Wall Street Protest Raw footage from last night, 12/1/2011, at Justin Herman Plaza where the SFPD attacked the peaceful members of Occupy San Francisco. Try as the 1% might, they cannot stop the spirit of the Occupy Wall Street Protest.
Dec
02
2 Occupy SF protesters arrested in scuffles
Two Occupy San Francisco protesters were arrested Thursday in separate scuffles with police after city officials had told them earlier they had to pack up their tents in the financial district and move to a new site provided by the city by Thursday.
One protester was arrested when officers saw him crouching with a laser as police moved in around 5:00 p.m. to place metal barricades around the encampment, said police Sgt. Michael Andraychak.
The protester, who has not been identified, was arrested on suspicion of making felony threats and possession of a prohibited weapon, Andraychak said.
A second protester was arrested around 6:30 p.m. when he tried to punch an officer. Andraychak did not have additional details about the arrest.
Occupy San Francisco members had been bracing for a possible raid earlier Thursday, but protesters felt confident police would not raid their encampment late Thursday or early Friday, said Katt Hoban, a member of the Occupy Wall Street Protest communications team.
“The mood is joyful, we feel stronger, we feel more unified, we feel empowered,” said Hoban.
Earlier, a dozen of the approximately 150 tents had been disassembled by noon, including the medical tent and one used for a makeshift kitchen. Tensions were high among those determined to remain at the public square across from the Ferry Building.
The Occupy SF movement has been based in Justin Herman Plaza since Sept. 17, but public health officials say the encampment is a public health nuisance.
The city has offered to move the participants to an abandoned school in the Mission district. That would give them a parking lot to maintain their camping culture, a classroom for their meetings and two bathrooms.
The city has taken out a six-month lease on the property and offered to send city trucks Thursday to help the occupiers move to the new location.
But some occupiers don’t like the deal, saying it’s in an isolated neighborhood and the move would be a violation of their freedom of speech and assembly. They don’t like the city’s ban on children and pets at the Mission location.
Dec
01
Occupy L.A.: 30 tons of debris left behind at City Hall tent city
Sanitation officials said Wednesday that they expect to haul away 30 tons of debris from the WallStreet Protest Occupy L.A. encampment –- everything from clothing to heaps of garbage to oddball curiosities left behind by the protesters who lived at the City Hall tent city for two months.
Andrea Alarcon, president of the city Public Works board, said workers already have removed 25 tons of belongings from the City Hall park, all of it heading straight to a landfill.
Sanitation crews also have vacuumed up about 3,000 gallons of water that had washed into a catch basin in recent days and are testing it for hazardous materials, she said.
The sheer volume of personal belongings left behind after the early morning Los Angeles Police Department raid has astonished city workers: books and CDs, luggage and boom boxes, mattresses and dining chairs, cellphones, electric razors, a small red guitar with its neck snapped –- all surrounded by dozens of collapsed and empty tents.
A steady flow of people stopped by the park Wednesday to take photos and video and watch workers in white hazmat suits rake trash into neat piles.
As workers broke down tents and placed them in trash cans, Ramir Delgado, 25, snapped photos out of curiosity.
“It’s a shame how I see all trash around here,” he said. He pointed to his head. “People don’t understand that the freedom starts here in your mind.”
Delgado said he was disappointed in Occupy L.A. “You know why this is filthy and not clean is there isn’t leadership,” he said.
A few feet away, crews in the hazmat suits raked trash of discarded protest signs, nail polish and jars of peanut butter.
“This looks like pure anarchy,” Delgado said, adding, “in a Hollywood way.”
Donna Spurgeon, who snapped pictures on her phone, said she was surprised by the mural in the center of the south lawn.
“How did that get built” she asked of the structure that city officials built around an historic fountain, a structure protesters turned into an art piece.
“If you’re here to protest, don’t deface public property,” Spurgeon said.
She said the aftermath looked like a “little war zone, a little ghetto.”
