Occupy Wall Street

Babagounj

Strength through joy
OWS Boston is gone.
The police started at 5 am and the cleanup crews were power washing the area by 8 am.
THIS IS THE END: Most occupiers said police handled the situation well, but Katrina, who wouldn’t give her last name, expressed outrage that police came in “at 5 a.m., when most people were asleep,” she told the Herald’s Christine McConville.By 8 a.m, the tents and signs were gone, and a graffiti-busting crews were hosing down a sign-filled wall near where the group had held its general assemblies.It seems the occupiers just ran out of gas. Police waited for the right moment to move in and clear everyone out.Will Lynch, 18, of Framingham, knew the end was coming: “I thought it wouldn’t happen, but they showed up, at 5 on the dot. Lynch says he was in the middle of the camp when the raid began. He left, he said, because he is a Berklee College of Music student and he has to prepare for exams. “It’s not a huge shock to anyone, except for the time of the day.”
 

UpstateNYUPSer(Ret)

Well-Known Member
The police love doing this--whether it is breaking up an unlawful assembly or conducting a drug raid. The pictures of those arrested all look like they just woke up.
 

804brown

Well-Known Member
OWS Boston is gone.
The police started at 5 am and the cleanup crews were power washing the area by 8 am.
THIS IS THE END: Most occupiers said police handled the situation well, but Katrina, who wouldn’t give her last name, expressed outrage that police came in “at 5 a.m., when most people were asleep,” she told the Herald’s Christine McConville.By 8 a.m, the tents and signs were gone, and a graffiti-busting crews were hosing down a sign-filled wall near where the group had held its general assemblies.It seems the occupiers just ran out of gas. Police waited for the right moment to move in and clear everyone out.Will Lynch, 18, of Framingham, knew the end was coming: “I thought it wouldn’t happen, but they showed up, at 5 on the dot. Lynch says he was in the middle of the camp when the raid began. He left, he said, because he is a Berklee College of Music student and he has to prepare for exams. “It’s not a huge shock to anyone, except for the time of the day.”

You cannot evict an idea whose time has come. Boston’s Occupiers will persist in rejecting a world created by and for the 1%. We might have been evicted, but we shall not be moved. We remain invested in the future of our movement. We will continue to challenge Wall Street’s occupation of our government.
We encourage everyone to join in the national conversation that has sustained #OccupyBoston for the past seventy-one days.
#OccupyBoston will hold a General Assembly tonight at 7:00 PM at the bandstand on the Boston Common.
We are the 99%, and we are no longer silent.
 

804brown

Well-Known Member
Some hire the homeless to stay in their places while they go inside where it's warm.

Still the apologist for corporate capitalism?? When will you learn. This movement cannot be stopped because the powers- that- be have told their puppets in cities across this country to expell the occupiers' encampments. The movement is still growing in smaller cities and has moved indoors for the most part. Just think: in only 2 and 1/2 months this movement has totally changed the dialogue of the political class. Discussions over wealth inequality and taxing the rich and homeless and poverty are everywhere. Even some pols are responding. OWS influence is growing daily. They made the dems on the "supercommittee" to grow a pair and reject the austerity cuts. They forced obama to halt the canadian pipeline, pushed people to take their $$ out of the major banks and into credit unions and local banks, influenced the banks to not charge those $5 fees, influenced how much colleges charge students and student debt, etc. Even locally here in nys, the governor cuomo decided to follow the polls and tax the millionaires to close the nys budget gap, etc.

You apologists for the corrupt status quo can continue to disparage this movement all you wish. But do not think it is gone or going away. Plans are already been made for big events in April and July of next year. You cannot evict an idea whose time has come!!
 

