Fight the Power

Occupy L.A. : Signs That The Times Are A-Changing
The First Two Days of Occupy Los Angeles
FIGHT THE POWER || BY ED RAMPELL || OCT 03, 2011

Editor’s Note: The “Occupy Wall Street” movement has spread within the past week to over 100 American cities. Though to many the goals of the national protest seem unfocused, with no apparent long-term strategy, there is no doubt that this movement has energized a good many in this country.

Back Page Magazine sent reporter Ed Rampell into downtown L.A. for the first two days of “Occupy L.A.” to get a read on this citizens’ movement.

“Look what’s happening out in the streets
Got a revolution Got to revolution
Hey I’m dancing down the streets
Got a revolution Got to revolution…
We are volunteers of America
We are volunteers of America”

– Volunteers, Jefferson Airplane


“Not since the late 1960s has there been anything like this!” declared Ron Kovic, the Vietnam vet Tom Cruise portrayed in the 1989 movie Born on the Fourth of July. “This is the beginning of a revolution in the spirit of Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela,” the longtime peace organizer told a throng of supporters outside of Los Angeles’ City Hall.

Photo by Ed Rampell

The hundreds of demonstrators who marched on Oct. 1 from Downtown L.A.’s Pershing Square to City Hall – where some planned to camp out as part of a nationwide “occupation” movement — were, like ’60s activists, mostly young. But unlike members of Kovic’s generation, for whom the Indochina war was the paramount issue, today’s campaigners are primarily preoccupied with the economy, in particular with America’s growing income inequality.

The so-called “Occupy Los Angeles” movement belongs to a national “leaderless resistance” using social media, and is acting in solidarity with Occupy Wall Street, where protesters have been rallying and camping out at Lower Manhattan’s Financial District to condemn bankers, corporations and other plutocrats they contend are looting and pillaging the U.S. and world economies.

Mario Brito, Occupy L.A.’s city liaison, summed up the occupation cause’s raison d’etre as “economic justice,” and told Back Page Magazine: “This is an international movement – it’s not only happening in Wall Street, it’s happening in 170 cities in the U.S., and cities in Europe and Latin America.” Events are scheduled the week of Oct. 3 to take place in Washington, D.C., including the American Dream Movement’s summit and protests at Freedom Plaza.

Photo by Ed Rampell

Speakers at the rally, which stretched around much of L.A.’s City Hall, included perennial congressional candidate Marcy Winograd, as well as the wheelchair-bound Kovic, who recited folksinger Woody Guthrie’s people’s anthem, This Land is Your Land. Later in the afternoon on the lawn near First Street and Main Avenue anyone who wanted to speak could through an open mic system; a poet read anti-capitalist poetry. Although LAPD maintained a substantial presence, there was no overt police abuse of power, such as the pepper spraying and mass detentions in New York by the NYPD.

The signs and T-shirts of many of the up to 3,000 people who gathered at L.A.’s City Hall bore anti-corporate slogans, such as: “Tax the Rich”, “Regulate the WBankers”, “End Corrupt Oligarchs”, “Make Love, Not Interest Bearing Debt”, “Robbed at Pen Point at Blank Check Range”, “From Tahrir to Eternity”, “Old & Still Idealistic”, “We the People”, and “We Are the 99%”, referring to the idea that America’s economic inequities overwhelmingly affect the vast majority of the population in adverse, unfair ways.

Photo by Ed Rampell

Many participants showed individual initiative with their sloganeering. A young woman literally thinking outside of the box wore a cardboard box emblazoned with the words: “I’m here so I don’t have to live in this box.”

A toddler sat in a baby stroller sporting the sign: “Help! They’ve stolen my future.” One man held aloft an effigy of the Monopoly game mascot Rich Uncle Pennybags, wearing a top hat, holding a martini glass and the words: “I’ve had Enough Trickle Down Economics.”

Photo by Ed Rampell

Some wore the same mustachioed mask as the militant character in 2006’s V for Vendetta movie, while others carried America’s 13 star flag from the Revolutionary War.

As she listened to Ron Kovics’ speech Katiuska Cruz — who identified herself as an unemployed class of 2009 college grad with no healthcare, originally from the Dominican Republic — held a placard proclaiming: “Revolution starts now; We need a reform.” In smaller letters were the words “Unity”, “Freedom”, “I am 99%”; the word “Greed” was X-ed out in a circle.

