Sunday, December 25, 2011

Occupy Orange County to end overnight camping in Irvine

The protesters, who have had 20 to 30 tents set up at the Irvine Civic Center for the last two months, agree to move Jan. 11, a lawyer working with the group says.

By Sarah Peters, Los Angeles Times

December 24, 2011, 6:26 p.m.

Occupy Orange County protesters have agreed to end overnight camping at the Irvine Civic Center in January, but the movement will continue in other forms, a lawyer working with the group said.

"What is not correct is that it is being characterized as us ending the occupation," said attorney Greg Diamond. "We expect that we are moving the occupation, and that may be as little as moving to the sidewalk or it could be to another city, to foreclosed houses or other properties. It can be a lot of things that may or may not happen ... "

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Protesters will end overnight camping at Alton Parkway and Harvard Avenue, where between 20 and 30 tents have been for the last eight weeks, at noon Jan. 11, according to the latest amendment between the group and city officials posted on the city website.

So far, the encampment has been largely peaceful and only one arrest has occurred, which was due to public intoxication, said Irvine police Lt. Julia Engen.

"We have enjoyed a very cooperative relationship to date with the protesters here at City Hall," Engen said. "They continue to communicate with city personnel, and there is nothing at all to indicate any change in the future."

The protesters were granted permission Oct. 25 to camp overnight at the Civic Center and have since received several extensions from the city.

But the protesters "acknowledge that no further extensions of time" will be requested or granted, according to the most recent city document on the subject.

Protesters will continue to be able to use the park space and sidewalks to express constitutionally protected rights, but will be limited by city laws and regulations.

"We have tried to treat this as a most peaceful demonstration, and the city has been fully engaged with the group by respecting the highest point of their cause, which is the right of free speech," said Irvine Mayor Sukhee Kang. "Both parties can certainly declare victory on how a group and the government can work together and come to a positive ending."

Occupy Orange County, which also has a protest site in Santa Ana, has plans for the next stage of the movement: "Occupy the Courts" is planned Jan. 20 at the federal courthouse in Santa Ana.

Not everyone at the Irvine encampment is happy with the latest agreement, which won approval by a 34-7 vote at the group's general assembly meeting.

"Yes, there are a lot of people who are disappointed," said protester Charles Cha. "For the hard-core Occupiers, the ones that don't have anywhere to go but here, there is disappointment and a lot of confusion."

Cha said, however, that the occupation is not ending, just transforming.

"We've created a physical space for ideas," Cha said. "We've reclaimed the commons — that's what physical space is all about. This is the demos. Democracy was born in the public square."

sarah.peters@latimes.com

Wednesday, December 21, 2011

Occupy Rose Parade

Occupy protesters take aim at Rose Parade

Pasadena police and Tournament of Roses officials have been negotiating with Occupy leaders for several weeks to prevent problems. Protesters will be allowed to march after all the floats have gone.

Members of the Los Angeles Unified School District's marching band perform for dignitaries in the parking lot of Dodger Stadium on Wednesday. The band will march in the Rose Parade. (Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times / December 21, 2011)

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By Catherine Saillant and Richard Winton, Los Angeles Times

December 22, 2011

The Rose Parade has long been a magnet for protesters looking for global attention for their causes and grievances.

Native Americans once threw a balloon filled with red paint onto the parade route to represent the spilling of Indian blood. AIDS activists interrupted the parade by staging a sit-in. One year, a Pasadena mayor wore a "Tournament of Racists" t-shirt to protest what he saw as the parade's lack of ethnic diversity.

But this year, Tournament of Roses organizers and Pasadena police are gearing up for something different as Occupy protesters, fresh from their encampments across the country, plan to converge on Pasadena. Like activists in the past, they are hoping to widen their impact with an estimated domestic TV audience of 50 million people and about 700,000 people along the route.

Occupy activists have been looking for a high-profile venue since their camps in Manhattan, Los Angeles and elsewhere were removed. Some see the Rose Parade as a logical next step. On Jan. 1, they will meet in Pasadena to prepare for the following day's parade, which is being held a day later because Jan. 1 falls on a Sunday.

