Adbusters Suggests
Occupy Wall Street
"Declare 'Victory' " and
Head Home for Winter
| Tue Nov. 15, 2011 8:27 AM PST
Adbusters, the Canadian anti-capitalist magazine that helped spark Occupy Wall Street, suggests in a new "tactical briefing" on its blog that protesters in lower Manhattan "declare 'victory'" and wind down the occupation for the winter, letting the "diehards" hold what's been a site of constant protests for nearly two months.
The magazine's advice came a day before New York police officers raided and cleared out Zuccotti Park, the beating heart of OWS, at the order of Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Authorities arrested nearly 200 protesters.
In July, Adbusters put out a call on its website to "flood into lower Manhattan, set up tents, kitchens, peaceful barricades, and occupy Wall Street." The magazine asked, "Are you ready for a Tahrir moment?" That call, in combination with months of discussion and organizing by an international cast of artists, activists, students, and more, gave rise to Occupy Wall Street on September 17th, a protest that spawned spin-off occupations around the world and shifted the debate in the US.
Adbusters' call to declare victory is one of two "strategies" the magazine lays out for OWS protesters:
STRATEGY #1: We summon our strength, grit our teeth and hang in there through winter … heroically we sleep in the snow … we impress the world with our determination and guts … and when the cops come, we put our bodies on the line and resist them nonviolently with everything we've got.
STRATEGY #2: We declare "victory" and throw a party … a festival … a potlatch … a jubilee … a grand gesture to celebrate, commemorate, rejoice in how far we've come, the comrades we've made, the glorious days ahead. Imagine, on a Saturday yet to be announced, perhaps our movement's three month anniversary on December 17, in every #OCCUPY in the world, we reclaim the streets for a weekend of triumphant hilarity and joyous revelry.
We dance like we've never danced before and invite the world to join us.
Then we clean up, scale back and most of us go indoors while the die-hards hold the camps. We use the winter to brainstorm, network, build momentum so that we may emerge rejuvenated with fresh tactics, philosophies, and a myriad projects ready to rumble next Spring.
Whatever we do, let's keep our revolutionary spirit alive … let's never stop living without dead time.
for the wild,
Culture Jammers HQIn the wake of the NYPD raid, Occupy Wall Street's fate remains unclear. A Manhattan judge issued a signed court order permitting protesters to return to Zuccotti Park with their encampment gear. However, by late morning on Tuesday, police continued to block off the the park to the public.
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Too Much Violence and Pepper Spray at the OWS Protests: The Videos and Pictures
NOV 19 2011, 6:58 PM ET 360The dousing of seated, non-violent students with a chemical agent at U.C. Davis should provoke a call for restraint. These images show their experience is not unique.
Police dressed in riot gear at U.C. Davis on Friday afternoon used pepper spray to clear seated protesters from the university quad where they had set up a small Occupy encampment, pro-actively and repeatedly dousing the passively-resisting students with a chemical agent designed to cause pain and suffering in order to make it easier to remove them.
It is hard to look at this kind of attack and think this is how we do things in America.
And yet it is all too American. America has a very long history of protests that meet with excessive or violent response, most vividly recorded in the second half of the 20th century. It is a common fantasy among people born in the years since the great protests movements -- and even some not so great ones -- that they would have stood on the bold side of history had they been alive at the time and been called to make a choice. But the truth is that American protest movements in real time -- and especially in their early days -- often appear controversial, politically difficult, out-of-the-mainstream, and dangerous. And they are met with fear.
Even decades later, acts of protest can be the subject of heated debate and lead people to question (as well as celebrate) the moral standing of those who put their bodies on the line during moments of historic tumult -- as Sen. John Kerry, Vietnam veteran and former anti-Vietnam protester, learned during his presidential bid in 2004.
This sort of dynamic holds for pretty much any group that aims to upend the existing social order using direct action, because few resort to such tactics if they think they have other, easier ways to petition for redress of grievances or could be heard as loudly through existing channels of expression. The Tea Party movement, for example, has held many protests but with few exceptions has stopped short of civil disobedience, finding early on that its members were by and large not willing to face arrest and that it could gain power relatively quickly through the political system by backing challengers in Republican primaries and allying with experienced party operatives. The Occupy movement is both very new and rather diffuse so far, and appears less interested in gaining power than making power uncomfortable and raising far-reaching questions and public awareness.
