Bluebird

Dissident poet silent no more

Kylie Northover

November 21, 2011

Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/entertainment/books/dissident-poet-silent-no-more-20111120-1np7u.html#ixzz1eNZOQDcf

Exiled Chinese poet and author Liao Yiwu is finally able to share his work with the world.

Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/entertainment/books/dissident-poet-silent-no-more-20111120-1np7u.html#ixzz1eNZYb4lO

 

CHINESE dissident writer and poet Liao Yiwu will finally appear in Australia this week - after having been banned from travelling by Chinese authorities 17 times in the last three years.

In May, Liao, deemed a counter-revolutionary, was banned from attending the Sydney Writers' Festival but in early July, he slipped out of China and into Vietnam, via a small border crossing he won't reveal, and with the help of contacts and friends, made his way to Germany.

Liao's publisher is German, and the author has settled in Germany in self-imposed exile, free of the censorship he faces in his own country, where his tales of ''hidden'' China are suppressed.

Speaking through a translator from Munich, ahead of his Australian visit this week, Liao says he is ''totally happy'' to be free to publish his works.

''This is really wonderful feeling - this cat-and-mouse play with the police and the state ceased finally,'' he says.

It is, of course, bittersweet victory - Liao had to leave behind his mother, daughter and friends, although he stays in contact with them.

Liao is best known in the West for his 2001 book The Corpse Walker (published in Taiwan and banned in China), which records the lives of 27 outsiders ''from China's forgotten classes'', among them a toilet attendant, a professional mourner, a leper and a grave robber.

But in China he has been a controversial figure since his 1989 poem The Massacre, written in response to Tiananmen Square, earned him four years in prison and a permanent place on the government's blacklist.

When he was released, his wife and daughter had left him, as had many in his literary circle. He spent years living among the homeless in Chengdu, playing the Chinese flute he had learnt in prison, and collecting stories.

He has written a memoir of his prison term - during which he was tortured and twice attempted suicide - the recent publication of which by his German publisher, was the catalyst for his recent escape. The Chinese police knew of Liao's plans to publish abroad and a long prison term was looming.

The harrowing memoir, Testimonials, is currently being translated into English.

Liao's recent trouble is part of a wider crackdown on creative expression - Liao's friend, Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo, is serving an 11-year sentence for subversion and artist Ai Weiwei was recently hit with a crippling tax fine he says is ''to silence him''. But Liao, in part thanks to the contacts he made during his time on the street, managed to slip under the radar. Does he feel uneasy that his friend languishes in prison?

''I don't want to follow his path,'' he says. ''Do you think it is right that I should also be in prison, to be treated as a 'symbol of freedom' by people outside? I have no intention of going back to prison.'' The crackdown took hold early this year when citizens in Beijing and other cities were urged to ''express their desire for reform'', inspired by the Arab Spring.

''The Chinese people were excited when they heard what happened in [the] Arabic world. They [went] to the cities, [and] that made the government extremely nervous and they tried to suppress it. But this is not up to the government to decide; they can try to suppress it but it will come up again and again,'' says Liao.

''The economic situation in China is not so good as the outside world imagines,'' Liao says. ''The inflation is worrying and the real estate situation is bad … property values have fallen and they have built too [many] new houses and cannot fill them … many cities are like ghost towns.''

And while we read about China's booming middle class, Liao believes this is exaggerated.

''The political and social structure in China is like a pyramid - most of the common people are at the bottom and only the political leaders are on top,'' he says.

He says his country's exploitation of natural resources and obsession with ''money and materialism'' have left his countrymen with low morale.

So he foresees change?

''If the Chinese Communist Party does not take a very clear position to say that what happened at Tiananmen was wrong, there will be no real change,'' he says.

The events of June 4, 1989, and firsthand accounts from victims, are the subject of Liao's next book - one that seems unlikely to ever be published in China.

''I have made over 300 interviews with people for this book,'' he says. ''It is historical fact, the stories of the victims.''

It means he might not be able to return to China without the threat of imprisonment, he says.

''I just have to wait. Mostly I hope the time will come when my books can be read by normal people - not just [as] pirate copies - in China.''

Liao Yiwu will read from The Corpse Walker (through a translator) at the Wheeler Centre on Thursday at 6.15pm.

Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/entertainment/books/dissident-poet-silent-no-more-20111120-1np7u.html#ixzz1eNZJOr6j

PDX Iconic

Portland pepper spray incident generates iconic Occupy photo

November 18, 2011 |  1:10 pm

 

The dramatic photo of a young woman getting a blast of pepper spray on her face during a mostly peaceful Occupy protest in Portland is destined to become an enduring image of the national movement.

The youthful protester vomited almost immediately after the Thursday incident and medics were able to wash out her eyes and nose so that she was not much the worse for it, Occupy Portland spokesman Reid Parham told The Times.

"She's OK," he said.

FULL COVERAGE: Occupy protests around the nation

Portland's Occupy the Banks demonstrations began Thursday morning with the arrests of 25 people on the east end of the Steel Bridge.

Interestingly, it was a gray-haired group that sat stubbornly at the entrance to the bridge, waiting to be taken away in flex-cuffs by police. The Portland Police Bureau put out a list of arrestees, and only one of them was under the age of 35. Seven were in their 60s. Five were in their 50s.

