For those we were waiting to greet, the situation was somewhat different. When my friend Michelle got out, her first words were a very understated “That place is really not a good place.” As another friend, “Repoliticize,” described her experience on twitter:

For those of you who haven’t had the, ahem, pleasure of paying a visit to the inner corridors of santa rita jail, a few words… this is a cold, concrete space, which will eventually defeat you into lying on surfaces you wouldn’t let children touch. If you stay there long enough to be served more than one “meal,” you realize there is only one meal that they serve in the holding cells, a sealed plastic bag with two thick, stomach-turning slices of bologna, two stale slices of white bread, two soggy cookies, an orange, and a packet of “bernard” orange powder for flavoring the oddly filmy water that comes out of the cell’s one faucet.

The toilet is next to the window, so that you’re forced to pee not only in front of your cellmates, but also passing guards and inmates you’re made to beg for more toilet paper, and there hasn’t been any soap in the cells on either of my visits to santa rita. There are no trash cans, so you sit and lie in your own filth: orange peels, plastic packaging, spilled “bernard” off-brand tang.previous inhabitants of the cells have written on the walls with mustard and the benches are thick and sticky with food and bodily discharge. There’s not thing to do but sleep (if you’re lucky) and ponder whether it’s worth it to eat the “food” or drink the “water”

I don’t want to be overly dramatic with this account — although everything is as disgusting or as bad as I say because this was a TERRIBLE experience — but let’s be real: I was detained for 24 hours. This is one of the LEAST bad experiences one could have in jail.

Now, why were they there? Why did 400 people from Occupy Oakland spend days in a county jail? Why was it necessary? What did this accomplish? And why are some still there?

The easy answer – the one you’d get from newspapers, who are careful to give you a (gradually rising) number of arrestees — is something like “Violence Erupted in Oakland.” And the police exist, as you and I know, to calm the violence, restore stability, preserve order, pacify the situation, etc. Sitting outside the jail, it was hard not to think about the ways those distinctions were being established spatially: inside, those who were arrested (CRIMINALS) were lying in filth; outside, we (CITIZENS) were bathing in the pacific beauty of pristine lawns, sky, sun.

I start by talking about this because I want to expand on the post I wrote on Sunday morning — and I apologize for the excessive length of this — but I’ve been unable to stop thinking about what was has been so viscerally physical for those 400 people who were arrested versus the way we, who are distant from their experience, are able to make sense of why they have gone through it (with perhaps a bit of uneasiness about having been spared it). And I can’t help but talk about where I was and what I saw, not because I’m a narcissistic blogger — that’s just bonus — but because where you are, and when, is what makes the story you are able to tell what it is.

As I wrote on Sunday morning, what was so striking the day after was how all the mainstream news stories seemed to have been composed the same way, starting with OPD’s press release (issued in the mid afternoon) as a rough outline, sprinkling in some quotes from non-OPD sources (often social media, no doubt collected from the comfort of their office chairs), and then (maybe) added on the additional information that between one and four hundred people were arrested in the evening, depending on how late in the day they filed their copy.

It goes beyond the shoddy plagiarism of their work, though. As a result of how poorly these stories were constructed, you got the sense that everything happened at more or less the same time: occupiers tried to occupy a building, threw stones, burned a flag (or some variation on these elements) and the police arrested them all. It all seemed to happen at once (or at least you had no sense of what the rhyme of reason of it all had been). There is some truth to this story – there almost always is – but we should observe both what a simplistic story it became and how overdetermined the shape of that story was by the situation of its writers: since the NYT and CNN lacked any deep information about what happened – having no reporters there, on the ground, to do fancy things like fact checking, interviewing, or getting background – they could only present their readers with SPECTACLE. A picture, a few quotes, a flashy fact like the number of arrestees; that’s all they had, so that’s all they could give. And maybe this is all they want to sell anyway: inform their readers that SPECTACLE happened in Oakland on Saturday (giving them this news immediately, before anything is really known about it), so that they could move on to even more newer news the next day, leaving this story behind, even before all (or even many) details about what actually happened were known.

The result is that, as more and more information trickles out – and as the story develops further, as people talk to each other, as video comes out, as new accounts emerge – the mainstream faucet of news about Oakland has already slowed to a trickle, if that; Saturday recedes deep into the past, and the news cycle churns on to the next thing.

All sorts of information asymmetries result from this sequencing: the stories written Saturday have details on every injury suffered by the handful of police who (supposedly) suffered injuries… because the police were in a position to supply the press with loving detail of every pinky scrape. It would not be until yesterday, by contrast, that the National Lawyers Guild – whose green-hatted observers were all over the place on the day of the march – would be able to write this account of and response to what happened:

“It is appalling that the OPD continues to violate the law and its own policies,” said Carlos Villarreal, NLGSF Executive Director. “The police instigated the confrontation by immediately attacking the march with chemical agents, flashbang bombs, and a volley of rifle or shotgun-fired projectiles.”

As of 11 a.m., Monday, January 30, the NLGSF can confirm that at least 284 people were arrested on Saturday during Occupy Oakland’s Move In Day. The NLGSF received many reports of assaults on protesters, including an incident in which police knocked one person’s teeth out with a baton strike to the face. Police reportedly threw others through a glass door, and down a flight of steps. A videographer was pushed to the ground and clubbed.

“OPD has shown itself incapable of handling crowd control in a legal, much less professional manner,” said NLGSF Attorney Rachel Lederman. “We would urge the appointed monitor to take action immediately to rein in this abusive conduct, which is leading to ever increasing liability for the City.”