Just over two months old, it has succeed in changing the terms of the national debate about income inequality in this country with shocking rapidity. And whether it flames out in a rash of alienating and chaotic street clashes or builds into a goal-oriented and sustainable force in American life -- sustainable as any protest movement, that is, which is to say not very -- it's clear it has already made one of the most significant interventions into the national debate on economic equality in years.
Which brings us back to the video of what happened at U.C. Davis yesterday: Non-violent students passively resisting both university and police directives to clear the area were subjected to acts of brutality that cannot be morally justified by any accounting of the facts on the ground. The raw video of yesterday's pepper-spray incident has rightfully gone viral since hitting the web last night. It is appalling:
Here's the same incident videotaped from a different perspective:
Junior faculty member Nathan Brown, an assistant professor of English at Davis, says what actually happened was even worse than what's shown on the videos, and has called on U.C. Davis Chancellor Linda Katehi to resign -- a call that has since last night become a petition. His description:
Without any provocation whatsoever, other than the bodies of these students sitting where they were on the ground, with their arms linked, police pepper-sprayed students. Students remained on the ground, now writhing in pain, with their arms linked.
What happened next?
Police used batons to try to push the students apart. Those they could separate, they arrested, kneeling on their bodies and pushing their heads into the ground. Those they could not separate, they pepper-sprayed directly in the face, holding these students as they did so. When students covered their eyes with their clothing, police forced open their mouths and pepper-sprayed down their throats. Several of these students were hospitalized. Others are seriously injured. One of them, forty-five minutes after being pepper-sprayed down his throat, was still coughing up blood.
As Will Wilkinson tweeted last night of the pepper-spray wielding officer identified as Lt. John Pike, "It ought to be possible to sue the pants off this guy and win."
The U.C. Davis police department has, not surprisingly, defended its actions. Ten students were arrested -- eight men and to women -- and about a dozen others were sprayed, according to the Davis Enterprise.
The nearest I got to Zuccotti Park before it was cleared earlier this week was passing it in a cab one night in New York; it appeared a small and forlorn collection of tents in what was by late October a very cold rain. Visiting McPherson Square in Washington, D.C., for the first time with Atlantic contributor Tina Dupuy earlier this month, I met union members and teenage college students trying to put their Habermas into action and create of a new public square in the form of Occupy DC. It seemed kind of sweetly literal -- building tents as a physical attempt at a structural transformation of the public sphere? -- and largely harmless to anyone but the protesters, because grungy and jerry-rigged and relatively defenseless against the elements or potential criminals. But since McPherson normally is a bit of a dead space in the city -- there are some residential buildings near it, but it's mainly surrounded by office-workers who clear out on evenings and weekends -- it didn't seem to be bothering anyone.
Perhaps Washington's still-intact Occupy encampment has been treated more gently than those in other cities because protests in the nation's capital are as routine and unremarkable as are the city's frequent rains. Between the easy co-existence with protests here, and the fact that the Occupy encampments and demonstrations across the country have been covered as much as regional stories as a national one, it's easy to have missed the truly shocking number of violent confrontations that have taken place as the anti-Wall Street movement has extended its reach.
Last night's video should serve as a wake-up call. Below are some of the other dramatic moments in the ongoing confrontations between Occupy protesters and police. Taken together, they paint a disturbing portrait that should at a bare minimum call into question the standards and practices police officers around the nation have developed for deploying pepper spray, which has only become a universal policing tool within the past 20 years. And they raise real questions about whether disproportionate police responses to the movement's intentional acts of civil disobedience have in some cases increased social disorder rather than restored calm.
