Occupy the Ports — Portland photos

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Not without well-founded political trepidation, we got up at 4am to ride with the Bike Swarm up to today’s 12/12/11 port shutdown. Joe was after footage and I was after photos and maybe a story. Most of the bike action happened before dawn, including some seriously unwelcome flashbacks to the bad old days of motorcycle cops hassling Critical Mass. But I did take a bunch of daylight photos of the blockades, which are here (click through to Flickr for the story parts):

I have some misgivings about today’s actions — a lot of the folks who work here don’t really seem to have been consulted or had their concerns heard, except in angry encounters. When there were such encounters, some of the occupiers were real good listeners. But I do fear the PR fallout from today will be ugly. There’s financial hardship that seems pervasive and inevitable … and then there’s a lost day’s work that you can directly identify the cause of. Whoever controls the media controls who gets painted as the latter. And Occupy wasn’t controlling the media today.