US Park Police raided the Occupy DC encampment on Saturday morning, removing protesters’ personal belongings, the majority of tents, and making 11 arrests. Protesters had been maintaining the camp at McPherson Square, one of the last remaining anti-Wall Street protests, for more than four months.
At about 5:30 a.m., dozens of police officers moved on the camp known to protesters as Freedom Plaza, some on horseback and others dressed in full riot gear. With a helicopter hovering overhead, police shut down bordering streets and formed lines within the park. The surrounding area was packed with police vans, tactical assault vehicles, and police motorcycles. One Metro transit station was closed during the course of the raid.
The raid lasted well into the evening as police methodically closed off one section of the park at a time, forcing protesters out, erecting barricades, and then inspecting and removing tents and other personal items.
According to a National Park Service flyer distributed to protesters, police were carrying out “further enforcement” of the ban on overnight camps, which police had begun enforcing at the beginning of the week. Police also referred to the raid as “nuisance abatement.” The Occupy DC web site described the raid as a “slow-motion eviction.”
Police claimed they were not evicting the protesters, but were simply enforcing park rules against overnight camping. National Park Service (NPS) regulations allow tents as symbolic tools of protest, but they do not permit demonstrators to use them as living quarters.
Park Police spokesman Sgt. David Schlosser said that the operation was being carried out section by section so that areas would remain open to allow Occupy DC to maintain an active protest. He commented remarkably, “The reason we’re doing it in sections is so people can exercise their First Amendment rights.” He added, “We’re very interested in transparency. We want everyone who’s watching to understand it’s not an eviction.”
A number of Occupy DC protesters said that their tents were removed despite the fact that they contained no camping or sleeping materials. Protesters watched as police in hazmat suits placed their belongings into clear plastic bags and hauled them away. Forklifts were used to remove tents and other debris. Police told protesters they would have 60 days to claim their property, beginning Monday..........
Park Police spokesman Schlosser claimed that any structure with at least one side open, and which was not being used as living quarters, would remain standing. But as more and more tents were removed, protesters became wary that police were following this rule. In particular, protesters were concerned about the fate of the Occupy DC library.
As it turned out, the library was eventually allowed to remain standing. But in the late afternoon, a group of protesters sat with locked arms in front of the library and were soon joined by dozens more. At this point, groups of riot-clad police officers approached the group of protesters from each side and began to push them back, in an effort to block off that corner of the square as part of their roving raid. Numerous protesters were prodded by police batons and pushed up against police shields.
According to DCist.com, one protester appeared to be knocked unconscious, and was then handcuffed and taken away. Another protester reported being knocked over by police while climbing over the chain fence that surrounds the park.
One police officer was hit in the face with a brick. The protester suspected of throwing it was tackled to the ground and arrested and was charged with felony assault on a police officer and assault with a deadly weapon.
U.S. Park Police returned to McPherson Square Sunday, checking that any remaining protesters were complying with the no-sleeping, no-living regulations. Police made 11 arrests over the course of the weekend, many for stepping over police barricades, or refusing to vacate areas when ordered by police. One man was arrested Sunday for allegedly threatening a police officer.
Occupy DC held a General Assembly Saturday evening to plan for the next stage of the protest. A statement on their web site reads in part: “Citizens of a free country should not have to ask for permission to occupy public spaces. Our occupation of McPherson Square is an expression of our right to free speech and peaceful assembly.
“We are maintaining a site of protest—a physical presence that gives visibility and voice to our dissent. We are creating a space in which free speech flourishes—not only the speech of occupiers, but that of the general public, the empowered and the disenfranchised alike.”

The City Council will decide this week on a proposal from Councilman Ignacio de la Fuente that would direct the Oakland Police Department to take a zero tolerance approach to any infractions of current laws regarding protests.
Fuente specifically cited blocking the street and gathering without a permit as examples of minor infractions that the police should enforce without exception.[The measure apparently failed to get the necessary five yes votes late yesterday]...........
Regardless of whether the resolution passes, the arrests on January 30 mark a definite shift in police enforcement tactics. Of the 400 people arrested, only twelve have been charged with a crime. Eleven of those people were only charged with the misdemeanor of “blocking a sidewalk.” This clearly shows that the purpose of these arrests was not to prevent vandalism or protect public safety, but to intimidate protesters.
