UPDATE 2 (9:07PM Central Standard Time): For an easily accessible link to numerous livestreams and ustreams, go here.

UPDATE 1 (8:50PM Central Standard Time): Arrests, police clubbing protesters, chaotic scenes on both ustreams.

INITIAL POST: Occupy is making the connection between austerity at home and perpetual war abroad. This is the fourth day of marches in Chicago, marches conducted in the face of a suffocating police presence. At this time, 8:25 p.m. Central Standard Time, about 2000 to 3000 people are moving through the downtown, with protesters closing off the sidewalks so that the bike police cannot assist in their encirclement:

Live video by Ustream

Here is another ustream:

Live video by Ustream

There are reports that the march is within a block or two of the NATO state dinner where delegates are present. Obama, Obama, we've got some shit to talk about.

Meanwhile, there was also a sympathy march in New York City:

As usual, the kids are taking the lead. Of course, Twitter is the best source of current information, including active ustreams and livestreams, use the hashtags #NoNATO and #OccupyChicago, among others.

Labels: Activism, Anarchism, NATO, Police, Ustream, War on Terror

From occupywallst.org:

•5:40PM EST: via @F29PDX: "Here's what's happening now: March in Las Vegas; direct action in Rockland, MA; march in Norfolk, VA; Rally in Gainesville, FL, rally and march in Phoenix, AZ; Rally in Minneapolis, MN; protest against Fletcher-Daniels in Kansas City, MO; and march in Portland! Follow Shut Down the Corporations for more updates tonight.

•5:10PM EST: Two arrested at huge march in Portland. Occupy Las Vegas shuts down Walmart.

•4:20PM EST: UC-Davis protesters shut down a U.S. Bank. Heavy police presence in Portland as police on motorcycles and bicycles try to cut off march and force protesters onto sidewalks. Some Occupiers have broken through police lines. Crowd estimated in 1000s. (Portland livestream). Oakland is off to shut down some banks. (Oakland livestream). Occupy DC has returned to Walmart construction site to continue protest.

•3:50PM EST: General Assembly underway at occupied university in Barcelona. Anti-ALEC demos getting started in more cities and towns across the US. Occupiers in New Hampshire will target Koch brother-funded Americans for Prosperity. Numbers grow in Portland despite rain. Occupy Boston heading to City Hall to demand: "No HIKES! No CUTS! No Layoffs" in public transit at 6pm.

•3:10PM EST: Police attack retreating Walmart protesters in SoCal, who had already declared victory by shutting down all targets. Some arrested while falling back as police rush forward with pepper guns loaded. Some Occupiers injured and seen limping away from police line. Others being treated by medics for bruises from baton strikes. Crowd dwindling as most protesters leave, some running to their cars.

•2:50PM EST: Police move in on SoCal protesters with batons drawn, push back and begin kettling protesters. Police seen on livestream cutting off escape routes, using unnecessary force against protesters who are trying to follow dispersal orders, and aiming pepper-ball guns at nonviolent protesters. Crowds also assembling in Portland.

•2:10PM EST: Standoff continues at Walmart warehouse in SoCal. via Occupy The Hood LA: ‏ @OTH_LosAngeles Keep in mind Riot Gear police came in while Occupy protesters were having a block party with music and discussion #PoliceState #FTP.

•2:00PM EST: Occupy Oakland will rally at noon PST ar Snow Park to shut down the banks, and 6pm PST at Oscar Grant Park for a Funeral for Capitalism. OWS NYC continues to occupy Bryant Park in front of BoA tower. Eight arrests were made outside Pfizer R&D facility in Connecticut after multiple CT Occupations protest. Actions have also begun across Arizona, Utah, and New Mexico targeting ALEC's connection to racist anti-immigrant legislation and for-profit prisons. (Phoenix livestream)

•1:30PM EST: Peaceful SoCal demo has been declared "unlawful" by riot cops who have kettled protesters and given dispersal orders despite being surrounded on all sides. In NYC, protesters run up to AT&T to decry anti-union policies.

•1:10PM EST: Banner drop at Grand Central overpass in NYC (photo)

•1:04PM EST: Protesters put bed in middle of intersection (photo) at 43rd st. and Madison Ave in NYC. Who are you in bed with? (Twitter) (Facebook)

•1:00PM EST: Riot police have surrounded anti-Wal Mart demo in SoCal, where protesters have been celebrating and listening to music in the intersection after shutting down all targeted warehouses.

•12:30PM EST: Actions starting in dozens more US cities, including Huntsville, Dayton, New Brunswick, Nashville, Buffalo, Albany, Richmond, Eugene, Louisville, Pensacola, Albuquerque, New Orleans, Charlotte, and more. Reports of arrests at BoA HQ in NYC as police aggressively push back protesters.

