Monday, April 30, 2012

Occupy Santa Cruz Passes Resolution of Support for Santa Cruz Eleven

OCCUPY SANTA CRUZ

RESOLUTION OF SUPPORT

WHEREAS, Occupy Santa Cruz believes that all of the defendants charged in the River Street action are journalists, members of our local press, and activists committed to the Occupy Movement, and particularly Occupy Santa Cruz, and

WHEREAS, Occupy Santa Cruz believes that the constitutionally guaranteed rights to freedom of speech and peaceful assembly may not be abridged by governmental fiat, and

WHEREAS, Occupy Santa Cruz believes that civil liberties are being broadly threatened by the continuing prosecution of these cases, and

WHEREAS, Occupy Santa Cruz believes that the criminal offenses prosecuted by our local District Attorney are over broad and overreaching in consideration of the facts, and

WHEREAS Occupy Santa Cruz believes that these defendants are being selectively prosecuted in a manner directly related to the existing adversarial relationship several of these defendants have with local police, past and present civic officials and the District Attorney's office, and

WHEREAS Occupy Santa Cruz believes that the Constitution of the United States of America and simple social justice require that the enormous power of government be exercised fairly and even handedly, and not be based on the identity or past actions of the defendants, and

WHEREAS Occupy Santa Cruz believes that these defendants posed no threat to public order or private property by their actions either as chroniclers of the events or as supporters of the River Street action,

BE IT HEREBY RESOLVED THAT Occupy Santa Cruz calls for the immediate dismissal of all charges presently lodged against the eleven River Street defendants and further calls for an end to all further prosecutions based upon any and all participation by any member of our community in the River Street action.

RESOLVED THIS 29^TH DAY OF APRIL, 2012 IN SANTA CRUZ, CALIFORNIA

New York Holding Occupiers Illegally Shot Down In Court

from the Law Offices of Rankin and Taylor:

Demonstrators Request Injunction Restricting NYPD’s Use of Metal Barricades

Posted on 27. Apr, 2012 by

NEW YORK (April 30, 2012) – Today, Occupy-affiliated demonstrators who were illegally held for two hours against their will on November 30, 2011 inside a pen built of interlocking metal barricades filed a civil rights action in federal court. The group is represented by the law firms of Rankin & Taylor and Beldock Levine & Hoffman. In addition to damages, the group seeks an injunction on behalf of all demonstrators in New York City that would prohibit similar Police tactics.

“We came to express our views at a place where the President might see us, and were detained for hours as if we had committed a crime,” said John Rivera, one of the class action plaintiffs, who was a member of the Civil Service Employees Association, a prominent New York Union, for 20 years and is a Bushwick, Brooklyn resident. Mr. Rivera has been demonstrating in New York City since the 1980s. His first political action was protesting the Soviet Embassy after the shooting of an American soldier in Germany. He says he has never experienced a detention like this one.

“We were demonstrating

peacefully and then with

no warning we were detained

for hours,” from Jonathan Jetter,

a plaintiff, professor, and the

owner of a Manhattan-based music

business. “We were denied access

to legal representation and

the press. I’ve taken part in

many protests and this was

the most chilling police

response I’ve yet encountered...”

“What happened to me, and my fellow protesters, was an eye opener. We were corralled like farm animals.” Mr. Rivera had been spending time in Liberty Park since September 19, 2011.

Though the New York Civil Liberties Union was successful in getting the NYPD to agree to restrictions on the use of barricades in 2008, the current suit alleges that the police department has violated those guidelines as well as the US Constitution.

“Under Commissioner Kelly the NYPD has considered itself above any restrictions when it comes to political protests, even restrictions it agrees to in front of a federal judge. We will look for judicial oversight of these tactics in order to defend New Yorker’s rights,” said attorney Mark Taylor.

“We were demonstrating peacefully and then with no warning we were detained for hours,” describes Jonathan Jetter, another of the plaintiffs, who is a professor at the State University of New York at Purchase and the owner of a midtown Manhattan-based music business. “We were denied access to legal representation and the press. I’ve taken part in many protests and this was the most chilling police response I’ve yet encountered,” he continued. Mr. Jetter lives in Queens.

“This felt like an attempt to scare us from participating in future protests,” explained Phoebe Berg of Brooklyn, another class representative. “I hate the fact that I can’t help but take into account the real possibility of being detained again, not allowed access to a water/food or a restroom for possibly hours, during the May Day General Strike and other future actions.”

