Occupy Portland News

[I know this is not a normal post for Alas, but I’m going to use my power as a mod to use Alas to spread the news about Occupy Portland]

As folks may know, Mayor Sam Adams has declared Saturday at midnight to be the eviction time for Occupy Portland’s camps at Chapman and Lonsdale Parks. In preparation for that, Occupy Portland is going to carry out a massive cleaning and voluntary tent dismantling program Friday and Saturday. Anyone in Portland who supports Occupy Portland, has free time Friday or Saturday, and would like to help out, please come down and join the cleaning crew.

Additionally, Occupy Portland is planning a family friendly celebratory evening of Occupation Saturday evening, so anyone who is comfortable with large crowds and who supports the occupation, please come down. From the experience of other cities, it is very hard for the police to move against thousands of people peaceably assembled. Even if you don’t want to stay past midnight, your physical support would still be greatly appreciated.

Occupy Portland has been through a rough week or two, with a few foolish and destructive people doing a variety of foolish and destructive things, and a general slide towards failing sanitation and some seriously reckless drug use (I’m not going to bother hunting up links, just google Occupy Portland, our local paper has done a stellar job of chronicling OP’s failings). We want to use this weekend to revitalize and refocus the occupation. Whether we keep the parks or not, we need to take this opportunity to clean things up and gauge community support.

I say “we”, but of course I speak for no one but myself. I am not the voice of Occupy Portland, just one active supporter amongst many.

Anyone who is not a Portlander who is reading this, please redistribute this information to anyone you know in Portland.

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16 Responses to Occupy Portland News

  1. 1
    Ian says:

    with a few foolish and destructive people doing a variety of foolish and destructive things

    I had to resign from Occupy Vancouver for that reason.

    – We’ve had excellent relations with the Vancouver Police Dept. until this week. We’ve squandered that. We created a situation where the Fire Department was duty-bound to come onsite (a First Nations Sacred Fire that was not being safely tended). When Police tried to semi-gently pull their way through the human ring protecting the fire, they received “human bite wounds.” The VPD and VFD ended up looking like they are more concerned with peacefully resolving conflict than we are.

    – It wasn’t just a few destructive people committing violence; OV’s culture has encouraged destructive behaviour. Everyone in and around the fire-defending circle was screaming their heads off at the VPD. If everyone is screaming, the least reasonable people will be kicking and biting. If everyone is calm, the least reasonable might follow their example.

    – Lesson: nonviolence is hard. Really hard. If we want to do linked arm barricades at all, we need to literally do drills every day (someone pretending to be a Police officer tugging the line apart while everyone remains motionless and silent). Training in nonviolence might be worth a try in Portland. Drill, baby, drill.

    – A further problem: gangs of people acting in the Occupy name have been disrupting mayoral debates with MIC CHECKs. In the context of a GA, a MIC CHECK silences disruptions in accordance with the consensus of the assembly, 90%+ consensus that we want to get on with things. When used by a few gatecrashers to disrupt a public meeting organised by others it’s pure thuggery. I’m honestly not sure whether or not this is being sanctioned by the Direct Action committee, or whether the DA committee would be authorized to do it without prior permission from the GA. It’s moot. Our GA is not currently capable of exercising consensus-based control over Occupy Vancouver activities. We can’t plausibly say that the gate-crashers aren’t acting in our name.

    Anyhow, because of the violence and disruptive behaviour we’ve completely alienated the allies I was trying to bring in. It seems to make more sense for me to be working from the outside at this point. I hope things are better in Portland.

    Solidarity.

  2. 2
    Radfem says:

    People are going to be cleared out by police in Inland Empire cities because they just want to clear the mall before the annual Christmas festival and having good manners or good relationships won’t change that. Just as well as this will probably be the last year our city will be able to afford the expensive event before it goes broke. In two years, if things go in the same economic direction, the police officers who break it up including SWAT will be lucky if they have jobs or paychecks in a region with the third highest devaluation of real estate properties in the country and an “official” unemployment rate of 14.5% and two dead industries, new housing and military.

