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A hundred members of Occupy Boston were arrested in the early hours of Tuesday morning after police tried and failed to get them to give up a satellite encampment across the street from their main Dewey Square occupation. Multiple reports from the scene suggest that the cops used excessive force in the course of making the arrests.
Meanwhile New York mayor Mike Bloomberg made his most conciliatory statement to date on Occupy Wall Street yesterday, saying that he would make no move against the demonstrators in Liberty Plaza “as long as they obey the laws.” Bloomberg, who had previously declined to answer questions about whether he would allow the camp to continue indefinitely, said yesterday that “the weather” could well be the determining factor in how long the occupation goes on.
What these two disparate developments — a raid in Boston, an olive branch in NYC — have in common is a recognition that shutting down major OWS protests is not a practical option for local police right now. Whether Bloomberg or Boston mayor Tom Menino would like to end the protests or not, they each recognize that right now any such attempt would prove disastrous. OWS is just too big, and too popular, to shut down completely.
So instead of a full frontal assault, what we’re seeing in both New York and Boston is an attempt at containment. In NYC, that’s taken the form of mass arrests at street demonstrations. In Boston last night it took the form of pushback against expansion.
Expect to see more of this kind of pushback, in these cities and nationally. And expect to see heightened tension around it as the OWS movement grows in numbers and the spaces already occupied become ever more cramped.
Students launched an occupation of the gardens outside the offices of the president of Scotland’s University of St. Andrews early this morning, protesting skyrocketing tuition fees.
Scottish tuition rates aren’t just high, they’re also bizarrely structured. Scotland’s universities are free for Scottish students, and free for European Union residents under EU rules that say that member state universities can’t charge more for other EU nationals than they do for locals.
But the rest of Britain isn’t subject to those rules, weirdly, so English, Welsh, and Northern Irish students, falling between the “free for Glaswegians” category and the “free for Latvians” categories, are charged high fees.
At St. Andrews those fees amount to £9,000 a year, which is $14,000 in American money. According to the organizers of today’s protest, that makes the university the most expensive in all of Europe — for those students who pay anything at all.
The high fees for “RUK” (rest of UK) students in Scotland were introduced this summer in reaction to massive fee hikes in English universities. The Scottish government defended the move as an effort to keep Scotland’s universities from being swamped with “fee refugees” from the rest of Britain.
The occupiers intend to stay for 36 hours, symbolizing the full four-year £36,000 fee. They have a Twitter account and a website if you want to learn more.
Last week a campus walkout in support of Occupy Wall Street, originally called for New York City, mushroomed in a matter of days to include dozens of campuses across the country. The Wednesday actions drew numbers ranging from hundreds to — on at least five campuses — single students, starting from scratch and organizing on their own.
And this week they’re doing it again.
After a frenzy of discussion and several straw polls on Facebook, the folks at Occupy Colleges have announced this Thursday, October 13, as their next day of action. They’re presenting this as a day of protest rather than a walkout, and they say they already have forty campuses on board. (They’ve also produced a handy-dandy guide to mounting an action.)
More to come…
When the Occupy Wall Street protests began on September 16, #OccupyWallStreet was the only related hashtag used on Twitter. Soon some folks started using #OccupyWallSt too.
Shorter is better on Twitter, since you only have 140 characters to say your piece, so when the protests really started getting media traction with the arrests of Saturday, September 26 some folks started using #OWS as a zippier alternative. That tag didn’t really catch on until this last Wednesday, though, when the folks behind @OccupyWallSt tweeted this:
@OccupyWallSt: Let’s stop the hash tag soup and use #ows for OccupyWallStreet
That tweet had an immediate and powerful effect.
#OWS, represented in yellow on the chart, spiked up on Wednesday evening, while #OccupyWallSt plummeted. At about noon yesterday #OWS actually overtook the original #OccupyWallStreet tag in popularity, and it’s been running at about 50% higher traffic ever since.
#OccupyWallStreet is still getting a lot of traffic, since it’s the most established hashtag, and the clearest. But #OWS is the new default, and #OccupyWallSt is dying. Spread the word…
Lots of computer problems this week. Mostly offline while I get everything squared away and do some long-neglected backing up and clearing out. Good stuff coming this weekend, I promise.
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