Occupy Fresno joined 100 cities in the United States and 1,500 cities worldwide for the Global Day of Rage on Oct. 15, 2011.
The global day of action was in solidarity with Occupy Wall Street movement that began a month ago in New York City to protest corporate greed and cuts to social spending, and to demand better living conditions and a more equitable distribution of resources.
Inspired by the Arab Spring and the European anti-austerity movements, Ad Busters, a Vancouver-based magazine, in July called for a protest on Wall Street by its readership, the “rebels, radicals, and utopian dreamers.” The call was answered by 2,000 people and the first general assemblies were held in Bowling Green Park in New York City to decide the course of action for the protest. The occupation began Sept. 17 with thousands of protesters gathering in New York City’s Financial District.
The local demonstration called Occupy Fest turned the south side of Fresno’s Courthouse Park into a wall of noise and a kaleidoscope of Fresnans from different walks of life.
Effigies of political party mascots – a donkey and elephant and a pig as a stand in for the corporatists – hung from the Anna Woodward Memorial Fountain. A Fresno Brown Beret held up a megaphone while a fully-disabled Iraq veteran addressed the crowd.
The sounds of hula-hooping children comingled with talk of the Los Angeles city council members who publically supported the occupations in their city. A young woman, with a red 99% painted on her cheek, tells her companion about the looming general strike in Greece. Literature is distributed about last week’s contingent of Occupy Fresno who attended the Fresno Unified School District meeting where they demanded that the superintendent and administrators take a pay cut.
The crowd included more than 150 people who enjoyed free food and free clothes, while other events — presentations by various speakers, children’s games, a performance by the Raging Grannies, hip hop performances and an impromptu drum circle – went on.
Saturday was the first day that Fresno City College student Berañea Adame was able to join the occupation. She said, “I love to see that Fresno is mobilizing to do something about what we believe is wrong in society.” Adame who is a member of MEChA at FCC said she hopes to see local issues addressed within the general assemblies of Occupy Fresno. “Not far from here, along G Street, is one of the highest concentrations of poor people in the city,” Adame said. “There should be better opportunities, so that we can all be productive members of society.”
The occupation in Fresno began on Sunday, Oct. 9 with community members occupying Courthouse Park. They have held the park continuously and plan to stay indefinitely. Local law enforcement have told occupiers that they cannot camp out in the park and they have so far complied by staying in the park but not settling down for long periods of time.
“We want to have a constant presence. We are finding different interests and bringing them together. We have been able to do this because we have no general static theme,” says Michael Dominquez, an FCC student who has been a part of the occupation since it began.
It was also the first day of occupation for Miguel Villegas, another FCC Student and part of the newly formed group Autónomos, one of the many organizations present. “It’s great to see the youth out here. Students need to get informed. The system is blindly oppressing people,” Villegas said. “Just by showing up here we can inform each other on what’s going on and draw attention to Wall Street. We’re trying to show that we want that change,” says Villegas.
Veteran local organizer, Gloria Hernandez, said there were a lot of new faces on the first day of occupation.
“We’ve continued to grow,” said Simone Whelan-Rhodes, one of the occupiers. “We’re not getting smaller. We have a lot of community support. We’ve been getting water, money, and food donated, even wireless internet access. Someone gave us a battery to charge our phones and laptops.”
Similar occupations have been steadily cropping up across the nation in cities like Philadelphia, Atlanta, Chicago, Cincinnati, Indianapolis, San Francisco, Washington D.C., and Boston and around the world, in Australia, Mexico, Canada, and Ireland.
Each occupation holds autonomous general assemblies and plans their own actions. The occupations show a public shift of focus from electoral politics to direct action. In the U.S. the criticism is not only of the powerful banks and corporations but of the U.S. political system.
The largest protests on Saturday were held in Italy with 200,000 people demonstrating in Rome. In New York City, 24 people were arrested on Saturday while attempting to withdraw money from their personal accounts with global banking giant Citibank. They were locked in and detained within the bank by police.
“We’re bypassing the local and national electoral process. We want the people in power to realize that we know what they are really doing,” said Michael Dominquez in explanation of the tactic of the movement. “We are waking up and as a people we are not consenting. These bankers and politicians have not earned our consent.”