wkmac

Well-Known Member
Has this previous year of global uprising been the opening skirmish of the “final conflict?” At this point, who can say? Who could have answered with any confidence at the start of the successful revolutions of the past? We can only examine events to date in light of revolutionary processes in the past, and compare the “Revolution 2.0” of the past two years to its unsuccessful predecessors in recent decades.
Chris Hedges recently evaluated Occupy in terms of Crane Brinton’s typology of revolutions (“This is What Revolution Looks Like,” Truthdig, November 15). The relevant steps in his list include a public loss of faith in the possibility of achieving change within the system, the inability of states to provide basic services, the undermining of the state’s aura of legitimacy and inevitability when its attempts to suppress dissent by force fail, and the internal fracturing and loss of morale inside the ruling class as its armed enforcers start to defect.
The trajectory from Wikileaks to Arab Spring to the Occupy movement already dwarfs the Seattle movement, and may be surpassing the global movement of 1968 (including not only the American civil rights, antiwar and student movements, but the French general strike and the Prague Spring). And unlike those previous movements, Occupy 1) has a generally favorable rating among a majority of the general public, and 2) coincides with the largest economic catastrophe since the Great Depression.
In its post-campout phase, Occupy is in the process of emerging from its cocoon, with new innovations like “Occupy Our Homes” and other distributed, stigmergic efforts independent of the original movement. Thanks to the helpful intervention of people like New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, it’s been dispersed like dandelion seeds, or (from the ruling class point of view) a metastasizing cancer.
Let’s start with the perceived impossibility of change within the system. Compare US President Barack Obama’s 2008 rhetoric, his near record electoral mandate and Congressional super-majority, with his cozy relationship to Wall Street and the national security state. Part of the fuel for Occupy is that people are finally learning how worthless their votes are.
John Robb recently argued that if the periphery of the Eurozone defaults, the waves from the financial collapse will transform the global Great Recession into Depression 2.0. Imagine if there’d been a networked movement on the scale of Occupy already on the ground when the Depression hit bottom in the early ’30s. Now imagine the gasoline-on-fire effect if a new Depression coincides with Occupy’s takeoff trajectory.
As for the the ability to provide basic services: The fiscally strapped, hollowed-out state has already retrenched on social safety net functions — and Occupy Our Homes, meanwhile, is in the news for filling that void through self-organized efforts to put roofs over homeless and evicted people. Every single time armed goons show up to evict them, the event becomes another morality play, distributed virally via YouTube. It’s the moral equivalent of the house-to-house fighting in Stalingrad, with each separate house the site of a new defensive stand. Neighborhood assembly offshoots of Occupy, on the Argentinian model, will likely soon start taking up the slack for things like reduced trash pickups and organizing mutual aid among neighbors, further undermining the state’s aura of legitimacy.
How about demoralization and defection? There’s a persistent rumor that some 200 NYPD officers — mostly the blue-shirted ones going all wobbly while the white-shirts were really gettin’ into it — called in sick on the day of Bloomberg’s eviction. The viral video of John Pike, I’m sure, was a wakeup call for cops all over the country that they’re living in a different era now, with forms of accountability bigger than Police Commission investigations to worry about.
Could it be that the global networked resistance movement is about to enter a positive feedback loop that will escalate out of sight?

Revolution 2.0: Is Occupy Reaching a Takeoff Point?
 

wkmac

Well-Known Member
Make note of this for the future.

The Portland Occupation stumbled upon a tactical innovation regarding occupying public spaces. This evolution in tactics was spontaneous, and went unreported in the media. On December 3rd, we took a park and were driven out of it by riot police; that much made the news. What the media didn’t report is that we re-took the park later that same evening, and the police realized that it would be senseless to attempt to clear it again, so they packed up their military weaponry and left. Occupy Portland has developed a tactic to keep a park when the police decide to enforce an eviction.
The tactical evolution that evolved relies on two military tactics that are thousands of years old- the tactical superiority of light infantry over heavy infantry, and the tactical superiority of the retreat over the advance.
Heavy infantry is a group of soldiers marching in a column or a phalanx that are armed with weaponry for hand to hand, close quarters combat. Heavy infantry function as a unit, not individual soldiers. Their operational strength is dependent upon maintaining the integrity of that unit. Riot police are heavy infantry. They will always form a line and advance as a unit.
Light infantry are armed with ranged weapons for assault from a distance. Light infantry operate as individuals that are free to roam at a distance and fire upon the opposition with ranged weapons. Cops firing tear gas, rubber bullets, water cannons, bean bag rounds, etc. are light infantry. They remain to the rear of the phalanx of riot cops (heavy infantry) and depend upon the riot cops maintaining a secure front and flanks to provide them a secure area of operations.
Protesters function fluidly as either light or heavy infantry. Their mass, because it is lacking in organization, functions as a phalanx, having no flanks or rear. Lack of organization gives that mass the option of moving in whichever direction it feels like, at any given time. If protesters all move to the right, the entire group and supporting officers has to shift to that flank. While the protesters can retreat quickly, the police can only advance as fast as their light infantry, supporting staff can follow and maintain a secure rear (if the mass of protesters were to run to the next block over and quickly loop around to the rear of the riot cops, the organization of the cops would be reduced to chaos). If that police cannot assemble with a front to oppose protesters, they are useless. The integrity of that tactic is compromised, and unable to maintain internal organization, the cops revert to individuals engaging in acts of brutality, which eventually winds up on the evening news and they lose the battle regardless of whether they clear the park or not.
Because of the lack of organization in a crowd of protesters, light infantry cops firing tear gas, etc. has little effect because it just serves to disorganize a group that relies upon disorganization in the first place. All it really does is disorganize the riot cops, who then resort to brutality.
 
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