It might be that those were the folks who could afford the time to be hauled away, booked and possibly charged; certainly, it reflects Portland's deep history of street protest.

The Occupy Portland demonstrations of the last six weeks are only the latest in a long tradition of turbulent clashes that date back to the city's well-remembered anti-Vietnam War demonstration of 1970, and earlier.

A former member of President George H. W. Bush's staff famously dubbed the city "Little Beirut" in reference to the noisy reception Republican candidates traditionally received there. And street clashes between protesters and police have over the years been a regular event at May Day rallies and union organizing rallies even before Vietnam.

In that context, Thursday's events were relatively mild. Yet Occupy Portland organizers allege law enforcement took an inappropriate and heavy-handed approach. 

"The city's overreaction and complete waste of tax dollars to quiet down a completely peaceful demonstration against the greed of banks was very unnecessary," spokeswoman Illona Trogub said in an interview.

Police said pepper spray was only brought out when a small group of unusually confrontational protesters refused to get out of the street and stood in the path of MAX transit trains.

Portland Police Bureau spokesman Lt. Robert King said the march had proceeded peacefully along most of the route, with officers trying to keep people on the sidewalk and out of the street.

There was initially "a pushing and shoving match" near SW 5th Avenue and Alder Street, King said in an interview, and again a "pretty intense confrontation" at SW 4th Avenue and Morrison Street.

The most raucous confrontation occurred near Chase Bank shortly after 4 p.m. as officers were trying to remove protesters who had entered the bank vestibule. But police were blocked by hundreds of demonstrators outside. Meanwhile, a core of protesters couldn't be cleared from the street, which is a path for one of the city's major downtown light-rail systems.

"Two of the protesters engaged in some kind of a struggle, a pushing match, with one of the officers, and in the course of that, tensions escalated and ultimately pepper spray was deployed, and that by and large resolved the disturbance at that location," King said.

Occupy spokesman Parham said one of the problems was that police, many of them on horseback, were actually shoving people into the street. "It's consistently true that the police were over-reacting and pushing people off of the sidewalks into the street, and then yelling at them to get out of the street," he said.

He said two people were stepped on by the horses, and one was knocked over. "All of the eyewitnesses say there was no warning that chemical agents would be used," he added.

King said the police have consistently employed an approach known as "tactical disengagement" during the last several weeks, often backing off and literally retreating from marching protesters "in cases where there could have been a flash point."

"What we encountered yesterday was different in its tone and its character from the previous marches," King said. "We're thinking it's because the people that were there yesterday were there to engage in direct action against financial institutions. This was designed to be an interruption.

"Again, there were hundreds of people, possibly as many as a thousand people, who marched. Many, many people were utterly peaceful," King said. "But there were definitely individuals involved that were more aggressive. Officers definitely encountered higher levels of resistance than they had seen in previous incidents."

The pepper spray deployment is under investigation, he said.

Meanwhile, the photo of the young woman taken by Oregonian staff photographer Randy L. Rasmussen has raced across the Internet, becoming, as the Oregonian described Friday morning, "a web sensation and an iconic photograph."

--  Kim Murphy in Seattle

Photo: A woman is blasted with pepper spray during Occupy protests in Portland Thursday. Credit: Randy L. Rasmussen/The Oregonian

Video: Police deploy pepper spray in Portland. Credit: KATU Communities

 

 

Pacific Northwest in revolt

In Portland, Occupy activists vow to 'shut down the banks'

November 17, 2011 | 11:27 am

 

Four days after their eviction from two downtown parks, hundreds of Occupy Portland protesters massed Thursday morning near a bridge that is one of the city's most important mass transit connectors, then made their way to a rally on the Willamette River waterfront. Seattle protesters, meanwhile, were squaring off with the mayor over recent use of pepper spray against activists.

In Portland, Ore., about 15 protesters who refused to budge were arrested at the Steel Bridge during the morning commute, with large numbers of police blocking access and then leading activists away in handcuffs without serious incident.

The bridge reopened after the remaining protesters began streaming across a pedestrian walkway below, eventually joining a waterfront rally on the other side of the river targeting large corporate banks -- one of several such rallies underway across the country.

FULL COVERAGE: Occupy protests around the nation

A number of organized labor activists joined Thursday's protests, highlighting upcoming cuts to staff at Portland's unionized transportation bureau at a time when the Steel Bridge -- the symbolic center of the morning protest -- is in need of repair.

"The Steel Bridge rates about a 30 on a scale of 100 in bridge safety in this country, while the public workers that do maintenance on this bridge are being cut," Occupy Portland organizer David Osborn said in an interview.

Later Thursday, small groups of activists planned ad hoc "civil disobedience" actions targeting large corporate banks across Portland.

A number of nonprofits across the city were planning to join in; the Central American Solidarity Committee said it would highlight banks' funding of an immigrant detention center, while groups such as Rising Tide and the Animal Defense League said they would focus on financing of such projects as coal export terminals and mountaintop strip mines.

Angus Maguire of We Are Oregon, which is one of the major organizers of a coalition that includes more than two dozen Oregon unions and nonprofit groups, said his organization works with unemployed people facing foreclosure of their homes. "The goal is to join with other cities to highlight the economic emergency that we're in as a nation, and the fact that Congress is continuing to fail to really do anything to put Americans back to work," Maguire told The Times by phone from the rally.