At a rally on Monday to protest the arrests and support those charged, the police confiscated the protesters speaker system, even after it was turned off. They said they were responding to noise complaints from local businesses, and that the protesters did not have a permit.
Nationwide the police are feeling more confident that they can harass Occupy protesters with impunity. The police raided the Occupy DC encampment last Sunday, making 11 arrests, on the basis of enforcing the park's rule against overnight camping.
Most ominously for protesters, and the working class as a whole, the political establishment is increasingly describing their actions as “terrorism.” Fuente called the Occupy Oakland attempts to occupy an abandoned building “an escalation that in my opinion basically amounts to domestic terrorism.” Monday's rally drew a small group of counter demonstrators called “Stand for Oakland” making a similar claim.
In Stand for Oakland's call to protest the Occupy Movement, they demanded an end to “the vandalizing and terrorizing of our city.” One of the prominent voices of Stand for Oakland is Marilyn Singleton, the Republican candidate for congress in California's 13th district.
Other prominent members of Stand for Oakland are Democratic Party Councilwoman Desley Brooks, Oakland Chamber of Commerce official Paul Junge, and developer Phil Tagami, who is best known for patrolling his building near the city hall with a shotgun during prior protests.

The sudden volte-face of famed Liberal destroyer Chris Hedges in his recent demonization of the Black Bloc, sinisterly entitled ‘The Cancer of Occupy’, is a wonderful introduction for North American activists to the field of Postcolonial Theory. Edward Said’s seminal text ‘Orientalism’ examines how Western study of ‘The Orient’ contributes to the functioning of colonial power. Representations of ‘The Orient” in Western texts purporting to offer knowledge and insight into ‘other’ countries actually perpetuates the dichotomy between the West and ‘Others’ – in so doing, reaffirming the colonial relationship, even long after postcolonialism has apparently been established following the decolonizing process. The role of former colonizer is adopted in the discourse by the white, educated Chris Hedges, who writes glowingly of Greece’s response to their economic crisis in an article from May 2010:
"Call a general strike. Riot. Shut down the city centers. Toss the bastards out. Do not be afraid of the language of class warfare—the rich versus the poor, the oligarchs versus the citizens, the capitalists versus the proletariat. The Greeks, unlike most of us, get it."
The Greeks, here, take the liminal role of “other”. In Hedges’ terms, they mimic his intellectual, activist ideals, without ever becoming equal to him. They are the student: he the master, echoing Thomas Babington Macaulay’s ‘Minutes on Indian Education’ printed in 1835, which set out an agenda to train ‘natives’ who were ‘Indian in blood and colour’ to become ‘English in taste, in opinions, in morals, in intellect’. These mimics would constitute a class who could protect British interests and help them in exerting rule over the empire. They would emulate, but never initiate or fully embody the ruling class values, in so doing ensuring their subjection and reliance on the colonizer. Hedges exhorts his ideal Occupiers to do the same, to denounce Diversity of Tactics, and to hurl their anarchist and Black Bloc comrades beneath the bus, by handing them over to the police. Hedges quotes indignant former eco-terrorist Derrick Jensen struggling with the radical aversion to resorting to the representatives of militaristic rule, to deal with internal problems: “When I called the police after I received death threats, I became to Black Bloc anarchists ‘a pig lover.’”
This indignity alone, it seems, is enough to fuel Jensen and Hedge’s disturbing anti-anarchist rant..... Frequently, self-proclaimed ‘nonviolent’ participants in the Occupy movement talk in adoring terms of those in Tahrir Square and Syria, invoking the misty-eyed myth that their struggles with state oppression and police brutality in America, are somehow comparable to their comrades’ battles in the Middle East. Again, Said’s ‘Orientalism’ is worth invoking with the central tenet that knowledge is never innocent. Knowledge is always profoundly connected with the operations of power. Holding up Gandhi and Dr Martin Luther King as fuzzy and politically correct (because brown) proponents of nonviolence, Western nonviolent pacifists conveniently slide over the white lauding of both Gandhi and MLK precisely because both these figures failed to threaten the hegemony of the ruling classes by participating in the colonialist discourse in the language of the colonizer. Both Gandhi and MLK were, in a sense, “different” in blood and color, but “western” in taste, in opinions, in morals, in intellect, and in perpetuating the moral and ethical superiority of the nonviolence both individuals had appropriated from the western discourse itself. Gandhi’s notion of nonviolence was forged as a hybrid between Emerson, Thoreau, Tolstoy and ‘Ram Rajya’. King’s was formed predominantly by Gandhi’s influence, and a trip to postcolonial India in 1957.
