Occupy Wall St. (support/debate)

[nike]

Re: Occupy Wall St. (support/debate)
Neuer Beitragvon oceanyoga am 24/10/2011, 10:07
I made this video yesterday: Voices from Occupy Los Angeles:

omigod, you really must hate all these nice hipsters people to show them in all their confused glory....
honestly:
i tried to watch the still-not-yet-peppered by sergeants looney hearts club camp 'till the very end, but when the meditation temple came up and yours private little fave's like nun-violent wellness for human animals, zeitgeist followed by "you look beautiful today" & "free hugs"... scott mckenzie in the background...
a playground for people suffering from B12 and idea-shortage?
mum's and dads nightmare's yoof:
the future of human kind...!
time for a change - at least the soundtrack:

brainzgarbage & soynoize: they are prisoners of affluence and ideology...

news from occupymunich:
some nice kids armored in occupy-merchandise tried to video our FnB-giveout, mimicking/enforcing "cooperation and community" between them and the involved activists and guests, the later two became quite angry after some ignored requests not to film - so we forgot a bit our good education a bit and asked the new generation of protest to leave after a quick push on several "delete recordings" buttons...
this is what happens if one gets publicity seeking...

[sali(e)]

Looks like Oakland, CA police department just joined the "No Thanx Krew". Looks like that krew really knows how to "pick 'em"!

[Mike Generic]

Oh yeah, anyone peeps got news bout Occupy Oakland?

I've been following Oakland since yesterday morning, but just through various indymedia/twitter/blog posts.
As far as I can tell, between 4:30 and 5:00am Tuesday morning, the cops surrounded and stormed the Occupy Oakland camp; I've heard a few reports of teargas, flashbang grenade and rubber bullet use. They arrested a bunch of people and tore the camp apart.
Tuesday evening (not sure exactly what time) at least 1000 people (indymedia/blogs were putting the number around 1000, mainstream media putting it at around 500) went to Oakland City Hall to protest the police action that morning, and shortly after, riot cops came in to disperse the crowd, again using rubber bullets, tear gas, bean-bag guns and flash-bang grenades.
Oakland PD said they kept tear gas usage to a minimum (bullshit), denied use of rubber bullets (again, bullshit), and denied using flash-bang grenades, claiming that the explosions were caused by protesters throwing M-80 firecrackers at them (buuuuuulllllllshiiiiit).
I've also heard several reports of the police ordering reporters from visibly mainstream news sources to shut off their cameras and leave the premises, as well as reports of journalists being targeted and fired at with rubber bullets and bean bags.

Just in case you were having a particularly cheery day, here's some video to help get you a little pissed off.

Oakland riot cop throwing a teargas canister into a crowd of people trying to help and injured man. The end of the video is the man who had been shot, reportedly at point blank range, in the face with a rubber bullet.

[Mike Generic]

http://www.newser.com/article/d9qjf6300 ... st-75.html

[Mike Generic]

Shit, I just read that the man in the first video I posted, where the cop lobs a smoke grenade into the crowd, who was lying on the ground was an Iraq War veteran, and is apparently in critical condition with a fractured skull resulting from a rubber bullet shot.

[nike]

Looks like Oakland, CA police department just joined the "No Thanx Krew". Looks like that krew really knows how to "pick 'em"!

tell them how you feel, baby, when it's your turn to be picked up, let's hope you make it on youtubes...
occupied oakland:

[lil'apple]

i tried to watch the still-not-yet-peppered by sergeants looney hearts club camp 'till the very end, but when the meditation temple came up and yours private little fave's like nun-violent wellness for human animals, zeitgeist followed by "you look beautiful today" & "free hugs"... scott mckenzie in the background...

some more voices from vanity fair la:
The General Assembly and Grassroots Democracy - posted october 3, 2011
https://unpermittedla.wordpress.com/201 ... democracy/

and my personal fav, even if it's far beyond the fan girl horizont:

We don’t simplistically classify ourselves the 99%. We will not willingly reduce ourselves to figures or characters that minimize and distort the oppression of Our everyday.
We are not a trend and cannot be summed up in a single sentence or two.
We are here to work for our freedom, and through our example, demonstrate that on whatever level, small or large, a movement organized by others for others, we can begin the work that reflects another world.