•12:00PM EST: Large crowd in Pittsburgh protesting drastic cuts in public transit system, including potential shut-down of 35% of services, half of all routes, and 500 jobs. (Pittsburgh livestream). Orlando begins march on BoA. (Orlando livestream).

•11:30AM EST: In Spain, massive protests still underway in Valencia and other cities. (Barcelona livestream). Teach-in underway in Bryant Park in front of Citibank discussing toxic loans, foreclosure, & bank crimes as Wells Fargo gets eviction notices in NYC. Anti-Walmart protesters continue to hold intersections in SoCal.

For breaking news throughout the rest of the day, return to occupywallst.org, go to shutdownthecorporations.org, use appropriate hashtags on Twitter, #occupywallstreet, #opdx, #occupythehood and #occupyoakland, among others, and watch livestreams and ustreams, such as the one at occupywallst.org and others linked there and elsewhere.

Labels: Activism, Anarchism, Occupy Wall Street, Police, Ustream

UPDATE (11:05 PM PST): There is a report of approximately 300 arrests today in Oakland.

INITIAL POST:

I was out all day, and don't know how things got to this point. At the time of this post, 7:30 PM PST, the Oakland Police Department is in the process of arresting about 100 people that have been kettled in front of the YMCA building in the downtown area near Oscar Grant Plaza. Apparently, there were confrontations earlier in the day that resulted in the police using tear gas, rubber bullets and flash grenades on protesters. All I know is that Occupy Oakland had previously announced plans to take over an abandoned building today and use it for housing and the provision of services, a building that turned out to be the Kaiser Civic Auditorium near Lake Merritt. For updates and links to livestreams and ustreams, use the hashtag #Occupy Oakland.

Labels: Activism, Anarchism, Bay Area, California, Occupy Wall Street, Police, Ustream, YouTube

Yesterday, Officer Ali of the San Francisco Police Department decided to club pfailblog, one of the ustreamers of the Occupy Wall Street West actions:

This is not something that happens by accident, a consequence of the turbulent emotions associated with political protest in a contentious urban setting like San Francisco. As elsewhere, like New York City, for example, the police know the livestreamers and ustreamers and harass them. In addition to pfailblog, another ustreamer was picked out of a protest and arrested, while Ali also shoved pixplz while he was ustreaming along California Street.

Labels: Activism, Bay Area, California, Occupy Wall Street, Police, Ustream, YouTube

UPDATE: For a flyer that sets out the location of planned actions, with explanations, go here. Scroll down for the map.

INITIAL POST: Tomorrow:

6:00am Occupy Wall St West!
Day-long Nonviolent Mass Occupation

When: Fri, January 20, 6am – 9pm

Where: San Francisco's Financial District (map)

Description: See http://www.Occu​pyWallStWest.or​g for developing details

San Francisco Financial District
DAYLONG NONVIOLENT MASS OCCUPATION
of the Wall St. banks & corporations attacking our communities
DON’T GO TO (OR WALK OUT OF) WORK AND SCHOOL

Organized groups will be coordinating specific direct actions and set their times and places. For members of the public/Occupy that are not part of an organized group, you can converge on Bradley Manning Plaza (Justine Herman) and join with others at any of these times, 6:00am, 12 Noon and 5:00pm.

For more background, go here and here.

Starting at 6am PST tomorrow, you can follow the day's events on Twitter at #OccupySF, #OWSWest and #OccupyWallStWest, among others. There will be at least 8 ustreamers providing video broadcasts of the actions over the course of the day, including pixplz, occupy-sf-maya, codeframeosf and mikeqtips, as well as the occupysf channel. Go to http://www.ustream.tv to find them. The Twitter feed will undoubtedly have links to these ustreamers and others as well as events unfold.

Labels: Activism, Bailout of Finance Capitalists, Bay Area, California, Neoliberalism, Occupy Wall Street, Ustream

NOTE: As mentioned here last Tuesday, Jessica Hollie, also known as BellaEiko, spoke about how we need to stop segregating ourselves through fear for the benefit of the 1%. Just passing it along so that you can see what I experienced.

POST: About five weeks ago, I was stunned by the realization that e-mail is the new snail mail. It came upon me suddenly, as these things so often do when you are older like myself, while I was producing a KDVS program centered around ustreamers of Occupy Oakland. I was trying to reach a ustreamer, BellaEiko, so that I could interview her along with another ustreamer, LaurynG. I posted a message on her ustream site, nothing. There was no e-mail address. What to do?