# # # #

For a video of the events of November 30, 2011, go to:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_hCTVwTLT3o

Press coverage of the events of November 30, 2011:Josh Harkinson, They’re Holding Us Hostage, MOTHER JONES (Dec. 1, 2011), available at http://motherjones.com/mojo/2011/11/occupy-wall-street-free-speech-zones-obama-protest- video

Matt Flegenheimer, Occupy Protestors Mobilize for Obama’s Visit, N.Y. TIMES CITY ROOM BLOG (Nov. 30, 2011), available athttp://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/30/ occupy-protesters-mobilize-for-obamas-visit

Joe Pompeo, Reporters Covering Occupy Wall Street Protest Outside Obama Fund-Raiser Say Police Barred Them, CAPITAL NEW YORK (Dec. 1, 2011), available athttp://www.capitalnewyork.com/article/media/2011/12/4378810/reporters-covering-occupy- wall-street-protest-outside-obama-fund-raise

John Del Signore, Protestors Blast ‘One Percent President’ Obama During $2.4M Visit to NYC, GOTHAMIST (Dec. 1, 2011), available at http://gothamist.com/2011/ 12/01/protesters_blast_one_percent_presid.php

Press Contact:Mark Taylor
Rankin & Taylor, PLLC
mark@drmtlaw.com

barricades, demonstrators, First Amendment, NYPD

Friday, April 27, 2012

Judge: "No Evidence..." Against the Santa Cruz Eleven

Becky Johnson's fine photo of me, after court last Wednesday. For the so-far most cogent article on the Santa Cruz Eleven Legal Trials, see her blog, One Woman Talking, at Blogspot.com.

Thursday, April 26, 2012

Santa Cruz Sentinel

Judge Paul Burdick dismisses charges against four defendants accused in 75 River Street Occupation

By Jessica M. Pasko - Santa Cruz Sentinel

Posted: 04/25/2012 10:57:20 AM PDT

Click photo to enlarge

Charges against Franklin Cruz Alcantara are dismissed in the Occupy... (Dan Coyro/Sentinel file)

SANTA CRUZ - A judge has dismissed the charges against four of the 11 people charged in connection with the takeover of a former bank last year.

Judge Paul Burdick said Wednesday that evidence was lacking to hold Franklin Alcantara, Grant Wilson, Edward Rector and Cameron Laurendau on charges of felony conspiracy, felony vandalism and misdemeanor trespass.

The four were charged in connection with the takeover of a vacant Wells Fargo bank on River Street in late November and early December. In that case, a number of people, acting anonymously but in solidarity with Occupy Santa Cruz, entered the building at 75 River St. and remained there for nearly 72 hours before leaving peacefully after numerous police negotiations. The group said they wanted to turn the empty building into a community center.

"There's no evidence to establish that any of these four defendants knew someone who later committed trespass intended to do so," Burdick said to Assistant District Attorney Rebekah Young. "You're painting with too broad a brush."
Young said she was relying on an aiding and abetting theory in prosecuting the case, but Burdick said there hadn't been sufficient evidence shown.

Still, he said, "I'm not condoning the conduct that occurred at 75 River St."

Jamyrson Pittori, the attorney who represented Rector, said her client was "a curious kid" who'd been drawn to the occupied building by the crowd, and wasn't a criminal. She agreed with Burdick's assessment that the prosecution was painting with too broad a brush.

"The costs to the taxpayers for prosecution of this case far exceeds the damages sustained by Wells Fargo," said Pittori. "Property crimes are bad, but attempting to prosecute more than 100 people, most of whom had nothing to do with it, is unconscionable."

Rector, Laurendau, Wilson and Alcantara hugged friends and family outside the courtroom, while supporters congratulated them on the dismissal.

Two other defendants, Bradley Allen and Alex Darocy, face trial next month on charges of trespassing and conspiracy. Their attorneys argue that their clients are photojournalists who were acting in that capacity at the time. A preliminary hearing is still pending for the other five defendants.

Young said Wednesday she plans to refile charges against Laurendau and Alcantara.

Follow Sentinel reporter Jessica M. Pasko on Twitter @jmpasko96

Keep Occupy Alive! Keep Hope Alive!

From Mother Jones magazine

Occupy's Big Stakes on May Day: Relevance

How can the protest movement survive? Make friends and "be a thousand-ring circus."

