.  Though the Panthers were subjected to FBI harassment and imprisonment, eventually splintering in the early 1970s, the movement had an important impact on Oakland politics.  Indeed, Seale himself went on to garner a full 37% of the vote in the city’s mayoral election of 1973, and eventually African Americans succeeded in wresting the entire political machine from white Republicans, occupying all major elected positions in Oakland.  Moreover, the Panthers inspired other marginalized groups such as Native Americans, Chicanos and Asian-Americans who in turn launched their own struggles for racial equality.

Political Impact of Wednesday’s Strike
As of this evening eastern time, it’s still a bit early to assess the practical impact of Oakland’s general strike.  Some reports suggest that activists have not succeeded in shutting down the entire city let alone Oakland’s important port, though some businesses remain shuttered.  It’s unclear moreover how many city workers joined the strikers but local coverage indicates that many teachers have joined the effort as well as thousands of students from the University of California, Berkeley.

Whatever the case, yesterday’s actions represent an important milestone for the Occupy movement.  Just a couple of weeks ago, as I penned my latest article outlining how a general strike might unfold in Lower Manhattan, I wondered how many people might take my writing seriously.  And while it’s still probably a stretch to think that activists can shut down the Wall Street area, the protests now seem to be accelerating at an exponential rate.  Already, solidarity marches with the Oakland general strike have been organized in Boston and Philadelphia, for instance.

It is perhaps fitting that it was Oakland, home to radical socialists such as Jack London as well as later black liberation figures like Huey Newton, which pushed the unique weapon of the general strike.  Though it was New York which initially provided the spark for the Occupy movement, Oakland is now nationalizing this struggle and inspiring other cities to take more decisive action.  Already, the familiar call of “Oakland is New York, New York is Oakland!” is gaining traction amongst the demonstrators, much to the chagrin of economic elites and the political establishment.