We, independent members of the Occupy Seattle movement, are occupying this Chase bank to interrupt business as usual. We are here to show you that the polished, sanitized spaces of our day-to-day lives are places of horror. Banks don’t simply add arbitrary fees to debit cards or double your interest rates. They perpetuate poverty. They drive homelessness, and with it joblessness and the denial of healthcare. They force people out of homes through sub-prime lending and foreclosures, gentrifying neighborhoods in their wake by investing in real estate and construction firms that build condos and drive up market rates. They help make your “up-and-coming” neighborhoods whiter and wealthier and dispossess everyone needed to make them so. And for those who operate at the margins of society, committing victimless “crimes” or trying to save themselves and their families from starvation, banks are there to dehumanize them when they land in a private prison or get locked up in an immigrant concentration camp, like Tacoma’s Northwest Detention Center (its extensive human rights abuse courtesy of Wells Fargo). All while executives reward themselves with millions for lives they have ruined and will ruin again, for a bottom line written in blood.
This movement isn’t just about bailouts. It’s not even about CEO salaries, corporate taxation, or campaign finance reform. The extremes of social and economic injustice most people experience today existed way before the recession, before Citizens United, and before executive pay skyrocketed in the last half-century. It’s about a culture. It’s about the logical consequences of capitalism. It’s about what those of us who grew up in America have heard since day one—the strong survive, the cream rises to the top. But the strength of those on top rests on the backs of millions who were never given a chance to achieve, the cream stays white, and the playing field is never even. It’s about the expectation your value as a person lies in your ability to drain money out of other people, and not in your ability to pursue your dreams in solidarity with fellow dreamers.
We refuse to live in a world in which power matters more than human lives and transactions more than relationships. We refuse to live in a world where survival—”getting a job”—means increasing the wealth of our bosses. We refuse to live in a world, in a country that never outgrew slavery—only sublimated it to the point we don’t recognize it, because its whips and chains have been replaced by redlining and unaffordable healthcare, or else hidden in the prisons that warehouse the people of color once enchained out in the open. We refuse to live in a world that inevitably confers privilege to upper-class, straight, white men, as it does under the rule of capital and the perpetual indentured servitude of the oppressed. We refuse to live in a world where we are accountable to anyone other than our interdependent equals. We refuse to live in a world where we are anything other than absolutely free.
Live your desires. Join us. This world is ours—all of ours—and don’t let them tell you anything different. We will build it together.
In solidarity with you in your own struggles,
Occupiers of Seattle
***
The above statement was sent to the press at the time of our occupation Wednesday afternoon, with a statement drafted by a comrade occupier attached. The latter statement was read in- and outside the bank during the occupation and included in the press release as an addendum. Unfortunately, I’ve only seen this press release surface on The Stranger’s Slog in a characteristically smarmy post and on Puget Sound Anarchists (with a couple typos; must’ve been some transcription problems), in which cases the two documents appear as one very long statement. I think the release as a whole is easier to parse when it’s clear they’re two different things, but I don’t really fault anyone for that and the media release went through a few different channels at the last minute anyway. The bigger deal is that this bank occupation was an inspiring act of direct action within our movement, one that helped unite and radicalize our members.
The police arrested the five of us, along with one medic in the tumult outside the bank during our arrest — awesome, beautiful people lay down in front of the van so the cops couldn’t drive us to the precinct as easily as they’d hoped, dozens of people were pepper-sprayed, cops shoved their bikes against people and got them shoved back(!), one pepper-sprayed man (the bearded dude in the video at ~3:30, the closest thing I’ve got to a hero atm) dove under the fucking van and got pulled out by cops. We spent six hours incarcerated between the precinct holding cell and a booking cell at the county jail, far less time than we expected, then we sprinted to an ongoing demonstration against Chase CEO Jamie Dimon outside a Sheraton where he was speaking downtown. Hundreds of people had gathered by the time we got there, many, many of them pepper-sprayed. At least two people got arrested in this demonstration after being brutally shoved to the ground by undercover cops; I saw one tackled in the street by a man others had seen uniformed and riding a bike earlier in the occupation (this cop immediately ran off, leaving his complicit comrades to arrest our friend for “obstruction,” his mouth full of blood and a ligament pulled). The other I only heard about later: he was locked up for several days and charged with assaulting an officer with a closed fist ($7,500 bail), something that those who had been with him throughout the day adamantly denied. The member of our legal team who was in touch with this guy said he wound up in a SWAT van, where the SWAT team threw a bag over his head and proceeded to punch him.
You better believe this is a police state. And the state is engaging in intentional tactics — from depriving occupiers of sleep to making examples of them through arrests and brutality — to wither a movement. And even though many of these cops are, yes, “nice” people who don’t actually want to hurt people, they do so by the nature of their institutional function and by complicity in the violence of their comrades. Your enemies have faces and badge numbers, even when one or both are concealed.