Now, these are lawyers speaking, lawyers who had multiple trained observers on the ground, and two days after they event, they are speaking from this accumulated observation, now checked against other sources and carefully justified. Let us then note, however, that while theirs is clearly the most credible account of what happened – the most informed, the best sourced – theirs is precisely the story that will not be widely reported, if at all. The moment has passed for that; only new developments will be reported, and this is old news. The “record” has been set, while everything else will remain merely “anecdotal” and unprinted. It will remain a subjective impression that the police were using indiscriminate physical violence, the kind of subjective impression you get if you talk to a whole bunch of protesters as they leave jail, hearing an accumulated record of expereince over the course of hours.

This is one problem with chronology; another is that the narrative logic of a newspaper article has its own warped sense of time, a distinctly non-chronological version of reality: beginning with The Thing (Clashes! Tear Gas! Arrests!, etc) it then goes on to add context and quotes and commentary on The Thing, thereby re-establishing that it was a singular thing, an event, a lede, a story. But it isn’t really a story in the strict sense of a chronological narrative: instead of a series of events linked together by various causes, effects, complications, and ambiguities – leading out of causes in the past and pointing towards new events in an inchoate future – it will be a singular thing, which happened, which has been “Reported” and which we can all consume and move on from.

There are rare exceptions, of course, but they are rare for clear reasons; Susie Cagle has been covering Occupy Oakland since the very beginning, because she’s an Oakland based reporter and because she wanted to. As a result, she has the deepest and most complete and most contextually rich version of the event. But no one has paid her consistently to do this, and that’s exactly the point: because the NYT (and even the Oakland Tribune) can weave together a story from OPD press releases and quotes from twitter, why should they pay someone to, you know, actually be informed about what’s happened? When Susie wrote her story, she didn’t know if she’d have anyone to pay her for writing it (whereas all the paid journalists who would write stories about what happened were either absent or had their eyes closed).

This is all, perhaps, completely unsurprising: since newspapers are in the business of producing news product, each article is a little commodified piece of information, easily swallowed, easily understood, and easily forgotten (so you’ll be ready for the next one). But all of this means that, for example, the “paper of record” produces their final story on Saturday night’s mass arrests (going to print on Sunday) by opening with this quite misleading sentence:

About 400 people were arrested and three police officers were injured after a weekend protest by members of the Occupy movement in Oakland, Calif., turned into a violent confrontation with law enforcement officers that led to an assault on City Hall.

Certain categories leap out, of course, as they always do, in the passive voice: while one group of people “were arrested,” another group of people “were injured.” Protesters are not classifiable as “injured,” even though so many of them were; the 400 people arrested were behind the walls of Glen Dyer and Santa Rita prisons, so little of no information was to be had about their injuries (or even still). In a vicious irony, since they’ve become “bodies” (as incarcerated human beings come to be called by police), they become effectively uninjurable; it wouldn’t be until they had returned to the world that we could know about their sprained wrists, head wounds, etc.

But the larger issue is this: if you were there – or even if you simply experienced it in real-time, over the livestream (as I did), or twitter, or whatever – you know how misleading that one sentence is. It isn’t untrue, exactly; those things did happen – more or less – but the chronology is incredibly important, and that’s the thing that’s been removed (along with protester injuries), when you reduce a narrative into a lede, especially one which strongly implies – as this one does – that the arrest was a response to the “assault on City Hall.”

Parenthetically, City Hall loves this kind of language, where the protesters are waging a war against the city. Councilmember Larry Reid claimed that “It’s almost like we’re being held hostage,” a strange thing to say while protesters were still in jail. Councilmember Ignacio De La Fuente said that Occupy protesters were engaging in “domestic terrorism.” Pictures like this one show us Jean Quan mourning the assault on her beloved city (this is a model of the county courthouse building):

And this, perhaps the most iconic image, is of protesters who took a flag out of City Hall, waved it around, then torched it:

I’m not going to defend things like burning of flags or vandalizing city hall; I wouldn’t have done it, I wish they hadn’t done it, and I think it was stupid to do it. I don’t think it accomplishes anything, and it feeds into the story that people like Reid and De La Fuente want to tell about Occupy Oakland, making it seem like Occupy are the violent ones.

That said, the “assault on City Hall” was virtually the last thing that happened on Saturday. It wasn’t the cause of the police reaction, as the National Lawyer’s Guild noted: it was a response to the actions taken by OPD and the city of Oakland. You can still think whatever you want about it; you can be appalled at the protesters who did it, if you like. But it wasn’t the cause of the days events; it was the coda to the night’s events, if that.

The story of what happened before that is there, though, if we gave it some room to breathe. Kevin Gosztola wrote a pretty strong account of what happened – relying mainly on livestreams and hard work –and Benjamin Phillips’ account at Occupy Oakland Media is quite accurate. If you want a deep and informed account of community (bad) relations with OPD, you will find Cami Graves’ story informative (also at OOM, starting with “The long, dark history of a troubled police department”).

