Allison Kilkenny | The Nation

Occupy Wall Street activists are preparing to travel to Tampa and Charlotte for the upcoming Republican and Democratic conventions. The group is planning to charter busloads of protesters south as part of demonstrations beginning in Tampa on August 27.

Local Occupy Tampa activists will likely remain in place through the RNC, despite efforts to move the group from a West Tampa park, ABC reports. Protesters moved to Voice of Freedom Park back in January following the city evicting the group from downtown. West Tampa park is owned by strip club mogul Joe Redner who has given the group an eviction date of September 15.

“Occupy Tampa has stood in solidarity with Occupy Wall Street since its inception, and will function as the host occupation for the Republican National Convention in Tampa, FL on August 27th–30th, 2012,” the group said in an official statement regarding the RNC, adding that ongoing preparations are being made for the convention protests, including securing sleeping arrangements for occupiers, in addition to canopies, sun screen and portable water containers for protection from the weather.

Occupy Tampa has formed a Regional General Assembly to coordinate Occupy groups throughout the bay area, including: Occupy Lakeland, Occupy St. Petersburg, Occupy Bradenton, Occupy USF, Occupy Port Richey and Occupy Sarasota.

“We have tried to plan as much as possible ahead of time, but we want to leave space open to spontaneously produce additional actions by harnessing the number of people that arrive,” the group states.

Food Not Bombs has called a World Gathering and plans to run feeding operations throughout the RNC. During the week before the RNC, chapters of Food Not Bombs from all over the world plan to convene in order to prepare to feed the flood of protesters entering the city.

“We invite everyone to come and take advantage of the preparations we have made, to help ensure that all occupiers and other supporting groups can use this moment of national attention to confront the political status-quo,” Occupy Tampa states.

Yves Smith notes police have started blocking roads and stopping and searching cars all over the neighborhood surrounding Voice of Freedom park, which is in a black, low income area.

“It’s common for raucous parties to spill out into the streets on Friday nights but all of a sudden the authorities have taken in [sic] interest in shutting them down with a huge police presence,” Smith writes.

Occupy Charlotte made a similar appeal to its supporters regarding the DNC, which kicks off in Charlotte at the beginning of September.

In a written statement, the chapter states:

“The Democratic Party has chosen this ‘Wall Street of the South’ as its rallying city despite North Carolina being one of the most anti-union states in the country and despite Charlotte being the home of several corporate criminals, most notably Bank of America, one of the mega-banks most responsible for the 2008 economic meltdown, Charlotte holds the second largest concentration of finance capital in the United States, the East Coast headquarters of Wells Fargo, the new home of human-rights offender Chiquita, and the home of Duke Energy, which recently merged with Progress Energy, making Duke the largest energy monopoly in the country.”

As perhaps part of a symbolic gesture to the Occupy movement, the Democratic National Committee recently announced it plans to pull some of its DNC-related money from Bank of America. Huffington Post notes that this could potentially be a little awkward, considering President Obama’s re-election campaign continues to use Bank of America for its banking needs.

“Both the Democratic and Republican Parties are controlled by moneyed interests and the 1%, and the Occupy Movement will hold both Parties accountable at the RNC in Tampa in August and at the DNC in Charlotte in September. We cannot allow this two-party system and its corporate puppeteers to determine our country’s destiny. While we recognize the historical significance of President Obama’s election, we will not sit idly by as the Administration favors corporations and the 1%, tramples civil liberties, and wages tragic wars,” Occupy Charlotte says in its statement, emphasizing to visitors that they are a nonviolent movement, and the Charlotte Mecklenburg Police Department has treated their chapter with respect and “vice versa.”

At least nine area countries and municipalities have restricted camping on public property so far this year, citing concerns about the Occupy Charlotte movement and potential protests tied to the DNC.

The Charlotte Observer:

Commissioners said they were not looking to curb free speech or people’s right to protest. But they did not want a repeat of last year’s Occupy Charlotte activities.

