Last week, Hernandez was protesting at the local Bank of America branch when he heard that several police cars had shown up at the house. They told him to move the couches out of the street. He refused and was given a citation and told to appear in court. The family held a "foreclosure fair," serving food, playing music and face painting in front of Fort Hernandez.
It's not an office at City Hall, but it's where they want to be.
"This is not about victory," Hernandez says. "It's about showing resistance."
by Gene Maddaus
@xicano007 @sjrivera my 2cents. They have a passion to part of a movement, but don't have the passion to be a movement... #notready2die4it
@rtops Totally agree!! That's one of the fundamental differences from their movement and previous ones. @xicano007
Sloppy journalism- far too many generalizations... Fort Hernandez is not the new ground-zero for Occupy LA- it's just one out of numerous ongoing actions. Sloppy journalism to assume that the movement has failed, sloppy journalism to assume we ever "hibernated"... articles are suppose to be objective and a truthful accurate reflection of a series of events, not this pseudo-reporting littered with the writer's shitty opinion. And some of the people interviewed haven't even been much involved with Occupy LA since last Winter- some of their opinions on the movement aren't very valuable.
The King Koopa Initiative has been immortalized in print. What a great name to galvanize opposition to a union/communist co-opt of the movement and express our tone and stance. Seriously not serious or not seriously serious, I'm not sure which one.
The Lex Luthor Initiative was fairly successful but I believe the OccupyLA media director should get the credit for solving the problem before the initiative really took hold at the camp.
Finally, The Duck Hunt Initiative was a mixed bag. Post-raid it was much more difficult to build a coalition of occupiers willing to potentially sacrifice their standing in the group. The fallout exposed me to state surveillance and poisoned my other occupy activities. I learned that it's important to build coalitions through consensus with active participation from all parties, even in cases where autonomous individual action can be justified. In other words, I became what I was fighting against.
Regardless, lessons were learned and no hard feelings were harbored. All this was done to help express the group will and give a constructive outlet to frustrations with "leaders" that were causing people to leave the movement.
I hope the strong and motivated people who these initiatives were directed at can trust that I only had the best intentions. I would be happy to build relationships with all of you in the future.
Horizontalidad!
This article does a lot of things well, but does one specific thing VERY poorly:
You wrote: "While the encampment was a powerful symbol, it was also a logistical nightmare. Just keeping the Port-a-Potties operating was a major drain on resources, not to mention providing food for the local homeless population and keeping the peace within the camp."
"They wore out their welcome," Alarcon says.
This is nested in the middle of a bunch of Richard Alarcon quotes (who, for the record, did not draft the resolution in support of OccupyLA. Eric Garcetti did, give credit where it's due). This quotation gives the impression that the city was providing any of these things, and/or that these points relate at all to the city and their logistics.
Nothing could be further from the truth. As one who personally woke up each morning during final weeks of the encampment to swab and clean those Port-a-Potties by hand, only to have the health inspector show up, compliment our work, then walk around the building and write up a bogus health violation and hand it to a different person altogether (any person would do, they liked going up to the media tent for some reason), I'm somewhat resentful of any notion that the city had anything to do with it. OccupyLA provided the port-a-potties, OccupyLA provided the food, OccupyLA kept the peace within the camp. The city was too busy denying us access to water, even for limited hours of the day, despite their being dozens of available faucets for that express purpose on the outside of the building. Cyclovia gets access every month to the city's water, but citizens of Los Angeles who were residents/participants in OccupyLA were denied. It should be noted that Mario Brito also intentionally prevented members of OccupyLA from attending negotiations to discuss these issues with commissioners within the parks department and DWP, despite repeated requests for access to the same table to which he had access.
@paganangel. Ciclavia does not happen every month. It happends twice a year and we do not use the water at city hall.
*there being dozens of available faucets.Why is this water issue specifically relevant? The #1 health code violation claim made (despite us paying out of pocket hundreds of dollars every month for hand washing stations and supplies for restocking): insufficient access to handwashing. This comes despite the fact that we were serving only pre-packaged foods, and the city had an available remedy only feet away. But to provide the city's resources to the city's inhabitants, even in a controlled and metered fashion, would be too much even to discuss.