The simplest version of the chronology that doesn’t complete obscure it would, I think, divide the day into two stages. Stage one was the confrontation at the Kaiser Convention Center, which happened in the early afternoon. This account describes what happened there, more or less as I experienced it; suffice it to say that the march took a long time to get to the Kaiser Center because the police were already there, and then the police used smoke bombs, tear gas, clubs, and bean-bag rounds[1] to drive the crowd away. It’s unclear what Occupy Oakland’s plan was, but whatever it was, it didn’t work. This photo (taken by Millicent) shows you the scene, but what you can’t see are the cops between the marchers and the Kaiser Center itself:

At that point, the march was stalled, and so they turned back along Oak Avenue, and came up against a line of police, briefly trying to stand up to them:

After that, the march turned away and began working its way back to Oscar Grant Plaza. They would eventually regroup there, but it seemed, from my perspective at the back, like a very near thing: the police were moving in military phalanxes, beating protesters who didn’t move fast enough, and obviously trying to kettle the march. It was scary. The fact that they were using physical force should surprise no one at this point, but what was new was the way they were using it: the police were on the offensive. Once the march got stalled at the Kaiser Center, they were moving us, at least until the marchers took back that momentum. I suspect that if they could have kettled the march there, they would have arrested everyone right then.

Once the march got back to OGP, there was a pause. And this, too, is important: it was some time later that a different march (with many of the same people but also many different people), started marching from Oscar Grant Plaza to try to take, apparently, the Travelers Aid building. That pause fooled me; I thought, from the demeanor of the crowd, that the day was over, and I went home. And, honestly, I was pretty bummed by what had happened, and not in the mood to march around the city chanting, which is what Occupy Oakland has been doing on Saturday nights for the last few weeks. I was tired, and I had stuff to do. And if it sounds like I’m re-thinking or trying to justify that decision, well, I obviously am: you cannot spend hours outside a jail, waiting, where your friends are imprisoned inside, without thinking really hard about why it was that they are in there and you are out here.

In any case, in the meantime, people had been discussing what had happened, rebuilding spirits, and deciding what to do next. And since it was widely circulated that the Kaiser Center had been Plan A, but that there was a plan B, the second march set forth. This would be the second stage, because the police were now in full effect. In the afternoon, they had been guarding the targets – like the Kaiser Center – and were not visibly following the march; in the evening marches, they were following and attempting to kettle the marchers, pretty clearly so that they could do what they eventually did: arrest every last one of them.

The unstoppable livestreamer Oakfosho was out for the entire time, and his videos show what happened along the march, seen from the ground  (at grueling length, but here’s an only 17 minute long edited and annotated version). But here, with footage take from a building above, you can see with great clarity what was happening at 19^th and Telegraph, when the police finally managed to block off all the exits from the square. It is a remarkable thing this video lets you see; you should read Millicent’s analysis of it, but mainly you should just watch it:

The important thing to take from this video is that the police were trying to trap the protesters so they could arrest them all – what they would later do – and they only failed because the protesters were able to push down a fence and and escape through it. Note that, at about 4:10 into that video above, the police fire flash grenades into the crowd – still trapped on all four sides inside the park – and at 4:20, you can see police rushing into the crowd and hitting people with their clubs. They push the crowd back, forcing them into a smaller and smaller area, until – at 5:20 – a group pushes down the fence and the whole crowd is able to escape.

As Millicent notes, while OPD is explicitly required not to treat an entire crowd as one thing (and to allow people who want to leave to leave), they do exactly what they are not supposed to do:

OPD manufactures the very condition it’s supposed to avoid: they are blocking people from leaving the scene. They are creating precisely the “position of heightened danger” they’re supposed to be trying to defuse.

After the escape through the fence, the march continued, with the cops following. But the police caught up with the marchers in front of the YMCA, and this time kettled them more successfully, blocking all the exits (by many accounts clubbing people to force them back and thereby packing them in like sardines) and then, after preventing them from escaping, arresting everybody (or, almost everybody) for failure to disperse (including, I was told, a guy who was just trying to get into his car and didn’t even know what the protest was about). They even brought a tank.

It was clear, at this point, that this is what they’d been trying to do all day, what they’d been planning to do earlier: arrest everybody and sort it out later. And it was only at this point that the “assault on City Hall” happened, maybe five blocks away. Once the 400 people who would be arrested that night had been informed that they were under arrest (which you could hear on the livestream as “Attention marchers: you have failed to disperse! You are now under arrest! Submit to the arrest” several minutes after the protesters had been chanting “Let us Disperse”), protesters who had escaped back to Oscar Grant Plaza “occupied” City Hall.

Think what you want about what happened after that. Think what you want about what happened the whole day, in fact. But I started with the mis-chronology of the NYT story – and the implication that the arrests were a reaction to the “assault on City Hall” – because it was only once police had arrested 400 people that some of the people they hadn’t arrested (and perhaps some other people) went to Oscar Grant Plaza, City Hall’s front lawn, and, angrily, in response to what had happened, did what they did. In other words, a group of occupiers angrily smashed stuff in City Hall and burned a flag after protesters were arrested for a failure to disperse when the police were preventing them from dispersing (and no official order to disperse was given the second time, a violation of their own rules).

At home, I could see what was happening over the livestream, could hear the crowd was chanting “let us disperse” and “this is a hostage situation.” I could read the tweets being sent out from inside the kettle, where protesters were describing what was happening to them. And the New York Times could have done that too, if they had wanted to. If they had, though, they would have to admit that the 400 people who were arrested were not, and could not have been, arrested for what was done in City Hall. They were arrested because Oakland Police Department had already made the decision to do a mass arrest, of everyone they could sweep up and the tie down. They are tired of Occupy Oakland. They want it to end. And so, they are now making decision not based on the law – which will be what causes the vast majority of these charges to be dropped, if the past is any indication, and most likely a class action lawsuit – but on the political desire of City Hall to get back to the business of making Oakland safe for business.