“I saw the nonsense that went on up there in Charlotte with people urinating on the lawns and some of the rif-raff that was going on, and people defecating out there,” Commissioner Jonathan Thomas said at the meeting. “These radical protest actions create a detriment to the health, safety and welfare of people, and the peace and dignity of the county.”

In an interview, Commissioner Tracy Kuehler said she “did not want to wake up one day and find a tent city on county property.”

The ordinance prohibits on county property any camping, crossing police barricades, setting fires and possession of “obstruction devices” like lock boxes, chains or handcuffs. Also banned are noxious substances such as trash, animal parts, manure, urine and feces.

The camping crackdown started in January, and included granting police more power to stop and search individuals during the convention. The city has added thousands of police from outside departments and spent millions on training, equipment and temporary barriers.

Occupy Charlotte speaks to the Charlotte City Council on the proposed new city ordinances. One individual was arrested for exceeding the three-minute speaking limit:

Police are confident the layout of the city will be their biggest asset (convention-related activities will take place in the heart of the business district, which is flat and ringed by expressways). This will, according the AP, prevent protesters from “causing trouble” in neighborhoods, a reference to the 1999 World Trade Organization protests, in which police famously chased a crowd of demonstrators into the nearby Capitol Hill neighborhood, leading to local residents who had nothing to do with the protests being swept up in the chaos.

Tampa police have also invested heavily in preparing for demonstrations during the RNC. Journalist Rania Khalek reported that the Tampa City Council recently voted on using some of the $50 million in federal grants secured by the city for the 2012 Republican National Convention for a “series of police upgrades” that will include an armored SWAT truck and a high-tech communication system.

The biggest lessons learned by authorities following the WTO protests are that containment and pre-protest neutering of activist groups (preferably via slow bureaucratic suffocation) are the quickest, most sanitized way to kill a demonstration. But if that fails, spending around $50 million on “upgrades” including buying a tank works just as well to crush uprisings.

In the past year, a series of mass protests and revolutions have swept the globe, exploding in Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, Bahrain, Yemen, Libya, Greece, Italy, Spain, the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Russia and Mexico, among other countries. The Financial Times called 2011 the "Year Of Global Indignation," while the Guardian's John Harris called comparisons made by individuals observing the modern global awakening to Paris in 1968 "not completely misplaced."

Now, political scientists in Russia are making a prediction that shouldn't come as surprising to close observers of international protests. Igor Bunin, president of the Center for Political Technologies, predicts that Russia may soon experience the rise of a radical new breed of protester.

"On the one hand, it seems to me that the protest movement will be more radical, more social, younger and more ready for direct actions," Bunin predicted.

Bunun predicts the opposition will disappear from the streets because they aspire to "real participation in the election progress."

"The spirit of the protest movement is now different from December 2011; this spirit is more of a spirit of social conflict and is more radical,” he warned. “The leaders are different, the liberal movement has become weak, while younger people – those who were born in the late 1980s – are now taking part in protests.”

Russia is currently waiting for the verdict from the Pussy Riot trial to be handed down. Three members of the feminist punk-rock collective known for staging political impromptu performances all across Moscow went on trial in Moscow two weeks ago. Most recently, the group held an anti-Vladmir Putin demonstration inside a cathedral, an act which may now land the women in jail for up to seven years.

The trio have been charged with “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred or hostility” for their performance in February when they entered the Christ Saviour Cathedral, ascended the altar and called on the Virgin Mary to “throw Putin out!”

RT reports another analyst, Igor Yurgens, head of the Institute for Modern Development, says the number of protest participants may increase if the economic situation in the country deteriorates sharply, a safe prediction given economic strife was a key component in every single mass protest witnessed thus far. Although, Yurgens says he doesn't see the economic situation in Russia deteriorating in that fashion, a conjecture that brings to mind Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke testifying before the House Financial Services Committee that everything was just dandy in the housing market before the entire thing blew up.

