Stories from #Occupy

Faced with evictions, occupy movement protesters look to new tactics

Disrupted by police, Occupy movements in several major cities now mobilize largely during daytime hours or through marches designed around specific issues. Some are aligning with local community groups, churches, and unions.

By Mark Guarino, Staff writer / 

Christian Science Monitor,

December 10, 2011

As the Occupy movement heads into the cold winter months, the movement is counting on ingenuity, good luck and – in one case – the federal courts to keep it mobilized outside financial districts and city halls across the United States.

The greatest challenge to date are the evictions by city governments that complain that overnight camping in city parks violates curfew laws and threatens public health and safety. Occupy movements in several major cities – Chicago, Portland, Philadelphia, San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles – were disrupted by police action and now mobilize largely during daytime hours or through marches designed around specific issues special to each city.

Protesters in all these cities argue the evictions violate free speech rights and that the use of curfew laws is hollow considering they are rarely enforced, especially before the Occupy movement became a mobilized presence on the streets.

The latest eviction happened early Friday morning in Boston where police arrested over 40 people at Dewey Square, where protesters had camped for 10 weeks. Showing up at 5 a.m., police removed about 150 protesters. The removal took about an hour and is described by people on both sides as largely peaceful with many leaving voluntarily.

The event struck a somber tone as many protesters hoped they could have been given a specific date in which to exit the park on their own.

“I would have like to have seen us do it ourselves,” protester John Ford told the Guardian. “Because there is a certain amount of respect and dignity that comes with intentionality.”

In some cases, protesters are turning to the courts to make their case that the evictions violate their free speech rights. A Suffolk Superior Court judge barred the Boston eviction in mid-November, granting the group a temporary restraining order. However on Wednesday, the judge decided against permanent protection, arguing that the park is state property with a curfew deadline and laws banning structures such as tents.

Occupy protesters in New Orleans received better news this week when a federal judge on Tuesday ruled that they could keep their camps for at least seven days in a park across from city hall, 12 hours after police forcibly removed the encampment at dawn. City officials complain that the Occupy protesters are creating a public health risk, which is costing the city over $50,000 in cleanup costs. They also say the encampment is denying access to the park for people unrelated to the movement.

US District Judge Jay Zainey scheduled a meeting Monday to determine whether or not the protesters can stay permanently.

The Occupy movement originated in New York City on Sept. 17 when several dozen demonstrators tried to pitch tents in front of the New York Stock Exchange to protest economic inequity and corporate governance. By October, similar activist movements under the Occupy banner had swelled in cities throughout the US and Canada.

The movement continues, if not just on the streets, but virally online, in classrooms and in small office spaces, where activists are planning day-to-day activities and partnering with local community organizations to provide manpower and resources for local issues ranging from unfair foreclosures to threatened cuts in union benefits and rights.

One splinter movement that is gaining momentum is Occupy Our Homes, which is aligning with local community groups, churches, and unions with Occupy activists in an effort to set up encampments outside homes under the threat of foreclosure by banks they say are profiting from wrongful evictions.

Leading the movement in California is the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment and the ReFund California Coalition, two groups that are working to stop foreclosures and arguing against what they describe as predatory mortgage lending.

At New York University, Occupy leaders are being invited into the classroom as guest speakers. Two courses planned for next semester are designed to examine the “history and politics of debt and finance,” according to the university.

Occupy Boston Shut Down

Police cleared an anti-Wall Street tent camp in Boston's financial district early on Saturday morning, arresting 47 people in one of the few remaining major U.S. cities where authorities had not yet evicted demonstrators.

Reuters,

10 December, 2011

In a mostly peaceful action, more than 100 police officers swept into the area before sunrise, when many of the campers were asleep, and sealed off the streets. Boston police said 33 men and 14 women were arrested, mostly for trespassing.

The end of the encampment in a small grassy area across from the Boston Federal Reserve Bank building and the city's main train station, came without the violence seen in some cities during the three-month protest movement, which started with Occupy Wall Street in New York.

Boston police did not wear helmets or riot gear and did not draw weapons on protesters, many of whom sat arm-in-arm. Other campers fled the scene during the raid.

At a news conference at police headquarters on Saturday, Boston Mayor Thomas Menino praised the work of the officers and restraint of the protesters during the clearing of the camp.

"In the interest of public safety ultimately we had to act," Menino said, adding the city would stop any attempt by protesters to set up camp elsewhere in the city. He said police swept in during the early morning hours because there were fewer protesters there at the time.

