Natasha Lennard

It looks like another strong example of the Occupy movement’s insertion into the public consciousness. If we needed reassurance of this, the episode ends with another character referencing “the 99 percent and the one percent.” And in a recent episode of “The Office,” Robert California, the CEO played by James Spader, complains that “the 1 percent are hurting too.” The language of Occupy is firmly lodged in the cultural mainstream.

But some caution before we celebrate the shifted zeitgeist. Occupy Wall Street began as an amorphous assemblage, a challenge to the status quo underpinned by radical politics and new social practices. What does it mean for this movement to sit so comfortably in the narrative of an NBC hit show, couched among popular movie references and soft jabs at wealthy New York lifestyles?

It’s a double-edged sword: the popular recognition nods to Occupy’s resonance, but also wields capitalism’s sharpest tool – recuperation. The risk is that Occupy stops providing a context of unrest and just blends in to the current cultural context as is. If Occupy actions and ideas don’t continue to surprise and challenge people, public awareness of the movement becomes no more potent than knowledge of the latest Ryan Gosling meme. “30 Rock’s” recognition of a coming insurrection might be a self-denying prophecy: What sort of political upheaval is preempted by a Thursday night comedy interspersed with commercials?

That said, a call for a nationwide general strike on May 1 has come out of numerous Occupy groups — and the debates around this are as unwieldy, confusing and full of potential as were the conversations leading up to Occupy Wall Street’s public inception on Sept. 17 in downtown Manhattan. No one knew what an occupation of Wall Street could look like or mean; same is true of May Day 2012. How will TV writers, or any writers, for that matter, get their heads around this one?

In last night’s “30 Rock,” Jack Donaghy warns, “There’s a war going on out there and you’re going to have to pick a side.” Gladly, there’s a side, enraged by the current context and weary of capitalist recuperation, that will never be comfortable as the punch line of an NBC comedy joke.

“I am a person living with HIV and I was held for over 30 hours in Santa Rita and denied my prescription medications on multiple occasions by jail staff,” one 28-year-old arrestee told Salon via email, asking to remain anonymous as his family are currently unaware of his HIV status. “I know three others with HIV and many others with psychiatric prescriptions who were also held without being given their meds,” he added.

Carey Lamprecht of the National Lawyers Guild San Francisco Bay Area Chapter and Occupy Legal collective confirmed that “two HIV positive individuals were held without access to medication for over two days at Santa Rita jail.” Lamprecht added that one man who usually takes anti-retroviral drugs every four to six hours went without a dose for over two days and was unable to access a legal counsel for more than a day while detained, as the large number of arrestees were constantly moved around the jail.

Different individuals living with HIV face different risks from missing doses, depending on their T-Cell, viral load counts, anti-retroviral therapy regimens and other factors. The risk, especially for individuals with low T-Cell counts is that the virus mutates rapidly and can develop resistance to medication if doses are inconsistent. The young man who spoke to Salon said that although his T-cell counts are “in the healthy range … none of the guards or medical staff ascertained any of this information” to determine the relative risks of detainees going without medication.

“It felt like we had disappeared. Deputies often didn’t know where individuals were and wandered from cell block to cell block looking for individuals to process,” the man said. “On multiple occasions, my cell block mic checked the guards and led chants, demanding in one voice medicine, food, and other necessities like toilet paper and maxi pads.”

Other stories about mistreatment published in Daily Kos could not be substantiated. Salon found no information to confirm rumors that female detainees were forced to urinate in front of male officers, that detainees were beaten in their cells or that guards sprayed tear gas into the cell vents.

The denial of medication appears to be the most common complaint. According to a release from the Occupy Oakland media team, “detained protesters were kept in painful zip tie handcuffs — some for 8 to 12 hours — were not allowed to access bathrooms and were not given medical treatment for injuries or illness.”

Claire, 28, a special education teacher for the Oakland Unified School District, was another such detainee. She arrived at Santa Rita a little after midnight Saturday, following her arrest as a part of the previous day’s Occupy actions. She suffers from severe depression and anxiety disorders, for which she takes a medication called Celexa twice a day.

