December 23, 2011

Occupy Oakland: vanguard of the 99 percent movement

While the protest may have started on Wall Street, Occupy Oakland seems to clearly have situated itself as the vanguard of the 99 percent movement.

“We set trends here, and sometimes we don’t even know we’ve done it,” an local activist said at a meeting between Occupy Oakland and visiting activists from Occupy Wall Street Thursday night.

He was referring to their presence at a City Council meeting Tuesday night, at which at least 60 protesters filled two balconies and the lower seating area of City Hall. Activists heckled the city council throughout the meeting, and many feel their presence was instrumental to the defeat of a resolution that would have enabled the city to use “whatever lawful tools” at the city’s disposal to preventing another port shutdown.

But showing up at public meetings is hardly Occupy Oakland’s biggest effect on the movement.

Hundreds of people have been arrested here since the protest began, and the group has a legal fund with more than $14,000 in it used to bail activists out.

While the encampment in front of City Hall has been raided twice, Occupy Oakland still manages to attract quite a crowd for its general assembly meetings. The group requires a quorum of 100 people or more just to vote on measures.

Two successful port shutdowns have generated not just headlines, but also substantial economic damage. On December 12 alone, the port shutdown is said to have resulted in $4 million in damage to the port and its users. They refer to the ports as the Wall Street on the waterfront. Occupy Oakland served as the central organizing group for all the December 12 port shutdowns on the West Coast.

“It seems Oakland has a little bit different agenda than the rest of the Occupies,” said Sierk Beij, who moved to Oakland from Holland in 2005. “We’re a little more hardcore.”

And of 12 occupations I have visited this month, no where have I heard the same kind of radical, antiestablishment talk that I’ve heard here in Oakland.

“I am not about nonviolent protests,” one activist said. “We all need to be ready to take up arms and we all need to be ready to die for this cause.”

Another said, “We are not really afraid of the police here. When they raided our camp, we responded with a port shutdown. When they raided us again, we responded with another port shutdown. Every time they hit us, we hit them back.”

In fact, Occupy Oakland’s general assembly, one activist told me, “refused to embrace nonviolence in favor of a diversity of tactics.”

He added, “It’s not about being violent. It’s about any means necessary.”

When I was in Boulder, Colorado, Occupy Oakland activists who had traveled there mocked some members of that occupation for not being committed enough to the cause.

“It’s about revolution, not reform,” Ian Murdock said at an Occupy Boulder meeting.

It should come as no surprise that Oakland would emerge as the central front in the struggle of the 99 percent. The Bay Area has always been a hotbed of activism – first with Berkeley in the early to mid 1960′s with the free speech movement and later San Francisco took over the helm with first anti-Vietnam war protests and then environmental activism.

While Berkeley and San Francisco have become gentrified over the years, Oakland has remained a gritty, working class city, still affordable for the 99 percent. Organized labor is strong here, with the International Longshoreman and Warehouse Union. And, of course, Oakland is the home of the Black Panthers, the militant black power group that still has a presence in the city and with Occupy Oakland, and used to march through the city streets carrying assault rifles.

Many Occupy Oakland activists say the more-recent social unrest even predates the Occupy Wall Street movement. It started, they say, in 2009 when Oscar Grant was shot and killed by a transit authority officer while handcuffed. The city came very close to having riots then, and the fervor, some say, has never really subsided. Occupy Oakland has renamed the Frank Ogawa Plaza outside of City Hall the Oscar Grant Plaza, a name that has taken such hold that even Google recently referred to the town green by that name.

“Some say it didn’t start with Occupy Wall Street, it started with Oscar Grant,” said Phil Horne, a San Francisco lawyer who originally occupied there, but relocated to Oakland, in part, for its more militant and communal approach to the protest.

“Oakland,” he said, “is the most radicalized.”

— Bob Plain