RAC: To all our families and companer@s in the struggle - Posted October 12, 2011
unpermittedla.wordpress.com/2011/10/12/rac-to-all-our-families-and-companers-in-the-struggle/

Statement from DeColonize LA - Posted October 16, 2011
http://unpermittedla.wordpress.com/2011 ... lonize-la/

Occupying LaLa Land - October 17, 2011
http://unpermittedla.wordpress.com/2011 ... lala-land/

news from occupymunich:
some nice kids armored in occupy-merchandise tried to video our FnB-giveout, mimicking/enforcing "cooperation and community" between them and the involved activists and guests, the later two became quite angry after some ignored requests not to film - so we forgot a bit our good education a bit and asked the new generation of protest to leave after a quick push on several "delete recordings" buttons...
this is what happens if one gets publicity seeking...

don't cha worry, Nike "No Thanx" Mihailowna, vanity fair light in frankfurt/main faces problems with zeitgeist AND npd-fascists trying hard to fill up the vacuum... taz and spiegel are full of it.

[Bakica]

Cops are protesting in my city.

Fuck yeah ! They will start shooting now

[Unreasonable Man]

Shit, I just read that the man in the first video I posted, where the cop lobs a smoke grenade into the crowd, who was lying on the ground was an Iraq War veteran, and is apparently in critical condition with a fractured skull resulting from a rubber bullet shot.

Get some Occupysf up in this hizzy...
Do you know if it was a tear gas grenade (That aint smoke) or a flash bang as I've heard reported elsewhere? The camera doesn't linger on that section long to see if the canister starts spewing CS gas (they were using the Waco good stuff, burns the skin) but it does show that one girl in essence being...stunned. Either way its worth noting that he was shot twice, once at point blank range and a second time when the dropped the flash-bang on his comatose body.

And the last I heard about Scott Olse(o?)n was that he was in fair condition after being in critical for most of yesterday.

Related I think the backlash from this is what canceled the occupysf raid last night as well as enabled occupyoakland to retake Oscar Grant Plaza.

[Mike Generic]

Hmm, last I heard Scott Olson was in a medically-induced coma.

[Unreasonable Man]

A hospital spokesman says the 24-year-old veteran and Wisconsin native, Scott Olsen, was upgraded to fair condition and moved into an intensive care unit on Thursday.

On another note #occupyoakland is calling for a citywide General Strike wednesday.

We as fellow occupiers of Oscar Grant Plaza propose that on Wednesday November 2, 2011, we liberate Oakland and shut down the 1%.

We propose a city wide general strike and we propose we invite all students to walk out of school. Instead of workers going to work and students going to school, the people will converge on downtown Oakland to shut down the city.

All banks and corporations should close down for the day or we will march on them.

While we are calling for a general strike, we are also calling for much more. People who organize out of their neighborhoods, schools, community organizations, affinity groups, workplaces and families are encouraged to self organize in a way that allows them to participate in shutting down the city in whatever manner they are comfortable with and capable of.

The whole world is watching Oakland. Let’s show them what is possible.

[punkmar77]

San Diego Occupy Raided

150 riot police marched double-time into the San Diego Civic Center without warning and began busting heads at approximately 1:30 in the morning tonight, 25 to 30 people were arrested, another of my friends from Tijuana was beaten severely by 7 cops..I was chased down the street but managed to get in my car and leave without being arrested.....all media was kept from this by police as well

[nike]

maybe it's a bit cynical in this moment, but i think i found one of the mental fathers siring the actual excitement:

VANITY FAIR - society - may 2011
Inequality
Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%
Americans have been watching protests against oppressive regimes that concentrate massive wealth in the hands of an elite few. Yet in our own democracy, 1 percent of the people take nearly a quarter of the nation’s income—an inequality even the wealthy will come to regret.
http://www.vanityfair.com/society/featu ... #gotopage1

and even more funny:

Joseph Eugene Stiglitz, ForMemRS, FBA, (born February 9, 1943) is an American economist and a professor at Columbia University. He is a recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences (2001) and the John Bates Clark Medal (1979). He is also the former Senior Vice President and Chief Economist of the World Bank. He is known for his critical view of the management of globalization, free-market economists (whom he calls "free market fundamentalists") and some international institutions like the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Stiglitz

bit strange, isn't it?

