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This week on Uprising:

* Police Violently Crack Down on Occupy Oakland
* Rose Aguilar on Occupy Wall Street and Political Fundraising
* Thom Ferguson on Money, Politics, and Occupy Wall Street
* Barbara Ehrenreich on Homelessness and the Occupy Movements
* Occupy Los Angeles: More Revolution, Less Party

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Police Violently Crack Down on Occupy Oakland

A day of arrests and raids at the Occupy Oakland encampment on Tuesday resulted in more than a 100 people taken into custody. Protesters had set up tents at the Frank Ogawa Plaza at City Hall, and on an annex in a park near Lake Merritt. Over a thousand people were determined to remain where they were and police justified their use of force including the deployment of flash grenades, tear gas, and rubber bullets claiming that activists threw bottles, paints, beer, and eggs at officers. The raid began at 5 am on Tuesday with 500 police officers from a number of California cities working together.

Oakland’s mayor and police department faced national scrutiny over the violent police crackdown that also resulted in a 24 year old Iraq war veteran being critically injured. Scott OIsen survived the Iraq war only to be hit in the head by a police projectile. He was admitted into critical care at Highland Hospital in East Oakland with a fractured skull and brain swelling. The Washington Post is now reporting that Olsen’s condition has been upgraded to “fair.” Several protesters posted videos of the day long Oakland police raid. In this video, we hear the sounds of police shooting a flash grenade into a crowd of people who are trying to help Scott Olsen after he was hit:

Occupy Oakland and Iraq Veterans Against the War called on people around the nation on Wednesday to hold vigils for Scott Olsen. Occupy Wall Street in New York organized a march around their City Hall on Thursday night with protesters chanting “New York is Oakland, Oakland is New York.”

Oakland Mayor Jean Quan also faced a hailstorm of criticism for the raid. She took to the Occupy Oakland General Assembly microphone on Thursday but was booed off the stage by the crowd. Mayor Quan then posted a video on her Facebook page saying she was “deeply saddened about the outcome,” that “ultimately it was my responsibility, and I apologize for what happened.” Occupy Oakland protesters have retaken control of Frank Ogawa Plaza and have called for a city-wide strike on November 2nd.

There were been arrests taking place this week in cities across the country including Chicago, Cincinnati, Philadelphia and Atlanta.

GUEST: Kat Brooks, member of the ONYX Organizing Committee, and involved in Occupy Oakland

Find out more at www.occupyoakland.org.

Rose Aguilar on Occupy Wall Street and Political Fundraising

The Activist Beat with Rose Aguilar, host of Your Call on KALW in San Francisco is a weekly roundup of progressive activism that the mainstream media ignores, undercovers, or misrepresents.

Thom Ferguson on Money, Politics, and Occupy Wall Street

The Occupy movements have succeeded most strikingly in one aspect – forcing greater and better mainstream media coverage of the vast income inequality in the United States. However, that media coverage has yet to translate into policy changes on Capitol Hill. While President Obama’s already weak jobs bill has stalled, he has revived a home mortgage refinancing program. But the program is so convoluted and conditional that it is unclear who, if anyone, will actually benefit from it. Meanwhile, Republicans continue to tout pro-business legislation and proposals like GOP candidate Herman Cain and his so-called 9-9-9 plan which would lower taxes for the wealthy and increase them for the poor.

GUEST: Thomas Ferguson, professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts, Boston and a senior fellow of the Roosevelt Institute, he addressed the Occupy Boston camp yesterday.

Barbara Ehrenreich on Homelessness and the Occupy Movements

The LA Weekly published an article last week headlined, “Occupy LA Sees a Homeless Invasion.” The Occupy LA encampment is just blocks from Skid Row, and there are an estimated 15,000 homeless people in the city. So far Occupy LA has no rules governing who can set up camp and share in the communal food, supplies, and tents. The Occupy Los Angeles encampment is outfitted with port-a-potties, make-shift showers, and supply centers where people can leave and take sweaters, blankets, and more. The set-up is meant to support temporary occupiers but has attracted homeless populations here and in other encampments. The confluence of communities is not surprising. Barbara Ehrenrich observed in a Sunday article for Tom Dispatch, “LA’s Skid Row endures constant police harassment, for example, but when it rained, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa had ponchos distributed to nearby Occupy LA.” Ehrenreich says homelessness as a political issue has been taken up by Occupy Portland, Austin and Philadelphia and, she writes, “Homelessness is not a side issue unconnected to plutocracy and greed. It’s where we’re all eventually headed.”

GUEST: Barbara Ehrenreich is the author of This Land Is Their Land: Reports from a Divided Nation. She won the 2004 Puffin/Nation Prize. Her seventeenth book, Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America (Metropolitan Books), has just been published. Her bestselling book Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, 10th Anniversary Edition, has just been released by Picador Books.

Read Barbara Ehrenreich’s latest article here: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/10/23-3

Occupy Los Angeles: More Revolution, Less Party

Here in Los Angeles, the Occupy LA encampment continues. In response to Mayor Villaraigosa’s statement this week that the tent city “cannot continue indefinitely,” the PR and Media Relations team at Occupy LA released a statement saying, “[a]s for a time stamp on our departure, there is none.”

Uprising host, Sonali Kolhatkar, went down to City Hall on Thursday afternoon to take a look at how Occupy LA was progressing and evolving: “There are now many more tents than before. The Catholic Worker served lunch to campers and homeless people alike. A 4-hour teach-in on the steps of City Hall was just beginning as I arrived, featuring singer Esai Morales, a representative of the South Central Farmers, and others. And, a second Medic tent was being set up, to treat basic and minor injuries.”

Sonali’s Subversive Thought for the Day:

“Greed is the inventor of injustice as well as the current enforcer.” — Julian Casablancas