Elsewhere in the Northwest, organizers of Occupy Seattle said Mayor Mike McGinn's apology Wednesday for the pepper spraying of protesters a day earlier didn't go far enough.

McGinn had said in a statement that he has ordered the Police Department to review the incidents and make sure that "appropriate commanders" are on scene with "appropriate levels of police resources" at future protests.

The mayor singled out the widely publicized case of 84-year-old Dorli Rainey, a well-known Seattle activist, who was among those blasted with the eye-stinging spray. A picture of her face streaming with pepper spray and antidote, taken by Seattlepi.com photographer Joshua Trujillo, has spread quickly across the country.

"To those engaged in peaceful protest, I am sorry that you were pepper sprayed. I spoke to Dorli Rainey (who I know personally) to ask how she was doing, and to ask for her description of events," McGinn said. "I also called in Seattle Police Chief John Diaz and the command staff to review the actions of last night. They agreed that this was not their preferred outcome," the statement said.

Occupy Seattle leaders, in their own statement, said they had notified the city of their intended march and route and it should not have been necessary to greet them with overwhelming force.

"Given that the police blocked our passage and then used pepper spray indiscriminately suggests that it is not Occupy Seattle that is unwilling to work with the city, but rather that SPD is not willing to work with Occupy Seattle," they said.

Rainey told the Associated Press that she had been on a bus when she saw the protests and decided to take part. Police, she said, began shoving their bicycles at the marchers and then opened up with pepper spray. She has no plans to withdraw from the protests, she added. 

Occupy Seattle announced that Rainey will be the keynote speaker at a "Voices of the Revolution" rally set for Saturday at Westlake Park, scene of the movement's initial encampment.

"I'm pretty tough, I guess," Rainey said.

Joan takes the mic

November 11, 2011, 4:51 pm For Joan Baez, Another Protest

By COLIN MOYNIHAN

Don Emmert/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images Joan Baez waved to a crowd of protesters with Occupy Wall Street during a concert on Friday in Foley Square.

After Occupy Wall Street protesters received permission from the city to hold a Veterans Day concert in Foley Square, not far from Zuccotti Park, the organizer of the event, Aaron Black, had to improvise in finding an area to serve as a green room, where musicians could stay warm before performing.

So it was that just before 1 p.m. on Friday Mr. Black was standing inside a Starbucks on Worth Street with Joan Baez and a few others, waiting for the audience to arrive. After some conversation about how the protesters had been faring in Zuccotti Park, Mr. Black pointed to a group of people marching along the sidewalk toward Foley Square.

“The veterans are here,” he said. “Let’s go.”

On their way out the door a young man recognized Ms. Baez and posed with her for a photograph. On the sidewalk, a woman called out, “You’re my mother’s favorite.”

Mr. Black and Ms. Baez walked through Foley Square, where about 300 people had gathered. Some wore military uniforms and waved American flags. One man held up a sign reading “No War but the Class War.”

As Ms. Baez neared the stage a protester named Jesse LaGreca, who was wearing a Civil War-style military cap, greeted her and said, “It’s an honor.”

Norman Siegel, the civil rights lawyer, stopped by and said, “Thank you for being here.”

Somebody asked Ms. Baez if she saw any similarities between the current protests and the many antiwar demonstrations that she participated in 40 years ago.

“The ideals are similar,” she said. “But now it’s more spread out.”

On the stage, a former air traffic controller for the Air Force named John Penley told the crowd that veterans had participated in Occupy Wall Street and related protests across the country.

A few moments later, Ms. Baez took the stage.

“This is a song I wrote in the 70’s and I wrote it in the era of the Vietnam War,” she said. “I wrote it for and about veterans of that war. It’s called ‘Where’s My Apple Pie.’ ”

Joan Baez at Occupy Wall Street from Gothamist on Vimeo.

Some in Foley Square swayed back and forth as they listened. A few sang along for the chorus.

Next, Ms. Baez played a Rolling Stones song called “Salt of the Earth.” She finished with a song about Joe Hill, a union organizer with the Industrial Workers of the World who was executed in 1915.

As she stepped off the stage, Ms. Baez signed a poster that read “Decolonize Wall Street,” and shook hands with a few fans.

“I don’t think there are any limits to how far this can grow,” she told one man.

As Ms. Baez left, several younger members of the crowd confessed that they had not recognized any of the songs she played. But Jerry Wade, who said he served in the Army from 1967 to 1972, had.

“When she played ‘Where’s My Apple Pie’ tears were streaming down my face,” he said.

Oak Land

Op-Ed Contributor

Trouble Beside the Bay

By ISHMAEL REED

Published: November 8, 2011

Alex Merto

 

JEAN QUAN may be the first in many categories — the first Asian-American and first woman to be mayor of Oakland — but she is far from the city’s first chief executive to face off with its police force. While dozens of mayors around the country have had to deal with Occupy movements, only Ms. Quan has seen the initially peaceful protests turn into street violence and even a general strike — a turn almost wholly attributable to the brutality of the city police.

In their zeal to fight back, however, the protesters, many of them white out-of-towners, have left locals unsure of who really has their best interests at heart.

On Oct. 25 the world saw an Oakland police force that blacks have had to deal with for decades — even before the Black Panthers organized to protest the shooting of a black youth in the 1960s, a time when the police were said to be recruited from the South because they knew how to handle African-Americans. In a video watched worldwide, an officer in riot gear fired a tear gas canister at a protester; the victim, an Iraq War veteran, later underwent surgery for his wounds. When some occupiers went to help him, another canister was lobbed at them.