“The first person I notified about my need for medication was my arresting officer (Hazelwood),” Claire told Salon, via email. “I believe he noted it somewhere in my paperwork. He told me that I would be able to see a nurse at Santa Rita, and that they have several antidepressants available there,”

On being seen by a nurse, Claire mentioned her condition again and that she had gone 24 hours without medication. “The nurse signed the form to indicate that I was cleared to be put into a holding cell. Several times over the course of the night and next day, I and a few others in my cell told guards outside that we needed medication, but were ignored,” she added.  During her detainment, Claire suffered from a mild but prolonged panic attack, during which she had difficulty breathing and controlling her muscles. She told Salon:

Around five p.m. on Sunday, a guard asked for the women who needed medication to come out of the holding cell, and said we would be processed and seen by a nurse. We were then fingerprinted and had mug shots taken. I again asked if I could see a nurse and explained my condition. I was told that I would not be able to see a nurse unless I wanted to stay in jail. The officer also stated that I would be getting out the following morning (Monday). Around midnight, we were released.

Alyssa Eisenberg, a 44-year-old Occupy activist and single mother, was also not given access to medication for 12 hours during her 18-hour detainment at Santa Rita. Eisenberg suffers from multiple sclerosis and retired early from social services work due to disability. She told Salon that she takes medication at least twice a day for pain and to aid with concentration, as her M.S. has led to cognitive dysfunction and memory loss.

“I was particularly concerned about the cognitive condition, about not understanding quickly what was going on in jail and struggling to process what guards were saying to me,” she said. Like others, Eisenberg informed a nurse of her medical condition and said that she saw at least two other people also express a need for medication. Eisenberg says she was detained for over 12 hours before being told that if she wanted to take pain medication, she would have to remain in jail for at least four more hours for observation. She told Salon that, based on comments from a number of officers, she believed she was soon to be released and so declined the medication, but was then held for six more hours.

“It was more than dehumanizing,” said Eisenberg, noting how lucky she felt that her detainment was so brief compared to long-term inmates.

Sgt. J.D. Nelson of the Alameda Sheriff’s Department said the allegations of mistreatment were “not true.” He described the claims of abuse and beatings as “ridiculous.” He also told Salon that, to his knowledge, no legal proceedings have currently been filed against the department relating to these allegations. When questioned  about reports that medication was withheld from HIV-positive detainees, Nelson said it was the first he had heard of this and noted that all detainees are seen by a medical professional. “People make claims,” he said, “I’m not saying it’s true or not true. A claim is a claim.”

Lamprecht told Salon that the National Lawyers Guild’s first concern would be to address charges facing any of the 400 people arrested during Saturday’s action before considering whether to pursue civil suits against the Sheriff’s Department.

According to the 28-year-old who was denied access to his anti-retroviral treatment, the events at Santa Rita created new, unexpected affinities. “Some of the prisoner orderlies were so inspired by our agitation in jail that they approached us (when out from under the eyes of the guards) and told us they would be joining us at Oscar Grant Plaza when they had finished their time,” he said.

Then there’s the backdrop: Chicago, the site of the notorious 1968 Democratic National Convention and police riot. The city of Barack Obama’s election night rally in 2008 — when a politician could still pull off a slogan like “hope” and it didn’t seem to everyone like a cruel joke. And, as of this month, a Chicago where protest rules and punishments for dissent are stricter than ever, thanks to ordinances recently passed through the city council.

“The ordinances, combined with Chicago’s history of spying on political activists, do not bode well for how the City will treat protesters at the upcoming G-8/NATO summits,” Heidi Boghosian, director of the National Lawyers Guild, told Salon.

The new rules, introduced by Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and passed by the city council, include an increased number of surveillance cameras across the city; the ability for Chicago’s police chief to deputize trained out-of-state law enforcement personnel; increases in parade permit fees and heavier fines for violating parade rules; keeping public parks closed longer than usual each day; the requirement that “large parades” (almost every sizable street protest) take out $1 million liability insurance to get permits and for organizers to “agree to reimburse the city for any damage to the public way or to city property arising out of or caused by the parade.”