(CNN) – Occupy activists tossed pipes, bottles, burning flares and other objects Saturday at Oakland police, who responded by using tear gas and smoke grenades and arresting more than 100 demonstrators, city and police officials said.

Now, I have no difficulty believing that at least a few protesters threw things at the police, though we should also be extremely skeptical; they always say that, and it’s at least usually not true (or at least wildly exaggerated). But while I had an obstructed view of those events – and I know what I did and didn’t see – it’s very easy for you, when you read a news article like CNN’s, to not see the most important clause in the article, the last one, “city and officials said.” This indicates for you (or should) that CNN is essentially doing to OPD’s press release the same thing that desperate college students sometimes do with wikipedia articles: copy and paste, and then change just enough words so that it isn’t plagiarism. CNN was not there yesterday, so they only saw what the Oakland Police Department told them to see. OPD wrote this:

Officers were pelted with bottles, metal pipe, rocks, spray cans, improvised explosive devices and burning flares.

And then CNN wrote down a garbled version of it. Similarly, they took this paragraph from the OPD press release:

By 12 pm, a crowd of approximately 250 had gathered in Frank Ogawa Plaza for the Occupy rally. Just before 1:30 pm, the group started marching southbound on Broadway. As the group of approximately 450 marched, traffic disruptions occurred on downtown streets.

And (slightly) re-wrote it as:

The tension began Saturday around noon when about 250 activists gathered in Frank Ogawa Plaza. They were joined later by another 200 people as they marched around the city.

They turned “12 pm” into “around noon” and they copied down OPD’s crowd estimates exactly (ABC7 guessed 2,000; I would have guessed about a thousand), and slightly altered the wording to cover their trail. After that, to their credit, they found the time to copy and paste text from the Occupy Oakland twitter feed and web site. And then they called it a day and went home, apparently; while real journalists were still being arrested while doing their jobs (Susie Cagle and Gavin Aronsen were both arrested, despite having press passes, then later “unarrested”), the good people at CNN were finished putting the imprimateur of “objective” journalism on OPD’s press release, and laughed all the way to the bank.

Pretty much exactly the same thing happened with the New York Times article, which has exactly the same architecture: liberal excerpts/paraphrasing from OPD press release, followed by copied text from activist social media. Even the Oakland Tribune managed to not only paraphrase the OPD press release  – and they’re a terrible newspaper, but still, they’re right there – but also to get the time of the weekly march wrong:

In what has become a weekly march, about 250 protesters gathered around noon at Frank H. Ogawa Plaza for a rally. At 1:30 p.m., the group began marching with a crowd of about 450 protesters. Forty-five minutes later, some of the marchers entered the campus of Laney College, city officials said. That was when police first fired tear gas, a witness said. At 2:50 p.m., marchers began tearing down perimeter fences around the vacant Henry J. Kaiser Convention Center, city officials said. Police declared an unlawful assembly and fired more tear gas. Witnesses said police fired rubber bullets after protesters began hurling items at them.

That error (the weekly marches happen at night) is so pointless, and yet also such a rookie mistake that it gives the game away. To make that mistake, you have to know almost nothing about what’s going on in Oakland. And the repetition of the same numbers and times should start to feel like what it is, an activity utterly empty of anything like professional journalism. The fact that all of these “journalists” repeat the same ridiculous crowd number, march times, etc isn’t just an indication of their tendency to downplay activist mobilization; its an index of their basic and fundamental worthlessness as news sources. They’re just copying and pasting. Or take the line “some of the marchers entered the campus of Laney College,” another phrase lifted directly from the OPD press release: almost all of the marchers got to the Kaiser center by marching through Laney. It’s not important, but there’s no “some” about it; virtually all of us got to the Kaiser center by marching through Laney and anyone who was there would know this. It isn’t just that there are errors, or that these errors are small and pointless; it’s that the level of non-knowledge required to produce these texts is huge: these articles are what they are as a function of the total distance and disconnect from what actually happened and a total dependence on being told what happened by the Police press officer (and an inability to do anything more than write that down, and slightly change the word order to cover their tracks).

This is a small post; I will write more later. For now, this: I don’t know everything that happened yesterday; I know what I saw and what I didn’t see. But if you only read the NY Times, CNN, and the Oakland Tribune, you won’t even have the benefit of knowing what they don’t know. Which is a whole hell of a lot.

You can read about Occupy Oakland Move-in Day here. The press conference will be at 10:00 a.m. PST and will be live-streamed here, I believe (about an hour from now, when I am); I’ll post a link to any video I find (EDIT: here’s the move-in committee’s open letter to the Mayor) .

Building occupations are becoming more common in the occupy movement, but — unless I’m mistaken — this is the first one that has been heavily publicized in advance of the action itself (albeit with the exception of the location). And while this is an effort to mobilize supporters to defend the action, a way to counteract the force that police have shown themselves willing and able to use against protesters and occupiers, it seems reasonable to expect that the Oakland Police Department will be out in force on Saturday, once the location of the building to be occupied is announced. Somehow I expect that duty rotations have been organized with this weekend in mind.

I have no idea how it will play out, but with all that in mind, this announcement (see also here) seems remarkably timed; OPD has been under federal scrutiny for years now, ever since running completely wild in 2003, and the threat of a federal government take-over of the department suddenly looms:

Frustrated and “in disbelief” by what he called the slow pace of reform, a federal judge on Tuesday ordered Oakland’s top cop to notify an expert overseeing the Police Department about anything that could affect a federal consent decree, including promoting or disciplining officers and changing policies or tactics.