That same night officers allegedly used rubber bullets during an assault on campers in Frank H. Ogawa Plaza. If so, that would violate the department’s rules of engagement. Those rules were adopted in 2003, after the police assaulted antiwar protesters at the Port of Oakland, even injuring some longshoremen who happened to be passing by.

The force’s viciousness, particularly against blacks and Latinos, is legendary. In one recent case, a group of officers known as the Riders, who racked up an impressive list of drug takedowns, were accused of brutality, kidnapping and planting evidence on their road to arrests. Another officer, nicknamed “Audie Murphy,” after the sharpshooting war hero and film star, shot four suspects and killed three. So little has been done to reform the force that a federal judge has threatened to take the entire department into receivership.

Many of Oakland’s officers don’t even live in the city, but rather its suburbs, a fact that helps maintain a strong “us versus them” worldview. (At a recent community meeting I proposed that the city study a plan, developed by Detroit, that rents foreclosed homes to police officers for as little as $1,000, to keep them in the city.)

The police still have influence in City Hall, though: their union repeatedly and vocally criticizes elected officials, including the mayor. For years it opposed making officers pay toward their pensions like other city workers. (The union agreed to start contributing in July.)

Mayor Quan initially supported the police after the Oct. 25 clashes. Keith Olbermann called for her resignation; so did Michael Moore, who made a nuisance of himself by barging into Oakland Highland General Hospital, demanding to see the injured veteran (who had already been transferred to another hospital). Support for the protests grew, with statements of sympathy coming in from Cairo and Düsseldorf, Germany.

Such pressure may explain why Ms. Quan later apologized for the use of excessive force by the police, and is now trying to take a hands-off approach to the matter. Needless to say, the police department has been critical, saying it was “confused” by her latest moves.

All of this has left Oakland’s blacks and Latinos in a difficult position. They rightly criticize the police, but they also criticize the other invading army, the whites from other cities, and even other states, whom they blame for the vandalism that tends to break out whenever there is a heated protest in town: from the riots after the murder of Oscar Grant by a transit police officer in 2009, to the violence of the last two weeks downtown and, most recently, near the port.

Someday we may discern the deeper historical meaning of these latest events. For now, what’s striking are the racial optics. How did Asian-Americans respond to the sight of a diminutive Asian-American mayor being hooted off the stage by a largely white crowd at an Oct. 27 rally? And where was the sympathy when, in years past, unarmed blacks and Hispanics were beaten or killed? Why did it take the injury of a white protester to attract attention?

Meanwhile, those hurt most by the protests are local business owners and workers, many of them minorities. Jose Dueñas, the chief executive of the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce of Alameda County, blamed the Occupy movement for stalled economic activity. “We’ve got no events planned, people are pulling back,” he told a local newspaper. “We don’t blame them.” The cash-strapped city has spent over $1 million so far in occupation-related costs.

Local activism has been pushed aside as well. Even as Occupy Oakland has occupied the Bay Area headlines, hundreds of black, white and Latino parents met to oppose plans to close five schools in black neighborhoods. The following day there was hardly a single line of newsprint about the meeting.

The Occupy movement has important things to say. But in its hurry to speak, it risks shutting out those who have been waiting their turn for a long time.

Ishmael Reed is the author of “Blues City: A Walk in Oakland.”

Pete Seeger in person, singing

Pete Seeger Leads Protesters, on Foot and in Song

October 22, 2011, 12:49 pm

By COLIN MOYNIHAN

Marcus Yam for The New York TimesPete Seeger, with canes, joined the Occupy Wall Street protests on Friday night. The 92-year-old marched from 95th Street to Columbus Circle.

The Occupy Wall Street protests have drawn their share of musical supporters over the past few weeks. On Friday night, Pete Seeger lent his voice to the cause, though the protesters had to go uptown to hear it.

Mr. Seeger, whose activist credentials go back at least as far as a benefit concert that he and Woody Guthrie did for California migrant workers in 1940 and who wrote or helped write populist ballads like like “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” and “If I Had a Hammer,” had been performing at Symphony Space at Broadway and 95th Street with Arlo Guthrie, Woody Guthrie’s son, and others.

About 11 p.m., Mr. Seeger, 92, emerged from Symphony Space wearing a red knit cap and carrying two canes. He then set off south, walking at a brisk pace and accompanied by a crowd of about 600, some of them carrying placards declaring support for the self-declared 99 percent that have been occupying Zuccotti Park for five weeks.

The crowd sang as they marched in the October chill, their voices swelling softly and carrying words to songs Mr. Seeger helped popularize, including “Down by the Riverside,” and “We Shall Not Be Moved.”

“He’s a symbol of the peace movement,” said one of the marchers, Larry Manzino, a retired research scientist from Piscataway, N.J. “He’s a guy who never caved, a guy who had integrity, a guy who stood up and said no when he had to.”

Police officers on foot and in vans traveled with the march. People peered out at the crowd from storefronts. At West 79th Street, a man silhouetted in the lighted window of an apartment gave a thumbs up to the marchers below. The crowd began singing Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land.”

T.J. Frawls, from Harlem, who said he was in an “apocalyptic punk metal band” called Universal Truth Machine marched along, strumming a guitar.

