WHAT THE RICH AND POWERFUL BETTER REMEMBER ABOUT OCCUPY WALL STREET

Oaklnd Police had an all night standoff with Occupy protesters and later broke up their campsite.

The Occupy Movement

Could Go From Lamb to Lion

 

The Occupy Movement isn’t going to go away. You can’t stomp it out or beat and gas the protesters forever. You can’t steal people’s jobs, homes, life savings, retirement dreams, and their children’s college educations and expect them to just walk away.  

Sooner or later, you won't be able to gather safely on the terraces high above Wall  Street sipping cocktails, smirking, and snapping pictures as you make fun of the waves of scruffy people singing and chanting for change in the street below. [See video left column.]

Whatever you think about the Occupy Movement, you’re wrong about its people. They aren't a bunch of boisterous college kids, Hippies or Flower People from the 1960s.

They're war vets, a number of whom have been wounded or disabled in Iraq or Afghanistan; union members who've been shafted out of their benefits, jobs and rights to collective bargaining; worn out men and women in their 60s, 70s and 80s who are grinding it out  daily in minimum wage jobs with little hope of retiring; they are teachers, small business owners, public and service industry workers, construction workers, truckers and homeless people who are seeking reentry to mainstream society.

At right, a U.S. Marine who is among thousands of vets who support Occupy and turn out to participate in its events, leads a protest march in the San Francisco Bay area. Below left, retired Philadelphia Police Captain Ray Lewis believes he was arrested last week for carrying a sign that city officials felt was unfairly critical of NYPD officers.

Lewis, who retired in 2004, says he was living a peaceful Walden-like existence in a secluded area of the Catskill mountains. He followed Occupy via computer streaming for a couple of weeks, then became so inspired by the courage and spirit of the New York demonstrators he was compelled to join them.

On his release from jail, he apologized for the "poor wording" of his sign and explained that it was intended to warn fellow policemen against being manipulated into becoming corporate mercenaries. "All the cops, he said, "are just workers for the one percent, and they don't even realize they're being exploited." 

So forget it. The Movement isn't going away. People are demanding a return to equality in America, or what they were willing to settle for before you declared war on the Middle Class: decent pay--meaning a living wage--good homes for their families, affordable health care and pharmacy costs, the ability to save for the future. And respect. They would have accepted these  modest rewards for hard work—things they thought had been fought for and won sixty years ago--and a return to fairness. Their demands can change.

 You're  mistaken if you think Occupy will go away. You've stirred this mess up and now there is something in the air:

 

Call out the instigators
Because there's something in the air
We've got to get together sooner or later
Because the revolution's here, and you know it's right
And you know that it's right

We have got to get it together
We have got to get it together now

Lock up the streets and houses
Because there's something in the air
We've got to get together sooner or later
Because the revolution's here, and you know it's right
And you know that it's right

Last week I watched police at the University of California at Davis pepper spray Occupy  students who were protesting a steep tuition hike. Linked arm in arm, they were quietly sitting down, blocking a sidewalk at the edge of the school's quad. A couple dozen of them  leaning forward, heads tilted to shield their eyes and lungs from the stinging, choking red clouds of pepper gas. Lt. John Pike (at left) in  black uniform with helmet and face shield, stepped forward holding up a red aerosol can. He walked toward the students brandishing the can flamboyantly, as if it was a ceremonial sword of some kind. Whatever his intended message, his gestures transformed the scene into a surrealistic one. [See video left column.]

Slowly, he strolled down the line of students, shooting powerful bursts of thick reddish mist down on them, taking care to coat their heads and shoulders. The submissive position of the students’ bodies was reminescent of the position assumed by thousands of men and women who received a bullet to the back of their heads seventy years ago in Europe. 

There were dozens of officers, members of the UC Davis police force, in small phalanxes strategically spread along the edge of  a crowd of several hundred angry students who began  chanting, “Shame on you! Shame on you! Shame on you!” as they watched fellow students and friends being sprayed. They were incensed but, amazingly, their outrage never neared any level of violence.

Momentarily, a second officer, aerosol in hand, stepped into the now sprawled and broken line of students who were writhing on the sidewalk, coughing and choking, but determined to sit or lay where they were. He opened up on them with his pepper spray. More members of the riot squad began moving in on the dazed students, turning over bodies, zip-cuffing their  hands behind their backs and dragging them off by their arms or feet, to waiting transport units several yards away from the quad.

Hundreds of students standing near and on the edge of the quad began chanting “Who do you serve! Who do you protect! Who do you serve! Who do you protect!” As the arrest process began drawing to a close, the crowd started inching towards police who wisely, but slowly and guardedly began pulling back. Each step the officers took backward was inches long and matched by an equal step forward by protesters. Tense moments passed like hours. The police stood shoulder to shoulder as they pulled back, then formed a concave protective front as they completed their pullback.                                                                                                                                 

As it became apparent that the confrontation was about to end peacefully, the students began chanting “This is our quad! This is our quad! This is our quad!” When the officers' retreat became complete the protesters' chant switched to a victorious "This is our university! This is our university! This is our university!" And that is how the confrontation ended for the day.

