Hazmat team responding to scare at Portland State University building
Over the past two weeks, there have been six locations in the Portland, Oregon area as well as locations in Connecticut and NYC that have received envelopes containing suspicious white powder.
In Portland , two different locations received letters on Thursday. The first letter was sent to Portland State University at the Market Center building near Southwest 4th Avenue and Market Street. The second scare took place at the Oregon Health & Science University in the Marquam Plaza Building at 2525 Southwest 3rd. On Wednesday, two white powder incidents were reported. One occurred at the Hilton Hotel in Downtown Portland, the second occurred at a Port of Portland building near the Portland International Airport. On Tuesday there was a scare at the Lloyd Center mall on Tuesday and there was an intial incident at the Mark O. Hatfield Federal Courthouse on April 26.
In all of the Portland cases, the envelopes were addressed to human resources offices and “anthrax” written either directly on the envelope or in a two-page letter in the envelope. Evacuations and hazmat teams were called out to address the scares, and several people who had contact with the letters were quarantined. No anthrax was found in any of the cases.
Referencing the Portland cases, FBI spokeswoman Beth Anne Steele issued a press release today stating “the FBI and its local partners believe they have stopped the sender or senders’ ability to continue this stream of threats.” They have not as yet clarified what that means, or whether there may have been an arrest.
“White powder” scares have also been currently occurring at locations in Connecticut.
The Rowland State Government Center in Waterbury and the Ruth Chaffee School in Newington were evacuated on Thursday. Keeny Street Elementary in Manchester was also locked down. All are closed today, pending an investigation. The powder in the Manchester school was accompanied by a letter mentioning Al Qaida.
A spate of “white powder” letters were sent to several banks in NYC on April 30, saying “Happy May Day”, seemingly referencing May Day protests.
No one was injured in any of the incidents and no anthrax was found. There is no indication at present whether these incidents are related.
I was was asked to post this here, in case there are any socialists lurking in these parts. This is an attempt for socialists to put aside the sectarianism that has for too long divided the left, and to show a united front on May Day.Socialists of America, Unite! on May 1, 2012
and:
Occupy spread like wildfire, setting America ablaze. From large cities like New York City and Los Angeles to small towns like Martinsburg, Virginia and Mobile, Alabama, occupiers are consistently organizing, planning, discussing, and taking direct action for the 99%.
Not since the 1960s and 1930s have so many people taken militant action against the state and capital.
No matter what we think of Occupy’s calls for a general strike on May 1, the important thing is that those calls are resonating on a scale not seen since the days of the free speech fights and the call for “One Big Union” by the Industrial Workers of the World.
and a listing of the signatories to the post:
Ben Campbell, Occupy Wall Street
Bhaskar Sunkara, Editor, Jacobin magazine
Billy Wharton, Socialist Party USA
Bob Turansky, Solidarity
Clay Claiborne, Venice filmmaker and The North Star
Chris Cutrone, Platypus Society
Chris Maisano, Democratic Socialists of America
Carl Davidson, Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism
Dan La Botz, Solidarity
Jason Schulman, New Politics magazine, Democratic Socialists of America
Fernando Gapasin, Freedom Road Socialist Organization
Manuel Barrera, independent revolutionary socialist
Michael Hirsch, New Politics magazine
Steve Early, Labor journalist, organizer, and member of Newspaper Guild/CWA
Zak, Occupy Wall Street Class War Camp
*Organizations listed for identification purposes only.
Organizational endorsements: John Reed Society; Platypus Affiliated Society
In this post we see people starting to drop the mask and call Occupy what it truly is-”a militant action against the state and capital”. It is not about reform. It is not about getting money out of politics or bailouts. It is against this present form of government, revolutionary and anti-capitalist at its core. That is the nature of the people driving it, and where they intend to go is not to a happy place. They define themselves by terms we think of as belonging to other countries-”class war”, “communist” “anarchist” “police state”. They can’t define their purpose, not because they don’t have one. They can’t define their purpose, because bringing down the government is their purpose, and that stated so boldly, would not be acceptable to the general public.
Here’s a short video of Occupy highlights from their NYE highlights in NYC to bring home the point (remember, this is their video, not mine; their things they wanted to remember):
But it is not enough. After Occupy’s initial splash last year, participation has not been growing. Hopefully it was just the winter and the heat will bring everyone out again, but I fear that we are not doing a good enough job communicating with the American people.
First we need to communicate in a language that they understand. Speaking to middle America in the same way that you would talk to your activist friends is not effective. Don’t use movement, socialist, anarchist, liberal… buzzwords that only some people know the definition of (and others have been trained to fear by decades of propaganda). Translate words like horizontalism, commodification, socialism, anarchy, anti-captitalist, revolution, into explanatory phrases that people without education in revolutionary thought can understand and see as moving their lives forward.
For years, the organized far Left has been scattered, separated by their various differences. They look to Occupy as their last chance
There have been reformers in Occupy, the people who truly joined because of money in politics or economic concerns. But they are shouted down and shut out by the revolutionaries. The revolutionists have held sway from the beginning, even before the initial boots on the ground which included anarchists, communists and reformers. The “99% Spring” is attempting to make Occupy more acceptable, more Liberal and less Left to make it more palatable to the public as a whole.
But if you inherently define yourself as being against the state and in a war with the police, it is hard to play at being acceptable. Clearly provoked confrontations with police don’t go over well with the American public. Nor does treating sleeping in a park as a hair shirt borne for all.
On May 1, with the aid of unions, and students who want off from school, they will have more numbers out than they could get on their own(in NY, their normal numbers on a weekday are around 30, weekend day 100). They have been working for months to get numbers for Mayday, so there may be some thousands for example in NY. Yet they will need much more to have their revolution of the proletariat, with massive sustained tens of thousands in the streets, a la Spain or Greece, for much more than one day, sharing the same thought.