The translation which occurs in Western colonial discourse mythologizes these Middle-Eastern struggles as somehow equal to North American struggles, and yet different to them. Such myths either promote the idea that the Egyptian revolution has been ‘nonviolent’ and ‘non-violent’, or that the violence on the side of the oppressed in, for example, Tahrir Square, is accepted and acceptable, without acknowledging or explaining the contradiction that it is never acceptable in North America. This promotes and sustains the idea that those in Western countries are, again, the same but different. They are different because they are better. North Americans and Europeans cannot expect revolutionaries in foreign lands to adhere to the same moral and ethical superiority as themselves, the true practitioners of nonviolence and pacifism. The Egyptian revolutionaries protesting in Tahrir Square get a free pass to throw stones because they are ‘less than’ North American protestors, and it sustains North American superiority to characterize our struggle in the West as a struggle which takes place on a higher moral and ethical plain. Despite the fact police brutality is a common and everyday occurrence for many Americans, particularly those living in poverty and homelessness, middle-class educated Occupiers such as Hedges decry the notion of violence as daily routine, because it occurs mainly to uneducated, socially, economically and racially ‘inferior’ sections of the American population. Revolutions on American soil must therefore adhere to a puritanical notion of nonviolence that brings the terminology under the Hegemonic control of those privileged few such as Hedges, who manipulate the discourse to give themselves the advantage, and discredit those who are ‘other’:
"This is exactly what pacifists have done in phrasing the disagreement as violence vs. nonviolence. Critics of nonviolence typically use this dichotomy, with which most of us fundamentally disagree, and push to expand the boundaries of nonviolence so that tactics we support, such as property destruction, may be supported within a nonviolent framework, indicating how disempowered and delegitimized we are." – Peter Gelderloos
This emphasis on creating clear, defined dichotomies in order to “delegitimize” thinkers is another tool favored by the colonizer to oppress. The conflation between violence and diversity of tactics is thus another method of controlling and subjugating difference through language. The colonizer creates “the other” in order to define themselves by the perceived deficiency. Hedges’ draws the Black Bloc as the “other”, using colonizing language to create a fantastical, faceless bogeyman against which he can define himself and the “good” members of the Occupy movement, not these fakers, these hooligans, these “Black” bloc anarchists. The binary opposition of black/white good/bad is never explicitly stated, but played upon through Hedge’s powerful, derogatory language. Language is power. In deliberately misappropriating the tactical term ‘black bloc’ as an adjective, and in some cases even a noun, Hedges, perhaps intentionally, creates a mythical, frightening, all-powerful and wholly evil enemy… which does not actually exist.

WSWS got the date wrong of the arrests. It was January 28, not 30.
Intimidation is right: In previous cases of mass arrests like this, most people had their charges dropped. But this time the DA is not dropping them, but instead is simply not filing them, which allows them a whole year to hold these charges over us, and to file them later, if they feel like it.
Yesterday's city council meeting was very intense. Most speakers opposed de la Puente's resolution, which was much more specific than the WSWS article describes: It was specifically to prevent any future port shutdowns. Several representatives of trade unions showed up, including a couple of members of the ILWU, who all opposed the resolution. In response Ignacio amended the resolution with an exemption, allowing for 'lawful activities, such as labor strikes'. Many of us yelled out that the truckers aren't allowed to organize into a union, so any strike of theirs would not be 'lawful'. Of the 8 council members, 4 voted for the resolution, 3 abstained on the basis that the resolution is unnecessary, since the laws are already in place, and only 1, Rebecca Kaplan, opposed it. Desley Brooks addressed the elder from the Panthers who had spoken, told her she loved her, had worked for the Panthers back in Seattle, but was proudly voting for the resolution. The Panther elder yelled at her 'I'm ashamed of you!'.
Several of the politicians lectured us that we want our free speech, but wouldn't allow them theirs, since we shouted them down with each lie that they told. Someone needs to explain to them what freedom of speech is really about, that giving people a couple of timed minutes to speak into a mic, while the officials can spout disinformation as long as they want, is not it. The power dynamic seems to be completely lost on people, and unfortunately none of the speakers addressed that these politicians quite literally control the 'market' on freedom of speech, that they control the tone in the media, etc. There was a very smart street medic, who should also be a street lawyer, who made some very powerful remarks. She read from the constitution and explained how the OPD has violated it. She also pointed out that the right to free speech does not come with a requirement to ask politicians for permits and to pay fees to assemble.