Despite the difference in their preferred genres, he said he was thrilled to be performing — sort of — with Mr. Seeger.

“He’s an icon of folk music, the people’s music.” Mr. Frawls said.

Shortly before 1 a.m. the crowd streamed into the center of Columbus Circle. There, surrounded by gushing fountains, musicians that included Arlo Guthrie, Tom Chapin and David Amram, joined Mr. Seeger on the base of the Christopher Columbus monument.

The crowd quieted. Guitars began strumming as Mr. Seeger began singing “We Shall Overcome,” a song that he introduced to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Speaking of Wall Street

The Geography of Occupying Wall Street (And Everywhere Else)

By NATE SILVER

October 17, 2011, 10:57 am

The nascent movement known as Occupy Wall Street had its largest single day of protests on Saturday. And a funny thing happened: most of the action was far from Wall Street itself.

No, I don’t mean at Zuccotti Park — which is not, technically, on Wall Street. Nor do I mean Times Square — all of 19 minutes away from Wall Street on the ‘C’ train — where large crowds of protesters gathered on Saturday.

Instead I mean Europe, where crowds in cities like Rome, Barcelona and Madrid were estimated at 200,000 to 500,000 per city (more, probably, than the protests in the United States combined). And I mean California and other parts of the western United States, where crowds were proportionately much larger than in the Northeast or elsewhere in the country.

Leaving aside Europe, where the Occupy protests merged, not always seamlessly, with those sponsored by left-wing groups, the distribution of protests throughout the United States may reveal something about the political orientation of the protesters.

The way that I studied this was to search through hundreds of local news accounts for credible estimates of the crowd sizes for each gathering. Where possible, I used estimates provided by reporters or public safety officials rather than the protesters themselves as they are less subject to exaggeration. In some cases, there were multiple estimates of the size of the protest in a given city — they ranged, for instance, from about 5,000 to 15,000 for the New York protests — in which case I used the median estimate.

This exercise is meant, in part, to provide a comparison to the crowds that gathered for the first widespread Tea Party protests on April 15, 2009, for which I adopted a similar approach and came up with an estimate of at least 300,000 protesters across the country.

Saturday’s Occupy protests were probably smaller than that. Over all, I was able to find estimates of crowd sizes in about 150 American cities, ranging from the thousands of the protesters that turned out in New York to the roughly 10 who turned out in Juneau, Alaska — or the one protester who represented the movement in Myrtle Beach, S.C.

Nevertheless, based on the median estimates for the cities, I arrived at an overall total of about 70,000 protesters who were documented as having been active on Saturday throughout the United States.

This is very probably an underestimate — there were some protests that were noted in news accounts but without any firm estimates of crowd size. But I’m fairly certain that I captured most of the larger protests. The true overall figure might have been somewhere on the order of 100,000 protesters. That’s pretty big, but not as big as the largest day of Tea Party protests in 2009, nor other recent protests like the pro-immigration gatherings of 2006, which accounted for about 500,000 people in Los Angeles alone.

It should be cautioned that the comparisons are not quite apples to apples. Although Oct. 15 was a focal point for many protesters, the Occupy groups are far more decentralized than even the Tea Party movement and the extent to which a concerted effort was made to turn out a large crowd varied a lot from city to city. Some cities also had larger gatherings before the ones held on Saturday.

(People who want to see or expand upon the raw data can find it in an Excel spreadsheet here. Disclaimer: it is provided ‘as is’ and I am unlikely to do any further work on crowd-counting.)

Nevertheless, the data is in reasonable enough shape that we should be able to make some inferences about the types of cities in which the largest numbers of protesters were gathered. They tended to be in West.

Over all, about 38,000 protesters — more than half of the documented total — turned out in the Western Census Bureau Region, which accounts for about 23 percent of the country’s population. On a per-capita basis, the West drew about two-and-a-half times more protesters than the Northeast, four times more than the Midwest, and five times more than the South. And it wasn’t necessarily in large cities — although places like Los Angeles and Seattle had large crowds, so did the wine-and-cheese town of Santa Rosa, Calif., and the college town of Eugene, Ore., among others.

This could be due to a number of factors. Perhaps it has something to do with race, for instance. Cities where African-Americans make up a majority of the population, like Detroit, New Orleans and Cleveland, have tended to have underwhelming numbers of protesters and poorly organized Occupy groups. (There are plenty of those cities in the South, the Northeast and even the Midwest — but not really in the western United States).

Or maybe it has something to do with technology: Much of the organizational activity for the Occupy movement has taken place online, and the West Coast is particularly tech-savvy.

I suspect that more than anything, however, it reflects the politics of the protesters. Specifically, they tend to be more liberal than they are Democratic partisans. Take liberalism, subtract the Democratic Party, and the remainder might look something like Occupy Wall Street.

Oregon, for instance, which had among the highest per-capita rate of protesters on Saturday, has the fourth-highest fraction of self-identified liberals. But it also has a large number of independents — and its share of proud Republicans — so its partisan balance between Democrats and Republicans is fairly average.

By contrast, a state like West Virginia has a large number of Democrats but few liberals — and there were almost no accounts of protest activity there.