[lil'apple]

Scott Olsen, the Iraq war veteran who was seriously injured by a police projectile during a protest in Oakland, has regained consciousness but "cannot talk".
Olsen, 24, is communicating with friends and family at his bedside by writing notes, but his injury is believed to have damaged the speech centre of his brain, according to Keith Shannon, who served with Olsen in Iraq.
Olsen is believed to have been injured by a police projectile. He was hit in the forehead in downtown Oakland on Tuesday evening, after marching with fellow demonstrators to protest the closure of an Occupy Oakland camp in the city.
"He cannot talk right now, and that is because the fracture is right on the speech center of his brain," said Shannon. "However, they are expecting he will get that back."
Shannon added that Olsen's "spelling is not near what it used to be".
"The doctors expect that he will have a full recovery," said Shannon, who is due to visit Olsen on Friday afternoon. "However, it is going to be a long road ahead for him."

next time take your helmet with you, Scott, good luck!

On another note #occupyoakland is calling for a citywide General Strike wednesday.

seems like some people always need to learn the hard way before they get real...

but i think i found one of the mental fathers siring the actual excitement:

i honestly never meant "vanity fair" to be serious, so you caught us completely unprepared... laughing tears!
so here's a picture from the vanity fair's album:

[ungovernable]

Occupy Montréal - a brief report
Anonyme, Jeudi, Octobre 20, 2011 - 16:22
(Analyses | Resistance & Activism)

The recent CrimethInc. text written to the occupying movement was distributed in Montréal by the hundreds in both English and French, depending on the language of the recipient. We translated the text ourselves, and it's good. Otherwise, there was a very small visible anarchist presence, mostly in the form of backpatches, a few black flags or black-and-red flags, and a few banners. This must be contrasted to the Maoists of the Parti communiste révolutionnaire, the Zeitgeist Movement, the Lyndon Larouche cult, various ragtag bands of Québécois sovereigntists, and other marginals who managed to be visible. There are more anarchists than any of these groups, except maybe the sovereigntists, but the majority of anarchists chose either not to engage or they chose to engage in a way that didn't mention the A-word.

One such way was the Décolonisons Montréal contingent (Decolonize Montréal or Descolonicemos Montreal, in English and Spanish), which consistently pushed the line that a strictly pacifistic protests is foolish and that the police are not the friends of the occupiers. They also pushed an anti-capitalist analysis early in the day, which might've helped to influence the character of the march later, and they helped to distribute some of the CrimethInc. texts, as well as promoting a demo against Canadian imperialism and the G20 summit in France on November 3 and a march organized by the family of people killed by police on October 22, both of which are cool.

The entire wooded section of the Square du Peuple (previously Square Victoria) is now covered in tents and tarps that are hung up between trees, as well as a few tarps and other things. It is a pretty interesting transformation of space, and it now feels like something that could be described by the word "glen". Bourgeois municipal law decrees that parks must close at 23:00, but Square Victoria is not a park, but a town square, and therefore open to citizens twenty-four hours a day. We can expect that there will be an attempted eviction at some point, but maybe the authorities will leave this job to Général L'Hiver. When things get too cold, perhaps we'll all just leave.

There was an unpermitted march of about a thousand people, or at least more than five hundred, through downtown Montréal today. Unpermitted marches aren't particularly special in this city, but the direction was. We walked west along rue Sainte-Catherine, against traffic, from Square Phillips to Concordia, which is pretty crazy. After that, we turned around and walked the other way to Place des Arts, cut through the Chinese Quarter to Old Montréal, hung out in front of the Bank of Montréal's headquarters, and walked back to the Square. There were no moments like Rome, but there could have been, and while there were lots of pacifists, there were also lots of people who were militant and joined in militant chants.

- "Pour un monde sans patrons, ni flics, ni prisons." For a world without bosses, cops, or prisons.

- "La police [sont] en service de riches et de fascistes!" The police [are] in service of the rich and the fascists. It didn't catch on too much, unfortunately.

- "A - ANTI - ANTICAPITALISTE." Very similar to the Spanish phrase, except it's like an "euh" sound at the end instead of an "ah" sound. Hugely popular, actually.