“When municipalities require that liability insurance be taken out by protesters before permits are granted, authorities are making it costly and burdensome for political groups to secure permits. Changing the requirements for obtaining protest permits is just one of many tactics that the Guild has seen used across the country in advance of large-scale demonstrations, all of which amount to an improper infringement on the right to assemble and engage in First Amendment-protected activities,” said Boghosian.

The insurance requirements and other parade restrictions give little incentive for organizers to apply for permits at all. In the well-founded understanding that mayhem will ensue and that many people heading for Chicago care little for permitted modes of dissent anyway, the city ordinances seem to disincentivize groups from taking on the burden of a permit, while not at all discouraging people intent on taking the streets from doing so.

Former Seattle police chief Norman Stamper, who oversaw the policing of the Battle of Seattle in 1999 and knows all too well the effect of repressive crackdowns on dissent, is skeptical about Chicago’s new rules to restrict marches, which include a requirement that protesters provide the city with a list of all signs, banners and sound equipment. “It could well backfire, its provisions provoking additional protest, and raising questions about how they would be enforced,” said Stamper.

Mayor Emanuel, in the face of immense opposition from protest groups and aldermen, conceded to drop an initial proposal to also increase fines for resisting arrest. Nonetheless, a press release from Occupy Chicago called the remaining ordinances’ passage through city council “a significant attack on democratic rights.”

“The mayor of Chicago has a clear choice,” said Bernadine Dorhn, former member of the Weather Underground and associate professor of law at Northwestern University, who spoke out against Chicago police actions at the 1968 DNC. “He can represent Chicago as an Open City: open the parks and public spaces, and welcome debate, dissent and arts … Or he can shut down speech and assembly, and prepare for the apocalypse: arm and prepare police for violence and confrontation, close the parks, schools and public places, and barricade the warmakers of NATO and G-8 as they meet for the new military/economic order.”

It seems Emanuel made his choice  and opted for preemptive crackdown, further setting the tone for tense scenes come May. When President Obama announced that Chicago would be the first U.S. city outside of Washington, D.C., to host a NATO summit, many residents expressed concern. University of Chicago economist Allen Sanderson told CBS Chicago that the summit could be a “potential disaster,” noting that the timing will see Occupy supporters “out of hibernation.”

The decision to stick with Chicago for the summit and amp up protest controls shows a president willing to co-opt and clamp down on dissent for his own purposes. As Sanderson warns, however, Obama and Emanuel might come to regret their choices. Occupy Chicago have already answered the new ordinances defiantly, announcing, “Mayor Emanuel, you’ll see us in the streets of Chicago: our streets.”

Jezebel has already noted the absurdity of “Axe, the cheap toiletry equivalent of the He-Man Woman Haters Club” trying to expand its market by creating a fragrance for women. It’s news to make feminists gag, and not just from the stench of Axe.

But the other key question is this: Can you bottle anarchy?

Axe is hardly the first brand to attempt to commodify a radical idea. Last year, Levi’s released a commercial that proclaimed urgently, “Now is our time,” juxtaposing fleeting shots of lithe, embracing bodies with protest crowds and a young, Levi’s-clad man squaring up to riot police. (In light of the riots in London last summer, Levi’s pulled the campaign from the U.K.)

What’s interesting about the Axe campaign is that it actually shows more than just images of a riot. The commercial purports to show two people rejecting the status quo — abandoning their subject positions (cop/robber) and embracing a very different relationship. Of course, being about Axe, the ad actually only serves to push its standard (bizarre) narrative that, no matter what the circumstances, people doused in Axe become sex magnets to sexy people.

At the very least, these ads are a nod to the popularity of dissent. People paid to sell products usually don’t associate major brands with something unpopular while trying to entice a larger market share. But should dissenters be concerned about the possibility of capitalism’s recuperative claws succeeding to commodify (and pacify) even anti-capitalism?

In the past decade alone, we have seen capitalism’s recuperation machine at its finest; the activist identities of an environmentalist, a gay rights supporter and a feminist, to name a few, were repackaged into something you could embody through buying the right T-shirt, wristband, light bulb or car.