    So more people will be homeless and living in public space perhaps not by choice or to make a statement. Our city has gambled most of its money away on risky forays into theater management, property management (most of downtown so property tax can’t be generated) and hotel management. Our city has greatly underserved what it promised HUD in affordable units by oh, about 14,000 them short.

    So it’s probably not going to be pretty. More arrests in already overcrowded jails since we don’t have state parole anymore for nonviolent offenders but county handles all those cases including incarceration now.

    We did participate in the education fair with our City Hall 101 workshop, financial budget reading, public records requests and similar issues and attracted good involvement including people who originally weren’t going to the fair. In part to give people in Occupy in my city a chance to get more involved in making change locally which many of them want to do rather than continue to camp out and worry about the cops who will be showing up sometime this week as soon as the permits for the festival are enacted because they have orders to follow. The festival here is the second most famous of its kind and the city leaders don’t want occupy people including homeless families on GMA.

  3. 3
    RonF says:

    Ian:

    Our GA is not currently capable of exercising consensus-based control over Occupy Vancouver activities.

    Nor will it ever. A purely democratic governing system like a GA simply doesn’t work for groups of any size. That’s why republic systems evolved for democracies. They’re not perfect, but they work better than pure democracy.

    Radfem:

    People are going to be cleared out by police in Inland Empire cities because they just want to clear the mall before the annual Christmas festival and having good manners or good relationships won’t change that.

    That’s the thing about public property; the whole public gets to use it, not just one group. Regardless of whether that one group is the Tea Party movement or OWS offshoots or a street fair. In fact, regardless of whether they’re in a group at all and just want, as an individual, to walk though the park or play frisbee. Everyone has to take their turn. The city’s job is to facilitate the use of public property by all the different people who want to use it, not to facilitate the long-term use of it by one group of people.

    In part to give people in Occupy in my city a chance to get more involved in making change locally which many of them want to do rather than continue to camp out

    Think about it. What did the Tea Party movement do? They had their rallies – and then they went home, got involved in the political process and actually effected change in local, State and Federal governments. You don’t have to favor those changes to understand that they worked.

    and worry about the cops who will be showing up sometime this week as soon as the permits for the festival are enacted because they have orders to follow.

    Entirely legitimate orders. Clearing out one group of people so that another group can use it (especially when the latter group’s activity is long-planned and properly permitted and the former group is neither) is an entirely legitimate use of governmental authority. In fact, it’s necessary.

    Our city has gambled most of its money away on risky forays into theater management, property management (most of downtown so property tax can’t be generated) and hotel management.

    All classic reasons why those kinds of things should be left to the private sector. And note how easy it is to gamble when you’re not using your own money.

  4. 4
    gin-and-whiskey says:

    It does seem that Occupy has sort of shot itself in the foot by going a bit too far left in its image.

    The underlying goals of the movement were (are!) designed to appeal to a lot of people, including the majority of the U.S. public, who is, obviously, in the 99%. But the process of the movement has been run in an ultra-liberal fashion, and so the face of the movement has also appeared to be an ultra-liberal one.**

    The fact that the various Occupy movements have become heavily associated with the fringe (rather than the middle) of the public has done a lot to insulate the government from incurring political cost when it shoves them out. Or sprays them with tear gas.

    When people hear about the police rousting Occupy, folks often think of tattooed drummers. That image issue is really difficult. It would be a lot harder to bring out the fire hoses if they were a bunch of people wearing shirts and ties, so to speak. The public has a much higher tolerance for government violence when it occurs against the “weirdos,” and unfortunately a lot of the Occupy sites have started to get that tag.