"It's Occupy 2.0 and why not start on New Year's Day in Pasadena?" said Daniel Niwander, an activist with Occupy Pasadena.

Pasadena police and Tournament of Roses officials have been negotiating with Occupy forces for several weeks on a plan that they hope will prevent any disruptions to the parade. Pasadena officials are allowing the Occupy group to march the route at the end of the parade, after all the floats have passed.

And Occupy is planning quite a show.

Protesters intend to march with large banners that decry wealth inequality in the United States and to unveil a few colorful "floats" of their own, including a giant people-powered octopus, said Pete Thottam, an Occupy spokesman. The octopus will be made out of recycled bags, stretching 40 feet from tentacle to tentacle, and is designed to represent the stranglehold that Wall Street has on the political process, he said.

Others will carry large blow-ups of the Constitution, one with the words "We the People" and the other "We the Corporations," he said. Planned speakers include Cindy Sheehan, an antiwar activist who lost her son in the Iraq war, local Occupy activists and possibly leftist documentarian Michael Moore.

Because the Occupy movement is loosely organized, it is unclear how many will show up and whether all concerned will agree not to protest during the parade itself.

"We have people coming from Seattle, Portland, Oakland and New York," said Thottam, adding that sign-in sheets suggest that the protesters could number in the thousands.

That would be significantly larger than past Rose Parade protests.

But Pasadena Police Lt. Phlunte' Riddle said law enforcement believes that officials have the situation under control. In the past, officials have allowed groups to march peacefully after the parade, including animal rights protesters and fringe sects predicting the end of the world. The Occupy marchers will hit the parade route after a phalanx of police cars moves through but while the crowd is still in place.

"We've enjoyed 122 uninterrupted parades and the 123rd won't be any different," Riddle said. "We have seen protests before, be it PETA, impeach George Bush or protests over Christopher Columbus. We have dealt with fears over Y2K and we are prepared for the Occupy movement."

Police got good news this week when a Pasadena-based "tea party" group dropped its plans to launch a counter-demonstration against the Occupy forces.

Michael Alexander, president and founder of TEAPAC, a Pasadena-based tea party group, said his members were outraged that Occupy would try to "politicize" the Rose Parade and began formulating a counter-protest. But after talking to police, his group decided to stand down.

"We have decided to not be part of this piece of drama and exercise in street theater," he said. "Pasadena is entitled to one day without politics."

Occupy activists said they were disappointed that the tea party won't be on hand.

"We consider them our brothers and sisters in arms in our fight to take back control of our country," Thottam said.

Pasadena Mayor Bill Bogaard said his one worry is that one or more fringe characters could ignore the intentions of Occupy and cause trouble. To deal with that potential, Occupy activists are training at least 40 volunteers, outfitted in brightly colored vests, to talk to marchers and urge them to remain calm.

Protest is nothing new to the Rose Parade. Early demonstrators protested the selection of a descendant of Christopher Columbus as grand marshal, unfurling a sign with a slash through a ship that read: "500 years of genocide." As the crowd shouted anti-Columbus chants, a woman ran into the street and threw balloons that broke and spattered fake blood.

Anti-Vietnam War demonstrators turned up along the parade route during the 1970s, causing a skirmish when police confiscated their posters and leaflets.

In early 1990s, civil rights activists targeted a lack of minorities on the parade's governing board. Then-Mayor Rick Cole briefly displayed a t-shirt emblazoned with the words "Tournament of Racists" as he rode in the parade. He later apologized but said at the time that he saw lack of women and minorities as a problem.

"Oftentimes at the end of the parade there are people who come into the street who have a lot of different message points and they share their message points," said Bill Flinn, executive director of the Tournament of Roses. "The Rose Parade is about bringing people together with all of the hope a new year brings."

catherine.saillant@latimes.com

richard.winton@latimes.com

Occupy Movement Widespread In California

Dec 21, 2011

Mark Muckenfuss

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A UC Riverside researcher says the Occupy Wall Street movement has expanded to nearly 30 percent of the state's municipalities in the past few months, based on a survey of Facebook pages.