In ordering interim Police Chief Howard Jordan to “regularly consult” with independent monitor Robert Warshaw, U.S. District Judge Thelton Henderson acknowledged that he was giving considerably more responsibility to Warshaw…

Jim Chanin, an attorney for the civil plaintiffs in the Riders case, said the judge’s order represents “a major sea change from before. Before it was just an option, and now it’s a court order. Every major decision that the chief makes, he has to consult with the monitor. This is radically different.”

You can read the monitor’s quarterly report here, if you like. It’s not a good time for them to be under increased scrutiny, to say the least. Or is it? Oakland city government may well welcome having law enforcement taken off their hands.

Socialism and/or Barbarianism has A Letter to Micky Arison, CEO of Carnival Cruiselines, and Gianni Onorato, president of Costa Cruises (ht Gtiso):

(Photo poached from here, who poached it from here(and altered it))

• Sh!t the Dowager Countess Says
• Trader Joe’s: Real ethics means paying farm workers fairly
• Gluttony Goes Viral
• The awkward moment when you break the law you proposed
• “If a Pulitzer isn’t a guarantee that, at the very least, you won’t get canned tomorrow, then what good is it?”
• “One of the gravest threats the FBI saw in the Black Panther movement was their Free Children’s Breakfast Program.”
• Biography Sideways
• MAKE, DARPA, and teens: A match made in hackerspace

Occupy San Francisco gets down to business:

Act II of the Occupy Wall Street movement, San Francisco version, kicked off on a rainy, blustery Friday in the heart of the city’s financial district. Targeting specific corporations like Wells Fargo and Bank of America and emphasizing real, tangible issues like home foreclosures, affordable health care and education as well as broader ones like the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, several hundred protesters – the exact number was impossible to estimate – fanned out across the city, snarling traffic, getting arrested, holding sidewalk teach-ins, and generally serving notice that after its brief winter hibernation, the Occupy movement was back and kicking.

Occupiers Close BoA, Hold Off Police for 10 Hours:

‎”It started out small. It was, to be fair, the most miserable day weather-wise in the Bay Area since the Occupy Movement began. Ask yourself this — would YOU get up at 5:00 AM and go out in the cold rain to watch a giant vampire squid and a black blob, or to sit on cold concrete in front of a bank?

By noon there were perhaps 1000 people spread out over the Financial District; by 6:00 PM, there were two or three times that. It was a day of a few rallies, but mostly smaller actions at banks, the courts and federal buildings. Foreclosures and Citizens’ United were the day’s standout villains.”

A Timeline of “Occupy Wall Street West” today, in SF.

Unpacking Homelessness on Occupy Oakland Move-In Day:

On December 28, in the midst of Occupy Oakland’s continuing battle against the city and OPD at Oscar Grant Plaza, another kind of Occupation battlewas taking place in Sacramento, largely out of sight of both activists and media. Homeless campers were experiencing another raid, as police cleared out their encampment. Despite the fact that Sacramento’s shelters are at full capacity already, the city nevertheless used anti-camping ordinances to clear the camp and scatter homeless people to the city’s doorways and park benches. The action by Sacramento’s city government and police parallels the cynical raids on homeless encampments throughout the last decade in Oakland and other parts of the East Bay.

The sensational focus on one Occupation, but not the other, borne of necessity, speaks to some of the artificial borders that have been set up in the mainstream Occupy conversation. After all, Occupy is often represented as a movement of middle class liberals, assuming a symbolic “homelessness” to bring attention to a small range of problems that have become the focus of attention in the last decade—the sub-prime crisis, the failure of elected leaders to address this crisis, the lack of substantive creation of job security and the completion of the co-opting of the Democratic party. For this reason, the active participation of homeless people in various Occupy movements—and especially in Oakland—became a cause of confusion and concern in the early weeks of the Occupy movement. Homelessness remains such an integral part of the American economic and social system, that few progressives or liberals even view it as a political issue.

Emmanuel Iduma has three posts on the Nigerian revolution.

Chika Unigwe on Occupy Nigeria.

• Hand jive
• Black Cinema, Red Tails, and Pariah
• The Idiot’s Guide to fighting Dictatorship in Syria (and avoiding foreign intervention)
• Jeffrey Sconce’s sentences are resistant to excerpting and tweeting.
• Women’s versus People
• Shorter Joseph Stiglitz: “Shit is fucked up and bullshit”
• Bambi meets Godzilla: Higher education edition.
• Should We Really ABOLISH the Term Paper? A Response to the NY Times

When a camera gets in between the cop and the person he’s beating on:

• SMS Holdings: The “Faith-Based,” Anti-Labor Company Behind Oakland’s Private Cops
• The Unholy Alliance of Monetary Expansion and Fiscal Austerity: More for those who have, less for those who don’t
• Mainstream Feminism’s Demand for Realism: On “Fotoshop by Adobé,” aesthetics, and posthuman feminism
• How Reddit went from a second-tier aggregator to the Web’s unstoppable force.
• Kaneezes and Gholooms. “The history of slavery in Iran is long and complex…”
• The Getaway + Other Videos

SOPA, PIPA, MEGAUPLOAD:

• Digital Culture Wars (SOPA, PIPA)
• There Is Nothing You Possess That Power Cannot Take Away
• Sopa and Pipa would create a consumption-only internet
• Internet Regulation and the economics of piracy
• The Internet Should Flex its Muscles More Often
• Megaupload Details Raise Significant Concerns About What DOJ Considers Evidence Of Criminal Behavior

The Workers are Animals. Let’s Replace Them with Robots”:

Among the billionaires at the vanguard of global capital, Terry Gou of Hon Hai (also known asFoxconn) deserves special recognition for his honesty. “Hon Hai has a workforce of over one million worldwide and as human beings are also animals, to manage one million animals gives me a headache,” said the chairman. His company has also begun building “an empire of robots” to replace a whining workforce.