    This of course if why pure democracy runs into so many problems. Forget about the inherent conflict between those who want A and those who want B. There’s an even more pressing conflict, which is the fight between short term (“Run Occupy like we want the country to be! No leaders! No rules! Complete inclusion!”) and long term (“If we want to have the maximal long term effect then we need to make sacrifices in the short term, including how we run Occupy, and including the decision to focus on a selected politically viable group of major issues.”) Absent some leadership to choose your battles, you tend to lose on all fronts.

    **A great example of why details are important: the finger-wiggling voting scheme. There is NOTHING WRONG with the underlying process that is visualized by the hand gestures. There is NOTHING WRONG with the use of hand gestures in general as part of a voting method. And from a technical perspective, there is NOTHING WRONG with the actual gestures.

    But this is political. And damn, it sure would have been better politically if someone, somewhere, thought “wait a second; a lot of people who we are trying to reach and influence are likely to think that this looks really weird, and where people will have to get past the look just to buy in to the validity of the vote.”

  5. 5
    Charles S says:

    Saturday night in Portland was pretty peaceful. We had thousands of supporters come out in the middle of the night and at least a thousand were still there when I went home to sleep at 4:45 (I’d been there all day cleaning). Sunday was almost peaceful (and I went all day thinking it had been, as I didn’t make it downtown until after the second park clearance) but when a situation involves trained men in full body armor with long clubs, the difference between almost peaceful and peaceful is huge.

    The police reported that no officers were injured and that no one arrested was injured. That is true. It is only true because after they brutally beat Justin James Bridges as he lay face down on the ground, they didn’t bother to arrest him. Apparently he had done something so horrible that he needed to be beaten with a two handed full down swing like you’d use to split logs, but he hadn’t done anything that the police considered arrestable.

    g&w and RonF, does that look like an appropriate police response to either of you?

    In addition, after those events I was downtown during a stand-off between police in full body armor and protesters that happened at SW 4th and Main. The police there were part of the Salem police department, recognizable by the Salem Police department logo on their armor. That logo was their ONLY identifier. They had no name tags. No Badges. No identifying numbers on their helmets or armor. This was incredibly irresponsible. Police officers need to know that they will be held personally accountable for their actions. They can not operate anonymously. I was somewhat disturbed by the lack of identifiers yesterday afternoon, I am far more disturbed by it after I learned what was done to Justin James Bridges earlier in the day.

    Contact number for Portland Police Chief Reese: 503-823-0000
    Contact number for Portland Mayor Sam Adams: 503-823-4120

  6. 6
    Elusis says:

    **A great example of why details are important: the finger-wiggling voting scheme.

    What are you talking about? The gesture you’re referring to is adopted from Deaf culture as a replacement for applause. Because it’s silent, it doesn’t interfere with the “human microphone” method of transmitting speeches that many #occupy groups have had to resort to due to being barred from using amplification. It also doesn’t add to ambient noise that neighbors might complain about.

  7. 7
    Charles S says:

    In Portland, up finger wiggling and down finger wiggling are used as a substitute for applause and boos, and are used to quickly gauge mood, but we usually use single raised hands for final tallies (they are a lot easier to count in a crowd in the semi-dark).

  8. 8
    gin-and-whiskey says:

    g&w and RonF, does that look like an appropriate police response to either of you?

    Uh, no. Not in the slightest. I don’t even have to go beyond your description. There’s no reason to use any violence in that situation, or in almost any situation involving nonviolent protestors.

    You appear to have misread my post: I am firmly against police brutality in all its forms. My post was not in ANY way intended to condone police brutality whether directed towards those society considers mainstream, or those who society places on the fringe.

    In fact, I think that Occupy is a very good thing. I was simply noting–and ruing–the facts that (a) the country as a whole doesn’t really seem to care about brutality towards any fringe members; (b) the Occupy folks don’t seem to be very politically savvy and/or the uberdemocratic process doesn’t work with that sort of thing, so the movements often present as fringe; and therefore (c) the shit which is going to happen in the next few months is unlikely to get the press it deserves.