Personally, my favorite moment of the meeting was when she gave her last couple of minutes to an Egyptian comrade who had been at a previous city council meeting, and who the council did not pay proper attention to. Since the comrade was not there, we spent that time in silence, with a couple of us on our feet, saluting our Egyptian comrades with a raised fist. The Panther elder broke into song during the last few seconds of it, singing 'We Shall Overcome'.
But really, Occupy is not about freedom of speech. We didn't go to the Auditorium to make speeches, but to reclaim it for public use

Riot police moved in at midnight February 28 to clear the Occupy protest camp established outside St Paul’s Cathedral last October.
Twenty arrests were made as a small group of protesters peacefully resisted. The majority packed away their equipment under threat of large-scale police repression.
The camp was established on October 15, 2011, after police prevented protesters from marching on the London Stock Exchange.
The police action, ordered by the City of London Corporation, was given the green light by the High Court. The eviction was allowed to proceed after the Court of Appeal refused Occupy London Stock Exchange (Occupy LSX) the right to appeal against the decision to the Supreme Court. As the operation was under way, police revealed that they also had the permission of St Paul’s authority.
The “School of Ideas” situated in a disused building in Islington was cleared of protesters at the same time, and the demolition of the building has been brought forward. Protesters had already been evicted from another empty building in the City.
At midnight, five spotlights were turned on the protest encampment. At around 2 a.m., these were turned off briefly. When they came back on, four police officers stood on the balcony of the cathedral.
Demonstrators built a makeshift barricade of kitchen shelving. At around 3 a.m., police removed a dozen protesters involved in this action. A barricade of wooden pallets was also dismantled by police and bailiffs.
Other riot officers armed with shields advanced along the cathedral steps forcibly removing protesters, some of whom were praying. Jonathan Bartley, director of the Christian think tank Ekklesia, said he was kicked repeatedly by police and dragged away from the cathedral.
Any remaining possessions were dumped into refuse trucks.
A fence has now been placed around St Paul’s in order to prevent any efforts to reoccupy the site. The City of London Corporation is preparing what it describes as a “deep clean.”........
The police action follows on from the clearance of the “Democracy Camp” in Parliament Square on January 16, when 12 vans full of riot police were deployed against a dozen protesters, who resisted peacefully. The police were equipped and determined to meet any more vigorous resistance with large-scale violence.......
A spokesperson for Occupy LSX expressed shock at the St Paul’s authority support for the police action, and asked if they had learned nothing in the last four months. Representatives of Occupy LSX had engaged in a spurious debate with leading figures from St Paul’s aimed at promoting the idea of a more “ethical” capitalism.
The Church of England is a significant part of the power structure of the ruling elite in Britain and has supported all the measures taken by the City of London Corporation to remove the protest.
After the Appeals Court decision, the Chapter of St Paul’s Cathedral said it hoped this would “lead to a peaceful dispersal of the camp outside St Paul’s.”
As images of riot police dispersing the camp were broadcast around the world, a spokesman tried to distance the church from the action it had condoned......
The eviction shows the determination of the ruling class not to tolerate any challenge to their activities. Conservative mayor of London Boris Johnson told reporters he was glad that “finally the law has taken its course”. His interest, he explained, is “the economic interest of the city and I want to make sure the businesses in that area can flourish.”

By any reasonable measure, the November 2 general strike was a grand success. The day was certainly the most significant moment of the season of Occupy, and signaled the possibility of a new direction for the occupations, away from vague, self-reflexive democratism and toward open confrontation with the state and capital. At a local level, as a response to the first raid on the encampment, the strike showed Occupy Oakland capable of expanding while defending itself, organizing its own maintenance while at the same time directly attacking its enemy. This is what it means to refer to the encampment and its participants as the Oakland Commune, even if a true commune is only possible on the other side of insurrection.
Looking over the day’s events it is clear that without the shutdown of the port this would not have been a general strike at all but rather a particularly powerful day of action. The tens of thousands of people who marched into the port surpassed all estimates. Neighbors, co-workers, relatives – one saw all kinds of people there who had never expressed any interest in such events, whose political activity had been limited to some angry mumbling at the television set and a yearly or biyearly trip to the voting booth. It was as if the entire population of the Bay Area had been transferred to some weird industrial purgatory, there to wander and wonder and encounter itself and its powers........