That evening when UC Davis Chancellor Linda Katehi left her office, she was escorted to her car through a long and silent cordon of students.[See video at left.] Their tent encampment was up again by Monday when Katehi addressed them from an outdoor stage to apologize for the pepper-spraying which she said was not authorized by her. She ended her remarks with an appeal for student protesters to work with her to restore the previous calm and congenial atmosphere of the campus. The crowd was unmoved and stood firm in calling for Katehi's resignation.  

The rich and powerful believe they hold all the cards, have all the power. They own Congress thanks to their lobbyists. The Supreme Court has ruled they can now plow billions of dollars  into smothering the voice of the people during elections and influencing the passage of  laws favorable to their special interests. They control thousands of state and national office holders whom they pay well to abuse their powers by clamping down hard on protesters of their heavy-handed tactics. The elitists are gambling that they can rely on law enforcement and the National Guard to protect them, their wealth, their homes and businesses and to maintain the status quo.

Conservatives want to see the degree of force police use against the Occupy Movement cranked up. They want Constitutional rights to free speech and public assembly narrowly interpreted and restrictively applied to Occupy by state and federal courts. They are pushing states and communities to strictly enforce local laws and ordinances to minimize or eliminate the use of public spaces by the people of Occupy.

There have been pepper-sprayings and police clashes with Occupiers in Seattle, Portland and other cities, but Oakland has the longest record for unleashing the most brutal responses to activists. This year its police force used rubber bullets, bean bag pellets and tear gas in attacking the Occupy Oakland encampment and a subsequent protest march. The first police assault resulted in a skull fracture to Marine vet Scott Olsen who served two tours of duty in Iraq.

There is an on-going lawsuit from 2005 against the Oakland Police Department for excessive use of force against non-violent anti-war demonstrators. Police Chief Howard Jordan was recently deposed about his command of the department during that period. He testified that he defines peace demonstraters as "anarchists" who oppose any kind of government action including requiring people to pay taxes. [Video at left shows a conflict at  UC at Berkeley.]

Robert Reich,  well-known economist, holder of the Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy Chair at the University of California at Berkeley and author of the books Supercapitalism and Aftershock, argues nothing less is at stake in the Occupy Movement than the First Amendment. What we've been seeing across the country, he says, is Americans being assaulted, clubbed and pepper-sprayed for exercising their right to free speech and assemnly--for protesting the ever increasing concentration of income, wealth and political power among the top one percent.

"And what's Washington's response? Nothing. . . the Supreme Court says money is speech and corporations are people." There's a revolving door between Washington and Wall Street  where bank executives become public officials who make laws that benefit the banks and then head back to the Street to make money off the rules they created."

The core message of the Occupy Movement, Reich says, is that the  concentration of income and wealth in the hands of the top 1% endangers our democracy.                                              

"When real people without money assemble to express their dissatisfaction with all this, they're told the First Amendment doesn't apply. Instead, they're treated as public nuisances--clubbed, pepper-sprayed, thrown out of public parks and evicted from public spaces."

As the recession grinds on Congress remains deadlocked over passing legislation that would put about 100 million people to work. Banks continue foreclosing on homes. Qualified students cannot afford college without taking on huge loan debt they will not be able to repay given the likely continued downward spiraling of wages, even if the economy improves.

Meanwhile, public schools are firing teachers and vital social services are being cut off.

The right wingers' objective is to break up Occupy Wall Street, hence the uptick in resistance and state sanctioned violence toward the Movement. The Right is desperate to destroy their most visible, widely supported and strongest opponent while it can. It thinks that if it can drive Occupy underground, it will be silenced or forced out of existence. This logic is contradicted by  history which tells us that once a resistance faction is forced underground, the enemy deprives itself of the ability to know what it's opponent is saying, doing or planning. And it has no sure way of knowing where the Movement is or who its members are. 

The rich and powerful are ignoring history at their peril. If they don’t like studying history, I suggest they pick up two novels: Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities or Boris Pasternak’s Dr. Zhivago.  Because there is a second course to the famous song whose lyrics are printed here. It goes like this:

 

We have got to get it together  
We have got to get it together now

Hand out the arms and ammo
We're going to blast our way through here
We've got to get together sooner or later
Because the revolution's here, and you know it's right
And you know that it's right

We have got to get it together
We have got to get it together

 

Song performed on video above left:

Something in the Air: Thunderclap Newman

(John Keene) Courtesy of MCA Records, Inc.

 

 

Copyright 2011

Anthony P. Mario