Occupy Oakland Tries to Capture the Oakland Convention Center - Occupiers Getting Desperate
Occupy Oakland attepted to occupy the Oakland Convention Center, with grandiose plans of turning it into some sort of political-social headquarters. The Oakland Police Force disabused them of these delusions, arresting some 300 of them. Interestingly, the Occupiers are becoming more violent.
Occupy Oakland organizers had earlier vowed to take over the apparently empty downtown convention center to establish a headquarters, hoping to revitalize a movement against economic inequality that lost momentum after police cleared protest camps from cities across the country late last year.
...
"The 1 percent have all these empty buildings, and meanwhile there are all these homeless people," protester Omar Yassin said.
Like all convention centers, the Henry J. Kaiser Convetion Center
http://www.oaklandconventioncenter.com/
spends a lot of its time "empty," awaiting renters for events. It also generates a lot of money for the city when it has renters. For the city to have given it up, even temporarily, to a rioting mob would have represented a loss of potential revenues which the city cannot afford, especially given the Occupiers' taste for vandalism. This lost revenue would have meant less jobs for Oakland citizens, making more of them homeless, and would also have meant less money available for social services, including those to the homeless.
Police in riot gear moved in, firing smoke grenades, tear gas and bean-bag projectiles to drive the crowd back.
"Officers were pelted with bottles, metal pipe, rocks, spray cans, improvised explosive devices and burning flares," the Oakland Police Department said in a statement. "Oakland Police Department deployed smoke and tear gas."
Some activists, carrying shields made of plastic garbage cans and corrugated metal, tried to circumvent the police line, and surged toward police on another side of the building as more smoke canisters were fired.
Is this even remotely 'non-violent" on the part of the Occupiers? As a matter of fact, attacking people with heavy objects such as "bottles, metal pipe, rocks" is assault and battery, while using potentially lethal objects such as "improvised explosive devices and burning flares" is attempted MURDER.
What's happening is that the Occupiers are becoming more violent for three reasons. The first is that they are frustrated: they have been trying for months to achieve political ends and they are failing: Oakland refuses to yield to their tantrums. The second is that they are becoming distilled into their most fanatical elements: only the most fanatical have been willing to continue forming these mobs, especially as the streets become colder and the movement increasingly unsuccessful. The third one -- the one which the City of Oakland has some ability to influence, is that by failing to not merely ARREST the core Occupiers but to HOLD THEM and PUNISH THEM for their crimes, they are enabling the Occupiers to build a core of veterans.
What Oakland police and prosecutors should be doing is assembling video and other evidence on the worst offenders, arresting them, and then charging them not with misdemeanors but with the felonies they are committing. Then the worst of the Occupiers could be sent to the city jail, or even a state prison. Doing this would directly deprive the Occupiers of the services of these fanatics, and indirectly intimidate others into quitting the Occupy Movement.
I've personally seen this happpen. I work with three women who are more or less sympathetic to the Occupy Movement. All three of them have real jobs and lives. At the start, the oldest and smartest of them, a 62-year-old veteran of the 1960's Counterculture (the fact that she's still alive and sane tells you that she's smart) thought of attending some of the Occupier rallies to do poetry readings, but gave up on the idea because she doesn't like large unruly crowds, and I haven't heard anything about it since. Another, aged around 30, sympathizes with the Occupiers but hasn't done anything concrete with her sympathies.
The youngest, aged 22, is a self-proclaimed "quasi-socialist" who has actually gone to some of the marches -- but only the ones in the summer and early fall. She hasn't camped out with them since the weather turned cold, and the point at which she stopped attending their rallies was when things started to turn violent -- she was specifically afraid of being beaten or arrested by the police.
People may not understand the complex chains of economic causation which make the Occupiers a curse on every city they infest. But they do understand being beaten or arrested by the police. And even those more fanatical than my work-mates would get the message if some of their buddies were arrested and -- instead of being fined or given a few days -- wound up spending a year in Santa Rita or some other state correctional facility.