• The Future is Female
• Time-lapse photography over Africa
• Kenya’s ‘Little Italy’
• Sex and Violence in Role Playing
• The Occupations in winter

• The Seen and the Unseen In Pakistan’s Economy
• “How war, markets and judiciously chosen twinsets saved Britain”:PennyRed‘s verdict on The Iron Lady
• Lights, camera, quick backflip: the eloquence of silent films
• Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie on branding, charity, and class in Nigeria’s schools.

Expropriating the expropriated (1983-2009), or, Why It’s the Top 20 not Top 1% That Matter:

Spain’s “Indignados” and the Globalization of Dissent:

POSTSCRIPTS (Since, obviously, the links above are not nearly sufficient, I’ll put all the new links I add today, here, so you can find them in one place if you want to):

• New York Times Tells Us Only Chinese Near Slave Labor Could Handle Steve Jobs’ Demands
• From the Archives: Savage Minds vs. Jared Diamond
• The violence of history: 1971 and the silencing of women
• Paul Simon’s Graceland Reconsidered
• Returning Dignity to Mugshot Victims: Spotlight on Jane Lindsay
• The East offering its riches to Britannia
• “it’s surprising that people haven’t been more surprised by John Ashbery’s decision to undertake a translation of Arthur Rimbaud’s Illuminations.”
• Martial Tribes and the Pakistan Army: A response to Aakar Patel
• The Return of Inequality: How the Occupy Movement Shifted Electoral Politics

The library did not close, and the students are still there this morning. Occupy Cal held a general assembly on one side of the space to discuss what to do next — which eventually reached the decision to vote on whether to take a decision now or later, and produced a perfect tie — and that eventually evolved into an interesting discussion between students and Anthropology faculty on what the role of faculty should be. I assume they’re still there. At some point last night a working group produced this statement on their occupation, which I reproduce in its entirety:

We love our libraries and are here to protect them. Libraries are critically important for excellent education for all. We students, faculty, and community members collectively have decided to occupy the Anthropology Library at UC Berkeley to protest the dismantling of the library system on campus and public education as a whole.

We chose to occupy this space because the Anthropology library is a recent victim of extreme service cuts. The hours of operation are being cut from the previous, already slim, 9am-6pm to the current 12pm-5pm, because the university has not taken the necessary steps to sufficiently staff the library. The multiple attacks on campus libraries are a reflection of privatization and the devaluation of the public education system.

We are here to reverse this process. We call on the administration to take immediate action to hire another full-time librarian to ensure full access to this valuable resource.

The administration may claim that there are insufficient funds, but in reality these resources exist, but their allocation by UC administrators and the state does not adequately reflect the values of excellent public education. Why have the UC Regents continued to approve 21% increases in administration salaries, while students are being denied access to their libraries? Why are the taxes of the 1% so low while essential social services are being cut across the state and country?

We stand in solidarity with the Occupy movement as a whole and the protestors at UC Riverside who were met with violence in their attempt to protest the austerity policies of the UC Regents, Sacramento, and Washington D.C.

Defend our libraries and schools. Occupy together.

— The Anthropology Library Occupation
January 19, 2012

Was this a symbolic protest? Was this a “real” occupation? What was accomplished? Was it a success? Perhaps the real measure of this particular occupation’s potency is that none of these questions are answerable. There  was a tent, and by the looks of it, someone was going to sleep inside of it. It is unclear whether this will be an ongoing occupation, or whether this was the first shot in a drawn out library campaign; much discussion last night centered on whether to make the anthropology library a focused encampment, ongoing, or to regularize a kind of roving library occupation in a different library each week. The problem is university-wide; as administrative salaries continue to bloat, library staff have been cut to the bone, to such an extent that when a single staff person took another job in December — as was explained last night — the Anthropology library had to cut its hours from 9-6 to 12 -5. But the severity of the Anthropology library’s situation is mirrored across campus, by design, where the administration is using natural attrition to cut personel, waiting for staff to leave and then declining to replace them. It’s the same story as everywhere else on campus, but as worthy a place as any other to fight encroaching neoliberalization of the campus. And there’s precedent; two years ago, Cal student protesters liberated this very library, in protest against the same kinds of cutbacks, and eventually got the funding replaced. And in many respects (as the organizers of that action have pointed out to me), that’s where the language of “Occupy [place]” first came from, albeit building on a long tradition of occupations elsewhere. However modest a victory it may have been — and may be — big things come from small places, and this semester is till young.

At the general assembly three days ago, a student spoke out in favor of the library occupation (one of the students who brought the initial proposal, I believe), by comparing it with Occupy Oakland’s upcoming occupation of a large building space — scheduled for the 28th of January — and argued that Occupy Cal would be part of setting a new trend in turning towards occupying buildings. We’ll see about that; Occupy Oakland’s plan “to occupy a large, vacant building and convert it into a social center,” will almost certainly be met with massive police violence, since occupying buildings has been a clear red line for local municipalities so far, and OPD has already established how they will respond to such things. Lots of occupiers have talked about turning away from occupying public spaces towards reclaiming buildings and houses (foreclosed and otherwise), but it’s still unclear to me how that will work, if it does; we’ll see what happens on the 28th. Occupy Oakland has a schedule of events posted for the 29th, but that feels a bit like a “the boys will be home by Christmas!” kind of optimism to me; I hope they will, but I’m not holding my breath either.