  9. 9
    Elusis says:

    Well hey Charles, why talk seriously about the substantive elements of the Occupy movement when we can just do some eye-rolling about their gestures…

  10. 10
    RonF says:

    g&w and RonF, does that look like an appropriate police response to either of you?

    I can’t speak for g&w. What I can say is that there’s insufficient context in that video to tell whether that officer you refer to was behaving appropriately or not. For all I know the guy he was whacking had a knife that he had just tried to use on the officer. Or he’d just kicked or struck the officer.

    Or not – it could have also been an out-of-control cop. I’ve been at demos and I’ve seen cops use excessive force. I saw a cop chase down a protestor into a doorway and break his leg with a baton and then take off. I’m certainly willing to believe that something similar happened here. But I can’t say it can be presumed.

    Now, you may say “O.K., for sake of argument let’s say he hit the cop. But the cop returned that with much more force. That’s unjustified.” Well, understand that there’s more people than cops. If people see one person kick a cop and get away with it with minimal police response, maybe 4 people all decide to start kicking the same cop. Now he’s in trouble. Best to make sure that nobody else gets the idea that cops can be kicked with impunity.

    I see a lot of yelling and screaming and pushing from that group of protestors. If people are told repeatedly to get out and they don’t and then they physically resist the cops when they show up with force, force is going to get used. Cops have weapons and training and they’re always going to use force more effectively than an untrained mob. If the protestors had picked up and left, or resisted passively, you’d have seen no violence on the part of the cops. But act like an angry mob and you’re going to get treated the way that cops are trained to treat an angry physically resistive mob.

  11. 11
    Eytan Zweig says:

    I am partially, at least, in agreement with G&W here. What I’m worried about is how the Occupy movement let its narrative be hijacked. Early on it was about financial inequalities. And that is something that it doesn’t take a lot of work to get people to sympathise with. All you have to do is demonstrate to them that they, too, are on the short end of the stick.

    But look at Charles’s posts above. He doesn’t mention the economy, or wall street, or anything like that. The main focus is police brutality. I have no doubt he is correct about the details of what happened. But as important as that is, that is not what the Occupy movement started out about. And it’s not something that will ever be sellable to the majority of people in the US (or any other country), because most people A – don’t have direct experience with police brutality, and B – have been brought up to side with the police in this sort of thing.

    The people who send the police against the protestors know exactly what they are doing. Either they manage to disband the protest, in which case they win. Or the protesters persist, and then media starts covering the police action – either positively or negatively, that doesn’t really matter – and the focus shifts away from any attempt to change the status quo. At worst, the occupy protest will manage to get enough public support for action against the police, but by then, the economy will be long forgotten and irrelevant. In either case, the status quo wins.

  12. 12
    Charles S says:

    I think the general strike in Oakland demonstrated that some level of police violence draws a serious response.

    I agree that news coverage of the Occupations tends to focus on police violence.

    I almost wrote this post last night, and it would have been very different. Last night I thought the eviction had been handled impressively peacefully. I had really good conversations with police on Saturday, including an officer who wanted an Occupy Portland t-shirt and talked about how even though he made a good wage he was struggling to figure out how to pay for his kids’ college education and how he felt like both political parties had abandoned the middle and working classes.

    Here in Portland, a lot of us are working on setting up neighborhood level Occupy assemblies for local people to come out and talk about how the economic collapse has affected them and what we should do about it. There are also people working on foreclosure interventions. Those have been done successfully elsewhere (including in Atlanta where Occupiers came to protect the house of a police officer who was being evicted) in a variety of forms. When we hold marches, they are mostly about economic, environmental or justice issues (some are about being allowed to protest, I think those are a waste). When one of us gets beaten or shot, we talk about that for a bit instead, but the Oakland General Strike was not simply about police brutality. Whatever OP does next will not simply be about police brutality (police brutality is a serious problem and deserves the attention it gets, but it is not the only problem or the core focus).