Sociology professor Christopher Chase-Dunn said he and graduate student Michaela Curran-Strange reviewed Occupy pages on Facebook between Dec. 1 and 8 and found that out of the state's 482 municipalities, 143 had such pages affiliated with them, including Occupy organizations in Riverside, San Bernardino, Redlands and other Inland cities.

Chase-Dunn, who has studied other sociological issues in the state and the dynamic between its northern and southern sections, said he was most intrigued by how evenly split interest in the Occupy movement seemed to be. Since the northern part of the state is often perceived as more progressive, he anticipated greater activity there.

"For this movement, that doesn't seem to be the case," Chase-Dunn said. "It was about the same number (70 in the north, 73 in the south), which surprised me."

What also caught his attention was the rapidity with which the movement spread and the places in which it grabbed a foothold.

"This thing is in places you would never expect, quite frankly," he said, noting that Coachella Valley established an Occupy page on Oct. 2, a little more than two weeks after the Wall Street organizers began camping out in Zuccotti Park in New York.

Of course, some Occupy groups were more significant than others. Occupy Yreka consisted of a single individual.

The groups often evolved, and Chase-Dunn said he hopes to examine more.

"What we don't have is a change over time," he said. "That would be interesting. The only time element we (looked at) was when was the thing established and how much traffic there was on the Facebook site and how many 'likes' there are."

He did notice that, while many sites shared the primary concern of economic inequality when they were established, they often began incorporating other local issues onto their pages.

He also noted changes in attitudes toward the groups, particularly Occupy Riverside, in which he participated for awhile.

"There's been a lot of support for this movement," he said. "But people get tired of their downtown being disrupted and the pressure is on to do something about it. In Riverside, the City Council was originally friendly to it and relations with the police were good. Later, when (the police) got orders from above to move everybody out, it got nasty."

Chase-Dunn sees the Occupy movement as an outgrowth of the Arab Spring.

"It has its own unique qualities but some of those qualities were taken from what happened this summer in Greece and Spain. The European summer got it from the Arab Spring. The causes are a little different but they're also similar. It's basically (concerned with) growing inequality and austerity measures."

But he thinks the movement is relevant.

"It's changed the discourse in American politics," he said. In the coming presidential election, he added, "this could make a big difference."

Saturday, December 17, 2011

Occupy study: 150 camps in California

Dec. 16, 2011 | By Steven Cuevas | KPCC

Occupy protests have spread to nearly 150 locations equally distributed between Northern and Southern California. Researchers at UC Riverside used social media sites like Facebook to track the movement’s growth from large urban centers to remote mountain towns.

Sociology professor Christopher Chase-Dunn and graduate student Michaela Curran-Strange manned the study, which has traced the Occupy movement to some far-flung locations.

“I found this guy up in Yreka who had lost his house to foreclosure," said Chase-Dunn, referring to the former Gold Rush town north of Mount Shasta, which boasts a population of 7,800. “And he was angry and he was trying to start a local Occupy. I don’t think he ever did but he was trying, and it was one person.”

UC Riverside researchers tracked him down, along with dozens of other California Occupiers, using social media like Facebook and Twitter.

“Basically it’s a cheap way to find out what’s going on in Idyllwild and Weaverville," said Chase-Dunn. "With social movements you wanna study how they diffuse, where do the ideas come from and then where do they go to.”

Some Occupy sites have a handful of campers. Others, like one based in the Northern California town of Arcata, have Facebook followers that number in the thousands. Some groups stage regular public actions; others limit their activism primarily to the Web.

According to Chase-Dunn, the broad range of concerns and possible solutions indicate a movement in flux. “There’s pragmatists who want to make a big difference in American politics, and then there’s a bunch of Utopians [that are] talking about the long distance future."

Chase-Dunn predicts that the movement will likely split over those lines and perhaps will create spinoff Occupy groups with more narrowly defined agendas. Researchers plan to examine voting patterns in California cities and towns with active Occupy groups.

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Sunday, December 25, 2011

Occupy Orange County to end overnight camping in Irvine

The protesters, who have had 20 to 30 tents set up at the Irvine Civic Center for the last two months, agree to move Jan. 11, a lawyer working with the group says.