Even Occupy Wall Street was something youth brands wanted to be part of. Writing in the Nation about MTV’s plans to film an Occupy season of “The Real World,” Allison Kilkenny argued that “MTV’s commodification of the experience runs the risk of inverting that which makes OWS so successful,” namely “it is a return direct action.”

But it should come as little surprise that corporations are trying to cash in on the Occupy brand, because regardless of its political potency and radical importance, OWS works as a brand. It’s a banner or slogan that can unite people who are interested in changing the current conditions under which we live.

The challenge posed by bottled anarchy is perhaps a more interesting one.

Riot scenes in jeans commercials could well make dedicated anarchists sick to their stomach. But there is the potential for some smugness too – the sort of smugness that might justifiably feel a little bit like winning. For decades now, the mainstream media has negatively glossed anarchists and political rioters as little more than masked, black-clad thugs. And if the popularity of Occupy has illustrated anything, it’s that thousands of people are looking at the current conditions under capitalism and responding, “No, not this.” Maybe those kids in black were on to something. Now even a commercial for body spray suggests that anarchy holds appeal — that it isn’t just destructive, but somehow urgent and sexy. We live in a time when dissent is something people can relate to and want, to such an extent that even advertisers recognize its force.

But what of the risk of co-optation? The concern that resistance is nullified into buying clothes and toiletries emblazoned with radical slogans and imagery? Bottled anarchy and riot jeans might be sad, early signifiers that even the most radical anti-capitalism can be sucked into a consumer identity. Yet the Levi’s campaign in particular suggests something interesting: When actual riots broke out in Britain, the campaign premised on riotousness was pulled from that country.

As Malcolm Harris wrote in the New Inquiry, “For a second, those two things [the Levi’s riot scenes and the U.K. riots] were too close. If Hollywood could talk, it would probably admit that the box office on ‘V for Vendetta’ wasn’t worth the hackers in Guy Fawkes masks.”

Similarly, riots resist co-optation because tactics associated with them tend to be premised on the anonymity of those taking part, and anonymity is a pretty difficult identity to repackage and sell.  Indeed, marketers will have their work cut out for them in turning “radical anarchist” into a recognizable consumer identity.

So there’s a lot to smirk about and little to fear from “Anarchy” in a bottle. At the very least, of course, anyone who has experienced a riot or a long-term occupation — anyone who knows the combined stenches of sweat, tear gas, pepper spray and unwashed clothes — knows that anarchy is no place to find olfactory inspiration. Even for Axe.

“As we are continually and violently pushed out of public spaces, the people of this city must find new spaces in which to foster dialogue, learn and engage politically. Private spaces must be liberated; the movement must expand,” reads a communiqué released from the occupation at 90 Fifth Avenue, which Occupiers abandoned last week to evade forcible eviction.

Indoor occupations are becoming increasingly commonplace for OWS supporters nationwide. This month, an estimated 100 protesters swarmed into the lobby of a Bank of America branch in San Francisco’s financial district. They danced on desktops and erected a tent in the name of Occupy San Francisco. The building was cleared of protesters hours later, with 95 arrests reported. In Washington, D.C., police arrested 13 Occupiers who briefly took over an historic school-turned-homeless-shelter, which was shuttered in 2008. Over 200 Occupy D.C. supporters gathered outside the vacant, city-owned building in a failed attempt to defend it.

Mike Andrews, 30, a New York-based writer and editor who has participated in Occupy Wall Street since before the occupation of Zuccotti Park began in September, said that whispers about “re-appropriating” buildings had been echoing around the encampment for some weeks.

“As the weather got colder, there were fewer rumors about expanding to a new park and more about trying to move indoors, especially looking to foreclosed properties or buildings that once provided public services but were shut down because of budget cuts,” said Andrews.

“My view,” he added, “is that there will be a lot of thwarted attempts to take buildings before any successful, long-term indoor occupations.”

Indeed most OWS incursions into buildings have already been shut down swiftly as police departments across the country make clear that infiltrations into private property (vacant or otherwise) will be met with the full force of the law. On the now-infamous night of November 2, when a call for a general strike in Oakland drew a crowd of over 10,000 to the city’s port, a couple of hundred Occupy participants took over an unused building. According to a statement from the Occupiers, it “formerly housed the Traveler’s Aid Society, a not-for-profit organization that provided services to the homeless but, due to cuts in government funding, lost its lease.” Before the sun rose, hundreds of police armed with tear gas, beanbag guns and flash-bang grenades cleared the building of protesters.

