Steve Iskovitz, a friend and former Green-Rainbow Party candidate for Cambridge City Council, has started emailing his thoughts from the front lines of the Occupy movement.  Since this blog has lain dormant for so long, I decided to lend it to him.  I will post the backlog of messages about once a day and then start posting them as they come in.  I am posting them uneditted.  His words are his own. You can find all of his posts under the Occupy tag.

Hi folks,

The big news around here the last week is that our camp is being flooded with mentally ill, homeless, alcoholic and drug addicted people from around the city. I’ve heard several rumors: that the police take people from Riker’s Island and deliver them here, that when police find drunk people in other parks they take or send them here, and that word is simply getting around among the city’s homeless that we have free living space, free food and free clothes. I can’t speak to the method by which these people are arriving, only that they are. Perhaps if any of the city’s army of journalists, who now busy themselves examining our operation with a magnifying glass, plastering their front pages with headlines about inequities between Occupy Wall Street and other occupations around the country, or details about controversies in our kitchen, and spend a minute or two investigating these rumors about how and why all these troubled people in need of care are showing up at our doorstep, that might be nice!

I’m only on the receiving end. Just this morning, a woman in front of me dumped a cup of soy milk onto the ground in the serving line. I decided to keep an eye on her, and a minute later she pulled a tarp off someone’s tent while it was still raining. I managed to get the tarp back from her and alert someone that she needs to be watched constantly. This is the kind of work I did back in Boston, and it’s really not that hard. Just hang around with someone all day and keep your eye on them, talk with them, divert them when they’re about to mess things up. I didn’t mind doing it back then, when I had nothing else to do, and it was my recognized responsibility. But we’re all busy with other things, and this type of thing is becoming an ever-increasing burden on our operation. As you can imagine, many of us have stories similar to mine, some much more difficult, like dealing with irate crackhead guys, etc.

People who are almost certainly paid police provocateurs have also shown up. Last week we had a family day and night, when families with young kids actually camped here. A corner of the park was taped off and provided extra security. It happened to be near a huge artistic sort of sculpture structure at the corner at Broadway. A really crazy guy came around the structure in the middle of the night. I heard (rumor) that some protesters actually alerted the cops to his presence and the police did nothing. Then (and this part is pretty much established fact) the dude climbed up to the top of it and began yelling. Quickly the police evacuated the area around the structure, supposedly to guarantee the safety of the people below, who just happened to be the families with kids. By 5 a.m., I’m told, mostly all the families were gone. So much for family night. The crazy guy in question had never been seen before and has never been seen since. There are other stories of supposed provocateurs showing up. So far we’ve handled them all pretty well, with few incidents.

But how long can we sustain this? As our movement has begun making progress, it has been saddled with this tremendous burden. As a counter-move, the kitchen has decided to shut down for three days. The plan is to see to it that food gets to the working groups get food. I think this is a brilliant response. Each working group recognizes and appreciates its own members. This plan would “dry up” the supply of free things to non-productive people in the park. Maybe they’ll go elsewhere, word will get out that it’s no longer a free party here. No doubt there will be problems with this plan, some arguments about who gets how much, logistical problems, etc., but something absolutely needs to be done, or all our resources, including our own sanity, will be drained.

It’s interesting to step back and look at it philosophically: One thing (among many) we’re protesting is the fact that the society, including the city here, is not taking care of its needy. So in response, that very system sics its own needy, its own troubled people, examples of its own failure, upon us in order to defend itself against us! It’s not hard to see the similarity between this and the military, for instance. Instead of taking care of its own poor, we invade other countries. But how do we staff the army of invaders? With those very same poor people. We don’t educate people properly, and thus have an ample supply of uneducated people who don’t know what they’re getting into when they join up! In this way they system can use its own failures to perpetuate its own existence.

Well, we’ll see how this new plan works out.

Elsewhere, Oakland, which can barely afford its own police, pooled police from all around central California to perform a military-style invasion against Occupy Oakland. They don’t mess around in Oakland! I haven’t seen the videos yet, but here they are, and remember, as they say, “This is what democracy looks like.” 

www.occupytogether.org

Occupy Atlanta was also busted, with many arrests, though it was all reported to have been very civil.

