OWS + Brigades make debut in the streets

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1. Seeing the comment here about how the police cracked down hard on the clowns makes me think immediately of David Graeber’s “On the Phenomenology of Giant Puppets,” in which he writes:

   As many activists have observed, the forces of order in the United States seem to have a profound aversion to giant puppets. Often police strategies aim to destroy or capture them before they can even appear on the streets. As a result, a major concern for those planning actions soon became how to hide the puppets so they will not be destroyed in pre-emptive attacks. What’s more, for many individual officers at least, the objection to puppets appeared to be not merely strategic, but personal, even visceral. Cops hate puppets. Activists are puzzled as to why.

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2. Hey folks, FYI the footage shown when this video is talking about the “violent police crackdown” on the Occupy Oakland Move-In Day is actually taken from the anti-capitalist march that happened as part of the November 2, 2011 Oakland General Strike. I’m not sure why the filmmakers decided to use footage that was unrelated to what they were actually talking about, but I feel it’s important to say that the use of Black Bloc tactics had nothing to do with the police repression of the Jan 28th Move-In Day. There was actually no police repression related to the Black Bloc property destruction during the day of the General Strike; the only violence done to people as a result of that action was taken by dogmatically nonviolent protesters who decided to physically attack people who were using the Black Bloc tactic. There was no Black Bloc at all during the Occupy Oakland Move-In day; the face of militancy during the Move-In day was actually the shield bloc, which was protecting the people of the march from the bean bag rounds and rubber bullets the police were firing indiscriminately into the crowd. For more info, take a listen here: http://www.kpfa.org/archive/id/77663

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