—By Josh Harkinson

| Thu Apr. 26, 2012 3:00 AM PDT

Occupy The Bridge

On the first of May, the Occupy Wall Street movement hopes to leverage the labor holiday known as May Day and muster enough people power to blockade the Golden Gate Bridge—assuming, that is, that striking bridge workers take the lead. "We can't do an action for them; we have to do the actionwith them," says Lauren Smith, a spokeswoman for Occupy Oakland. An union organizer for the bridge workers had no comment on their plans, but alluded to something big: "Our actions are going to speak louder than words."

While the presumptive bridge protest is just one among dozens of demonstrations being planned for 40 cities on May 1, it illustrates how the movement is simultaneously getting bolder and more strategic in its bid to remain a relevant part of the national conversation.Occupy organizers promise that Tuesday will be bigger than anything we saw from the movement last fall. "May Day will be the big kickoff of Phase 2 of Occupy," says Marissa Holmes, an early OWS organizer. "I think we will see a lot of people in the streets taking more militant actions than they had in the past." But bringing out the numbers—and rebooting a movement that has largely faded from the headlines—will require a greater level of partnership with organized labor and kindred protest movements.

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May Day, or International Workers Day, is a national holiday in many parts of Asia, Europe, and Latin America, but it hasn't been observed in the United States for years due to its historical association with the Communist Party. The exception was 2006, when hundreds of thousands of low-wage workers joined "A Day Without Immigrants," a one-day boycott of schools and businesses to protest US immigration policies.

Los Angeles was the epicenter of those protests, and it was that city's Occupy activists who first suggested reviving May Day—this time with a call for a general strike. The major Occupy groups have endorsed the plan, though national labor unions haven't—a symptom of their political cautiousness but also the prevalence of labor contracts that contain "no strike" clauses.

I spoke with some academics who question whether a general strike (which Occupy Oakland attempted last fall), or a bridge shutdown (which was tried in New York), make much sense for the movement at this stage. "Tactics don't remain effective—and especially when you are dealing with a huge issue like they are," says Michael Kazin, a Georgetown University professor who studies social movements.

"Occupy needs to play a part in electoral politics, it needs to work outside electoral politics, it needs to be a thousand-ring circus," says author Todd Gitlin.

In Kazin's view, the closest historical precedent to Occupy is the anti-monopoly movement of the late 19th century, when socialists, anarchists, and populist reformers united to bust the trusts. Much as Occupy has embraced social media and live-streaming, the anti-monopolists published hundreds of independent newspapers. But, Kazin adds, they also worked to elect sympathetic politicians. "I think history teaches that when people to the left of liberals are able to advance is when you have people who at least talk about reform in power," he says.

"Occupy needs to play a part in electoral politics, it needs to work outside electoral politics, it needs to be a thousand-ring circus," says Columbia University journalism professor Todd Gitlin, a 1960s-era president of Students for a Democratic Society and author of the forthcoming book Occupy Nation. (Gitlin has also written for Mother Jones.) He worries that occupiers are overly paranoid about being co-opted by would-be allies in the political realm. For example,Adbusters, the magazine whose call for protest sparked Occupy Wall Street, recently blamedthe 99% Spring—an activist training effort led by groups like MoveOn.org and the Service Employees International Union (SEIU)—for "the derailment of our movement." (Click here to read my piece on the 99% Spring, in which I attended one of the training sessions.)

May Day could help mend those divides, as planning coalitions featuring dozens of labor, community, and immigrant-rights groups—including many 99% Spring organizers—have popped up in major cities. Holmes expects tens of thousands of people to turn out in New York City, where planning for May Day has been a major focus of Occupy this year. But that's a drop in the bucket compared to the 500,000 residents and immigration activists who marched through downtown Los Angeles in March 2006, drawn by LA media personalities such as syndicated radio host Eddie "Piolín" Sotelo, who has not publicized this year's protests.

"I think one way it gets bigger is that people understand how broad the reach of these banks and companies is," says Stephen Lerner, an executive board member with the SEIU. Wells Fargo mutual funds, for instance, invest millions of dollars in the GEO Group and Corrections Corporation of America, private prison firms that profit from detaining immigrants. And Bank of America has been a major financier of coal-fired power plants—though new ones may be a thing of the past. Lerner hopes that May Day helps people realize that "the same forces run everything, and we can join forces in targeting them."

