Source: Wikimedia Commons

“We are the 99%” the chant goes.  But in Oakland, this is clearly not the case. The motley crew marching under the Occupy banner clearly hold values that are far outside the American mainstream. Mayor Jean Quan learned this the hard way. When Occupiers en masse began squatting in a public area, Jonathan Mahler writes,

Quan’s first instinct … was to let the protesters stay. There were just a few issues that needed addressing: the illegal open fires, the unauthorized and possibly dangerous use of City Hall’s power outlets, the 911 calls reporting incidents of violence and sexual harassment inside the camp.

Arturo Sanchez, an earnest young deputy city administrator, was dispatched to serve as Oakland’s liaison to the movement. His brief was to both express the city’s concerns about the camp and to listen to the protesters’ complaints. He quickly learned that the protesters wanted nothing to do with him or anyone else representing the city. “It’s a shame,” he says. “If they had come to us with an agenda, we’re probably one of the few cities that would have written resolutions and lobbied our state legislators and sent a message along with our mayor when she went to the White House.”

Oakland’s government mistakenly treated an insurrectionist movement as a progressive one. Occupy Oakland’s organizers weren’t disenfranchised liberals but committed anarchists operating from a revolutionary playbook that prohibited all negotiations with government officials. In fact, government officials were at the top of their target list. As one Occupy Oakland blogger put it, the goal was to launch “unmediated assaults on our enemies: local government, the downtown business elite and transnational capital.”

There are self-identified communists and anarchists, along with those Mahler calls “militant nihilists” who treat destruction as a way of life.

This past May, Occupiers ran amuck in the city, smashing windows and setting fires…(read more)