The aspiring actress, who recently moved from Boston to L.A., told Back Page Magazine: “I think it’s very unfair what’s going on. The 1 percent pretty much have all the money. Now Bank of America is going to charge $5 a month [debit card fees]. It’s pretty screwed up how a lot of people are getting their houses taken away, and most of them are really poor. While the rich are sitting in their… homes, drinking champagne.

“It’s just very unfair what’s going on and it’s about time something is done. I’m just so glad – people say we’re a ‘lost generation,’ but we’re not. Look at what we’re doing: We’re standing up, we’re tired; we’re over it. We’re going to do something about it. And we’re starting right now!” asserted the young Latina, who performs protest music in the Sex Pistols and Gogol Bordello tradition in order to “speak up.”

A grey-haired Caucasian man who identified himself as Tom and as an attorney held a sign stating: “John Galt can go to hell.” Tom called this character in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged “a rich asshole who tells the public to be damned. He’s the patron saint of rich assholes. He justifies, provides morality, for all rich assholes.”

Photo by Ed Rampell

Tom described this ethos of the marketplace as “believing religiously in [Adam Smith’s] ‘invisible hand,’ that will provide prosperity to man, if everybody is nice and greedy.”

Tom expressed outrage that while around 1,000 people have been arrested during the Occupy Wall Street protests (700 marchers were held by NYPD following an Oct. 1 march across the Brooklyn Bridge), none of the corporate culprits who devastated the economy have been charged with crimes.

“I have clients that do 25 to life for stealing a pack of underwear, and these guys steal billions – and they don’t do any time! It’s like the government’s conspiracy of the haves versus the have nots,” said Tom, who explained he was at the City Hall demo to “lend my body… to the crowd and let the powers that be know that we’re here – and we’re going to take over.”

Sitting on City Hall’s lawn a Filipina named Christina likened the national occupation movement to the 1980s “People’s Power” uprising against dictator Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines. Christina’s homemade sign declared: “USA has the biggest income gap among developed countries – time for change”, and she maintained “the most unequal society is USA, and next is Great Britain,” where riots took place last summer.

“In essence, statistics show and everywhere you see it: 1 percent of the population controls 90 percent of the wealth… There has to be equality in our lives… so all of us benefit from the resources of the world,” insisted Christina, who was laid off last year from her position with healthcare insurers, but has a new job working for personal injury victims. Christina participated in Occupy L.A. “because I just want to get involved. I think it’s time for change. I think it’s time for Americans to wake up… We formed the People’s Power revolution to oust Pres. Marcos… The American people have to rise up… This is the beginning of [People’s Power in America].”

Photo by Ed Rampell

On Saturday night hundreds of people camped out on City Hall’s grounds, although not inside of the cordoned off municipal building itself. No arrests were reported as of Sunday afternoon.

Media coverage of and international support for the movement is growing, just as the occupations are. Author and free speech champion Salman Rushdie tweeted: “The world’s economy has been wrecked by these rapacious traders. Yet it is the protesters who are jailed.”

Susan Sarandon and Michael Moore spoke at Lower Manhattan rallies, where – due to an NYPD ban on PA systems at Occupy Wall Street — listeners repeated en masse each sentence out loud so members of the audience and media could hear the filmmaker’s speech. (The same tactic was used during one of Kovic’s speech, apparently out of solidarity with the New York occupiers.) On Oct. 2 Moore stated on C-SPAN’s Book TV: “This movement is boiling over. Please join us.”

Occupy L.A.’s Mario Brito asserted: “The vast majority of Americans actually believe income inequality is a major problem. They only reason they haven’t acted upon it is because there hasn’t been a mass movement.”

That is, perhaps, until now.

Denouncing “corporate pigs” and praising the Arab Spring, 20-something Katiuska Cruz called the occupation movement: “Genius… great! …This is the new ’60s. This is our own ‘Spring’ – you know, how Egypt did it. We’re just doing it in the American way.” Call them the 21st century’s “volunteers of America.”

For more info see: http://occupylosangeles.org/




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THE AUTHOR
Ed Rampell
Ed Rampell is an L.A.-based film historian/critic and author of Progressive Hollywood, A People’s Film History of the United States. His interview with Charles Ferguson, the Oscar-winning director of Inside Job, is in the September issue of The Progressive Magazine.