@103

So, I'm SOMEONE OF COLOR who was NOR RAISED with privilege, and I can still say:

A) That this recent focus on anti-cop speech and historical oppression has little to do with the logistics and promise of change offered by the power of the Occupy Movement.
B) Just because someone is of color doesn't mean they "have suffered more in the recession." Are you really that easily convinced of such generalities? You need to be thinking for yourself a little bit, it sounds to me like your mind is being co-opted here.
C) "Ignoring their experiences" is very different than wanting to stay on message with the Occupy Movement.
D) The proposal to change the name to Occupy/Unoccupy is just as big a waste of time as was the proposal to ban all name changes.
E) You're talking like a political pundit and doing very little independent thinking. If you "have a true and sincere desire to change the economy in ways that better safeguard the future of our country" and believe that you need to "honor the real lived experiences of people of color..." You also need to honor the real lived experiences of people who are NOT of color, because they also fall into the 99%. You need to honor the real lived experiences of everyone.

It's also worth noting the ridiculousness that Dominic pointed out in this post... Enacting A Cop-Free-Zone is not enforceable and make it seem that Occupy Seattle is, for some reason, completely unaware of what they are capable of doing.

In browsing some of the other meeting minutes, I found this from the 21st where it was stated:

"Decision a few nights ago to cut off all police involvement has changed the game.
Encourages people to respect decision. Please don't talk to cops, yell at them, work with them. Any is danger to our safety."

I support Occupy Movement...but this doesn't sound like that at all.

Regardless of your personal experiences with the police (or your opinion of officers as individual human beings) or how insane/extreme/ridiculous anarchist critiques of the police may sound, any half-serious examination of the role that police play in social uprisings makes their role quite clear: they exist to maintain social order, which means enforcing laws that perpetuate inequality in how they are written, interpreted, and enforced.

Who backs up home foreclosures with force? Who has consistently tried to deny those occupying Westlake park shelter, by destroying tents and setting up blockades under awnings during the rain?

Kristian Williams has written an excellent article on the various ways police have interacted with struggles for economic justice. You can find it here:
http://www.dollarsandsense.org/archives/…

In regards to the conflicts over racism at Occupy Seattle, Joel Olson wrote this incisive article about the ways that the ruling class (the 1%) use race to divide the 99% and our struggle for justice: http://libcom.org/library/whiteness-99-j…

I am posting this here for people who want to try and alienate others from "the movement" by talking about "radicals" who "infiltrated the G.A." to think critically about the way that sort of language cuts off further dialogue or attempts to understanding one another. Just because someone has political ideas that are far from your own does not make them infiltrators of "the movement," it means that they are coming from a place that you cannot immediately understand and thus ought to take the time to develop a relationship with them--as opposed to writing letters to and articles in the Stranger in order to defame them. Below is a piece a wrote that I hope will give people more patience for the process and in working to understand one another and build a movement that embraces diversity rather than dismissing it as "radical" and a foreign force of "infiltration."

WHY ARE WE HERE?
Ask any two people involved with the Occupy Movement this question and you are most likely to get two different answers. What must be recognized when attempting to define the Occupy Movement and when seeking to identify its goals is that we are a movement composed of vastly varying perspectives. “We are the 99%,” but “the 99%” contains people with a mass of different grievances and potential solutions to the current state of the world. We have all come together in response to the same call to action, “Occupy Wall Street.” However, this call to action is only a common catalyst; we have been mobilized by the same target—Wall Street and the vast inequalities in material wealth and power represented by it. What this movement is about then, is creating new spaces for political activity and citizen engagement to take place. We declare the spaces of the occupations as places where an equality of voices may exist; the spaces of Occupation seek to build democracy from the ground up.
Right now, the process of democracy is the most fundamental aspect of this movement and must not be undermined by a sense of urgency for products or other results; because our primary product is democracy itself and we have already begun to take possession of it through the creation of these spaces. Allow this to continue to unfold.
In broader society, outside of the spaces of the Occupations, many people have their attention captured and their imagination dominated by a story being told. This story is continuing to be told in a way that supports those who are telling it and which also controls those who are uncritically listening to it. This story is being told by all of the mainstream media corporations, elected officials, and their mutual friends in the major banks and other transnational corporations. The story says that some people hold power and that the rest of us need to appeal to them or attempt to get more of ‘our own’ within their ranks in order to affect change. This is not actually the case.
What we are realizing with the Occupy Movement is that the power is within all of us—all we need to do is realize this and cease to believe the stories telling us otherwise while shifting our focus to building a better world. The dominant narrative of the world now, the story being told by “the 1%,’ is that only one possible world exists and the majority of people have no power to create it. It is the job of the Occupy Movement to subvert this message and liberate our self from that horror story. All of the laws empowering corporate interests, waging war on the planet and its peoples, torturing people, and putting masses of people in prisons in order to protect the interests of “the 1%,” and even the people who feel trapped into playing their roles within this grand story—the inflexibility of all this goes away once we begin to act as beings capable of telling our own stories. Act as though the world is not doomed to be as it is.
For this movement to continue to gain momentum, we need more people to wake up from the matrix created by the mainstream media and all of its mutually reinforcing storytellers; stop believing that we are powerless to create a better world and begin working with others to create a world in which many worlds fit—a world in which each and every being has agency that is recognized and valued by everyone else. Wake up!