SF Chronicle: Occupy protesters take over vacant Turk Street building
(04-01) 17:57 PDT San Francisco — A group of marchers led by Occupy movement protesters has entered a vacant building at Turk and Gough streets in San Francisco, claiming the property as a “permanent occupation” and refuge for homeless people in the city.
The group entered the building at about 5:45 Sunday evening, after marching there following a really at Union Square. Police were on the scene, but there were no immediate arrests or confrontation.The march, which numbered a few hundred, was peaceful along the route. Marchers were playing music, chanting slogans and carrying signs saying “House Keys Not Handcuffs” as police officers looked on and blocked traffic.
When marchers reached the building, a two-story commercial structure at 888 Turk Street, they were met by activists dressed in black who had already entered the building and allowed them inside.
The march followed an afternoon rally in Union Square. The event, described in a press release as “poor people play April Fool’s prank on Union Square,” was promoted as part of a supposed 12-city April Fool’s Day action designed to “demonstrate poor peoples’ right to exist in public space.”
Speakers protested laws that keep homeless people from sitting, lying down, hanging out “and-perhaps worst of all-sleeping,” organizers said. They claimed that citations for offenses like these comprised “roughly one third of all prosecuted offenses in San Francisco at the end of 2011.” Paul Boden, one of the organizers, told the crowd at Union Square that area businesses “are targeting poor people as being bad for business. If you ain’t shopping, they don’t want you around here.”Before leaving Union Square, those assembled were joined by a contingent from Occupy Oakland, who arrived on an old AC Transit bus. The bus, decorated with graffiti and fitted with a screen door at its entrance, followed the marchers along the route.
Benny Evangelista is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. bevangelista@sfchronicle.com
Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2012/04/01/BAP11NTE3K.DTL#ixzz1qqDvQAal
OWS Activists work for the “Free Network Foundation,” planning a decentralized and open-source mesh Internet
You’re on the Internet. What does that mean?
Most likely, it means one of a handful of telecommunications providers is middlemanning your information from Point A to Point B. Fire off an email or a tweet, broadcast a livestream or upload video to YouTube, and you’re relying on vast networks of fiber optic cables deep underground and undersea, working with satellites high above, to move your data around the world, and to bring the world to your fingertips.
It’s an infrastructure largely out of sight and mind. AT&T, Level 3, Hurricane Electric, Tata Indicom – to most these are simply invisible magicians performing the act of getting one online and kicking. To many open-source advocates, however, these are a few of the big, dirty names responsible for what they see as the Web’s rapid consolidation. The prospect of an irreparably centralized Internet, a physical Internet in the hands of a shrinking core of so-called Tier 1 transit networks, keeps Isaac Wilder up at night.
New York City: Zuccotti Park has been re-occupied tonight, the half-year anniversary of Occupy Wall Street. March 17, 2012
It’s shaping up to be a busy spring for Occupy. The movement born last year in a New York City park has come roaring back to life this week after a period of hibernation. It promises to be even livelier in weeks and months to come.
On Monday, according to the Sacramento Bee, a crowd numbering in the thousands, including Occupy protesters, converged on California’s capital to denounce soaring college tuition costs. Chanting “You’ll hear us out, or we’ll vote you out,” they tried to occupy the capitol rotunda. Some succeeded. In what the Bee called “a massive show of force,” 100 California Highway Patrol officers arrested 68.
Occupy is taking credit for the White House’s recent decision to move a May meeting G-8 leaders from Chicago, where Occupy and other groups had threatened protests, to safer and more remote Camp David. “We scored a victory, forcing them to retreat to the back woods of Maryland,” Andy Thayer, Occupier and spokesperson for the Coalition Against NATO/G-8, tells ABC News.
Protests still will be mounted, he says, against NATO, which has chosen not to flee Chicago and will meet there as planned. “There’ll be a mass march on the NATO summit,” says Thayer, “not only a march, but any number of other activities. It’s unclear whether it will be on the 19th or 20th. We will decide in the next few days.”
Rolling Stone journalist Matt Taibbi — he who coined the immortal phrase about Goldman Sachs being a “bloodsucking vampire” — spoke at an Occupy Wall Street rally today. Via Taibbi’s blog:
Occupy Wall Street is kicking off a new series of actions today, and as part of the campaign, I’m going to be speaking at Bryant Park at 11 a.m., through about noon, when a march will begin.
The topic is Too-Big-To-Fail banks, and Bank of America in particular.The Twitters were abuzz with reports from his speech. We’re going to post a few of Taibbi’s thoughts about Bank of America via Twitter.