Yes, the specific people who were sent to prison might be radicalized. But the less radical of their supporters would fall away from the movement -- they'd still sympathize with those sent to prison, whine that they were "political prisoners," and (peacefully) protest their incarceration. But they wouldn't want to be in their shoes.
The Occupiers would thus become a smaller and smaller, more and more violent group. Eventually they'd have their "Weathermen" moment and morph into a tiny terrorist organization, which the FBI would hunt down and put into federal prisons for long stretches. Hopefully, a lot of the Occupier "Weathermen" would blow themselves up or get shot resisting arrest. And their story would thankfully be over, the damage done to American life minimal.
"Occupy Oakland has got to stop using Oakland as its playground," Mayor Jean Quan, who has come under criticism for the city's handling of the Occupy movement, said at a late evening press conference.
"Once again, a violent splinter group of the Occupy movement is engaging in violent actions against Oakland," she said, speaking as officers in riot gear were still lined up against demonstrators in downtown intersections.
Jean Quan gets it. Or half of it. The Occupiers are throwing a tantrum at Oakland's expense: to them this is all an exciting violent game. The Occupy movement has nothing to do with any meaningful political action (though it imagines itself to) and everything to do with yelling and smashing things.
The part she doesn't get is that it's not a "violent splinter group." It's the core. Ultimately violence -- and incompetent violence at that -- is all the Occupiers have to offer.
A group of demonstrators ultimately made their way to City Hall, where they brought out a U.S. flag and set it on fire before scattering ahead of advancing officers.
This is a good sign, believe it or not. We Americans love our flag. Groups which burn US flags are unintentionally signalling "We are not your fellow Americans, you don't have to take you seriously" to the populace at large.
The point of the Occupiers, if they have a point, is to try to influence the 2012 elections in favor of the Democrats the way the Tea Party influenced the 2010 elections in favor of the Republicans. They may have a delusion that they can intimidate the country into voting the way they want, but this will boomerang, because they are too weak and because so far they have only punished liberal areas with their presence. The desperation of the Occupiers, their radicalization and increasingly overt anti-Americanism and violence, means that the movement is about to implode.
This should be fun :D
Occupy Oakland organizers had earlier vowed to take over the apparently empty downtown convention center to establish a headquarters, hoping to revitalize a movement against economic inequality that lost momentum after police cleared protest camps from cities across the country late last year.
...
"The 1 percent have all these empty buildings, and meanwhile there are all these homeless people," protester Omar Yassin said.
Like all convention centers, the Henry J. Kaiser Convetion Center
http://www.oaklandconventioncenter.com/
spends a lot of its time "empty," awaiting renters for events. It also generates a lot of money for the city when it has renters. For the city to have given it up, even temporarily, to a rioting mob would have represented a loss of potential revenues which the city cannot afford, especially given the Occupiers' taste for vandalism. This lost revenue would have meant less jobs for Oakland citizens, making more of them homeless, and would also have meant less money available for social services, including those to the homeless.
Police in riot gear moved in, firing smoke grenades, tear gas and bean-bag projectiles to drive the crowd back.
"Officers were pelted with bottles, metal pipe, rocks, spray cans, improvised explosive devices and burning flares," the Oakland Police Department said in a statement. "Oakland Police Department deployed smoke and tear gas."
Some activists, carrying shields made of plastic garbage cans and corrugated metal, tried to circumvent the police line, and surged toward police on another side of the building as more smoke canisters were fired.
Is this even remotely 'non-violent" on the part of the Occupiers? As a matter of fact, attacking people with heavy objects such as "bottles, metal pipe, rocks" is assault and battery, while using potentially lethal objects such as "improvised explosive devices and burning flares" is attempted MURDER.