So perhaps the protesters are more ideologically minded than they are interested in partisan politics. In fact, they may be relatively disengaged from “politics as usual.” In a somewhat informal New York magazine survey of 100 protesters in Manhattan, only 39 percent reported having voted in the 2010 midterm elections.

All of this could create headaches for the Democratic Party — and for the protesters — if it tries to co-opt the Occupy movement.

Then again, there are some parallels between the Occupy protests and the Tea Party, which especially at first was more representative of a certain strand of conservatism than it was the Republican Party. The Tea Party has become somewhat unpopular now — but Americans had warmer views of it initially, something which is now true of the Occupy protests.

Perhaps it’s the lack of overt partisanship that people are responding favorably to.

Perhaps, even, ‘post-partisanship’ will emerge from the left and right of the country rather than from the center.

So far, despite Occupy Wall Street’s name, its energy seems to be coming from the left coast.

Clash on the B.B.

October 1, 2011, 4:29 pm Police Arrest Hundreds of Protesters on Brooklyn Bridge

By AL BAKER and COLIN MOYNIHAN

Robert Stolarik for The New York TimesSome demonstrators that walked from Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan to the Brooklyn Bridge were arrested on Saturday when they blocked traffic on the Brooklyn-bound lanes. 

Updated, 6:12 p.m. | In a tense showdown above the East River, the police arrested several hundred demonstrators from the Occupy Wall Street protests who took to the roadway as they tried to cross the Brooklyn Bridge on Saturday afternoon.

The police did not immediately release precise arrest figures, but said it was the choice of those marchers that led to the swift enforcement.

“Protesters who used the Brooklyn Bridge walkway were not arrested,” said the head police spokesman, Paul J. Browne. “Those who took over the Brooklyn-bound roadway, and impeded vehicle traffic, were arrested.”

But many protesters said that they thought the police had tricked and trapped them, allowing them onto the bridge and even escorting them across, only to surround them in orange netting after hundreds of them had entered.

“The cops watched and did nothing, indeed, seemed to guide us on to the roadway,” said Jesse A. Myerson, a media coordinator for Occupy Wall Street who was in the march but was not arrested.

Things came to a head shortly after 4 p.m., as the 1,500 or so marchers reached the foot of the Brooklyn-bound car lanes of the bridge, just east of City Hall. In their march north from an encampment at Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan, they had stayed on the sidewalks – forming a long column of humanity penned in by officers on scooters.

Where the entrance to the bridge narrowed their path, some marchers, including organizers, stuck to the generally agreed-upon route and headed up onto the wooden walkway that runs between and about 15 feet above the bridge’s traffic lanes.

But about 20 others headed for the Brooklyn-bound roadway, said Christopher T. Dunn of the New York Civil Liberties Union, who accompanied the march. Some of them chanted “take the bridge.” They were met by a handful of high-level police supervisors, who blocked the way and announced repeatedly through bullhorns that the marchers were blocking the roadway and that if they continued to do so, they would be subject to arrest.

There were no physical barriers, though, and at one point, the marchers began walking up the roadway with the police commanders in front of them – seeming, from a distance, as if they were leading the way. The Chief of Department Joseph J. Esposito, and a horde or other white-shirted commanders, was among them.

After allowing the protestors to walk about a third of the way to Brooklyn, the police then cut the marchers off and surrounded them with orange nets on both sides, trapping hundreds of people, said Mr. Dunn.

Mr. Dunn said he was concerned that those in the back of the column who might not have heard the warnings “would have had no idea that it was not okay to walk on the roadway of the bridge.” Mr. Browne said that individuals that were in the rear of the crowd that may not have heard the warnings were not arrested and were free to leave.

Officers plunged into the crowd – with protesters at times chanting “white shirts, white shirts” — and, one by one, they made the arrests, using plastic flex cuffs. A freelance reporter for The Times, Natasha Lennard, was among those arrested. Charges against those arrested were not immediately available.

Earlier in the afternoon, as many as 10 Department of Correction buses, big enough to hold 20 prisoners apiece, had been dispatched from Rikers Island in what one law enforcement official said was “a planned move on the protesters.”

Etan Ben-Ami, 56, a psychotherapist from Brooklyn who was up on the walkway, said that the police seemed to make a conscious decision to allow the protesters to claim the road. “They weren’t pushed back,” he said. “It seemed that they moved at the same time.

Mr. Ben-Ami said he left the walkway and joined the crowd on the road. “It seemed completely permitted,” he said. “There wasn’t a single policeman saying ‘don’t do this’.”

He added: “We thought they were escorting us because they wanted us to be safe.” He left the bridge when he saw officers unrolling the nets as they prepared to make arrests. Many other who had been on the roadway were allowed to walk back down to Manhattan.

Mr. Browne insisted that the police did not trick the protestors into going onto the bridge.

“This was not a trap,” he said. “They were warned not to proceed.”

The Occupy Wall Street protests, against what demonstrators call inequities in the economic system, are in their 15th day.

The video below was broadcast earlier this afternoon on the Livestream channel of a group called “globalrevolution.” The Times does not endorse the captions that appear on the screen.

Natasha Lennard and William K. Rashbaum contributed reporting.

It takes a tiny village in a park on Wall Street

Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times

Wall Street Occupiers, Protesting Till Whenever

By N. R. KLEINFIELD and CARA BUCKLEY

Published: September 30, 2011

A man named Hero was here. So was Germ. There was the waitress from the dim sum restaurant in Evanston, Ill. And the liquor store worker. The Google consultant. The circus performer. The Brooklyn nanny.