For reasons that will be explained shortly, we believe that actions like this – direct actions that focus on the circulation of capital, rather than its production – will play a major role in the inevitable uprisings and insurrections of the coming years, at least in the postindustrial countries. The confluence of this tactic with the ongoing attempts to directly expropriate abandoned buildings could transform the Occupy movement into something truly threatening to the present order. But in our view, many comrades continue thinking about these actions as essentially continuous with the class struggle of the twentieth century and the industrial age, never adequately remarking on how little the postindustrial Oakland General Strike of 2011 resembles the Oakland General Strike of 1946.
The shipping industry (and shipping in general) has long been one of the most important sectors for capital, and one of the privileged sites of class struggle. Capitalism essentially develops and spreads within the matrix of the great mercantile, colonialist and imperial experiments of post-medieval Europe, all of which are predicated upon sailors, ships and trade routes.[This is BADLY wrong! Capitalism did not at all develop in the mercantile centers of post-medieval Europe, but in the English countryside, with the Enclosures. The urban merchants existed within the feudal social order and never moved to undermine it. See The Agrarian Origins of Capitalism by Ellen Meiksins-Wood,http://www.monthlyreview.org/798wood.htm] But by the time that capitalism comes into view as a new social system in the 19th century [Wrong! Capitalism was already quite prevalent (let alone visible) in England by the mid 18th century, was already being discussed by the likes of Adam Smith and James Steuart] the most important engine of accumulation is no longer trade itself, but the introduction of labor-saving technology into the production process. [BADLY wrong! Trade never facilitated accumulation. Profit cannot be the result of selling, only via the extraction of surplus labor in the sphere of production]
Superprofits achieved through mechanized production are funneled back into the development and purchase of new production machinery, not to mention the vast, infernal infrastructural projects this industrial system requires: mines and railways, highways and electricity plants, vast urban pours of wood, stone, concrete and metal as the metropolitan centers spread and absorb people expelled from the countryside. But by the 1970s, just as various futurologists and social forecasters were predicting a completely automated society of superabundance, the technologically-driven accumulation cycle was coming to an end [Accumulation is not driven simply by "technology," not unless extraction of surplus value is involved]. Labor-saving technology is double-edged for capital. Even though it temporarily allows for the extraction of enormous profits, the fact that capital treats laboring bodies as the foundation of its own wealth means that over the long term the expulsion of more and more people from the workplace eventually comes to undermine capital’s own conditions of survival. Of course, one of the starkest horrors of capitalism is that capital’s conditions of survival are also our own, no matter our hatred. Directly or indirectly, each of us is dependent on the wage and the market for our survival.[This is the great contradiction of capitalist production, but related in a very confused manner]
From the 1970s on, one of capital’s responses to the reproduction crisis has been to shift its focus from the sites of production to the (non)sites of circulation. Once the introduction of labor-saving technology into the production of goods no longer generated substantial profits, firms focused on speeding up and more cheaply circulating both commodity capital (in the case of the shipping, wholesaling and retailing industries) and money capital (in the case of banking). Such restructuring is a big part of what is often termed “neoliberalism” or “globalization,” modes of accumulation in which the shipping industry and globally-distributed supply chains assume a new primacy. The invention of the shipping container and container ship is analogous, in this way, to the reinvention of derivatives trading in the 1970s – a technical intervention which multiplies the volume of capital in circulation several times over.[BADLY wrong! Production is still the foundation of capital accumulation, even though much of it is now taking place in places other than the US, Western Europe and Japan]
This is why the general strike on Nov. 2 appeared as it did, not as the voluntary withdrawal of labor from large factories and the like (where so few of us work), but rather as masses of people who work in unorganized workplaces, who are unemployed or underemployed or precarious in one way or another, converging on the chokepoints of capital flow. Where workers in large workplaces –the ports, for instance– did withdraw their labor, this occurred after the fact of an intervention by an extrinsic proletariat. In such a situation, the flying picket, originally developed as a secondary instrument of solidarity, becomes the primary mechanism of the strike. If postindustrial capital focuses on the seaways and highways, the streets and the mall, focuses on accelerating and volatilizing its networked flows, then its antagonists will also need to be mobile and multiple.[There is no "post-industrial capital, this is an illusion resulting from the relative de-industrialization of the US] In November 2010, during the French general strike, we saw how a couple dozen flying pickets could effectively bring a city of millions to a halt. Such mobile blockades are the technique for an age and place in which production has been offshored, an age in which most of us work, if we work at all, in small and unorganized workplaces devoted to the transport, distribution, administration and sale of goods produced elsewhere. [And once circulation is blockaded, then what?!]
