Thank you for the writeup, pandoraeloeste! I couldn't be there, and I'm grateful for the recap.
Holy class divide, Batman. The difference between our reception in Fruitvale and North Oakland (the area that the anti-gentrification group was picketing) is like night and day. People in Fruitvale honked and cheered. People in North Oakland shouted at protesters to get out of their city. Recognition and excitement versus fear and anger. There's probably something profound about the relative levels of privilege in rich and poor areas of the city, who benefits the most from the system as it stands now, and who has the most to gain/the most to lose from the sort of radical solutions that come out of Occupy. Oh, yes. I live in North Oakland, near the Piedmont border. If public transit here were a little better, I'd say an Occupation here could do a hell of a lot of good, though it would not meet with the enthusiasm it would in Fruitvale. This is where the money in Oakland is concentrated (well, okay, the banks and Clorox could make that claim
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I think a lot of the wind got taken out of the sails of the labor solidarity side of May Day when the Golden Gate Bridge Labor Coalition decided to call off its action. A lot of time and energy went towards planning the bridge shutdown, and we didn't have anything in place to redirect that energy to. (There were some shady stuff leading up to that. I know what they told us at GA - that OO had agreed to be involved on the conditions that they would have input in the logistics of it and would get support from the other stakeholders involved (outreach on behalf of the action, not being maligned to the press, etc), and those conditions weren't met - but that can't be the whole story, because there were other non-OO GGBLC actions planned that fell through quite suddenly. I would love to have been a fly on the wall when this stuff was decided.) We had time built into the day where (ideally) people would go and do autonomous actions, some of which could have been labor solidarity-related, but nobody did them. How do you plan a good action
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Holy class divide, Batman. The difference between our reception in Fruitvale and North Oakland (the area that the anti-gentrification group was picketing) is like night and day. People in Fruitvale honked and cheered. People in North Oakland shouted at protesters to get out of their city. Recognition and excitement versus fear and anger. There's probably something profound about the relative levels of privilege in rich and poor areas of the city, who benefits the most from the system as it stands now, and who has the most to gain/the most to lose from the sort of radical solutions that come out of Occupy.
Oh, yes. I live in North Oakland, near the Piedmont border. If public transit here were a little better, I'd say an Occupation here could do a hell of a lot of good, though it would not meet with the enthusiasm it would in Fruitvale. This is where the money in Oakland is concentrated (well, okay, the banks and Clorox could make that claim ( ... )
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