The hodgepodge Lower Manhattan encampment known as Occupy Wall Street has no appointed leaders, no expiration date for its rabble-rousing stay and still-evolving goals and demands. Yet its two weeks of noisy occupation has lured a sturdily faithful and fervent constituency willing to express discontentment with what they feel is an inequitable financial system until, well, whenever.

They arrived by design and desire. Or by sheer serendipity.

Like Jillian Aydelott, 19, and Ben Mason, 20. They are a couple, both having taken an indefinite leave from school in Boston to travel across the country, very much on the cheap. Stopping in Providence, R.I., five days ago to sleep at a homeless shelter, they encountered a man who called himself Germ and said he was an activist. He was coming to the protest. They figured why not. They have yet to leave.

Ms. Aydelott’s feeling was: “Nothing is happening. People on Wall Street have all the power.”

The stalwarts seem to range from a relatively modest 100 to 300 people, though the ranks swelled to more than 2,000 on Friday as the protest has begun to attract mainstream attention from those disaffected with the weak economy and to enlist support from well-known liberals.

The actress Susan Sarandon stopped by, as did the Princeton professor Cornel West and former Gov. David A. Paterson of New York. A widely reported episode last Saturday, when four protesters were pepper-sprayed by a police commander, elevated the visibility of the demonstrators.

On Friday night, many marched to Police Headquarters to criticize what they described as the improper tactics that the police have used against their movement. (The police commissioner, Raymond W. Kelly, has defended the actions by the police, though he has said they will be reviewed.)

Nicholas Coniaris, 35, came to the makeshift village in Zuccotti Park near Wall Street on Friday and will be gone soon. He is from San Diego, a counselor who works with homeless veterans, and was squeezing in protesting while awaiting a wedding he was attending on Saturday. A friend from Japan, a fellow wedding guest, was here as well.

Having brought a tuxedo for the wedding, Mr. Coniaris decided to get extra mileage out of it. He wore it while he stationed himself in the center of the park clutching a coffee cup that said “God Bless,” and a sign that said, in part, “Support the Rich.”

“Just a little something,” he said mockingly to passers-by. “Half a billion dollars. I’m not asking for a trillion.”

After a couple of hours, his cup contained $1.15.

It all began when a Canadian advocacy magazine, Adbusters, posted a call for action on its blog in July. A New York group naming itself the General Assembly, inspired by recent meetings in Madrid, began to hold organizing meetings in Tompkins Square and other public places, leading to a Sept. 17 march near Wall Street. Shooed away from Wall Street, the protesters wound up in Zuccotti Park, which is bounded by Broadway and Liberty Street and has become their base.

Most of the demonstrators are in their teens or 20s, but plenty are older. Many are students. Many are jobless. A few are well-worn anarchists. Others have put their normal lives on pause to try out protesting and see how it feels.

Not all of them can articulate exactly why they are there or what they want. Yet there is a conviction rippling through them that however the global economy works, it does not work for them.

“I’m angry because I don’t have millions of dollars to give to my representative, so my voice is invalidated,” said Amanda Clarke, 21, a student at the New School. “And the fact that I’m graduating with tens of thousands of dollars in loans and there’s no job market.”

Their politics zigzag wildly. An unemployed schoolteacher calls herself a fierce independent, while an employed teacher is a conservative. An anarchist photographer wants libertarianism to be reclaimed by the left.

“This is not about left versus right,” said the photographer, Christopher Walsh, 25, from Bushwick, Brooklyn. “It’s about hierarchy versus autonomy.”

A finance worker walked around with a dollar bill duct taped over his mouth and carrying a pizza box, on which he had written, “I could lose my job 4 having a voice.” Nikita Nikitovich, 44, a New York Pilates teacher, was working as one of the protest’s media contacts. A 38-year-old bicycle messenger with a shaved head and a long braid arrived early Friday by bus from New Orleans, and had been waiting for a protest to erupt since Hurricane Katrina. “That’s when we were shown the big picture,” she said.

For all the bedraggled look of the mattress-and-sleeping-bag-strewn camp, it has a structure and routine. A food station occupies the center of the park, where donated meals are disbursed, especially pizza and Popeyes chicken. Sympathizers from other states have been calling local shops and pizza parlors and, using their credit cards, ordering food to be delivered to the park.

There are information stations, a recycling center, a media center where a gasoline generator powers computers. At the east end sits the library, labeled cardboard boxes brimming with donated books: nonfiction, fiction, poetry, legal. There is a lost and found.

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A medical station was outfitted with bins holding a broad array of remedies: cough drops, Maalox Maximum Strength, Clorox wipes, bee pollen granules. The main issues have been blisters, including some from handcuffs, and abrasions.

There are also a few therapists. Some out-of-work protesters are depressed. They need someone’s ear.

Elsewhere is a sanitation station, with designated sanitation workers who sweep the park. The park is without toilets, a problem that many of the protesters address by visiting a nearby McDonald’s.

The encampment even has a post-office box, established at a U.P.S. store, and has been receiving a steady flow of supportive letters and packages. Someone from Texas sent a bunch of red bandanas, now draped on the necks of demonstrators. Others have sent camera batteries, granola bars and toothbrushes.

