Floods

Courtesy of LA Times

Photographer:  Robert Galbraith, Reuters

Oakland Strike: Demonstrators flood across the bridge

Amy Goodman reports here on the first general strike in the city of Oakland since 1946.  With crowd estimates ranging from 20,000-100,000, demonstrators shut down the Port of Oakland, sending employees home fully paid.  Community activist Kate Brooks describes viewing the bridge from the hill: "I looked back, and all I could see was floods and floods and floods and floods of people chanting and marching." 

 Ms. Brooks' view of the bridge can be seen on video at the link.  She also states:

We’re out here today, A, as a part of Occupy Oakland, but it was really preempted by the brutal and vicious attack on peaceful protesters by the Oakland Police Department last week, where they shot tear gas and flashbomb grenades into crowds of women and children and elderly. The most famous example of what happened, of course, was to the Iraq veteran, Scott Olsen, who was hospitalized. Thank goodness he’s doing much better now, but there was a point there where folks were not sure if he was going to make it. And I think people have just—on the heels of the Oscar Grant protests, where they also used very brutal repression on us, I think, really, people have just had enough, you know, that we just said we’re not going to take it anymore. And so folks came out in the thousands, right, across race, across class, across ideologies, across tactics, to say, "No more."

20 percent of the city's teachers did not report to work.  Demonstrators were also joined by representatives from the postal workers' union, the SEIU, the longshoremen’s union and the Oakland Education Association, all of whom backed a day of action in solidarity with the Occupy Wall Street movement.

Angela Davis is one of the speakers viewable at the Democracy Now! link.  "We stand in defense of Scott Owen," she proclaimed passionately.  "And the memory of Oscar Grant."  Activists renamed Frank Ogawa Plaza after Oscar Grant, in memory of a 21 year old man shot to death by a transit police officer on New Years Day, 2009.

More photos here at the LA Times reporting a mostly peaceful day of enormous, engulfing crowds in protests against income inequality and corporate greed, starting around 9 A.M. and lasting until early evening in which thousands of protesters swarmed the nation's 5th largest port. 

Courtesy of LA Times

Photographer:  Kent Porter, Santa Rosa Press Democrat

Oakland Strike: Victory at the Port, Sunset

"We're fighting for our children, really," said Audra Casanova, a UC Berkeley comparative literature student with $42,000 in educational debt - and marching with her husband and six month old son, Alexander - "so they're not owned by federal loans like we are."