The mayor of Albany and Governor Cuomo ordered Albany police and New York state troopers to move in and shut down and arrest Occupy Albany, but guess what? The police and troopers REFUSED ! Occupy Albany is still there. This is the most hopeful news of all, and is a bit like what happened eventually in Tunisia, I think, and Egypt, though in that case it was the army who turned. Someone told me just today that when police drive by Occupy Buffalo, they either give them the thumbs up, honk their horns, run their sirens, or bring them coffee. Similar report from Cleveland.

Last night there was a march around town in support of Oakland. It was loud and spiritied and sounded like a lot of fun. I was too exhausted to join it (went to sleep early and slept good and long) but I heard it went off without incident…So, good and bad news coming in from all around, hard to summarize, even harder to predict what’s coming. Well, I’ll end with one last comment: I doubt they’ll try here what they did in Oakland, but if they do, they certainly won’t hear the end of it. We have a lot of support all around the city.

(Any or all of this report can be forwarded, attributed or not.)

Steve Iskovitz, a friend and former Green-Rainbow Party candidate for Cambridge City Council, has started emailing his thoughts from the front lines of the Occupy movement.  Since this blog has lain dormant for so long, I decided to lend it to him.  I will post the backlog of messages about once a day and then start posting them as they come in.  I am posting them uneditted.  His words are his own. You can find all of his posts under the Occupy tag.

Hi folks,

It’s been a while since my last report. I’ve had internet access troubles. I’ll pick up where I left off about a week ago:

I visited Occupy Pittsburgh again on Monday afternoon (October 17), and it had grown considerably since Saturday. I went back that night to wait for my 5 a.m. bus, and it had grown again noticeably since the afternoon, and during the few hours I was there two more tents went up!

While there were some similarities with the New York site, I took note of the differences. It was much more relaxed. There seemed to be no tension at all with the police. Protesters would walk over and talk with the cops, it was all very friendly. The site stil had a lot of space, they could use megaphones, and they had tents, so life there was much easier than at Occupy Wall Street in New York. Some people talked about the idea of making straw huts there, and I thought about how, as the anthropologists and sociologists say, different conditions result in different cultures. The Pittsburgh site can grow in a different way because conditions allow it. Likewise, all kinds of things could come from other sites around the country based on different climates, space, relationships, etc.

I got off the bus in Harrisburg and spent the morning at that city’s occupation site. Considerably smaller, there were only two people when I arrived, about ten by the time I left at noon. I was told they have 100 or so by there evening General Assembly (GA), and about ten people sit or stand around for the overnight, since they’re not allowed to camp. I was told two or three smaller towns in Pennsylvania also had occupation sites!

That evening I got off the bus and visited the Philadelphia occupation. It was huge, spreading across the City Hall plaza, two or three times the Wall Street site. I was told there were about 350 tents, about 600 people. It was incredibly relaxed and positive. All the facilities– kitchen, distribution, info, etc., operated out of huge tents.

Although all three Pennsylvania sites I visited were more relaxed, I didn’t feel quite right at any of them. Maybe because I was new and didn’t have a purpose at any of them, but also the slow, relaxed atmosphere somehow didn’t feel right to me.

The instant I arrived back in Zucotti Park in New York I felt I’d returned home. I prefer the excitement and vitality of it, and the feeling that I’m in the center of it, since all the occupations around not just the country but around the world are all currently centered around it.

But I learned from the Pennsylvania sites that it was not necessary to be constantly frantic. Somehow in my first six days in New York I’d come to associate occupation, excitement, chaos and constant crisis as inherently connected, but I realized during my five-day break that that had just been coincidence.

I returned to working in the storage facility. Throughout the week we managed to get things more under control. The storage space, like everything else, was brand new just a few weeks ago, but now we have our routine down fairly well, and we’re all much more relaxed about it. Other people come in in late morning to help out with our crunch time, when we pick up shipments from the UPS store, and help open and sort them. By late afternoon it’s down to just the core group for other tasks.