Norman Schwartz, 76, a retired attorney from Calabasas, felt differently. He stopped by Wednesday afternoon to snap photos and suggested that the Occupy L.A. scene was a great lesson in democracy. He said he was sad to see the park so empty.
“There was no longer this wonderful thing going on,” he said. “It was just an empty, dirty park.”
Dec
01
Police take down Occupy LA camp, arrest nearly 300
Police in riot gear and biohazard suits removed anti-WallStreet Protest activists from their camp at Los Angeles City Hall on Wednesday, arresting nearly 300 people and fencing off the area.
On the East Coast, about 100 Occupy WallStreet protesters in Philadelphia swiftly and peacefully vacated their encampment overnight, but police later arrested 52 around the city on charges ranging from obstructing a highway to assaulting a police officer, officials said.
In Los Angeles, some 1,400 police officers brought in on buses surrounded the Occupy LA camp after midnight and declared protesters congregated on the lawn, sidewalks and streets around City Hall to be an unlawful assembly, ordering them to disperse or face arrest in line with an eviction order from the mayor.
The Los Angeles encampment, which officials had allowed to remain even as other cities moved in to clear out similar compounds, had been among the largest on the West Coast aligned with a 2-month-old Occupy WallStreet Protest movement against economic inequality and alleged excesses of the U.S. financial system.
Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa had originally welcomed the protesters, even supplying them with ponchos for rainy weather. But as city officials complained of crime, sanitation problems and property damage he decided the group had to go.
Villaraigosa initially set an eviction deadline for 12:01 a.m. Monday but city officials held off on enforcing it for 48 hours in the hope protesters would drift away on their own.
The strategy appeared to pay off, with police avoiding the use of tear gas or pepper spray that marked evictions of protesters in Oakland and other cities. Aside from minor initial scuffles, the crowd was boisterous but mostly peaceful and the bulk of the operation was done before dawn.
“I couldn’t be prouder of what I believe is maybe the finest moment in the history of the Los Angeles Police Department,” Villaraigosa told reporters. He said there were no major injuries to police or protesters.
PROTESTERS PULLED FROM TREES
Police swept into the park overnight as the raid began in earnest, arresting anyone who refused to leave and dismantling the camp. Tents were pulled down and flattened after police peeked inside each one with a flashlight.
Some protesters took refuge in tree houses but were ultimately removed by officers using platform lifts. Once the park was cleared of stragglers, workers erected fences and said they would rehabilitate debris-strewn grounds whose landscaping was ravaged by campers.
Los Angeles police Sergeant Mitzi Fierro said 292 people were arrested, all but two of those for failure to disperse. One person was arrested for interfering with police and another accused of battery on an officer.
Lieutenant Andy Neiman said before the operation that some protesters had been reported to be storing human waste at the site for unknown reasons. He later said police entering the camp had encountered “a horrible stench.”
Fireworks were set off as the crowd grew steadily more raucous before police arrived. Many protesters chanted, “Move your feet, Occupy the street!”
Protester Anthony Candelaria, 21, a Los Angeles college student among the crowd gathered at City Hall, said before the raid began that he planned to “hold the fort down until they drag us out by our feet.”
In Philadelphia, demonstrators left their camp in a plaza outside City Hall without incident shortly after 1 a.m., but confrontations erupted a short time later at four different locations and resulted in arrests.
Philadelphia police said 52 people were arrested on various charges including obstructing a highway, conspiracy and failure to disperse at a busy intersection. One person was charged with aggravated assault on a police officer.
In San Francisco, Mayor Ed Lee has offered anti-WallStreet Protest activists occupying a park in the city’s financial district an alternate location for their camp. But the group ultimately rejected the offer, which had included land for pitching tents and a building with restrooms.
The mayor has promised to find a shelter for homeless people who had taken up residence at City Hall and were estimated to account for at least a third of the camp.