Portland, pepper spray:
Seattle, pepper spray:
Berkeley, batons:
Oakland, tear gas (Scott Olsen video):
Oakland, rubber bullets:
Oakland, tear gas:
Oakland, tear gas:
Oakland, batons:
Oakland, tear gas:
New York, pepper spray:
Denver, pepper spray:
See also:
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Occupy Wall Street
Turns a Corner
Michael Greenberg
AP Photo/Seth Wenig
Occupy Wall Street protesters gather in Zuccotti Park after marching around Wall Street in New York, November 17, 2011
At around 1 AM Tuesday morning, police arrived to evict the occupiers from Zuccotti Park. It was a surprise attack, planned with impressive secrecy, and launched from Peck Slip, a relatively desolate stretch of the city, under the FDRDrive between the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges. For more than a week, hundreds of blue-shirted police officers—the force’s proletariat rank and file—had been receiving training in crowd control. Monday night, they were told to report to lower Manhattan with “hats and bats”—riot helmets and batons—without being informed why. The action was so unexpected that, after lamps from dozens of Emergency Service Unit trucks flooded the encampment with light and officers swarmed into the park dragging occupants out of their tents, members of the protesters “self-defense team” didn’t have time to chain themselves to the locust trees, as planned. Commissioner Raymond Kelly was photographed in a dark business suit and pink tie, watching the proceedings from the edge of the park like a solitary commander.
For weeks Kelly had been meeting on a daily basis with Mayor Bloomberg as part of the mayor’s unofficial protest task force, which also included the fire commissioner, Salvatore J. Cassano; two deputy mayors, Howard Wolfson and Caswell F. Holloway; and the head of the city’s Law Department, Michael Cardozo. The occupation seemed to be dictating life at City Hall. According toThe New York Times, many evenings, Bloomberg would call Wolfson or Holloway for an update before going to sleep.
Off-site protesters, alerted of the raid via Twitter and text messages, were unable to get within two blocks of Zuccotti Park, and found themselves floundering around Foley Square to the north of the park, scattered and cut off. Most of the subway stations near the park were shut down. Reporters were pushed away from the area—eight were arrested—which partly explains the dearth of objective eyewitness accounts of the action. Kenan Rubenstein, a blogger for the political group ACT Now, writes that doormen in the area were instructed to keep residents from leaving their buildings. “I just spoke with the CBS News desk and they were told to leave the airspace above Zuccotti Park by NYPD,” Anthony DeRosa of Reuters tweeted.
Various protesters told me of the use of pepper spray and freewheeling beatings with batons. Retired Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Karen Smith, acting as a legal observer at the park, told the Daily News of “a black woman standing next to me…frantically telling the cops her daughter was in the park and she wanted to make sure the girl was okay. All of a sudden, a cop takes his baton and cracks her in the head. She hadn’t done a thing. Then they started chasing people down the street.”
City Councilman Ydanis Rodriguez, who tried to get to the park after the raid had started, was arrested with blood flowing from a gash in his forehead. He was charged with disorderly conduct and resisting arrest, and by Tuesday night he had yet to be arraigned or permitted to see his lawyer. And so the tenor of the eviction could be pieced together.
At 6:30 AM Tuesday morning—just hours after the police removed the last protesters from the park—lawyers for Occupy Wall Street had managed to wake up Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Lucy Billings, a former ACLU lawyer, who signed a temporary restraining order prohibiting the city from “preventing protesters from re-entering the park with tents and other property previously utilized” until the city could show cause for the eviction. The case would be argued later in the day, in front of another judge, Michael Stallman, who had been chosen randomly by computer. In the meantime, despite Judge Billings’s order, police kept the park barricaded and closed.
More than two hundred had been arrested during the raid. The rest of the occupiers crashed in friends’ apartments or at Judson Church near Washington Park, a traditionally progressive institution whose minister, Michael Ellick, had become an active supporter of the movement.
In fact, organizers had been in talks with some of New York’s religious leaders for at least two weeks, negotiating support for the movement around the city. On Tuesday, coincidentally, they had been planning “a move” as one organizer put it to me. “The clergy would give us [an alternative] space to de-concentrate Zuccotti, to lessen the need for Zuccotti, to diminish its importance.”
According to Ellick, 1,400 “faith-based leaders in and around New York” were throwing their support behind Occupy Wall Street. When I asked him what defined a “leader,” he answered, “anyone with a constituency.” But what did support mean? For Ellick and John Merz, an Episcopal priest at Ascension Church in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, it meant opening church kitchens and giving protesters a place to shower and sleep “even though we’re not a shelter.” It would involve public support as well, talking to the press and urging parishioners to join the protesters in their various anti-corporate actions.
