Philadelphia Convention Plans Lead To Rift In Occupy Movement

In early November, Nathan Kleinman, an Occupy protester in Philadelphia, received an email from someone named Michael Pollok who said he was part of a group of protesters affiliated with the Occupy movement. Pollok said the group planned to hold a convention in Philadelphia during the week of July 4, when 876 delegates from congressional districts around the country would draft "a petition for a redress of grievances" to be presented to Congress.

Kleinman didn't like the idea, and he didn't think it would go over well with other people at Occupy Philly either. He had a few specific concerns, chief among them the fact that the event involved a representative model of government, as opposed to the consensus model that has characterized the Occupy movement from the beginning.

"I explained all that and had a back-and-forth with him. He got increasingly testy and his responses were increasingly dismissive, and so eventually I gave up on him and figured he'd go away," said Kleinman. "But that's not what happened clearly."

This week, the Associated Press and other media outlets reported on Pollok's plans for the convention, unleashing a bitter debate among occupiers over the question of who has the right to represent the movement. (The Huffington Post posted the AP story.)

Occupy Wall Street Camps in Los Angeles, Philadelphia Dismantled in Massive Police Raids

Some 1,000 police officers raided the Occupy Los Angeles encampment in a park outside City Hall over night, arresting scores of people and evicting what has been the largest Occupy camp in the country. Meanwhile Occupy Philadelphia protesters vacated their encampment this morning after more than a thousand police moved in and warned them of mass arrests. We get eyewitness updates on both raids from National Lawyers Guild legal observer Ken Montenegro in Los Angleles and Occupy organizer and activist Jeff Rousset in Philadelphia. “[Philadelphia’s history of free speech and democracy] changed this morning at around 1 am. The city shut down the subways; they barricaded all of city hall, about two blocks in every direction; and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of cops poured in. They forced everybody off the plaza,” Rousset says.

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Source: Democracy Now!