Nov
25
Occupy Apple Pie: Video from the WallStreet Protest Thanksgiving
Occupy WallStreet Protest movements around US have celebrated Thanksgiving holiday at makeshift encampments. In New York, Occupy WallStreet Protest organizers have been handing out thousands of Thanksgiving meals at Zuccotti Park, where the protest movement began on Sept. 17 before spreading nationwide.
Nov
23
December 6: Occupy Wall Street Goes Home
December 6 will be a big day of action for the Occupy WallStreet Protest movement. The WallStreet Protest will join the struggle of families and communities that have been on the front lines of a struggle for economic justice. We will stand in solidarity and ask our fellow WallStreet Protest locations to join us for a national day of action on the foreclosure crisis. We are fighting Wall Street’s reach on every block, every farm, every house in America with sit-ins at foreclosed properties to right this moral injustice.
The Occupy WallStreet Protest movement is born of the simple belief that humanity could meet our common needs if not for the predation and greed of the very few. Nowhere is this disparity of wealth and power more evident than in the struggle to secure the human right to housing.
In a nation that puts the right to housing at the center of its founding dream, millions of people have lost their homes or fear that they soon will because of the foreclosure crisis. Wall Street created this crisis with lies and greed. And Washington, instead of investigating Wall Street and banks, is cutting back room deals to let bankers escape justice for their crimes.
Wall Street turned a fundamental human need into a badly rigged casino game with fraudulent lending practices and corrupt securitization. They destroyed our economy, kicked tens of thousands of people illegally out of their homes, and are now using a small fraction of the money they stole to buy off politicians and settle for far less than they owe.
Spread the word regarding this release from the WallStreet Protest
Nov
11
What is a Veteran? Best Vets Day Message.
What is a Veteran? by Father Denis Edward O’Brien/USMC
Some veterans bear visible signs of their service: a missing limb, a jagged scar, a certain look in the eye.
Others may carry the evidence inside them: a pin holding a bone together, a piece of shrapnel in the leg – or perhaps another sort of inner steel: the soul’s ally forged in the refinery of adversity.
Except in parades, however, the men and women who have kept America safe wear no badge or emblem.
You can’t tell a vet just by looking.
He is the cop on the beat who spent six months in Saudi Arabia sweating two gallons a day making sure the armored personnel carriers didn’t run out of fuel.
He is the barroom loudmouth, dumber than five wooden planks, whose overgrown frat-boy behavior is outweighed a hundred times in the cosmic scales by four hours of exquisite bravery near the 38th parallel.
She – or he – is the nurse who fought against futility and went to sleep sobbing every night for two solid years in Da Nang.
He is the POW who went away one person and came back another – or didn’t come back AT ALL. He is the Quantico drill instructor who has never seen combat – but has saved countless lives by turning slouchy, no-account rednecks and gang members into Marines, and teaching them to watch each other’s backs.
He is the parade – riding Legionnaire who pins on his ribbons and medals with a prosthetic hand.
He is the career quartermaster who watches the ribbons and medals pass him by.
He is the three anonymous heroes in The Tomb Of The Unknowns, whose presence at the Arlington National Cemetery must forever preserve the memory of all the anonymous heroes whose valor dies unrecognized with them on the battlefield or in the ocean’s sunless deep.
He is the old guy bagging groceries at the supermarket – palsied now and aggravatingly slow – who helped liberate a Nazi death camp and who wishes all day long that his wife were still alive to hold him when the nightmares come.
He is an ordinary and yet an extraordinary human being – a person who offered some of his life’s most vital years in the service of his country, and who sacrificed his ambitions so others would not have to sacrifice theirs.
He is a soldier and a savior and a sword against the darkness, and he is nothing more than the finest, greatest testimony on behalf of the finest, greatest nation ever known.
So remember, each time you see someone who has served our country, just lean over and say Thank You. That’s all most people need, and in most cases it will mean more than any medals they could have been awarded or were awarded.
Two little words that mean a lot, “THANK YOU”.
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