The organizer I spoke to was keen on the alliance, not only for the material support it offered, but also, and mainly, because it confirmed the movement’s ethical position. Ellick, Merz, and other like-minded clergymen would reinforce Occupy Wall Street’s non-violent tenor. “If a more violent contingent splinters off during a demonstration and things turn nasty, it would be only a small part of the story. We wouldn’t be tarred for the actions of a few.”
Trinity Church, the historic Episcopal church located a block south of Zuccotti Park, had been cautious in its support of the occupation, allowing protesters to hold meetings on its steps and, on occasion, use its bathrooms. Trinity is one of the largest landowners in the city, and its main business is the management of its properties, among which is a large open space on Canal Street and Sixth Avenue. The space abuts Duarte Square, a half-acre city park. Organizers had been in negotiation with the church to expand their encampment to the Canal Street space. Despite pressure from more radical Episcopal priests from other parishes in New York, Trinity ultimately decided to forbid access to its land. One priest I spoke with who preferred not to be identified, was indignant at Trinity’s decision—“Its meekness,” he called it, “its fear of antagonizing authorities who are responsible for upholding so many of its privileges. Let’s face it,” he added, “they’re more a corporation than a place of faith. They have fewer parishioners than I do.” He said that meetings at Trinity had been heated. “This is a basic challenge to our values. If we don’t support Occupy Wall Street, what do we stand for?”
By 9 AM Tuesday morning, protesters had gathered at Duarte Square. Trinity’s property was fenced off, and padlocked. Two young men cut the locks and protesters streamed in. Soon they were met by police in riot gear who surrounded the area. After withstanding a couple of dozen arrests, about a thousand protesters began marching south on Broadway, back to Zuccotti Park.
Ellick stayed on at Canal Street, talking to a small cluster of people that had gathered around him. He had put two fallen maple leaves in one of the button holes of his pea coat which seemed to encapsulate his demeanor: committed, exhausted, and modestly adorned. “Occupy Wall Street has re-radicalized us,” he said. “We’ve become protest chaplains again. If we’re going to shape the movement, we have to join its horizontality. This is not a 20th century movement. There are not a lot of rules.” Like the protesters, he seeks to “move beyond traditional words and concepts” towards “a new Christian vocabulary for a post-Christian world.” He refers to the Gospel as the “macabre, science fiction Enlightenment.” According to the Judson Church website, “he currently lives in Greenwich Village, where in his off time he contemplates time travel, the prophetic interactive mythology of comic books and zombie films, and churches as potential American Mystery Schools for the 21st Century.”
On Tuesday’s march from Canal Street down to Zuccotti Square, some protesters appealed to the police as fellow members of the 99 percent, while others cursed them as mercenaries employed by a criminal army. “We know that you are on our side,” said a young woman to a line of stone-faced officers, who seemed as exhausted as she was. She told me that she was a senior at NYU, majoring in “cultural diplomacy. If people can express themselves with their voices, they won’t become violent with their bodies,” she explained. Nearby, a man with a bandanna around his head was urging protesters to “kick over the barricades” when they reached the park. “We have a right to be in Zuccotti. Are you read to stand them down?” (Late Thursday morning, after a tense demonstration near the stock Exchange, protesters did pull aside the barricades, fed up with the way police were controlling access to the park.)
Despite the rising level of frustration, however, the protesters remained peaceful. Many clutched a copy of judge Billing’s temporary restraining order, showing that people in positions of established power were behind them. Perhaps the order could be brandished as a kind of passport for reentry into the park. “This is a peaceful country!” they chanted as they moved down Broadway, scuffling with police almost as if it were a game. And then, “The whole world is watching!”—a warning to police that their every moved was being recorded.
Reaching the park, they found themselves bottlenecked on the perimeter. The chrysanthemums had lost their flowers, the leaves of the locust trees had turned golden, and the naked, power-washed park was held by police and private security guards from Brookfield Properties, the company that owns the park. The security guards wore green neon vests. Straining at the barricade, protesters peered in at them as if they were offensive objects in a museum. It was the opposite picture of the last two months, when occupiers filled the park and the police watched from the outside.