It's unclear here what the title "radical" means, though it appears to have something to do with direct action, a method of protest on the rise across the globe that involves usually nonviolent demonstrations such as strikes, occupations, graffiti and sabotage (among other property destruction), hacktivisim, blockades, etc. Basically, "direct action" simply means protesters refuse to adhere to the ridiculously repressive restrictions placed upon protest by the government wherein demonstrators in the United States, for example, need a permit to do everything from march to use a bullhorn, and then they're ultimately caged in by the police anyway.

Direct action is a way for the people to take back the power.

It's safe to say these Russian theorists' predictions are correct, namely because tough economic times always equal more protests, not just in Russia, but anywhere in the world, and protesters have now had a taste of success when implementing direct action. Protests had become something of a joke pre-2011, exercises in futility, remnants of a bygone era of hippies and flower children, but starting in 2011, they took on a new powerful purpose.

Direct action has become the last tool of resistance against a massive, seemingly indestructible machine of over-consumption and waste. Environmental activists are pioneers in the resistance field, mostly because physically occupying space or blocking industry shipments are literally the only means they have to save the planet.

Now, there is heightened interest in their methods.

Candace Bernd in Truthout recently documented her experience meeting with young US environmental activists, who she says are "willing to put their bodies on the line, risk arrest and spend hours and hours in weather upwards of 100 degrees in Texas to train techniques that will mitigate the effects of global change."

If one thing is sure, this summer won't be remembered as one where young environmentalists twiddled their thumbs while wild fires broke out across Colorado and record temperatures were set across the nation. Instead, this summer will go down as one of the hottest, not only in terms of temperature, but also in terms of resistance.

Climate justice organizers with Rising Tide North Texas (including myself), publicly launched the Tar Sands Blockade, a nonviolent direct action to stop the southern leg of the Keystone XL pipeline in Texas, with a little help from our friends at 350.org last month, and so far the response to our effort has been overwhelming.

We just wrapped up the Texas Keystone Convergence, a regional training effort that brought in roughly 70 climate justice activists primarily from southern states to learn how to use nonviolent direct action effectively.

Will protesters become "more radical"? Probably, yes, but that diagnosis shouldn't necessarily alarm anyone. If "radical" means an increase in non-violent direct action, then this is cause to celebrate.

Update: Early press releases for this event erroneously declared Mexico's Yo Soy 132 would be involved with the Carlos Slim event in New York. That, in fact, was not the case. Occupy Wall Street and Two Countries, One Voice emhpasized at the event that, while there is solidarity between the movements, Yo Soy 132 was not participating in the event. 

I spoke with several organizers and activists about how so much information could have been circulated, claiming Yo Soy 132 would be participating in the event, and my sources blamed miscommunication among the groups, though a report in La Jornada suggests the disagreement was actually of a political nature:

In light of the peaceful protest called by the Two Nations organization, the decision to not participate was made because Democratic party operatives were involved, a situation that goes against the principle of nonpartisan Mexican student collective.

The remark may be a reference to Two Countries One Voice leader Andres Ramirez, who began his career in Washington, DC working as a legislative aide to US Senator Harry Reid, and then worked for Nevada Governor Bob Miller in the State of Nevada Washington, DC Office. Ramirez later joined numerous political and advocacy campaigns. Most recently, he served as the Senior Vice President of the political and advocacy think-tank NDN. Currently, Andres serves as the Vice Chair of the DNC Hispanic Caucus where he is tasked with helping the DNC develop and implement its Hispanic engagement strategy.

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Like the American Occupy Wall Street movement, Mexico’s Yo Soy 132 has gone international. According to the movement’s activists, more than fifty groups now operate under the 132 banner in parts of North America, Europe, South America, Australia and even China.

The movement’s growth and expansion have ensured that wherever Institutional Revolutionary Party presidential candidate Enrique Peña Nieto travels, he encounters another protest.

Also similar to Occupy, 132 is a big tent movement consisting of a wide array of grievances, including media, political and economic monopolization, indigenous and migrant rights, educational access and environmental protection, among other issues.