"This is not over, it's just changing, " Boston Police Commissioner Ed Davis said of the movement. Police will monitor a planned evening general assembly by protesters on the Boston Common, a green space of about 50 acres located in the heart of the city.

Davis said overtime costs for the police force staffing the protest over the last two months were nearing a million dollars.

Crews working to clean up the Dewey Square park will be working on the soil, putting new sod on the grassy patches and repairing an irrigation system. Officials hope to have the park reopened to the public by the end of the week.

Much of the tightly-packed Occupy tent city had been dismantled before a Thursday night deadline set by Menino. The mayor had ordered the protesters to clear the camp after a judge ruled they did not have the right to occupy the square.

As dawn broke in Boston, tents, furniture and other debris were being dismantled and thrown into garbage trucks. Crews were raking, clearing debris from flower beds and power-washing graffiti from sidewalks and an adjacent building.

In a joint statement, the Massachusetts' chapters of the American Civil Liberties Union and the National Lawyers Guild said that while the encampment at Dewey Square may be gone for now, Occupy Boston protesters "successfully and peaceably deployed their First Amendment rights to spread their message."

The statement said that nearly everyone in the country has now become familiar with the Occupy movement's concern that 1 percent of citizens possess an oversized share of the nation's wealth and an ability to "act with impunity" and ignore the needs of the other 99 percent.

"Despite today's police action, no one can evict an idea," the statement said.

Outside police headquarters, about a dozen protesters stood silently and held a large white sheet painted with black letters, "We're not going anywhere."

Occupy DC Prepares for Its Valley Forge

Wired,10 December, 2011

WASHINGTON — “If this is the revolution, this is our Valley Forge,” said a doughy, middle-aged man with frazzled long brown hair.

I was shivering when we spoke at 7:30 a.m. Thursday morning — as I had been shivering for the seven previous hours. Arriving about midnight on Wednesday, I’d missed the day of cold rain that had left the Occupy DC camp somewhere between damp and drenched. Without a sleeping bag or pad (both lost in a police action a few days earlier) and in 35-degree weather, I settled into a soggy upholstered chair under a mostly dry blanket. The loose weave welcomed the wind that whipped through our flimsy yurt on the barren granite and marble of Freedom Plaza along Pennsylvania Avenue.

A fellow camper, whose tent had collapsed in the rain, was wandering the plaza in only a hospital gown and blanket that morning. He’d just returned from emergency treatment for hypothermia, and all his clothes were still wet. Scott, a volunteer from southern Maryland who describes himself as an outdoorsman, had gotten the man on a bus to the hospital the night before and also tended another man in the early stages of hypothermia.

“Last night was only a mild case of what they have coming,” Scott said. “I don’t think a lot of people are prepared to be in the elements.” Scott would know. He spends nearly every night, every season (except during rain) in a hammock outside his parents’ house. (Like many people at the camp, he lives with family and describes himself as “disabled.”)

Whether the National Park Service intends to or not, it’s refusal to try to evict the protestors is calling the Occupiers’ bluff that they will survive the winter and indefinitely beyond. The fate of the DC occupations — it has two, not always amicable, camps — is growing more important as they attract a diaspora from cleared encampments around the country.

And the situation is growing crucial as many earnest, but unfocused, activists try to get their shit together. A general assembly can dicker and drift about visions and policy goals. But, it can’t space out on winter survival.

Like Philly and other occupations that differed from the class-divided Zuccotti, DC integrates the bottom of the 99 Percent — the mentally ill, recovering felons, substance abusers and homeless — in many cases, the same person. (“I’m going to see if I can find an AA meeting. There’s usually one at noon,” I heard a tall, young man say on the plaza.) But these people, directionless for so much of their lives, may be the ones to pull things together.

Loraine is a tireless custodian of Freedom Plaza. Eschewing a coat or sweater in favor of just a V-neck T-shirt (to keep her other clothes from getting wet), she scrubbed dishes for at least an hour outside in the bitter cold Thursday morning. Later she scoured the camp with a broom and dustpan.

At 37 years old, but looking a decade older, she’s struggled, often futilely, to pull her life together. Having dropped out of school due to student-loan problems, she later spent time in jail and suffered mental illness (she didn’t explain the circumstances).

“I had a lot of bad stuff happen,” mainly in her native Mississippi, she said. “There ain’t no such thing as a second-chance program.” Lorain lost custody of her five children. She is determined to get on her feet — with a home and a job — and be with them again.

Often derided (with justification) as an aimless movement, Occupy has in fact given Loraine her focus. Until now, she’s struggled on her own (she’s been homeless off-and-on in DC since April 2010). “So now, I get to join with the whole world.”