A group of students launched into a rendition of The Star Spangled Banner, to the disgust of an older protester who shouted, “Those bombs bursting in midair created this beast. The Star Spangled Banner is not our song. We will create a new song, a new anthem.” As if to clinch the argument, he added, “Wall Street was built by the Dutch to keep the Native Americans out!” Here, microscopically, were the two sides of Occupy Wall Street: those who believed they were reclaiming an American value that had been lost, and those who believed that there was nothing to reclaim, that an acceptable history did not exist and would have to be created from scratch after a revolution.
The wait for the decision from Judge Stallman wore on. A man impersonating Billy Graham, a popular figure in the movement with his thick platinum hair, clerical collar, and white jacket and boots, advised the crowd to exercise “radical patience.” At around 5pm tweets and text messages came in with the result of Judge Stallman’s ruling: the park would be reopened, but no sleeping bags, tents, or lying down would be allowed. Cleverly, the city defused the anger, almost immediately reopening the park, giving many protesters the illusion of victory and reoccupation. Thousands thronged inside the barricades, conducting the largest General Assembly I had seen since October 5, the day of a large-scale march at Foley Square. The “people’s mic” had to repeat each speaker’s words in three waves in order to reach everyone’s ears.
On Wednesday, librarians returned to the park and briefly succeeded in reestablishing the People’s Library spot near the northwest corner with a few hundred newly donated books. An emblem of the protest’s civilized, cultural-minded purpose, the People’s Library had in previous weeks grown into an eclectic collection of approximately five thousand volumes, not including periodicals and journals, and had been housed in a tent with a professional cataloging system that can still be perused at LibraryThing. During the raid, the contents of the library had been thrown into Sanitation Department dumpsters and hauled—along with uprooted tents, computers, recording devices, personal belongings, battery-powering bicycles, kitchen equipment and medical supplies—to a sanitation department garage on West 57th Street. Photographs of these confiscated belongings told the story of a violent rout that in its aftermath had the look of a mass real estate foreclosure. (Fortunately, some of the computers and recording equipment belonging to Occupy Wall Street’s Media Group had been moved to office space near the park prior to the raid.)
As of late Wednesday afternoon, only a fraction of the books had been found, and many of those were damaged. More might turn up in the general Zuccotti garbage heap at the back of the garage, but they will probably be too soiled to use. In any case, by 7:00 PM Wednesday, the police had confiscated the newly donated library as well.
Still, the immediate feeling about the eviction and its aftermath, was that they provided the perfect set up for actions planned for Thursday, Occupy Wall Street’s second month anniversary. The actions—which had been coordinated with similar activities in other cities—involved a march to shut down the stock exchange in the morning and, later in the day, a gathering at Foley Square, followed by a night-time march across Brooklyn Bridge. The marches now seemed more urgent, a test for the movement as it entered a new phase. After the dramatic events of Tuesday, a large turnout was expected. Labor unions were exhorting their members to show up. Deputy Mayor Wolfson said that the city was bracing for “tens of thousands” of protesters. In the end, despite poor weather, thousands of people did take to the streets to march with the core of protesters, in what seemed to be a powerful show of resilience. And although there were some scuffles with police and close to 200 arrests were made, many reported that the march proceeded peacefully.
In the days since the eviction, the protesters have seemed by turns stunned, exhilarated, enraged, defeated, and newly determined to press on. An organizer insisted that the eviction was “a major victory.” It has restored the protesters’s image as decriers of economic injustice, putting an end, for now, to damaging news stories about drug addicts and sexual offenders in their encampment. It has also relieved the movement of having to materially support the occupation, which had become a draining responsibility. Prior to the eviction, the nightly General Assemblies had been drawing fewer participants, often no more than thirty-five or forty, indicative of the growing sense of activist burn-out.
But Zuccotti Park had also been an effective stage, the movement’s symbolic nerve center, “the flagship occupation of an international franchise,” as one organizer wryly remarked. The lack of communication between autonomous groups within the movement had been a constant problem. Some organizers fear it will deteriorate further without their central forum. Others feel it opens the door to a new, more effective structure. The larger question the movement now faces is whether, without Zuccotti Park (and dozens of other occupation sites around the country that have been similarly raided) it will be able to hold the focus of its supporters. The movement has been re-energized. It has turned a corner. But to where?
November 18, 2011, 11 a.m.
>via: http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2011/nov/18/crackdown-zuccotti-occupy-wa...