Occupy Cal’s library action is much more modest, of course, and by general consensus is meant to keep the library open for those who would normally use it, effectively by substituting Anthropology faculty volunteers for library staff. During the new “normal” operating hours, the library will operate as usual; only during the “liberated hours” will you see scenes like this (from BAMN’s post on the event):

I’d say about a dozen students were really studying the whole time I was there, but that’s also a not-inconsiderable number; it was a symbolic protest in one way — since most of the occupiers were not using the library as a library is normally used — but an impressive number actually were; the library is divided into two natural sections, and while one was filled with political discussion, general assemblying, and s forth, the other was filled with quiet students quietly working.

The library action was peaceful, though, at least in part because of its modest size and faculty intervention. In UC Riverside yesterday, student protesters were presented with the usual UC police violence, and we’ll see that again at Berkeley, I predict; the administration doesn’t like pictures of its police beating students, but it likes student protesters even less. Last night, though, there was none of that. The administration sent the chair of the Anthropology department a statement to read to the students, trying to make clear that the only reason they weren’t being subject to the usual police violence was the “supervisory” presence of the Anthro faculty, who are, in all likelihood, not going to be there forever (nor, some students argued, should they, except as protesters themselves). And so it will be interesting to see what the faculty do next, if they quietly recede into a non-presence as they have before.

Maybe they won’t, but we’ll see. These faculty were roundly thanked for their presences — and their mobilization was both quick and impressive — but their presences as “supervisory adults” was also not exactly in perfect harmony with the spirit of the action, and won’t be sustainable in the long term anyway. No actual administrators would come to read the administration statement themselves, after all — though they did send several completely conspicuous spies to observe and report on what was happening (conspicuous by their cloud of contempt and refusal to communicate with people round hem) — so Anthro faculty had to speak for the administration, an arrangement the administration no doubt enjoys. Act Two of this will be telling. As of now, though, nothing is happening… nothing except students occupying a library, reading, and being students.

UPDATE (Saturday, 1/21): via, the Kroeber Study-In Resolution declares:

Whereas, The George and Mary Foster Anthropology Library hours were cut this semester by close to 50%; and

Whereas, a policy of attrition is eroding all of our libraries and other vital student services; and

Whereas, the loss of resources and services has a detrimental effect on educational opportunities for students at this campus; and

Whereas, the University’s stated mission “is to serve society as a center of higher learning, providing long-term societal benefits through transmitting advanced knowledge, discovering new knowledge, and functioning as an active working repository of organized knowledge;” and, finally

Whereas, the University cannot fulfill this mission, or maintain its status as a premier learning environment, without the full functioning of, and access to, its exceptional libraries as they are pivotal in providing space for the sharing of knowledge and the free exchange of ideas; and

Be it resolved, we demand the restoration of the Anthropology Library hours to their Fall 2011 schedule; and

Be it further resolved, that we demand the proper staffing, funding, and foresight in order to maintain full operational capacity of all campus libraries; and

Be it finally resolved, that while you remain unwilling to maintain the normal operations of our library, we will keep the Anthropology Library open until our demands are met.

Learn more from Wikipedia. From the Electronic Freedom Foundation. From Google. From Boing Boing. From Reddit. From Mashable. From Craigslist. From Threat Level. From MIT Media Lab. And We need to talk about piracy (but we must stop SOPA first)

• A Country’s Frustration, Fueled Overnight
• Nigeria: country tense as Jonathan accedes to some of fuel protestors’ demands
• Nigeria fuel strike ends with soldiers in streets
• Governor Fashola Condemns Deployment Of Soldiers In Lagos
• Soyinka Calls for ‘Immediate and Unconditional Removal’ of Soldiers From Lagos Streets
• Show me the Money
• ‘Nigerian Spring’ Here to Stay
• Wristwatch designer, other govt cronies got fuel import allocation
• Nigerian subsidy crisis opens window of opportunity
• Fuel Subsidy Removal: Nigerians Speak Ill
• Decolonising the Nigerian Constitution
• The Butchers Of Nigeria
• The Nigerian Strike: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly
• It is More than Just Subsidy

What was the Bad Thing? It doesn’t matter; it’s an arbitrary and senseless hand of God that enters the narrative and makes things shitty. Fire came and burned the father up, in point of fact, but he could as easily have drowned or been hit by a meteor or killed in the other Bad Thing that will happen later; the fire doesn’t matter in its particularity, any more than it matters why The Great War happens, or any of the other Bad Things that happen. A Bad Thing simply happened and then life got really scary and desperate.

It is important to notice this fairly simple fact, because this is what the narrative is about. The fact that the Bad Thing is arbitrary and senseless is not beside the point; it is the point. As Event, it signifies “arbitrariness.” And while it’s a clumsy bit of writing – deus ex machina being the cheapest form of authorial intrusion there is – that is also precisely the point. Arbitrary does not mean “random,” but something more like “subject to authorial will.” And this isn’t just a badly written movie (though, good lord, it is that); this is a movie that quite explicitly wants to elevate arbitrary authorial spectacle over the complex and contingent ambiguities of human existence, to quite nakedly and directly demand that we revere the Voice of the Author[ity] over the nuances of character. After all, this is a movie whose perverse dramatic climax is when the Director gets the Lifetime Achievement award, and we are meant to believe that Hugo would risk his life to help him do it (or, rather, to overlook the fact that he never would). It’s a bold move to write your Oscar acceptance speech into the film itself – casting Ben Kingsley to play you – but Scorsese, it appears, is a bold auteur: his characters are there to serve him.