- "Le Capital nous fait la guerre. Guerre au Capital!" Roughly: Capital wages war on us. Therefore, WAR ON CAPITAL! It was also hugely popular. In Montréal, the crowd is pretty okay with the idea that capitalism sucks, even if we are having difficulty pushing an anti-police analysis. Perhaps that will change when the attacks begin. It is worth noting that none of the people we sometimes see at the anti-police demos were present, as far as we could see. Maybe they knew that their time was gonna be wasted.

The general assembly was useless. Two committees were formed, one which is planning "individual actions" and one which is planning "collective actions". We weren't there and so we can't speak to it very much.

It is worth noting three other things. First, large numbers of people STUCK IN TRAFFIC due to our blatantly illegal march honked their horns and gave the marchers the thumb's up, so that's cool. Second, when we walked past the fire hall in Palais des congrès, they blared their sirens and made a lot of noise, and that was kind of nice. Third, as of writing, the statue of Queen Victoria is wearing a Guy Fawkes mask, wearing a giant sign for the Zeitgest Movement as a necklace ("Aller à l'Avant - ZEITGEIST - Moving Forward"), and wielding the Patriot's Flag, which is a symbol for Québécois sovereignty dating to the pre-Confederation rebellion in the Canadas. So it's better than it was before, but the problem is that the statue still exists.

May all your occupations become decolonizations, synonymous with insurrections.

LOVE & SOLIDARITY
a Montréal anarchist or two

http://www.anarchistnews.org/node/15565

[butcher]

I actually thought that Crimethinc text wasn't that great.

Better:

Plaza – Riot – Commune

We are the generation of the abandoned, the betrayed. Tossed up on the shores of the present by 150 years of failed insurrection, by the shipwreck of the workers’ movement, the failure of a hundred political projects. But it is not only our once-upon-a-time friends who have departed. Today, even our enemies flee from us, even capital abandons us: no more its minimum promises, the right to be exploited, the right to sell one’s labor power. Abandoned, we greet the world with utter abandon. There is no longer any possible adequacy of means and ends, no way of subordinating our actions to the rational or the practical. The present age of austerity means that even the most meager of demands require the social democrats to pick up bricks. Betrayed by democracy, betrayed by the technocrats of socialism, betrayed by the dumb idealism of anarchy, betrayed by the stolid fatalism of the communist ultraleft. We are not the 99%. We are not a fucking percentage at all. We do not count. If we have any power at all, it is because we are the enemies of all majority, enemies of “the people.” As the old song goes, we are nothing and must become everything.

Though it is a key characteristic of capitalism that each generation of its victims has, in its way, considered its persistence beyond a few decades unlikely if not preposterous, the difference between us and them is that in our case it just happens to be true. Now, not even capital’s footservants can paint a convincing portrait of a future based upon markets and wages – all the sci-fi dystopias of flying cars and robot servants seem truly ridiculous. No, the future only presents as ruin, apocalypse, burning metal in the desert. It is easier to imagine the end of life on earth than our own old age.

This is why anxieties over the implicit statism of anti-austerity struggles are baseless. With the exception of a few benighted activists and media ideologues, everyone understands quite well that the Keynesian card was played long ago, blown on wars and bailouts, the victim of its own monstrous success. There will be no rebirth of the welfare state, no “reindustrialization” of society. This much is obvious: if there is an expansion of the state, it will be a proto-fascist austerity state. Nor is there any longer a “Left” in any meaningful sense, as a force that desires to manage the existing world on different terms, in the name of the workers or the people. Those radicals who, tired of the weakness of the loyal opposition, imagine themselves called upon to “destroy the left” find that their very existence is predicated upon this old, vanished enemy. There is no Left left: only the great dispirited mass of the center, some wild and misdirected antagonism at the fringes.

The hopelessness of deflecting the state from its current course; the realization that even a slight reform of the system would require collective violence of a near revolutionary intensity; the attendant awareness that we would be idiots to go that distance and yet stop short of revolution –all of this gives many anti-austerity struggles a strange desperation and intensity. Our hope is to be found in this very hopelessness, in the fact that, in the current cycle of struggles, means have entirely dissociated from ends. Tactics no longer match with their stated objectives. In France, in response to a proposed change in the retirement age, high school students barricade their schools; roving blockades confuse the police; rioting fills city center after city center. In Britain and Italy, university struggles recruit tens of thousands of youth who have no hope of attending the university, nor any interest in doing so for that matter. There is no longer any possibility of a political calculus that matches ideas with tactics, thinking with doing. Do we suppose that French children are really concerned about what will happen to them once they are ready to retire? Does any young person expect the current social order to last that long? No, they are here to hasten things forward, hasten things toward collapse. Because it is easier to imagine the end of the world than retirement. Because anything is better than this.