Of course, BellaEiko has a Twitter account, as she also predictably tweets about Occupy Oakland and Occupy more generally. At this point, it began to dawn on me that Twitter is more than just a social networking site for celebraties to tell all their fans what they ate for breakfast. I had a brief encounter with such an insight previously when someone tweated their critical responses as they read Tony Blair's book, A Journey, last year, but I did not grasp the ramifications of it. Now, I was learning the hard way that it is nearly impossible to reach people involved in occupations initially through phone calls or, when available, e-mail. As far they were concerned, I may as well be living in Kazakhstan. So, I had to face reality: if I wanted to obtain guests involved in Occupy I was going to have to open a Twitter account. I begrudingly did so, and finally reached BellaEiko so that she could participate in the interview.

If you are going to attempt to engage Occupy, you cannot avoid engagement with Twitter and Ustream. Twitter is, in essence, a global chatroom where those at the scene of a general assembly or action rely information to everyone else outside of it. Occupiers also issue calls for assistance through Twitter, as they are retweeted across the Internet. As a consequence, homepages for various occupations have been rendered secondary, usually updated hours or even days after the fact. Homepages now appear to serve the purpose of providing detailed content which then, of course, gets delivered to people through Twitter. Not surprisingly, Facebook serves much the same purpose, but my impression is that Twitter has superceded Facebook as the means by which real time information is disseminated, rendering it more of a vehicle for organizing future activities.

Meanwhile, the participants of Occupy are humanized through Ustream. Ustreamers show every aspect of Occupy through video sent out over the Internet through phones and cameras. Ustreamers shatter the demonized construction of occupiers purveyed in the commercial media by showing them as they speak and act in real time. Jessica Hollie's speech, as presented at the top of this entry, is just one example among many of this phenomenon. OccupyFreedomLA, a ustreamer associated with, of course, Occupy LA, provided another compelling example when she ustreamed a group including herself preparing for a possible police assault by telling each other how to prepare for the possible use of tear gas and stenciling hearts on their hands to display to the officers as a symbol of their commitment to non-violence. One can agree or disagree with the actions of the occupiers in a specific situation, but, through Ustream, they are shown as flesh and blood people in the richness of their social and emotional diversity. The fact that the police have adopted less violent tactics towards Occupy as a consequence of these live presentations of Occupy activities is already well known.

Embedded within this embrace of the accelerated communication capacity of social media liesa number of troubling dilemmas. Practically, there is the problem that the use of social media varies with age. Hence, older people are less likely to understand Occupy because they do not use Twitter, Ustream and Facebook. If anything, I suspect that Facebook would constitute the most likely means of them receiving information about Occupy outside of the commercial media. Beyond this, there is the question as to whether Occupy runs the risk of becoming a virtualized form of reality television as people consider the movement a form of vicarious entertainment. Why go to a general assembly or action when you can stay home and watch it on Ustream? Along these lines, note that interest in police raids upon occupations, as reported through Twitter, seemed to wane if it became apparent that the police were not going to violently attack them.

More abstractly, there is the question as to the personal consequences associated with people processing so much information so rapidly. Franco Berardi, also known as Bifo, maintains that people receive information through communication technologies far beyond their ability to process it over time. Every aspect of our lives, our work, our families and our personal activities, are suffused with this virtual intrusion The result is eventually a feeling of powerlessness and depression, which is expressed either inwardly through withdrawal or self-harm, or outwardly, through violence directed against others, along with an accompanying loss of intimacy. Combined with the pre-existing psychological problems of burnout and depression connected to the exaltation of the activist, a figure encouraged to dedicate all aspects of their life to the movement, much as, paradoxically, executives subordinate their lives to the artifical needs of their corporations, there is a potentially combustible peril here. Yet Occupy is inescapably intertwined with the urgency of social media. One wonders, have the participants of Occupy and the recipients of Occupy's stream of virtual information found a way out of the cul-de-sac described by Bifo? Regardless of the answer, the creative expansion of the uses of social media by Occupy may partially illustrate the integration of the movement with contemporary socioeconomic conditions, rendering it a potentially radically transformative enterprise.

Labels: Activism, Anarchism, Bay Area, California, Occupy Wall Street, Ustream, YouTube

I went out with this group on Monday morning. I'm the bearded guy in a black raincoat, with a red backpack on his back, holding a sign in the background at 53:21 through 53:26. I should have included this video with my post about the shutdown earlier this week, but just now came across it. OakFoSho was the ustreamer.

Labels: Activism, Bay Area, California, Occupy Wall Street, Sub-Proletarianization of America, Unions, Ustream