Greeting from Oakland

映像祭にゲスト参加予定であったJennaさんからビデオメッセージが届きました。来年こそは参加してほしいです。オキュパイオークランドについての報告です。また、翻訳できれば載せていきます。

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=huuUdLRD91w&feature=youtu.be

Greetings from Oakland, CA, and apologies I can’t be with you in person. My name is Jenna Woloshyn, and I am an Occupy Oakland activist. I want to... tell you a bit about our Occupy movement. Taking inspiration from Occupy Wall Street, activists in Oakland started having meetings to start an occupy movement here. Our encampment was established at the plaza in front of City Hall on October 10, 2011, and quickly became a working community with a library, kitchen, children's area, first aid tent and more. Decisions were made at large meetings called General Assemblies that took place 4 times a week. General Assemblies must have a 100 person quorum, and they are run on what we call 90% consensus which means 90% of people voting must agree on the decision made. OO became the center for activism in the city, and there was a rally for something just about every week. On October 25, OO gained international notoriety when Mayor Jean Quan ordered the encampment cleared, and the police complied with the utmost brutality. Downtown Oakland looked like a war zone, and the police sent Iraq war veteran Scott Olsen to the hospital with a serious head injury after launching a projectile directly at him.

The community at large was outraged by this unnecessary show of force on a peaceful protest movement. The General Assembly the following evening had over 1,500 people at it, and we voted to call for a General Strike on November 2nd. Throughout the next week, tents went back up on the plaza, and the encampment was re-established. While November 2nd was not an actual general strike like those we’ve seen recently in countries like Greece and Spain, in the space of one week, we were able to organize more than 10,000 people to join our activities for the day which included multiple marches and speak-outs. The local labor council, the main association of unions in the area, endorsed the day of action and set up a barbecue that fed thousands of people. Many unions actively encouraged their members to leave work for the day such as the Oakland Teachers who had a full third of their membership skip work to join the strike. The highlight of the day was a successful march on the ports by thousands of people which successfully shut down the Oakland Ports for two shifts. Our new occupation remained until Mayor Quan, in coordination with mayors across the country, ordered the encampment cleared once again on November 14th, in the middle of the night. Just like the politicians coordinated to simultaneously clear us out of our encampments, the Occupy activists from multiple cities on the West Coast of the US coordinated to shut down the Ports on December 12th. Many cities held actions at their ports with partial shutdowns in Portland, Seattle, and Los Angeles, and a full day’s shutdown of the port of Oakland. The success of this shutdown was not just in the thousands of people who participated, but in the longshore workers themselves. The leaders of the longshore union actively opposed the Dec. 12th action, but the workers still refused to cross our picket lines.

Without an encampment, participation is not has high, but OO still operates as best it can. We hold two General Assemblies a week on Wednesdays and Sundays. While the GA’s are still the place where all OO activists come to make the general decisions of the movement, most of the day to day organizing happens in the committees. Some committees focus on the functioning of Occupy Oakland, like the facilitation committee that runs the GA’s, or the events committee that lately has been organizing neighborhood barbeques throughout the city to gain support and broader participation. There are some committees that focus on certain areas of struggle. For instance, Occupy the Hood focuses on anti-racist organizing and aims to get more people of color involved in the movement, one thing they’ve been involved in is housing defense to keep people in their homes when the banks try to foreclose. Both students and educators of all levels participate in Occupy Education to stop the attacks on education in this area. I participate in the OO Labor Solidarity committee which aims to provide solidarity and help advance labor struggles. We’ve joined with unions in their marches and picket lines to show the bosses and the 1% that the 99% stand together in solidarity and the workers are not fighting their individual battles alone.

While public sentiment is still largely on our side, it’s been difficult to get the large numbers to join our actions that we saw while we still had a physical encampment. On January 28th, we had hoped to attract thousands of people to an event that we called Move-In Day. The plan was to take over a vacant building and create a new home for Occupy Oakland as well as a community center for the city’s residents. While we did have nearly 2,000 supporters to march that day, it was not enough to overcome the police repression. While the march was mostly peaceful, there was a small scuffle between police and some protesters. After we failed to take the building, we marched back to City Hall. Many people left at that time, but those who stayed, decided to march again. That march was completely peaceful. Still, the police trapped the marchers and arrested almost 400 people. At the same time, a small group broke into city hall and vandalized it. It is still unclear who was responsible for that action, as no one was caught. But the day turned into a media disaster for OO. The mainstream media villainized OO activists as hopelessly violent, misguided, and cut off from public sentiment. They ignored all footage of peaceful activity and replayed the clips from the scuffle earlier in the day and the damage at City Hall.