And in an incident that soon came to exemplify the harsh police crackdowns occupiers have met, a SWAT team armed with live-ammo semi-automatic rifles stormed a building that had been occupied for one night in Chapel Hill, N.C.

“A group of anarchists wanted to make the building into a community center. They believed they had the right to repurpose the vacant building, because the owner had done nothing with it since he bought it in 2004,” said Josh Davis, a graduate student at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and a freelance reporter. Davis was briefly detained by heavily armed officers while reporting on the eviction of the building, which had been a Chrysler dealership until it closed in 2003.

Occupy protesters are by no means the first groups to attempt to reclaim vacant spaces across the United States in recent years. Writing for Salon in May 2010, I noted that squatters and homelessness advocacy groups saw opportunity in the tens of thousands of foreclosed homes and abandoned construction sites, which sat vacant and speculated upon by real estate companies and banks in the wake of the financial crisis.

At the time, Tom Angotti, a professor at Hunter College’s department of urban affairs and planning told me, “Everybody knows there’s a lot of potential for squatting now… but the type of vacancies that there are today are very different to those that arose in the 1980s. A lot of them are due to unfinished construction, and will be occupied again when the economy picks up.”

The economy remains distressed, but Angotti’s prediction – that vacant buildings will again be “occupied” – has new meaning in light of Occupy Wall Street. Unlike in 2010, thousands of people this year have shown themselves willing to mobilize and risk arrest in the name of occupation. Across the Atlantic, recent indoor occupations are also proving robust. Activists seized an entire vacant, UBS-owned office block in London in mid-November and have repurposed it for public use and community services. The entire complex remains in occupiers’ hands and now goes by the name “The Bank of Ideas.”

“The zeitgeist is particularly favorable now; occupation is the word of the moment,” said Frank Morales, a mainstay of the 1980s Lower East Side squatters movement in New York. He served many years as the assistant pastor at St. Mark’s Church and has recently been working with Organizing for Occupation – a direct action group which helps move homeless people in vacant buildings and orchestrates foreclosure eviction defenses.

Morales said that most OWS participants who have approached him recently for advice on seeking indoor spaces to squat in New York have sought big spaces, where community services could be set up and general assemblies and working groups could meet. “In the last instance, people are seeking permanent living spaces for themselves or for people without housing,” Morales said.

Occupy protests in New York, Minnesota, San Francisco, Atlanta and others have also mobilized to defend homes from foreclosure by gathering large crowds to stand in front of houses when eviction threatens, or by simply threatening to mobilize — leveraging the Occupy protests’ popularity to force banks and speculators to negotiate with troubled home owners.

And despite focusing on foreclosure defenses and housing the homeless himself, Morales praised the variety of indoor squat and occupations that people are attempting to take and hold, adding, “property is a terrain of conflict, and people stepping into it in a forbidden way. They’re deciding they’ve had enough. Squatting is a practical way of exhibiting this self expression.”

Like the actions in the streets, parks and plazas that have constituted OWS, the building occupations have not been uniform in either purpose or method. Also like the park and plaza occupations, the indoor actions have challenged notions of public and private space and how it is used. What was once a concrete park in lower Manhattan, which hosted business people on their lunch breaks, became a tent city and site of political interaction and conflict with authority. A once-quiet New York student center hosted 24-hour anti-capitalist film screenings, General Assemblies, dance parties, dinners and squatters without a university affiliation.

Early in the Zuccotti Park occupation, a flyer from the Barcelona occupation, translated into English, spread amongst marchers. It proclaimed that “The greatest violence would be returning to normality” and concluded “We don’t just want the plaza; we want the whole city.” As more and more attempts to take buildings and indoor spaces are made across the United States, perhaps the Occupy movement’s winter strategy was hiding in public all along.

