Occupy Oakland's costs to residents spell disaster

San Francisco Chronicle ^ | December 9, 2011 | Chip Johnson

[artichokegrower]

After two months of the Occupy movement, Oakland residents should adopt their own chant.

We are the 98.5 percent.

The 1 percent control the vast majority of the nation's wealth, possess influence in the highest halls of government, and profit from the misery of others. The one-half percent have taken to the streets.

Then there's everyone else: the veritable Silent Majority who work and pay the bills and the taxes that make the wheels turn.

Even though both sides of the conflict claim to have our backs, neither group, it seems, has our best interests at heart.

Oakland Mayor Jean Quan is now desperately trying to repair her relationship with the downtown business community after she originally supported the monthlong camp on the plaza in front of City Hall.

Quan's office has joined with Port of Oakland officials, who oppose Occupy's planned shutdown of the port Monday. The action is part of a coordinated effort by Occupy groups to shut major shipping ports from Alaska to San Diego.

"Both the union and the Port Commission are opposed to Port closures and so am I. Closing the Port will hurt the people who work there - the longshoremen, the truckers and the transport logistics workers," Quan said in an e-mail to me this week.

[artichokegrower]

"The 99 percent have made sacrifices for this movement," said a member of the Occupy Oakland group who calls herself Veruca. "Everyone has to make sacrifices. We're into this together."

You don't have a job. You are preventing those who do from getting to work. You are jeopardizing their future employment as these jobs may leave Oakland. So who is making the sacrifices?

[piytar]

"What this shutdown costs is the permanent loss of jobs, impacts on working families and the working people these movements are trying to help," Isaac Kos-Read, a port spokesman.

No. What this shutdown costs is the permanent loss of jobs, impacts on working families and the working people these movements falsely claim they are trying to help.

The occupy crowd is mostly greedy entitlement minded leaches. They could not care less about working people, Mr. Kos-Read, ya dope.

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

"The 99 percent have made sacrifices for this movement," said a member of the Occupy Oakland group who calls herself Veruca.

To claim that you represent "99%" is a more extreme claim than the "Bolsheviks," who merely derived their name from the Russian word for "majority." I'll give you, tho, that it's slightly less extreme than Hitler's claim to speak for "the whole German people."

Either way, cut it out. You speak only for yourselves. Even if "yourselves" does include - to the nation's disgrace - the current occupant of the White House.

"Everyone has to make sacrifices."

No.

"We're into this together."

When did you first get these grandiose delusions?

[DUMBGRUNT]

Something in the water?

Michael is an attorney and crusader for social injustice.

[rogue yam]

I was in downtown Oakland last night, attending a jazz concert down at Jack London Square. On a Thursday night in the midst of the holiday season it was a ghost town. Oakland needs Occupy Oakland like San Francisco needs another earthquake.