Somehow, the media has discovered us. Tired of just the freak-show-in-the-park angle, they’ve taken a fascination with the inner workings of the operation, and take innumerable pictures of us opening boxes, of shelves of food, etc.

Overall, though, the occupation site in general seems to be settling in a little. After a few weeks I’m finally learning to distinguish who’s who. I’m beginning to recognize and get to know the long-termers, the different working groups. It makes it a lot easier. For example, a lot of the different departments manage their own stuff. That means they come over and organize it themselves, and they come and get what they need. This saves us a lot of time and confusion. The transition to this system at first resulted in multiple cases of theft, but we’re getting a handle on that now.

On the larger scale, Mayor Bloomberg has changed his tone considerably. A week or two ago he was talking about how we have a right to be there, he has no problem with us, etc. Over the past few days he’s been saying we’ll have to go soon. Local media has ,ade inferences of some impending police crackdown. Last night a mentally ill man came into the park and started some sort of ruckus. Two cops crossed the street and entered the park, as though in response to this. It all looked, to the rest of us, like a thinly disguised attempt at provocation. Our folks managed to get it under control quickly enough, thwarting whatever plan it might have been. I saw the guy walking around today too.  Last night we passed a cop on Broadway, coming back from storage, and he stared at us. Up to now, they’ve pretty much ignored us, so I think it’s all part of an attempt to scare us and get us to give up. It won’t work, though, there are too many experienced activists here who know all these tricks, and our community support is deeper than ever.

In fact, the “no-tent” rule is being violated more and more. Every night a few more people put them up, and there’s been no police response to this. There’s been a lot of talk, in fact, about the no-tent rule being a human rights violation. The Red Cross, I hear, has come out with a statement to this effect, and some local clergy also, taking the human rights approach to this. The weather has been getting colder. I haven’t had a problem with this, though rain is still a bit of a problem.

Oh, and on the tent issue– while I was away the medical folks put up a tent. The police came in to take it down, and there was some kind of a standoff between police and occupiers. Jesse Jackson happened to be in the park at the time, and someone ran across and alerted him. He came over and stood in front of the tent with the occupiers, and the police backed down, and the medical tent has been here since. This story reminds me of the Republican National Convention in Minneapolis in ’08, when the police attacked the medical tent and shot tear gas canisters inside the tent. Medical facilities are important, delicate areas, and apparently the police feel they can dismantle a movement by attacking them there, despite the fact that doing so even in wartime is a violation of the Geneva Convention.

Elsehwhere, they arrested 130 in Chicago yesterday. I heard a rumor that there are 10,000 people at Occupy Portland (Oregon), though I haven’t researched this. Occuy L.A. is supposedly larger than ours. I met someone from Buffalo who said they’re going strong there and that they have a fire pit, and when the police drive by they wail their sirens and wave in support! Someone who was in Occupy Cleveland(I think it was) said the police hardly ever come there but when they do they bring coffee for the occupiers!…Public opinion around the country is running in our favor…Someone from Hawaii just sent us organic macademia nuts and dried bananas grown on their farm.

So, all kinds of different things happening all around. I hope the folks in Chicago are out of jail and doing okay. Lots of details, I shouldn’t have to wait a whole week before my next report. All for now,

Steve

(Any or all of this report can be forwarded, attributed or not.)

Steve Iskovitz, a friend and former Green-Rainbow Party candidate for Cambridge City Council, has started emailing his thoughts from the front lines of the Occupy movement.  Since this blog has lain dormant for so long, I decided to lend it to him.  I will post the backlog of messages about once a day and then start posting them as they come in.  I am posting them uneditted.  His words are his own. You can find all of his posts under the Occupy tag.

It’s by pure chance that I was present for the first day of Occupy Pittsburgh.