Like the financial system which is its warped mirror, the present system for circulating commodities is incredibly brittle. Complex, computerized supply-chains based on just-in-time production models have reduced the need for warehouses and depots. This often means that workplaces and retailers have less than a day’s reserves on hand, and rely on the constant arrival of new shipments. A few tactical interventions – at major ports, for instance – could bring an entire economy to its knees. This is obviously a problem for us as much as it is a problem for capital: the brittleness of the economy means that while it is easy for us to blockade the instruments of our own oppression, nowhere do we have access to the things that could replace it. There are few workplaces that we can take over and use to begin producing the things we need.[And this is the key, still is the key!] We could take over the port and continue to import the things we need, but it’s nearly impossible to imagine doing so without maintaining the violence of the economy at present.

Early Sunday morning, the New York Police Department (NYPD) arrested over 70 demonstrators who were commemorating the six-month anniversary of the start of Occupy Wall Street in Zuccotti Plaza in Lower Manhattan. On September 17 a few hundred young people began camping in the plaza to protest the domination of American politics and the economy by the banks and corporations.
In the most recent protest, demonstrators marched through Manhattan’s financial district and past the New York Stock Exchange chanting the now-familiar, “We are the 99 percent.” Hundreds assembled in the plaza nearby during the afternoon and evening in a peaceful and largely festive gathering. The NYPD removed one structure—protesters say it was a banner—that had been erected and lined the streets adjacent the plaza in a show of force. At 11:30 p.m. a police commander ordered the protesters to disperse and most began leaving.
Shortly after midnight, uniformed and plainclothes police moved into the plaza en masse and began to handcuff people. Other officers swung their batons. Some protesters linked arms and police tackled others to the ground as they pushed into the crowd. Video footage shot of the assault shows police tackling more than one peaceful protester. Many were taken into custody in police vans while a city bus was called into service to remove others.
One woman. Cecily McMillan, suffered a seizure after police threw her to the pavement and had to be taken to a hospital.
NYPD spokesmen have asserted that the protesters had broken park rules by bringing in tents and sleeping bags. According to the Washington Post, Sandra Nurse, a member of Occupy Wall Street’s direct action working group, denied that protesters had been prepared to occupy the plaza and pointed out that they had neither sleeping bags nor tents.
Demonstrators have alleged that the NYPD used excessive force and called for an official investigation into the department’s actions.........
In recent weeks Occupy activists have complained of surveillance by the NYPD that goes well beyond the now habitual videotaping of protests themselves. According to the New York Times, one Occupy organizer said that on December 16, “officers parked outside her home in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, where people were discussing a demonstration planned for the next day. … Another found uniformed officers outside her apartment who told her they were there to conduct a ‘security check’ for a condition they would not identify.”
These allegations come on top of revelations that the NYPD conducted massive surveillance of Muslim groups well beyond the borders of New York City, particularly on college campuses and at social activities.

Occupy Wall Street activist Cecily McMillan suffered a seizure when New York City police officers pulled her from the crowd and arrested her as hundreds attempted to re-occupy Zuccotti Park on Saturday to mark six months since the launch of the movement. In her first interview since her arrest, McMillan says she has decided to speak out because of an outpouring of public support. "I have received so many emails and twitters and messages and phone calls, and people [are] just really horrified about what happened to me." McMillan has a black eye, and her body is covered in bruises, at least one in the shape of a handprint. She says she was not allowed to contact an attorney while she was taken to the hospital and transferred to a jail cell along with some of the 72 other detained protesters. Facing charges of police assault and obstructing governmental administration, she was released Monday after a judge denied a request that her bail be set at $20,000. McMillan is Northeast regional organizer for Young Democratic Socialists of America and a graduate student at the New School for Social Research. We’re also joined by Meghan Maurus, McMillan’s attorney and mass defense coordinator at the New York City chapter of the National Lawyers Guild. [includes rush transcript]