Latina Lista:

In a July 27 manifesto, the 132 Movement defined itself as a non-partisan, autonomous, anti-neoliberal and peaceful force. The 132ers advocate for a free, scientific, humanistic, high-quality, and diverse educational system that is “guaranteed by the state at all levels as a constitutional obligation.”

Now, 132 has joined forces with Occupy and dubbed itself “Two Countries, One Voice,” and is targeting Mexican magnate Carlos Slim, whom Forbes recently named the world’s richest man. As of March 2012, Slim and his family were worth $69 billion.

This evening, the coalition plans to occupy Saks Fifth Avenue where Slim has a good chunk of ownership. Protesters say the action is directed agains the “1 percent of the 1 percent.”

On the “Two Countries, One Voice” website, organizers claim that Slim has built his telecommunications empire “on the backs of Mexico’s poor” and accuse Slim of overcharging Mexicans “billions and billions of dollars while his monopolistic practices have cost the Mexican economy $129 billion.”

“We will not stand for such abusive practices that exploit people just so that the richest man in the world can get richer,” the group states.

“Carlos Slim is taking his model he created in Mexico that was built on the backs of the poor charging excessively high prices and providing inadequate service to countries across Latin America and Europe,” said Juan José Gutiérrez, one of the leaders of Two Countries One Voice and the president of Vamos Unidos USA. “We’re here today to say enough is enough. We’re here today to shine a glaring light on the damage monopolies can have on a country and a people.”

As for rampant poverty in Mexico, Slim said in an interview with Larry King in December 2010 that he is “convinced that all this poverty in Mexico and Latin America…is the opportunity to grow.”

But opponents says his policies of price gouging and overcharging have actually slowed Mexico’s economic growth.

A report from the Organization for Economic Cooperation & Development states that Mexico’s phone industry, dominated by the billionaire Sims (he controls a whopping 70 percent of the market), overcharged customers $13.4 billion a year from 2005 to 2009, hurting the nation’s economy. The OECD also recommended eliminating restrictions on foreign investment in telecommunication sand strengthening the powers of its phone regulators.

“Slim’s practices are like a virus—they continue to spread and multiply causing harm every where it goes,” added Aaron Black with Occupy Wall Street. “We can’t ignore him, he is aggressively growing his empire and we need to say no more.”

In addition to support from the Occupy movement, 132 will be joined by a handful of New York politicians. New York State Assemblyman Robert Rodriguez told Reuters he hopes the protest will raise awareness of the need for changes to Mexico’s regulatory system.

Slim’s business model “has led to price gouging and charges many of my constituents high prices,” New York State Senator Adriano Espaillat said at a press conference held by the coalition.

Slim’s spokespeople downplayed the significance of the protest, telling Reuters Two Countries One Voice is a paid movement, a claim whose roots appear to reside entirely in a statement made by Slim’s son-in-law, Arturo Elias Ayub, who said in a telephone interview with Reuters that a recent anti-Slim protest at George Washington University had been made up of people who were paid $20 or $30 to turn up.

Two Countries One Voice leader Andres Ramirez says the allegations are false, and while the group helped with transportation and lunch costs for people who had traveled a long distance to the university protest, no one had been paid just to protest.

Follow #occupysaks on Twitter this evening for updates from the protest.

A weekend protest in Burlington turned violent when police shot protesters with pepper spray and rubber bullets. Hundreds of activists demonstrating against a proposed tar sands oil pipeline that would extend across northern New England gathered in front of a Hilton housing attendees for the thirty-sixth annual New England Governors conference. Just before 5 pm, the demonstrators attempted to block buses transporting the conference attendees to dinner, prompting police dressed in riot gear to fire on the crowd.

