Police violence in Oakland (California) leaves one person struggling for his life - General Strike called

A victim of police violence

Several blogs I follow have emphasized this operation. Yesterday Ah, Mephistopheles! reported of a huge crowd of riot police slipping under the shadows of the night through the Californian city (look at the video and count them please: they may well be many hundreds or even a thousand). Later they were at Snow Park besieging the tent camp.

Earlier in the day the Occupy Oakland crowd had shut down for a while the Chase Bank and occupied the streets with large demos.

The whole strength of the police violence is captured by videos at Jews sans frontieres and Washington's Blog: tear gas and rubber bullets were shot at the protesters without any safety consideration, right to the face. 

An injured demonstrator is helped

Follow the links in text for videos.


Update:

Scott Olsen

One person, Scott Olsen (pictured), is struggling for his life in comma after being hit on the head by a police projectile (gas cannister it seems) and then thrown a stun grenade on him and the people helping him.

See:

• Occupy Together: Occupy Oakland will continue to stand (videos and photos)
• Occupy Wall Street: We are all Scott Olsen #OWS (video of when Olsen was injured and photo)
• Al Jazeera (story, photo-gallery and one video)

Follows the video of when Olsen was hit: people tried to help him and one policeman shot
a stun grenade into the small crowd of people trying to help:

Some more videos are available at Protestation.org from the mainstream media, who are trying to blame demonstrators: ABC News, CBS 5.


Update (Oct 27): General Strike called via Twitter

According to Washington's Blog, the Occupy movement has called for a General Strike next Wednesday Nov 2nd. There is debate about calling for a Worldwide general strike for next year. See at Twitter.

(Honestly I have my reservations, it looks leftist in the Leninist sense of the word: unready. But we have seen many unexpected things this year out of raw enthusiasm and spontaneous organization so, well, it may work after all - but it can also fail and show some of the limits of the movement at this stage. Of course, I hope it works: right-wing Communism, if such must be said of the USSR and such, has already failed catastrophically, so maybe leftism can work after all).

Update:

Some more links: Daily Kos (videos, photos, live stream),The Bay Citizen (Oakland Mayor Kuan changes course on Occupy Oakland).

Californian rubber bullets are much smaller caliber than those used here in Europe

Also: Occupy Oakland.

Popular Assembly which called for General Strike