There was a march to Market Square downtown, and a rally there, which I caught the last hour of. Then they marched over to the occupation site, a small park a few blocks from downtown, near Uptown and not far from the Hill District. A few people set up tents immediately, someone brought a table, which quickly became filled with food, and after a little while, the General Assembly. I want to say it was the historic first G.A., but actually it was the third of fourth the group has held, but it was the first on the actual occupation site. It was all much more orderly than OWS in New York. Partly because they were allowed to use a megaphone, but mostly because it was much smaller (though the first ones in New York were probably smaller, too). Also, there weren’t two, nor even one drum circle on the edge of the park.

It’s funny, the other occupation sites around the country seem to have tents and amplification, only New York is denied both, making it the most difficult, yet New York is still by far the most important and the most exciting. Anyway, so the working groups ran through their policies– basic stuff like no violence, respect the grounds, they reached consensus on doing protests downtown twice a week and talked about some of the institutions they’d march to. This was interesting because the park where they are, with the owner’s permission for the time being, I think is called BNY Mellon (Bank New York Mellon), and the very first protest is going to be down at the headquarters of– that’s right– BNY Mellon!

I suggested they go up to CMU and protest the flood of military money and research there, not the least of which is development of drone technology. The idea wasn’t too well received, because CMU is several miles away and up a long hill and they don’t want to march there. I hope they reconsider and take a bus or something, because this is a great opportunity to raise awareness of this ill collaboration between elite higher education and futuristic death technology. (I made a sign at the Market Square rally that said, “CMU: No Autonomous Killer Drones.”)

But it’s not my call. I’ll have to leave such decisions up to the Occupy Pittsburgh people. It’s great to see this happening in my hometown, conservative as this place is. But New York is the epicenter. Wow, they rallied all around the world, now inspired by Occupy Wall Street. Even in Hong Kong, and Santiago, Chile, as well as Europe, and all over this country.

I was impressed with the Pittsburgh people, though. They understand completely the concensus process. They use the exact same techniques they do in New York. It’s as if they all attended the same seminar, but they didn’t. I’m a little curious how this technique and the values system that goes along with it can be adhered to so precisely in so many different places at the same time. Just so that I’m not misunderstood: I’m completely in favor of it. It’s a highly developed method of organizing, and it’s incredible to me that this method is practiced so widely and so proficiently. How can this be? Is it some kind of generational shift? Does it have something to do with the new communications technology? They’ll put their own local stamp on it, of course. One girl said she had to leave to watch the Penguins’ game, ha-ha. I just hope they can find one person to stay behind on Sundays to watch people’s stuff while the rest go off to watch the Steelers.

BNY Mellon said they could stay at least until tomorrow morning. I think they just want to make sure the people don’t trash the grounds. I get the sense that if they tell them to leave, they’ll just leave, so it’s totally different from OWS and Brookfield Properties in that sense. And they say there’s a church a few blocks away where they can stay if they need to, though there’s really nothing like a permanent, visible site…Compared with New York it’s all strangely civil. 

(You can forward this if you like, attributed or not.)

Steve Iskovitz, a friend and former Green-Rainbow Party candidate for Cambridge City Council, has started emailing his thoughts from the front lines of the Occupy movement.  Since this blog has lain dormant for so long, I decided to lend it to him.  I will post the backlog of messages about once a day and then start posting them as they come in.  I am posting them uneditted.  His words are his own. You can find all of his posts under the Occupy tag.

Hello folks,

I left Zuccotti Park and Occupy Wall Street Thursday afternoon to come back here to Pittsburgh to take care of some stuff for the weekend. For simplicity’s sake, I’m just going to go chronologically, picking up where I left off last weekend.

Indeed, things did get back to “normal” at the end of the weekend. Actually, even Monday, though a holiday, felt more workaday. The problems I complained about so much in my last story went away soon after I wrote about them. I think there was one or a very small number of thieves, who must have left after a day or two.