*

For the neo-Leninist philosophes who build their cults in the shells of the dying universities, such an impossibility of lining up means with ends is nothing but a barrier or block. Where is the revolutionary program in the Egyptian revolution, they ask, where is the program in the streets of Britain or Greece? Who will discipline these bodies for their final assault on the palaces and citadels? For such thinkers, only an idea can guarantee the efficacy of these bodies. Only an idea – the idea of communism, as some say – can make of these bodies a proper linkage between means and ends. But communism is not an idea nor an idealism – it means freeing bodies from their subordination to abstractions. Thankfully, we are skittish, faithless and flighty people. We have trouble listening. For us, communism will be material or it will be nothing. It will be a set of immediate practices, immediate satisfactions, or nothing. If we find discipline and organization, it will come from what we do, not what we think.

By “idea” the philosophes mean something like “the Party.” They intend to make themselves and their ideas mean, as structure and social form. They intend to cement the old pact between the intelligentsia and the workers’ movement. But there is no intelligentsia anymore and there certainly is no workers’ movement to speak of. The entire structure of duty and obligation – Christian in origin – upon which the classical programmatic parties were built no longer exists, because capital no longer needs morality for helpmeet. There is acting for ourselves; there is acting with others; but there is no sustained acting for another, out of obligation.

*

Our indiscipline means that among political ideas only the one idea which is, by its very nature, determined to remain an idea, an ideal, can gain any purchase here: democracy. From Tunisia to Egypt, from Spain to Greece, from Madison to Wall Street, again and again, the “movement of the squares” buckles under the dead weight of this shibboleth. Democracy, the name for the enchantment of the people by its own image, by its potential for endless deferral. Democracy, a decision-making process become political ontology, such that the form itself, the form of the decision, becomes its own content. We democratically decide to be democratic! The people chooses itself!

In the present era – the era of the austerity state and the unemployment economy – radical democracy finds its ideal locus in the metropolitan plaza or square. The plaza is the material embodiment of its ideals – a blank place for a blank form. Through the plaza, radical democracy hearkens back to its origin myth, the agora, the assembly-places of ancient Greece which also served as marketplaces (such that the phrase “I shop” and “I speak in public” were nearly identical). These plazas are not, however, the buzzing markets filled with economic and social transaction, but clean-swept spaces, vast pours of concrete and nothingness, perhaps with a few fountains here or there. These are spaces set aside by the separation of the “political” from the economy, the market. Nowhere is this more clear than in the most recent episode of the “movement of squares” – Occupy Wall Street – which attempted, meekly and rather insincerely, to occupy the real agora, the real space of exchange, but ended up pushed into a small, decorative park on the outskirts of Wall Street, penned by police. This is what building the new world in the shell of the old means today – an assembly ringed by cops.

If there is hope in these manifestations, it lies in the forms of mutual aid that exist there, the experimentation people undertake in providing for their own needs. Already, we see how the occupations are forced against their self-imposed limits, brought into conflict with the police, despite the avowed pacificism of the participants. The plaza occupations – with all their contradictions – are one face of the present dissociation of means from ends. Or rather, they present a situation in which means are not so much expelled as sublimated, present as the object of a vague symbolization, such that the gatherings come to pre-enact or symbolize or prefigure some future moment of insurrection. At their worst, they are vast machines of deferral. At their best, they force their participants toward actually seizing what they believe they are entitled to merely want.

How far we are from Egypt, the putative start of the sequence. There, the initial assembly was an act of symbolic violence, decidedly so, which everyone knew would open onto an encounter with the state and its force. And yet, even there, the separation from the economy – from the ways in which our needs are satisfied – remained inscribed into the revolution from the start. In other words, the Egyptian insurrection was not deflected to the sphere of the political but started there to begin with. And all of the other episodes in the so-called “movement of squares” repeat this primary dislocation, whether they remain hamstrung by pacifism and democratism, as in Spain, or press their demands in material form, as in Greece.