The tactics vary from city to city, but the most aggressive policing originates in methods developed by law enforcement agencies in Miami in response to large protests against the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) agreement in November 2003. Miami’s approach, in the words of Miami-Dade State Attorney Kathy Fernandez Rundle, created,  “a model … for the rest of the world to emulate in the future when these sort of events take place.”

In Miami more than 10,000 demonstrators converged on the downtown area, where a conference of trade ministers from 34 countries met to discuss the FTAA, which many South American nations opposed. Police in riot gear used rubber bullets, projectiles and batons to aggressively clear the streets of protesters. An estimated $8.5 million was spent on security for the FTAA conference and police forces from around the state were pulled in.  The ministers didn’t reach any agreement and at least 140 protesters were arrested. Many more were forcibly blocked from assembling.

“Downtown Miami is built on a grid structure, so in terms of city planning it’s almost a gift to law enforcement. They kettled protesters, unembedded press, everyone together into giant squares and would push into them and beat people severely with batons. During all this there were helicopters overhead nonstop,” explains Maryam Monalisa Gharavi, who helped produce an Indymedia film about the FTAA protests and their suppression, titled “The Miami Model.”

“Miami is where the creeping militarization of police tactics vis-à-vis political protest was congealed,” she said in an email. “Not only in numbers but in equipment the Miami police outnumbered us and widely employed militarized strategies to overwhelm people.”

The Miami Model, or what former Seattle police chief Norman Stamper dubs “paramilitary policing,” now seems an entrenched framework for dealing with large, often nonconfrontational protest movements. Stamper oversaw the policing of the so-called Battle of Seattle in 1999.

The model was partly a response to the events of Seattle ’99, according to Alex Vitale, associate professor of criminology and sociology at Brooklyn College. Protesters at the World Trade Organization Ministerial Conference overwhelmed local police, who responded with an abundance of force and tear gas.

The fear of another Seattle was compounded by an alarm about dissent after Sept. 11, according to Vitale. “After 9/11 police forces invested in hardware, body armor and special weapon,” he explains. “In the minds of some people in law enforcement, there was an equating of dissent and terrorism.”

Many local police departments facing Occupy protests have also not seen dissent like this in their streets in recent decades, and don’t know any other approach, Vitale says.

“In places like Dallas and Denver, police are pulling out batons because they don’t know how to deal constructively with dissent,” he adds.

Vitale says that the use of rubber-coated bullets and tear gas often signals “handling dissent on the cheap.” Instead of bringing in enough officers to establish control, “a handful of guys are sent in with armor, rubber bullets and flashbang grenades.”

“It’s very clear that cities across the country have not learned from our mistakes,” said Norm Stamper, the former police chief of Seattle who resigned after the debacle of 1999 and has since publicly expressed regret for his handling of the situation, especially the use of tear gas.  Stamper is now a critic of the Miami model.

“The message doesn’t seem to go through: Militarized tactics exacerbate situations,” said Stamper, who added he was particularly disturbed by recent footage from the Occupy Oakland protests, which he said resembled “a war zone.”

Gharavi’s mention of “unembedded press”  illustrates one aspect of the Miami Model that is not being used against the occupation movement. At least five independent journalists were arrested covering the 2003 FTAA protests but there were also reporters on the other side of police lines – embedded with Miami Police Department, as war reporters often are with the military.

Unlike their independent counterparts, embedded journalists from the Miami Herald, CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, Reuters and the Associated Press were provided by the police with helmets and gas masks. They were criticized by activist groups and other journalists for focusing coverage on police equipment and organization, while missing some controversial police actions on the streets, according to the American Journalism Review.

Mainstream reporters seem to have learned the lesson and stopped embedding. They now face arrest and police aggression in numerous U.S. cities. Twenty-six journalists — myself included — have been arrested in the United States in recent weeks reporting on the protests.

“It’s pretty obvious that many police don’t recognize their local journalists or their press passes,” said Bernie Lunzer, president of the Newspaper Guild, Communications Workers of America. Like the protesters,  journalists covering occupation actions face the challenge of predicting and responding to police tactics.

Looking back to Miami 2003 is  good place to start.  As Vitale puts it, “The Robocop style of policing we saw there is now the default way.”