Author: Haley Gray
A team of student organizers have been building a network on campus in solidarity with the Occupy Wall Street Together movement. The Youth Coalition for Community Action (YCCA), Student Labor Action Coalition (SLAC), Black Student Alliance (BSA), and MEChA*ALAS together with a new student group, Students Occupy L.A., are working together to get Occidental students involved in Occupy Together, a coast-to-coast movement spurred by the Occupy Wall Street camp-in that began in New York City on Sept. 17.
“We knew that this movement was bigger than one club so we needed to start organizing as if it were bigger than one club,” YCCA President Guido Girgenti (sophomore) said.
Organizers from YCCA and Students Occupy L.A. pitched a tent in the Occupy camp outside City Hall and stayed overnight the Friday through Monday of Fall Break. At an open meeting last Thursday, the group provided public transportation directions to City Hall and posted their own contact information so that Occidental students who arrived late could find their peers.Their meeting inspired about ten Occidental students to camp out at Occupy Friday night, with numbers dwindling as the break went on.
On Saturday, about another 30 Occidental students joined the occupiers in a march of “the 99%” from Pershing Square to City Hall. The march was part of Global Day of Action, a worldwide coordination of marches for economic justice. The marchers aired grievances of all kinds on hand-made signs, voicing their malcontent with corporate greed, outrage at the richest one percent of the population and cries for economic justice.
On Oct. 9 Jack Moreau (junior) and Joe Dingman (junior), the students behind Students Occupy LA (perhaps you’ve seen their tent in front of the MarketPlace), began hosting meetings every Sunday through Thursday at 9:30 p.m. in front of the library. Dingman estimates that they draw about 30 attendees to each meeting. The pair call their gatherings a “General Assembly,” after the organizing body at the heart of the Los Angeles Occupation. Moreau and Dingman attend the GA meetings at City Hall every night and report back to their own General Assembly on campus.
This coalition of student groups also organized an on-campus walkout last Thursday. More than 50 students met between Johnson and Fowler at 1:30 p.m. for the nation-wide class walkout organized by Occupy Colleges, a national network operating in solidarity with Occupy Wall Street.
Girgenti and his fellow organizers plan to work more with Occupy Colleges in the future and intend to build a sustained nation-wide network of student activists for economic justice.
“The organizational response from students has to have a nation-wide students has to have a nation-wide scale to really link up with this movement,” Girgenti said. “In the coming weeks student organizers are going to be figuring out if we can connect to national student organizational frameworks.”
Thus, the function of the group’s Fall Break stay at City Hall was not just to get Occidental students down to the protest. The real purpose of the group’s stay, which they made clear in their meeting last Thursday, was to make connections with other student groups involved in the Occupy movement.
According to Girgenti, networking over the break went well. The group plans to hold a post-Fall Break conference to debrief the long-weekend camp-out and to make plans for the future of Occidental student involvement in Occupy.
Not all Occidental students, however, agree with the Occupy Movement.
Politics major Andrea Kippur (senior), aside from noting the hypocrisy she sees in wealthy students at a posh liberal arts school rallying behind “the 99%,” takes issue with the decentralization and lack of a refined goal of the Occupy movement.
“I think one of the main flaws with this ‘occupy’ movement is that it does not seem to have a direct momentum heading towards a goal. The posters range from gay rights to women’s rights to anti-capitalist manifestos. However, it doesn’t seem like many of these “occupiers” even understand the political environment that allowed for corporations to make so much money,” Kippur said.
Mimi Hitzemann (sophomore), also an Occidental student and organizer for YCCA, isn’t bothered by the lack of specific goals in the Occupy protests.
“At this point Occupy isn’t a movement per se, it’s about waking up the country, shifting the framework from ‘greed is good’ to love and justice,” she said.
“I really hope Oxy students start thinking historically,” Guido said. “I think we should not and we cannot lose this opportunity to build a powerful movement around issues of justice and equity because if we lose this opportunity and we don’t grab this moment in history, we might enter a period where there are no job prospects for young graduates, no relief for crushing student loan debt and the channels for democratic protest will continue to be eaten away by corporate money.”
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