  13. 13
    Ian says:

    RonF, I agree that cities with more than a million people cannot be governed by direct democracy. However, it is not at all impossible for a group like Occupy Vancouver which only consists of a couple thousand people to govern itself by consensus-based direct democracy.

    Direct democracy has some advantages over representative systems. It’s really good at building trust and consensus where previously there was none. I saw the Vancouver GA debate the question of how to open an OV bank account for hours, which seems like an insane waste of time until you realize that those assembled were strangers to each other who needed to find a way to trust someone with the collective’s money.

    Direct democracy also promotes a sense of personal responsibility. If you see a need, fill it. Rally support if the problem’s too big for you to solve alone. Don’t wait for some leader to come along and fix the problem. You are the leader as far as that problem’s concerned.

  14. 14
    Robert says:

    However, it is not at all impossible for a group like Occupy Vancouver which only consists of a couple thousand people to govern itself by consensus-based direct democracy.

    Maybe. But the historical record of such groups is that they can govern themselves until a seriously divisive issue comes up, or until there is a crisis that demands prompt action. The group either falls apart, is destroyed by the crisis, or (most commonly) stays “democratic” in theory but in practice falls into the hands of a small group of actual leaders.

    This isn’t just me hating on OWS, by the way. In college I was a board member of OSCA, the food and housing co-op, which tried to run things on as direct a democratic basis as possible…in practice, we either floundered or fell in line behind the leadership. We were always tweaking the rules and the processes, and generally came out pretty darn democratic…but the more we relied on representatives and subgroups, the better the institution performed.

    I would say that the direct democracy population limit is in two digits, not four.

  15. 15
    gin-and-whiskey says:

    Elusis says:
    November 14, 2011 at 1:18 pm

    Well hey Charles, why talk seriously about the substantive elements of the Occupy movement when we can just do some eye-rolling about their gestures…

    Why? Because the process and appearance ARE SUBSTANTIVE.

    They may not seem substantive to the people who are enacting them. But they sure as fuck are substantive insofar as they are likely to have a significant effect on what (if anything) the Occupy movement is actually likely to substantively accomplish.

    Would we be a better country if folks paid attention to what people said, instead of what they looked like? Sure, maybe. But we’re not there. Dismissing political realities as unimportant is frankly a really stupid idea.

    Also, process and appearance are relatively easy to fix–not objectively easy at all, but a lot easier than “agree on and implement specific large scale changes to the US financial system” or other similar examples.

    Amp says that the appearance comments are in the “10 stupidest” objections to the Occupy movement. He’s completely and utterly wrong. I’d bet you $100 (if I had it) that i you could have had those numbers and that press and that interest WITHOUT the most radical fringes then more would get done in the long run–not because the radicals cause problems, but because the perceptions of the radicals cause problems.

  16. 16
    Eytan Zweig says:

    I’d just like to say I agree very much with everything G&W said in @15. A lot of the apparent decisions of the Occupy movement are designed to appeal to the members of the Occupy movement, at the expense of making them less relatable to those not in the movement. But the people who already believe in the movement do not need to be convinced for the movement to succeed.

    Appearances matter because appearances are the weapon with which the Occupy movement will win or lose. They’re not what the movement is about, but they are what will determine the outcome. Sure, the movement is getting noticed – but getting noticed isn’t particularly helpful if it’s polarizing the public into an “us vs. them” mentality which ends up making most people side with the financial establishment. Getting noticed is only important if you can turn this attention into a positive one. And that means caring about appearances.

    Elusis’s post is *exactly* what’s wrong with the movement, why I believe it is doomed to fail. It is the pervasive belief that substance is more important than style. That’s true, when you’re in charge, or when you have a small, localized goal that doesn’t need mass support. But Occupy wall street is fighting a battle that can be won only on the field of public opinion, and walking into this battle with the belief that your righteousness is the only weapon you need is a good way to get (metaphorically) slaughtered.