What's happening is that the Occupiers are becoming more violent for three reasons. The first is that they are frustrated: they have been trying for months to achieve political ends and they are failing: Oakland refuses to yield to their tantrums. The second is that they are becoming distilled into their most fanatical elements: only the most fanatical have been willing to continue forming these mobs, especially as the streets become colder and the movement increasingly unsuccessful. The third one -- the one which the City of Oakland has some ability to influence, is that by failing to not merely ARREST the core Occupiers but to HOLD THEM and PUNISH THEM for their crimes, they are enabling the Occupiers to build a core of veterans.
What Oakland police and prosecutors should be doing is assembling video and other evidence on the worst offenders, arresting them, and then charging them not with misdemeanors but with the felonies they are committing. Then the worst of the Occupiers could be sent to the city jail, or even a state prison. Doing this would directly deprive the Occupiers of the services of these fanatics, and indirectly intimidate others into quitting the Occupy Movement.
I've personally seen this happpen. I work with three women who are more or less sympathetic to the Occupy Movement. All three of them have real jobs and lives. At the start, the oldest and smartest of them, a 62-year-old veteran of the 1960's Counterculture (the fact that she's still alive and sane tells you that she's smart) thought of attending some of the Occupier rallies to do poetry readings, but gave up on the idea because she doesn't like large unruly crowds, and I haven't heard anything about it since. Another, aged around 30, sympathizes with the Occupiers but hasn't done anything concrete with her sympathies.
The youngest, aged 22, is a self-proclaimed "quasi-socialist" who has actually gone to some of the marches -- but only the ones in the summer and early fall. She hasn't camped out with them since the weather turned cold, and the point at which she stopped attending their rallies was when things started to turn violent -- she was specifically afraid of being beaten or arrested by the police.
People may not understand the complex chains of economic causation which make the Occupiers a curse on every city they infest. But they do understand being beaten or arrested by the police. And even those more fanatical than my work-mates would get the message if some of their buddies were arrested and -- instead of being fined or given a few days -- wound up spending a year in Santa Rita or some other state correctional facility.
Yes, the specific people who were sent to prison might be radicalized. But the less radical of their supporters would fall away from the movement -- they'd still sympathize with those sent to prison, whine that they were "political prisoners," and (peacefully) protest their incarceration. But they wouldn't want to be in their shoes.
The Occupiers would thus become a smaller and smaller, more and more violent group. Eventually they'd have their "Weathermen" moment and morph into a tiny terrorist organization, which the FBI would hunt down and put into federal prisons for long stretches. Hopefully, a lot of the Occupier "Weathermen" would blow themselves up or get shot resisting arrest. And their story would thankfully be over, the damage done to American life minimal.
"Occupy Oakland has got to stop using Oakland as its playground," Mayor Jean Quan, who has come under criticism for the city's handling of the Occupy movement, said at a late evening press conference.
"Once again, a violent splinter group of the Occupy movement is engaging in violent actions against Oakland," she said, speaking as officers in riot gear were still lined up against demonstrators in downtown intersections.
Jean Quan gets it. Or half of it. The Occupiers are throwing a tantrum at Oakland's expense: to them this is all an exciting violent game. The Occupy movement has nothing to do with any meaningful political action (though it imagines itself to) and everything to do with yelling and smashing things.
The part she doesn't get is that it's not a "violent splinter group." It's the core. Ultimately violence -- and incompetent violence at that -- is all the Occupiers have to offer.
A group of demonstrators ultimately made their way to City Hall, where they brought out a U.S. flag and set it on fire before scattering ahead of advancing officers.
This is a good sign, believe it or not. We Americans love our flag. Groups which burn US flags are unintentionally signalling "We are not your fellow Americans, you don't have to take you seriously" to the populace at large.
The point of the Occupiers, if they have a point, is to try to influence the 2012 elections in favor of the Democrats the way the Tea Party influenced the 2010 elections in favor of the Republicans. They may have a delusion that they can intimidate the country into voting the way they want, but this will boomerang, because they are too weak and because so far they have only punished liberal areas with their presence. The desperation of the Occupiers, their radicalization and increasingly overt anti-Americanism and violence, means that the movement is about to implode.
This should be fun :D