The same is true for James, a convicted felon who “about took someone’s life” and spent 17 years in prison. He now runs intake for the Freedom Plaza camp — requiring newcomers to commit to nonviolence and other principles, for example. “I don’t want to sleep next to you in a tent if you don’t take a vow to be nonviolent,” he said.

Coming from a former gangbanger, the admonition to stay in line has a lot more weight than from a young, untested idealist. The rough characters of Freedom Plaza might be hard to connect with at first, but they are perhaps the best to have your back.

Another is a man who goes by Joe. A five-year Navy veteran of the first Gulf War, he now avoids and maybe even fears the military. When I tried to take his picture, he at first demurred due to vanity. Later he confessed that it was to protect his family. Joe’s brother is in Army intelligence, and being connected to an occupy radical could be a liability for both of them.

“I don’t know what kind of subversive list they are going to put us on three years from now,” Joe said.

But Joe is putting his military training to work prepping for winter. The camp has three military–grade tents designed for extreme cold. The occupiers can’t hammer tent spikes into the plaza to secure them. Joe has rigged up a simple system, using 55-gallon drums of water, to weigh down each corner of the tent. (He’s thinking of patenting it to use in tent cities for refugees.) The Park Service, which shouldn’t even be allowing tents of any sort, gave the go-ahead when Joe proved that they could withstand winds of a highly improbable 100 miles per hour.

At 9 am on Thursday he told me he had to make a quick run to Home Depot and then would be assembling the tent by 11. At 12:30 he was stomping around the plaza, cursing about the friend with a pickup truck who still hadn’t shown. “I’ve got dollars, and I’m just waiting on nickels,” he said. In a loose, volunteer movement, one flake can stop progress dead.

Further north at McPherson Park, the ambitions were far bigger, the success far smaller.

Already pushing the rules by camping in tents for the long term, their general assembly decided (at least some would say) to build a massive 17-foot-tall, 24-by-24-foot wooden building, since nicknamed The Barn. Assembled rapidly from pre-fab sections in the middle of Saturday night, it would have been a brilliant structure to keep up to a hundred people warm during GA meetings, meals and rough weather. And it was impossible to get away with, as most of them knew.

Instead, it was first a cause for a party. Benjamin Faure, often the hipster comic of the bunch, kept proclaiming the barn to be “The Christmas Miracle.” A woman screamed that the building made her horny.

After the police ordered it dismantled on Sunday, the barn became an trigger for a public fight with the until-then frustratingly accommodating authorities. It’s hard to protest if there is no one to fight.

But other occupiers saw the standoff as betrayal of the GA. 

They’d voted for the barn thinking it could really work. Built in segments, is could technically be dismantled, maybe qualifying it as an allowed temporary structure. And after the police said it could never stand, several people argued for dismantling it and saving the $1,400 of wood they had approved to buy.

One occupier, Darrell, said that the notes from the GA meeting had mysteriously gone missing. “I feel like I’m in George Orwell,” he said.

It’s maybe not surprising that the pragmatists at McPherson were comprised of many of the homeless members in the camp, or at least those who chose a homeless life by sleeping in the park every night. Dismissing the GA as a meeting for outsiders, one man said, “The sleepers [residents] have our own meetings.”

Post-barn, the plans are pretty modest. (Work in the winterizing team slacked off after unseasonably warm weather arrived, someone said.) They are soliciting donations of warm socks, thermal underwear, “zero-degree” sleeping bags, chemical-activated foot and hand warmers. Construction is limited to flinging giant tarps over multiple tents to consolidate the heat the people in each tent emit. They are also putting tents up on wooden pallets. But Joe from the other camp warns that a pallet, without enclosures around the sides, is simply a shelter for rats seeking food left in tents.

Rumors are kicking around about building smaller wood structures that are easier to move and dismantle, but the appetite for building may have waned. Nate, a carpenter and member of the McPherson camp, said, “I’m not wasting my time and my effort on that.”

When it comes to the Washington occupation, and maybe all of Occupy as a whole, the question isn’t just will it survive, but if it does, what version of it will — the serious political stance, the playful attention-getter or the real-world homeless community? It’s not yet certain that all of them can work together.

Rumors are kicking around about building smaller wood structures that are easier to move and dismantle, but the appetite for building may have waned. Nate, a carpenter and member of the McPherson camp, said, “I’m not wasting my time and my effort on that.”

When it comes to the Washington occupation, and maybe all of Occupy as a whole, the question isn’t just will it survive, but if it does, what version of it will — the serious political stance, the playful attention-getter or the real-world homeless community? It’s not yet certain that all of them can work together.