I began volunteering with the people who receive, store and distribute donated items. From the time I started, Monday or so, to Thursday when I left, the operation has mushroomed. Daily donations have maybe doubled or tripled during that time, and we got a huge space donated to us. The day begins going over to the UPS store where donations are sent. Tehy get mad if we don’t get there early enough, because we get so many boxes that they almost block access to the store! How many boxes? Maybe 400 a day? Just a wild guess. It takes three or four of us about three trips with the carts or dollies to take them all to the storage space. Pushing a cart through the sea of pedestrians for five blocks down Broadway past Wall Street itself to the space feels like some kind of archetypal dream experience. Down around the back, wave to the security person to let us in, up the freight elevator and in. The security guards and elevator operators are all on our side, ask us how we’re doing, are we ready for the rain, etc. All around town this solidarity that still surprises me, accustomed as I’ve gotten over the years to hostility from average people for whatever issues we’ve supported in the past.

We open boxes, sort stuff, send some things back to the park and store others. Communication isn’t perfect, but enough  people go back and forth that things tend to get to where they’re needed. What do people send? Every type of clothing you can imagine, and a lot of it is quite nice. Jackets, fleece, hoodies, socks, rain ponchos, etc. Granola bars, peanut butter, food of all types, sharpies, duct tape, medical supplies, bottles of chewable vitamin C, sleeping bags, hand-knitted hats and scarves, you name it. It comes from all over the country– Oregon, Florida, Michigan, everywhere. A guy sent a box of food from Puerto Rico! (Speaking of distance, one volunteer came from Hawaii, specifically for this.)

Personally, I like working in the storage area. I can only take crowds and noise for so long, but mostly I like to be effective, and I can get a lot more done without having to wade through a crowd to walk a distance of ten feet. I usually work til around 5 or so, go back to the park for dinner, then return to the space and work til around 11. Besides, there are plenty of people who like holding signs and having their pictures taken. Yes, there is NO SHORTAGE of people who like to have their pictures taken! I don’t mean to sound negative about the crowds. It’s good to have a lot of people. It’s the price of success. Just as the painfully cumbersome process of trying to reach consensus at the General Assembly meetings. (“I move..I MOVE…I MOVE…that we table this issue…THAT WE TABLE THIS ISSUE…THAT WE TABLE THIS ISSUE…til tomorrow…TIL TOMORROW…TIL TOMORROW.) Impatient as I am, it feels so ridiculous to me, standing in the cold rain listen to procedural statements when I could be doing constructive work, that after about five minutes I run off. But that’s me. Fortunately, others have the patience to engage in what really is a historic process. These meetings, and the way they’re conducted, are changing history. Even the cumbersome process of repetition so that everyone can hear, is a beautifully creative response to the stupid, spiteful rule that prohibits us from using amplification. And I notice that some people really ENJOY being part of the human mic. I saw a young guy who I guessed wasn’t a full-time occupier but a New York resident who came in after work or something. He was maybe 22, and he was all smiles as he enthusiastically repeated the speaker’s words, as if participating in a choir or chant. I would have thought he would have felt embarassed, that it would somehow seem goofy, but he didn’t feel this way at all. Just as it was hard for me to understand how he could have enjoyed shouting with the crowd, you might have trouble understanding how thrilled I was my first full day when, bothered by some trash on the ground, I found where the brooms were kept and began sweeping up. It was important for me to see  the expression on the guy’s face and to think about it. Because it means to me that everyone takes something different away from this movement, just as everyone has something different to contribute.

Ultimately this kind of thing interests me even more than the Wall Street greed that we’re standing against, though again, that’s just me. People say, “We know what you’re AGAINST, but what are you FOR?” I would say, “You want us to answer you in words, or in actions?” Come to Zuccotti Park and see how we take care of each other. People have donated food, others have donated their time to cook it in their kitchens, others pick it up and deliver it here, others serve it. These people work all night cleaning when the space is clear, these people do security, these people are working with the media, I’m over there with the guy from Cleveland and the guy from Minneapolis and the girl from North Carolina opening boxes and running supplies over, those people are handing out sweaters to people who are cold and umbrellas on rainy nights. This guy takes a bunch of us out on a cardboard run so we can stack the cardboard under our sleeping bags to keep us a little elevated and dry in the rain, that guy let me use his phone to call Greyhound for the schedule. The other morning there was no sugar or cream for the coffee, so I rushed the few blocks to the storage space, found some honey, soy milk and rice milk and ran it back to the kitchen.  So that’s what we’re FOR, taking care of people. We’ve got 1,200 people sleeping in a space so small, if you roll over you might land on the person next to you, yet if someone arrives and needs a space, we move over and make more space for them. I haven’t seen one fight all week. A few shouting matches which were quickly de-escalated by whoever happened to be standing around at the time.

