Occupy Oakland General Strike Photos

The pictures of folks committing property damage should be pulled. They put these folks at risk.

ya'll, i totally understand property destruction with a purpose. But you know who is going to clean that up? The workers. Most likely the most at risk workers, the folks who REALLY could not afford to miss work today. Does the CEO of Whole Foods pick up those tables? No. Common now. Also, there are several WF workers, leaders included, that are down and are doing everything they can within their power to support the movement without losing their jobs. Lets build with the workers, not make them pick up after you.

I believe a time will come when an opportunity will be offered to abolish this lamentable evil. Everything we do is to improve it, if it happens in our day; if not, let us transmit to our descendants, together with our slaves, a pity for their unhappy lot and an abhorrence of slavery.
Patrick Henry January 18, 1773

From afar, looks like the black bloc is putting others at risk. They commit property destruction during a non violent protest. That alienates common folk who don't want to be part of the property destruction. No, property destruction is not violent, but it gets lumped in as being so by the masses (CNN, FoxNews, CBS News, etc) or new people being involved. Have read that some anarchist are happy with some of the decision making process for Occupy Oakland and that the marxist intellects haven't infiltrated the process too much and although moveon.org has been making money off the OWS movement; the movement has been able to resist most of those things coming from fortune 500 organizers. The other thing that one faces with combining property destruction during the mass protests is possibility of police provocateurs. Yes people are pissed, but I'd hate to see an innocent person (aka first timer at a protests) take the fall for the property destruction caused by a few pissed off black bloc folks. Just because you can smash a window, does not mean I agree with everything your about.

In Dartmouth College v. Woodward (1819), corporations were recognized as having the same rights as natural persons to contract and to enforce those contracts. In Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, 118 U.S. 394 (1886), the Supreme Court recognized corporations as persons for the purposes of the Fourteenth Amendment. In Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010) the Supreme Court of the United States held that corporate funding of independent political broadcasts in candidate elections cannot be limited under the First Amendment.

also, i know it looks like just a building, but there are people in there. People who may want to build with the movement and now are afraid to do so. Workers and customers were terrified in there. These are people we need to build with, not alienate through fear.

Should these photos be pulled? Of course not. These are things that really happened and to not show it would be a crime to journalism. Does it put these people at risk? Probably not. Their faces are covered and if they were so concerned, they wouldn't have done it in the first place.

And speaking as someone who was a witness, these people weren't just destroying property. They were also attacking their fellow protestors who tried to come between them and the vandalism. I don't personally know what any of these folks politics is and what their main goal was with their participation with the strike but if it was to take attention away from the message and scare people away from the movement, I think they accomplished their goal. And if that was not their intention, well then I expect they're feeling really shameful right now.