It might be too much to call Hugo a fascist movie, in this sense, but I like the way the word feels on my tongue, here, the kind of association between spectacle and authority that it evokes (and consequential contempt and crass instrumentalization of those who are weak enough to be used). In any case, I hope the slippage in my language – between auteur, author, and authority – suffiently indexes the way this movie wants to make the author both the object of the spectacle, the master of the spectacle, and the primary subject of love and sympathy. For in doing so, it wants to make us forget people’s whose precariousness – whose subjection to the whims of the powerful – would make them not give two fucking shits about an old man’s battered ego, much less risking their entire existence to give it one last pump.

After all, something bizarre happens between the beginning of the movie, when we are watching Hugo try to survive in a desperately precarious place, and the end, when we are watching Hugo watching movies and a moviemaker. How on earth has the movie gone from the paradigmatic orphan plot to a Behind the Music documentary? How have we been tricked into thinking the real tragedy of the Bad Thing was that it hampered a director’s career?

Let us go back to where we start, and where we end: Hugo’s existence – post-Event – is profoundly ruled by arbitrary fate. He is contingent, utterly dependent on the unpredictably vaguaries of chance, etc. Hugo isn’t just metaphorically an undocumented worker. He’s actually quite literally an illegal alien, as Millicent pointed out to me; he may have blue eyes and the palest of pale skin – in yet another Parisian nostalgia film where brown people don’t exist – but let us add up the details: existing on the margins of official society, he keeps the machinery running without anyone knowing, lacks a secure right to exist or assurance that his job will continue, his livelihood is illegal (in that he must steal to live), and the police question his presence on sight and will arrest him if the truth is discovered. He is, in other words, the very embodiment of precarious life, a person whose ability to exist is so radically contingent on the visissitudes of random fate that his existence can’t have any independent meaning or coherence; he will simply be, but be fundamentally dependent for life on random chance, until random chance destroys him.

The reason this happened – the thing that caused him to be cast out of meaningful society, a permanent outlaw whose life can have no reliable or secure meaning – is itself essentially meangingless. No one started the fire. He’s not a Harry Potter whose parents were murdered. It just happened. And the result of that senseless event is: to be cast into a world of senselessness.

But at this point, there are two points to make. On the one hand, we’re at the level of very basic universals: Hugo’s Good life went away because of a Bad Thing, and that Bad Thing could happen again, at any time, and take away what little he has left. All that bullshit about movies and clocks and machines and magic tricks haven’t entered into the picture because they’re all essentially compensatory. Why is Hugo into movies? Because he and his father used to watch movies after his mother died. Why is he so into machinery and the automaton? Because it’s his connection to his dead father. The plot – a splendid and incoherent minefield of machines and clocks and movies and magic tricks and all sorts of great MacGuffins – is nothing more than Hugo’s attempt to deal with a reality defined by the absence of everything that is universally good, his effort to bring about a state of being where his life will be not bad. In other words, we have to reduce the movie down to its crude essence: Good Things and Bad Things. Drama! Loss! Pathos!

Which brings me to my second point: someone did start the fire. It was Martin Scorsese. All that bullshit about clocks and magic tricks is there to hide the simple fact that Scorsese’s movie has built us a perfect orphan, with a perfect orphan story, using fire and spectacle to do it. But this is purely functional necessity. For while the movie ends with the important rich director saving him – just as the important rich director put him in this mess in the first place – it turns out, obscenely, that the plight of this orphan was, itself, mere spectacle for us to enjoy feeling sorry for, and the real question in the film is whether we’ll remember that spectacle is the most important thing. Because somewhere in the middle, what is at stake in the narrative suddeny, seamlessly, becomes the question of whether important rich guy will get his proper due from society as an important guy. Martin Scorsese expects us to believe that the most marginalized and vulnerable member of society imaginable – Hugo – would suddenly, for no apparent reason, decide that what he truly needs to do is help an old man who has been, uniformly and without exception, cruel to him. He doesn’t just expect it; he takes for granted that in a movie which starts off being (essentially) about an undocumented alien trying to stay out of an ICE detention center, what we really need to be concerned about is the question of whether a great filmmaker will get lauded and praised for being great.

Underneath all of this, I want to suggest, is the realization (and repression) of the fact that “Martin Scorsese” is profoundly irrelevent to the world today. By putting him in quotation marks, I don’t mean Scorsese himself; I mean that “Famous Director Obsessed With Blurring the Boundaries Between Film History and Real History” is tremendously out of step with a world now defined not by glorious luxury, but by precarious workers whose lives are being destroyed by senseless Bad Things. We are (or he is afraid we are) the people who came back from the Bad Thing and stopped giving a shit about wonderful daydreams, a la the soldiers who came back from the Great War and stopped watching The Director’s movies. And by making Hugo’s narrative about this tragedy and its resolution – about the terrible fact that this is the case, and then building a dream world in which we look away from a terrible reality and fluff his ego as dream-maker once more – is it too much for me to note and to abhor how he has decided to put the focus on himself?  Is it too much to scramble around for the worst words you can find to describe a movie that starts with an incredibly powerful evocation of the fear, loneliness, and terror of useless and discarded life — the pain of being disallowed even to be a cog in the machine — and apply them to the filmmaker who would make that movie, ultimately, about how great it is to be on top of the pyramid, and how sad it is to not be on the very top any more? And then put himself back on top?