Even though a majority of people still think favorably of the Occupy Movement, less people have been participating in the organizing since that day. Our failure that day as well as the media firestorm has led to much debate over the way forward for OO. The debates are focused mainly on what tactics to use in our actions. Some people feel we must always use the most militant action. Others feel we must never engage in any type of direct action that may provoke brutality from the police. Personally, I think we must always take into account the balance of forces, and choose our tactics based on what will bring out the most people to participate. Sometimes, a militant action, like shutting down the ports, is what will bring masses of people to join us. Other times, like move-in day, we should abandon militancy. It’s a tricky thing to figure out. Of course there will be mistakes made, but the beautiful thing about the Occupy Movement is that there are so many more people dedicated to figuring out “how do we change society?”

These debates have sharpened lately in the run up to our next big day of action on May 1st, International Worker’s Day. OO as well as some other Occupies around the country have been calling for a general strike that day. Again, I don’t think we’ll see an actual general strike like those of Greece, so I think calling it a general strike is the wrong move. I don’t even think we’ll have the same amount of participation that we saw on November 2nd. However, there have been a lot of positive developments in the planning for that day. The Longshore union has the ability to have what they call a stop-work meeting a few times a year during working hours. They have decided to use one on May 1 in solidarity with our call, which means the Ports will be shut down for the day. There are a number of unions of Golden Gate Bridge workers that have been working without contracts. Some of them have taken strike votes and have been talking about going on strike starting May 1st. They have begun conversations with OO and Occupy San Francisco about marching on the bridge and shutting it down that day. I don’t know if that will happen. It will be interesting to see how successful it will be if it’s tried. One thing I know for sure is that there will be a large regional march starting in East Oakland and ending in Downtown in the afternoon that has been organized by a coalition with Occupy activists, immigrant rights activists, and others. I expect it will draw thousands of participants.

What the planning for May 1 has shown is that even though the Occupy movement is not as visible now as it was in the past, it’s still respected as live movement representing working people and the 99%. And although it seems we’ve lost the sympathy of the mainstream media, we use our own media to help build sympathy and generalize debates amongst a broader layer of people. Many citizen journalists have turned to youtube to disseminate footage that police would rather keep secret. OakFoSho.com is one prominent site of an independent videographer who films occupy events. There are established independent left wing news outlets like indybay.org and socialistworker.org that continue to cover the Occupy Movement as well as present debate. But there are also two newspapers that have sprung up specific to Occupy Oakland: The Oscar Grant Plaza Gazette, and the Occupied Oakland Tribune. Both which provide print editions and also have websites. All these and other independent media outlets have been crucial in allowing us to tell our side of the story as well as allow us to carry out more thorough debates.

I encourage you to learn more about OO as well as follow the future of our movement by visiting any those sites. Of course we can’t know how events will unfold and affect OO, but the Occupy Movement in general has given the prospect of struggle in the US a much brighter future. And I for one look forward to participating in it.

マーティン氏からの挨拶

レーバービートの映像スタッフ　マーチン氏の来日が決定しました
彼の挨拶文を以下に記します。

戦争と貧困に反対する映像祭にご招待くださったあなたと実行委員会に感謝します。

レイバービートを代表して、世界のビデオ撮影者・活動家たちと会えるのが楽しみです。とてもわくわくしています。
私 は過去16年間、レイバービートのビデオを制作・編集してきました。私の作品はレイバービートの目録にある何百もの作品の一部となっています。ご存じのよ うに、私たちは主に労働問題を取材していますが、戦争ほど反労働者的なものはありません。最近6年間の私の仕事はほとんど反戦デモの取材であり、イラクか らの帰還兵たちおよび反戦イラク帰還兵の会と共に活動してきました。
視聴者が電話で参加するテレビ番組を彼らが制作した際は、反戦ベトナム帰還兵の会や平和を求める帰還兵の会と一緒に手助けをしました。この番組は39週間放送され、現在は一時中断中ですが、4月に再開されます。
こ こシカゴの大きなデモを取材するレイバービートの集団制作に加えて、私はワシントンにも何度か出かけ、全米規模の集会の短い番組を作っています。昨年夏に