by MARK GABRISH
CONLAN
Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s
Newsmagazine • All rights reserved
PHOTOS: Occupy San Diego march January 7
The occupation
is dead but Occupy San Diego lives on. That was the message in the streets of
downtown San Diego on January 7 as members and supporters of Occupy San Diego
staged a march from Children’s Park on the Embarcadero to Civic Center Plaza.
The march was called to commemorate the three-month anniversary of the original
occupation — and was advertised with a similar-looking leaflet — but it took a
considerably more circuitous route, going out to the entrance of Seaport
Village (where police formed a human barrier to keep marchers from going in),
then turning and walking along the Embarcadero to the Broadway Pier and going
up Broadway and into the Gaslamp Quarter.
That was also
the message of John Kenney, who in a movement that prides itself on being
“leaderless” nonetheless emerged into prominence when he staged a 36-day hunger
strike to protest the San Diego City Council’s refusal even to vote on, much
less approve, a resolution supporting the occupation as the city governments of
San Francisco and Los Angeles had.
“Clearly, Phase
One is over,” Kenney told Zenger’s in an
exclusive interview January 16.
“We are no longer occupying spaces like Civic Center Plaza across the nation.
We’re more into occupying the mind, occupying places like banks, places like
foreclosures. We don’t want the focus to be on occupying that space — which we
can’t do right now — or the daily rugby match with the police here. This isn’t
about fighting the police. We really have a bigger movement and a lot more
things to say.”
The day before
the January 7 march, Kenney had an article in La Prensa, a long-existing bilingual San Diego publication
targeting the Latino community, describing what Occupy San Diego and an allied
organization called Ocupemos el Barrio/Occupy the Hood are doing to reach out
and address the concerns of people of color in general, and African-Americans
and Latinos in particular. Kenney quoted Carlos Pelayo, president of the San
Diego/Imperial Counties Chapter Labor Council for Latin-American Advancement,
as saying, “This foreclosure crisis was a wake-up
call for many in my community … [Foreclosures] really are making people aware
of their 99 percent consciousness, and making them wake up to the actions of
the 1 percent. This crisis will serve to get our communities together and
activated to fight this travesty.”
The Occupy movement is also moving away from its initial
decision not to present actual demands to the political system. Occupy San
Diego and its sibling organizations have scheduled an “Occupy San Diego County
Strategic Summit” Saturday, February 4, noon to 6 p.m., at the Centro Cultural
de la Raza, 2004 Park Boulevard in Balboa Park. “We’re trying to call anyone
who’s been involved with the Occupy movement since its inception to this date,”
Kenney explained, “as well as outreach to various communities of color. The
[San Diego/Imperial Counties] Labor Council is working on it in a big way. They
have a representative who comes to all our meetings. [We’re doing] outreach to
many women’s groups, LGBT [Queer] groups. The Radical Feminist Committee is
working with us.”
Along with a moratorium on foreclosures, Kenney said, other
specific demands the Occupy groups are coalescing around include a call for
local governments to “divest from huge financial institutions and allow
modifications on credible debtors for 80 percent of the current value, not the
inflated prices they bought their homes for” during the boom. In addition,
Kenney explained, “We are for Move to Amend, which is the campaign to amend the
U.S. Constitution to eliminate corporate personhood. We are against the
National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) and the PATRIOT Act, and we want
money out of politics. So we have four different resolutions sitting in front
of our City Council.”
Kenney doesn’t have much hope that the San Diego City
Council will endorse any of the Occupy positions. After all, they had shown
themselves perfectly willing to let him starve himself to death rather than so
much as consider a resolution allowing the occupation of Civic Center Plaza.
(Kenney said he ended his hunger strike at 36 days because that was “as long as
César Chávez did.”) “We expect almost the same deal as we got out of them the
first time,” he explained. “We presented Move to Amend to our City Council on
December 6, the very day the Los Angeles City Council passed the resolution. Our guys won’t even look at it. Surprise,
surprise.”
One week after the Strategic Summit, on February 11 or 12,
at a location to be announced later, Occupy San Diego is planning to host an
“Occupy Southern California Conference” in San Diego as a follow-up to one in
Long Beach January 14 and 15. The Conference is also targeting the California
Democratic Party convention scheduled to take place in San Diego the same
weekend. “We’ll try to formulate some direct actions, like a march, maybe a mic
check or something like that, while the Dems are in town, as well as outreach.
A lot of our issues are the same as theirs. We both have big umbrellas. We hope
some of the Democrats come and join us. That being said, we have disparate
elements in our Occupy movement, including some anarchists who want nothing to
do with representative government. But we’re dealing with that.”
Four activists with Occupy San Diego — Mike Garcia,
Tahra Ludwig, Tito and Chris McKay — are facing felony charges of conspiracy to
disturb the peace when they disrupted Mayor Jerry Sanders’ state-of-the-city
address January 11 with a “mic check.” “That was just
absurd,” Kenney said. “They’re charging them with ‘conspiracy’ for expressing
their right to speak under the First Amendment. This is what they [the San
Diego city government and police department] have done straight from the
get-go. They have clearly targeted us. We have a federal suit in. Not only
that, they have deliberately ratcheted up the charges so we would have even
higher bail bonds” — according to the Occupy San Diego Web site, bail was set
at $10,000 for each defendant — “so it would drain our resources as well.”
According to Kenney, the San Diego city attorney’s office
doesn’t have to present the charges immediately. They have one whole year to
decide whether to go to court with the original charges, reduce them or drop
them altogether — and, Kenney said, they’re using that to put Occupiers in
“legal purgatory” for a year. “They can press those charges against you any
time for a year, so basically you’re in legal limbo,” Kenney explained. “So
it’s very difficult to carry a civil suit. They’re clearly targeting us. We’re
almost going to have to wait a year out to press a civil suit against them.”
Kenney called the disruption of the Mayor’s speech “a
spontaneous direct action of those individuals, not of our entire movement,”
but added, “We stand behind the fact that they shouldn’t have been arrested on
those trumped-up charges. It’s just indicative of what they’ve been doing from
the get-go.”
EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the form in which the above
article appears in the February 2012 print edition of Zenger’s Newsmagazine. Since then, Zenger’s has been informed by Occupy San Diego member William
Johnson that the February 4 and 11 events mentioned by John Kenney had not been
“consensed to” — i.e., approved — by a general assembly of Occupy San Diego,
and therefore they should be regarded as John Kenney’s personal projects rather
than official Occupy San Diego events.