Of course, not everybody agrees on how to do that. Take the Golden Gate Bridge occupation, which would nominally be in support of 375 bridge mechanics, ferry captains, and bus drivers who face a steep increase in health care costs: "Obviously, it is an incredible action, the whole idea of it," argues Occupy Oakland's Smith. Gitlin, the former SDS president, worries that blocking the bridge might incite road rage against the protesters. And then there's the man the Washington Post calls "arguably the most influential living historian of American labor," UC-Santa Barbara's Nelson Lichtenstein. "I guess I would say, sitting in my armchair here at age 67, that yeah, I hope they do shut down the bridge," Lichtenstein says. "The liberals and the Obama-ites and whoever else, they are looking for a sense that this chronic recession is generating a sense of crisis."

Whatever happens on the bridge, it represents an evolution for Occupy Oakland, one of the most energetic but least disciplined Occupy chapters. Since January, when confrontational protests in Oakland led to 400 arrests, the Occupy group has held BBQs and street cleanups in city neighborhoods to rebuild trust. Smith wants the bridge occupation to send a clearer message than past protests. "The reason we are being a little more cautious," she says, "is we want to prevent the waters from being murky this time."

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Linda's Hearth Indulgence: A MentalScape

Writing And Talking and Using Words, Sustaining Our Social Being

I am a writer, tho' more often barren than dancing in the glen with Muses who favor me, or with saintly channeled visions, these days. It's just one of the reasons I think about language and words. I like to play in the sand castles of our shared chat. It takes me an effort, a whole discipline, to mentally step beyond the sandbox or the shoreline to hear -- and share -- more distant drummers' singing. Maybe I can experiment with putting words to wordless or abandoned thoughts?

I produce this blog, this scrapbook partly to remind myself about hearth,threshold, the well; the place, structure, capacity for life that folds so sleekly between personal and social. Domesticity as spiritual necessity and as buffering for the inevitable schizophrenia stalking us between inside life and outside life.

I. BEYOND WORDS

When I lose my language grip altogether, and am finally ready to "recover", I return to France's great actor and writer Antonin Artaud.

When I can't cheer myself up or find safe ways to get lost in internal passions, I reach for Louise Hay, once a lifesaving gift from my daughter. A little Will Rogers can help, too.

When I start feeling as tho' I know what I believe or where I belong, I make myself read something thoughtful and intelligible which I disagree with ~ never easy for me, yet necessary for my 'mental health', should I care to be around other humans. These are three mere "steps", and the steps significant choices.

A great part of my nature, perhaps essence, ascribes to dealing with life in words and language, to engage socially and strive for general transparency. But it is not a necessary part; one can also commune with plants and trees, with or without a "green thumb," and still be perfectly, humanly, effectively, whole. And still be "sane", regardless what others believe. Ultimately, it is our choice -- each one of us, AND all of us together -- choosing to live in social human groupings, even sometimes 'subhuman groups' as in Haiti right now because of our shared neglect.

We are taught social engagement denotes a level of maturity. I choose to believe it illistrates a particular facet or realm of maturity rather than a necessary rung or hierarchal tier.

Seems sometimes we can feel so pushed into being a socially engaged human, and it can seem so utterly enforced, coerced, pre-ordained. Such a state comes to feel not authentic or not of our co-creating? Then we may cease to thrive, then begin to die. There are so many "preset" agreements and conditions for social engagement we may even forget we are also Earthlings, we are animals too, we belong to Grandfather Fish and Grandmother Herb as much as any ancestors. and we ultimately belong to The Eternal.

Spiritually, this human realm does not really have to be "Hotel California." We CAN check out from social conscription systems; we can step out of role bondage and economies. (Well, almost. I couldn't do it if I were a nursing mother unless wealthy enough to have a beloved wet nurse handy. I may be wrong tho'?) I understand that the incredible doctor Carl Jung did exactly this -- step out of language and it's precepts -- at the end of his days?

And it turns out, often the consequences are not as difficult, not as obscene or risky as we are taught to expect, less painful than a hangover or consecutive bad dreams.

II. When words spook you, SPOOK THEM BACK!

Wrestle with them as tho' they have their own mouths, own elbows, own angst. I need to overcome my very "excellent" proofreading learned skills (when not on FB or sugar obviously) in order to regain my sense of the flavorous, melodious, sometimes multiple dimensionality of the "small" words we all use. Journalistic proofreading is all about efficiency. "Efficiency" is kinda like "housekeeping" in a way.

Yet when "I am" a writer, I don't want to be building composites. I want to be painting with watercolor words, igniting firecracker words, lisening for bird-whispers-downwind words. As if words were architecture, I want to be creating Falling Waters or the beauty of a red-n-yellow Japanese Maple tree, more often than 'Pleasantville' or tv's "The Honeymooners".