And to address a criticism that’s been made of past protest movements: We’re not all white. My first few nights I camped with all Chinese or Chinese-Americans.There are lots of blacks and latinos camped there. Locals and out-of-towners. And there are homeless people living there. There are some mentally ill people, some alcoholics  Some media have criticized us for this. Criticized us for allowing people who are down and out or troubled in some way to camp in the park with us! 

“But who’s funding you???” There might be some rich people giving some thousands here and there, but a lot of it’s probably $20 bills and $50 checks, and peanut butter from Missouri and band-aids from Tennessee. “But who’s in charge???”…The questions themselves illustrate the inability of people who think within the terms of traditional politics to understand us. They don’t even know what questions to ask. Q: If President Obama showed up here right now, what would you say to him?” A: “The kitchen needs help in the serving line.”

The other night I told a young “occupier” about my experience during the “anti-globalization” movement back in 2000 and 2001: We seemed to be forming a new culture. Internet networking, consensus meetings, convergence spaces, free meals, an evolving sense of global justice, and the sense that we were communicating, through our actions, with similar movements in South America and Europe. In April of 2001 in Quebec, we helped stop the Free Trade Area of the Americas dead in its tracks. Then 9/11 happened and we went on the defensive. Instead of successfully stopping “free trade” treaties and creating a vision for a better world, we were unsuccessfully attempting to stop wars, becoming paranoid over police-state eavesdropping techniques, watching the world slip into chaos and envisioning hellish a future of autonomous killer drones. And withdrawing into ourselves. For ten years! Then some loser, a total failure of a human being, lights himself on fire in Tunisia and burns himself to death. What a pitiful jerk he must have felt like at that moment! But from that desperate action from that pitiful loser jerk comes Arab Spring, European Summer, and American Autumn. It sounds like some crazy story from an old DC comic book or a children’s fairy tale, but it really happened.

I’d thought that the culture that disappeared after 9/11 had died. But it didn’t. It had just laid dormant, and now it’s back. We just picked up where we’d left off ten years ago! With a few differences, like: Now half the people in the crowd have video cameras in their pockets. Years ago a police commander could spray pepper spray in the eyes of three hippie protester girls and no-one would care. . Next thing you know there’s a thousand people in the streets for each one of them. “Whoops,” the police might have said. “Oh well, we’ll make up for it by…arresting 700 people on the Brooklyn Bridge!” Now we’re front-page news around the world. “Whoops again.”

Now I’m starting to wonder: Maybe we can occupy the research facilities where they’re developing the autonomous killer drones, or the factories where they make them.

Okay, just to wrap up my chronology: As I was getting ready to leave Thursday I became aware of the emerging threat. Brookfield Properties said we would need to clear the park in sections Friday morning so they, under police guard, could clean it. This is the technique they used to get rid of “Bloombergville,” a similar but much smaller occupation that happened recently. I hated to take the easy way out and leave, but I had a previous commitment. They called out to their supporters, and a big showdown was to occur Friday morning. How many thousands of people were there to greet the police? How many arrests would have resulted? 3,000? 5,000? The mind reels. But Brookfield and the city backed down. They knew they could never have pulled it off. What would have happened if they did? Some kind of general strike across the city?

Tomorrow (Saturday) is to be a global day of action. Occupy Pittsburgh might start then. Something’s going on in Harrisburg. Philly’s going, DC’s going strong. Sorry this was so long. All for now,

Steve

(Any or all of this report can be forwarded, attributed or not.)