Posted 12 years ago on July 10, 2012, 6:58 p.m. EST by OccupyWallSt
via Kasama, who will continue to cover events and statements as they emerge:
Door beaten in by SWAT police raid.
Early morning, July 10, SWAT police forced their way into the Seattle apartment of organizers from the Occupy movement. The sleeping residents scrambled to put on clothes as they were confronted with automatic weapons.
The neighbor Natalio Perez heard the attack from downstairs: “Suddenly we heard the bang of their grenade, and the crashing as police entered the apartment. The crashing and stomping continued for a long time as they tore the place apart.”
After the raid, the residents pored over the papers handed them by a detective. One explained: “This warrant says that they were specifically looking for ‘anarchist materials’ — which lays out the political police state nature of this right there. In addition they were looking for specific pieces of clothing supposedly connected with a May First incident.
When the police finally left, they did not arrest anyone.
This action targets well known activists from Occupy Seattle and the Red Spark Collective (part of the national Kasama network).
This apartment has been a hub for organizing the Everything 4 Everyone festival in August – to bring together West Coast forces for a cultural and political event building on the year of Occupy.
The raid is a heavy-handed threat delivered by armed police aimed at intimidating specific people – but also st suppressing the work to continue the Occupy movement in Seattle, and create E4E as a space for radical gathering.
Posted 12 years ago on July 9, 2012, 8:49 a.m. EST by OccupyWallSt
Among the many things to remark on here in Montreal in relation to the remarkable student strike and the maple movement it has engendered is that people don’t seem to beat tactics to death. When new tactics have strategic uses that are underpinned by solid aims, and crucially, when they exhibit a bit of novelty or flair, they stay in play. On the other hand, when tactics appear to have outlasted their usefulness and especially their vibrancy, they are abandoned, reworked, or take another enlivening form.
It’s still unclear exactly how this happens. Ideas are put out there — on Facebook, posters, or the streets, and especially at student and neighborhood assemblies — and clearly, strategic and tactical decisions are made as well as implemented. Directly democratic along with highly participatory forms of decision making have long been institutionalized at many of the schools on strike, and several members of the student coalitional association CLASSE have mentioned that this self-governance was pivotal to planning, organizing, and mobilizing this strike. Or more strongly, that the strike couldn’t have happened without those bodies.
But there’s also this curious way in which a sort of “general will” or popular consensus — outside any formal process, and more like a gravitational pull — makes it apparent that a particular tactic has people’s enthusiasm and participation, or not. And not in a cynical or mean-spirited way; people on the ground seem to somehow, inexplicably, concur that something feels right to do.
The key point is: there’s a palpable and (compared to contemporary movements in the United States) profound lack of tactical, not to mention strategic, staleness.
We would like to invite all NYC anarchists, radicals, autonomists,
Occupiers, POC, queers, anti-capitalists, undocumented people, feminists
and individuals who are interested in organizing events to join us at
Prospect Park on July 22 for an Open Assembly and BBQ.
The Open Assembly is a forum for reporting back about recent projects,
announcing current and future projects, and inviting others to collaborate
on those projects via breakout groups at the end of the meeting. Our goal
is to bring together individuals and groups to meet, discuss, and
coordinate projects.
Large assemblies have difficulties acting as decision making bodies, but
enable large numbers to come together and cooperate. These decision making
challenges have contributed in fragmenting of the large assemblies. By
removing the decision making process and bringing together working groups
the assembly can continue to serve as a space for people to plug into
projects and coordinate on projects.
If all goes well, this kind of gathering can repeat at some regular
interval and help build bridges and facilitate the growth of the radical
community in NYC.
If you are interested in helping setup/cleanup/etc or have questions,
please send an email to
Last week, Mountain Justice and RAMPS stopped nine coal trucks and a coal barge after the Mountain Justice Summer Action Camp. These actions showed once again that people are willing to put their bodies on the line to stop the plunder of Appalachia and raised the spirits of West Virginians fighting to save their home, but Larry Gibson reminded us our work is not done.“Everything has to get bigger from here,” Larry said. “We need to put our backs up against the wall and not back down. The 99% means nothing if we don’t all support each other. No matter what our positions are we must come together.”
Larry is right. To win our struggles against the extraction industries, we will have to band together. The fight against strip mining has been gaining ground over the last few years (here, here and here, but King Coal will keep stripping to the bitter end and leave Appalachia with nothing unless we act now. It was only after aggressive direct action in the 60s and 70s that the political will was created to address strip mining on a federal level. If we want strip mining to end and restoration work to begin; if we want a post-coal future that is more than devastated landscapes, rampant fracking, and deepening poverty; if we want a healthy and whole Appalachia, we must escalate our resistance.
At PowerShift 2011, currently imprisoned activist Tim DeChristopher pointed out, “With only the people in this room, we could send 30 people onto a mountaintop removal site, shut it down temporarily, start to clog up the West Virginia court system. And we could send 30 people the day after that and the day after that and the day after that every day for a year. I believe we would never get to the end of that year because mountaintop removal would end before we reached that point.”
This summer we will take the first step toward that vision. Come to southern West Virginia on July 25. RAMPS will host a mobilization where people will prepare to take nonviolent direct action to shut down a strip mine. We are calling for as many people as possible to come together and do what the politicians, the regulators and the courts have been unwilling to do; to defend the land and the people; to stop strip mining.
The success of this depends on your participation. Whatever your skills, availability, or ability to risk arrest, there are ways for you to make this mobilization a success. To join ongoing working groups or find out more about ways to participate, please email officespace@wg.rampscampaign.org. We also deeply need your financial support. Please donate today so RAMPS can continue its vital work. Most importantly, spread the word.
We are all in a David versus Goliath struggle for our future, but Goliath is starting to stumble. With our survival at stake, we can unite and we can win.
As part of a city-wide protest movement against Chicago City Hall's assault on mental health clinics, a major battle erupted in mid-April, 2012 over keeping open the Woodlawn Clinic on the South Side. Here are nighttime scenes of the occupation, subsequent press conference, and interviews detailing why this decision has spelled disaster for humanitarian health assistance to the City's most vulnerable population. These closing also presage broader social costs. Included are Toussaint Losier (Mental Health Movement); Sophia Kortchmar, activist; N'Dana Carter (Mental Health Movement); Rev. Jose Landaverde (Our Lady of Guadalupe Angelican Catholic Church); Ronald Jackson (mental health activist). Included also is a short tribune to Helen Morley, a mental health clinic consumer and activist who predicted to city officials that if they closed her clinic, she would die. Her clinic closed on April 30, 2012, and she died on June 6, 2012.
