Yesterday, the reconstituted #OccupyOakland General Assembly voted to hold a city-wide general strike. Today, planning for that strike began.
When I arrived at Oscar Grant Park about 5:30 PM, around 400 people were already meeting in the rotunda area, discussing plans for the general strike. The square itself looks nothing like it did last week, of course. Only a single facility, a food tent, is operating now, whereas before there was an info tent, a library, a large kitchen facility, a communications tent, and lots more. About ten camping tents are now pitched in the square, whereas before there were more like a hundred of them covering almost every square inch of the grassy area of the plaza.
A motion was made and eventually passed to approve the printing of 10,000 flyers announcing the general strike -- to be printed up tomorrow at a union shop (naturally) and ready for distribution at tomorrow's General Assembly. Ding!
The San Jose Mercury News is already out with a story, and seems to have gotten it down reasonably:
OAKLAND -- Occupy Oakland protesters debated Thursday evening the practical difficulties of organizing a citywide general strike with the aim of shutting down the city of Oakland on Nov. 2. Speakers urged teachers, students, union members and workers of all stripes to participate in whatever way they could, and said the entire world was watching Oakland. "Oakland is the vanguard and epicenter of the Occupy movement," said Clarence Thomas, a member of the powerful International Longshoreman and Warehouse Union who urged the hundreds of assembled people to support the strike.
The strike is to take place on November 2nd, one week from today. Mass assemblies of strikers (and everyone else) are to take place at 9:00 AM, 12:00 PM and 6:00 PM. A group is still working on a statement of purpose for the general strike, which had some amendments proposed for it; this position statement could have passed the General Assembly after I left.
The strike meeting then broke up into working groups, one of the groups being media and messaging, which I joined. Plopping myself down for the working group meeting on the concrete just a few steps from the doors of City Hall, who did I see sitting in front of me but Alyssa, aka Allie123 (You can read more about her amazing OccupyOakland exploits here).
I wasn't immediately sure it was her; I waited for a break in the flow and asked her quietly if she was Alyssa. Indeed she was! We barely got to talk at all as the meeting was progressing, and then this group itself broke up into subgroups, one of which was blogging, which both of us joined.
Such are the vagaries of #Occupy movements that by the time we had all introduced ourselves and said what we might be doing (e.g, writing diaries on Daily Kos about the General Strike!) the General Assembly was beginning. Alyssa then vanished in a proverbial puff of smoke (or so it seemed) never to be spotted by me again. But she's still tweeting so I guess she's still on this Earthly plane somewhere. At any rate the group got organized enough to pass around a sheet where we could all enter our email addresses. We'll see how it goes from there...
By the time the GA convened the entire rotunda was packed. I estimate around 1000 people, possibly more, were in the square. (You can read here, in this diary, how Mayor Quan was allegedly supposed to speak to the General Assembly but wasn't willing to wait her turn.) The first part of the GA consisted of a vigil/ceremony for Scott Olson, the veteran who was severely wounded by the Oakland police Tuesday evening. Hundreds of candles were lit around the rotunda, and various friends of his and other veterans spoke using simultaneously a microphone and the people's mic to quite stunning effect.
I would tell you about the rest of the General Assembly, but I had to leave in search of a bathroom... There are no more portapotties in Oscar Grant Square, nor anywhere else in the immediate area that I could find. Downtown Oakland is an urban desert at night; nothing is open that you would even remotely guess might have a bathroom; even the Burger King has no public restroom. If Mayor Quan wanted to do something really useful she would have the city put back the portapotties that were presumably removed in the raid on Tuesday morning!
Figuring this out, I made my way down to the BART station, hopped the train to Ashby, got to my car and back to my house without risking the City of Oakland declaring a health hazard. Barely. (That's probably not why you're reading this diary, but that's the way it goes. Heh.)
What I can tell you is that the crowd -- and I do mean a lot of people -- was energized. The fact that the whole world is now focused on Oakland was not lost on the group. Cars were constantly honking as they passed on 14th Street and tons of media people were about. I have no idea whether any group can pull off a general strike in a week, but having that as a goal is going to focus #OccupyOakland and bond people together even more than they already are after the nasty events of two days ago, if such a thing is possible.
And thank FSM for indoor plumbing.
Thu Oct 27, 2011 at 10:26 PM PT: Ruh roh.
The hacktivist group Anonymous is making good on its promise of digital retaliation against the Oakland Police Department for the force it used against protesters this week.
A distributed denial-of-service attack against the department’s website — www.oaklandpolice.com — is underway, and the website currently is unreachable.
In addition, members of the collective have begun releasing information about Oakland police officers, and the call is out for additional help.
“The time has come to retaliate against Oakland police via all non-violent means, beginning with ‘doxing’ of individual officers and particularly higher-ups involved in the department’s conduct of late,” read an Anonymous statement, posted to Pastebin.
An Oakland police spokesperson could not immediately be reached for comment.
Doxing references the public release of information about individuals.
http://patdollard.com/...
Thu Oct 27, 2011 at 10:59 PM PT: And now the legal battles begin.
But the heat kept rising for the Oakland Police Department on Thursday. Civil rights attorney Jim Chanin, who has fought the department on many reform issues, said the department on Tuesday had violated its own crowd-control rules, which call for medical services to be available when tear gas and other control measures are used.
Under court order, the department signed a policy requiring the safety precaution, stemming from a 2003 protest in which officers fired "less-than-lethal" munitions on a crowd at the Port of Oakland protesting the war in Iraq. The New York Times described it at the time as "the most violent (clash) between protesters and the authorities anywhere in the country since the start of the war."
Chanin said Tuesday's clash reminded him strongly of the 2003 incident. He said he doesn't yet know what the consequences to the department
could be, though he noted that the department spent millions of dollars settling lawsuits in the wake of the 2003 dust-up.
Mercury News