This brings the plaza occupations into relation not only with the entire development of orthodox Marxism, from Lenin through Mao, which places the conquest of state power front and center, but also its apparent opposite in this historical moment: the riots of Athens and London and Oakland, which, bearing the names of Oscar Grant, Alexis Grigoropoulos, or Mark Duggan, treat the police and state power as both cause and effect, provocation and object of rage. Though the looting which always accompanies such eruptions points the way to a more thorough expropriation, these riots, even though they seem the most immediate of antagonistic actions, are also bound by a kind of symbolization, the symbolization of the negative, which says what it wants through a long litany, in letters of fire and broken glass, of what it does not want: not this, not that. We’ve seen their limits already, in Greece –even burning all of the banks and police stations was not enough. Even then, they came into a clearing, a plaza, swept clean by their own relentless negations, where negation itself was a limit. What then? What will we do then? How do we continue?

Between the plaza and the riot, between the most saccharine affirmation and the blackest negation – this is where we find ourselves. Two paths open for us: each one, in its way, a deflection from the burning heart of matter. On the one hand, the endless process of deliberation that must finally, in its narrowing down to a common denominator, arrive at the only single demand possible: a demand for what already is, a demand for the status quo. On the other hand, the desire that has no object, that finds nothing in the world which answers its cry of annihilation.

One fire dies out because it extinguishes its own fuel source. The other because it can find no fuel, no oxygen. In both cases, what is missing is a concrete movement toward the satisfaction of needs outside of wage and market, money and compulsion. The assembly becomes real, loses its merely theatrical character, once its discourse turns to the satisfaction of needs, once it moves to taking over homes and buildings, expropriating goods and equipment. In the same way, the riot finds that truly destroying the commodity and the state means creating a ground entirely inhospitable to such things, entirely inhospitable to work and domination. We do this by facilitating a situation in which there is, quite simply, enough of what we need, in which there is no call for “rationing” or “measure,” no requirement to commensurate what one person takes and what another contributes. This is the only way that an insurrection can survive, and ward off the reimposition of market, capital and state (or some other economic mode based upon class society and domination). The moment we prove ourselves incapable of meeting the needs of everyone – the young and the old, the healthy and infirm, the committed and the uncommitted– we create a situation where it is only a matter of time before people will accept the return of the old dominations. The task is quite simple, and it is monstrously difficult: in a moment of crisis and breakdown, we must institute ways of meeting our needs and desires that depend neither on wages nor money, neither compulsory labor nor administrative labor, and we must do this while defending ourselves against all who stand in our way.

Research & Destroy, 2011

Occupy Melbourne basically split today.

[punkmar77]

We suffered a split early on too butcher, between pacifists holding "I S.D.P.D." and the majority that knew better than to trust any police...spirits were down for a day or so..then we were attacked and maced with arrests, the split faction tried to occupy a park with supposed blessings from police but didn't last more than 3 days before they were removed..in the end they all slithered back to the camp we defended. 3000 strong at last nights gathering.

[butcher]

the 'we' when i refer to occupy melbourne doesn't exist, i'm not involved.

[nike]

i honestly never meant "vanity fair" to be serious, so you caught us completely unprepared... laughing tears!

dead serious: i found it by chance, i was looking for something else and at first i couldn't believe it myself, but after the eternal Gobblez saw it too:
the hype of the year was born in vanity fair...

i actually thought that Crimethinc text wasn't that great.
Better:

guess one fine day i will understand what's the point making this we-are-doomed-the-end-is-near-rant of some depressive sunnyboy better than creammethinks chummy selfpromotion?

wanna have a laugh in all this carneval mess?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/blog/20 ... all-street
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/blog/20 ... -questions

and guess i deserve a working class hero medal for sparing ap-net the german interviews with the leading zeitgeist clique of the leaderless mess in frankfurt - they are already controlling the net-output , ban banners of leftwing trade union yoofs...

[THEBLACKNOVA]

Occupy Tijuana

In the early morning of October 18, around 2:20am, the Municipal and State police illegally, arrested 27 Occupiers: 20 men, 6 women and 1 child.

Oct. 22, 2011 Occupy Tijuana Returned to organizing and took to the streets.