“The police and Burlington PD responded forcefully, kinda got the butt end of that,” said Marnie Salerno, a recent college graduate who works in a coffee shop and sustained minor injuries during the clash. “Shot with pepper spray coated rubber bullets—then some other people were shot with just rubber bullets and other people were pepper-sprayed. I was pushed into the middle of college street and I had officers pushing me back and one with a gun on me most of the time that had these bullets, yeah.”

In a press release, the Burlington police department said the maneuver was defensive after officers were “physically confronted by the crowd.” Additionally, the department claims that while police did fire pepper balls and stingball pellets at activists, they did not fire or carry rubber bullets.

The difference between “stingball pellets” and rubber bullets appears to be largely semantic, since both are weaponry consisting of small rubber projectiles fired at individuals with the intent to suppress crowds.

Despite claiming protesters physically confronted officers, no activists were arrested, and police report two officers sustained minor injuries, while claiming no protesters were injured, a report that contradicts statements from activists like Salerno and tweets from other observers:

“Burlington police confront protesters on College St. Rubber bullets fired. Injuries,” tweeted @vtnewscheck.

“Activists attending con. in burlington, vt attacked by riot police & rubber bullets. 6 injured,” @nugrooven tweeted.

Meanwhile, an activist named Ben claims the FBI visited his home, wanting to talk about the planned protests. At the time, Ben was not home, but the agents allegedly spoke to his housemate, Jo Robin.

Jo, who prefers to use an assumed name, considered the visit a form of intimidation aimed at chilling political speech. In a story posted at privacysos.org, she wrote, “It isn’t appropriate, and I want the federal government to know that we are not intimidated.”

Occupy Boston posted the following update on Facebook:

FBI agents visited the apartment of an activist in Vermont today (7/26/12) in advance of the planned regional Occupy gathering in Vermont on the weekend—see the report, as well as advice for YOU should you receive such a visit, namely, take their card and say your lawyer will contact them. Never lie to a federal agent, that is a felony.

 

Mike Kanerick, an aide to Burlington Mayor Miro Weinberger, told VT Digger city officials were not aware of FBI activity related to the protests, and “therefore, cannot comment on it.” Kanerick said the mayor “welcomes peaceful protestors to the City and appreciates their efforts to bring attention to a range of important environmental and labor issues.”

Some on Twitter expressed surprise that police in Burlington would be equipped with high-tech riot gear, but the armed-to-the-teeth accessories make sense given the Burlington Join Terrorism Task Force operates as a satellite of the Albany JTTF, an entity that brings together local, state and federal resources for “special events” such as the gathering of New England governors, Canadian Premiers, ambassadors and, yes, business leaders. Hence, lots and lots of protest-crushing gear.

The VT Digger reminds its readers that since 2005, the FBI has listed “ecoterrorism” as the top domestic terror threat, and a 2009 FBI press released placed “highly destructive ecoterrorists” above “hate-filled white supremacists,” “violence-prone anti-government extremists” and “radical separatist groups.”

The FBI considers property damage “ecoterrorism,” which criminalizes otherwise nonviolent direct action, the overwhelmingly favorite tool of environmental activists.

The Guardian:

In recent years environmental campaigns which have involved sabotage include the Newbury protests and the GM crops campaign. The Reclaim the Streets protests, where roads were dug up and trees planted could also qualify, as could the Greenpeace activists who climbed the chimneys at Kingsnorth and wrote Gordon on them. Are we seriously claiming that these people are ecoterrorists?

What about the courts that cleared them of criminal damage? Are they conspirators? It is vital to remember, as one activist points out to me, that the right to cause damage in order to prevent greater damage is enshrined in law, as the Greenpeace case has shown.

Activists have criticized the behind-closed-doors policy of the governors and premiers and their staffs when crafting environmental policies that will affect the citizens of Vermont.

“It’s clear the governors and premiers are meeting to talk about trade policy, energy and infrastructure,” said Avery Pittman, a spokeswoman for participating protest groups. “They’re definitely prioritizing profits and money-making over the needs of the people or the impact these proposals will have on us, the people who live on the land and are affected by the decisions.”