Two General Assembly meetings are held each day to conduct organizational business and work on objectives. “We meet every day to decide what our demands are,” said Hero Vincent, 21, an artist and singer from Charlotte, N.C., who has been here from the beginning.

Not allowed to use amplified sound, the protesters have devised their own means of communication. Each speaker says a sentence, and then everyone else repeats it, so it ripples outward. Decisions must be by consensus. Hand signals convey responses. For instance, holding your palms upward and wiggling your fingers means approval, while holding them downward means disapproval. Level hands mean uncertainty.

People are divided into committees, including town planning, child care, direct action and a de-escalation group charged with keeping things orderly. There have been a few arguments.

When will all this end?

One protester thought when the temperature fell below 50. Others were less sure.

Sid Gurung, 22, a student at the New School who enlisted because he said he was “extremely disappointed and angry that I have no future,” would agree to no timetable. “Our task is important,” he said. “We could be here for months. Our opponents are giants.”

Saudi Women Protest Driving Ban

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Published: June 17, 2011 at 11:45 AM ET

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — Several Saudi women boldly got behind the wheel Friday, including one who managed a 45-minute trip through the nation's capital, seeking to ignite a road rebellion against the male-only driving rules in the ultraconservative kingdom.

Activists — inspired in part by the uprisings around the Arab world — have not appealed for mass protests in any specific sites. But they urged Saudi women to begin a mutiny against the driving restrictions that are supported by clerics backing austere interpretations of Islam and enforced by powerful morality squads.

Encouragement poured in via the Internet. "Take the wheel. Foot on the gas," said one Twitter message on the main site women2Drive. Another urged: "Saudi women, start your engines!"

The defiance could bring difficult choices for the Western-backed Saudi authorities who so far have escaped major unrest from the Middle East turmoil. Officials could either launch a crackdown on the women or give in to the demands at the risk of angering traditional-minded clerics and other groups opposing reforms.

It also could encourage wider reform bids by Saudi women, who have not been allowed to vote and must obtain permission from a male guardian to travel or take a job.

Security forces mostly stood by, activists reported, in an apparent effort to avoid clashes or international backlash. Some reported that women drove directly in front of police patrols. No arrests or violence were immediately reported.

"We want women from today to begin exercising their rights," said Wajeha al-Huwaidar, a Saudi women's rights activist who posted Internet clips of herself driving in 2008. "Today on the roads is just the opening in a long campaign. We will not go back."

The plan, she said, is for women who have obtained driving licenses abroad to begin doing their daily errands and commuting on their own.

"We'll keep it up until we get a royal decree removing the ban," she told The Associated Press.

The campaign's official start follows the 10-day detention last month of a 32-year-old woman, Manal al-Sherif, after she posted video of herself driving. She was released after reportedly signing a pledge that she would not drive again or speak publicly.

Her case, however, sparked an outcry from international rights groups and brought direct appeals to Saudi's rulers to lift the driving ban on women — the only such countrywide rule in the world.

A protest supporter, Benjamin Joffe-Walt, said there were confirmed reports of at least several women in the driver's seat in the capital, Riyadh.

Maha al-Qahtani, a computer specialist at the Ministry of Education, said she drove for 45 minutes around the city with her husband in the passenger seat. "I wanted to make a point," she said in a telephone interview. "I took it directly to the streets of the capital."

Web message boards set up on Twitter and other social media carried unconfirmed reports that some women also got behind the wheel in the eastern city of Dammam and elsewhere. Joffe-Walt said some Saudi men claimed they drove around dressed in the traditional black coverings for women in an attempt to confuse security forces.

A YouTube page urged supporters around the world to honk their car horns for the Saudi women.

But conservative forces also counterattacked on the web. One video — denouncing the "revolution of corruption" — featured patriotic songs and a sinister-looking black hand with red fingernails reaching for the Saudi flag. On Facebook, a hard-line group had a message for Saudi women seeking the right to drive: "Dream on."

Saudi Arabia has no written law barring women from driving — only fatwas, or religious edicts, by senior clerics following a strict brand of Islam known as Wahhabism.

They claim the driving ban protects against the spread of vice and temptation because women drivers would be free to leave home alone and interact with male strangers. The prohibition forces families to hire live-in drivers or rely on male relatives to drive.

Saudi King Abdullah has promised some social reforms, but he depends on the clerics to support his ruling family and is unlikely to take steps that would bring backlash from the religious establishment.

In London, the rights groups Amnesty International called Thursday on Saudi officials to "stop treating women as second-class citizens and open the kingdom's roads to women drivers."

"Not allowing women behind the wheel in Saudi Arabia is an immense barrier to their freedom of movement, and severely limits their ability to carry out everyday activities as they see fit, such as going to work or the supermarket, or picking up their children from school," said Philip Luther, Amnesty's deputy director for the Middle East and North Africa.

Earlier this week, a group of women drove around the Saudi Embassy in Washington to protest the kingdom's ban on female drivers. Similar convoys converged on Saudi diplomatic missions in other cities around the world.

In November 1990, when U.S. troops were deployed to Saudi Arabia before the invasion to oust Iraqi troops from Kuwait, about 50 women got behind the wheel and drove family cars in one of the first acts of defiance against the ban. They were jailed for one day, their were passports confiscated and they lost their jobs.

___

Associated Press writer Sarah El-Deeb in Cairo contributed to this report.