toomuchtime_
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After a night of confrontations with police and dozens of arrests in downtown Oakland, Occupy protesters temporarily blocked an entrance at the Port of Oakland this morning, attempting to prevent trucks from entering.The scene was tense earlier at the port entrance at Adeline and 3rd streets, where truckers faced off with about a dozen protesters who erected a chain-link fence across four lanes of traffic and reinforced it with Dumpsters to keep truckers and port employees out.
The fences were taken down about 9 a.m. by protesters, who said they were going to other entrances at the port to picket.
At one point while the barricade was up, one driver ran through it and said he would run down the protesters. In response, a female protester yelled "You are trying to hurt us over your job? For money? Really?"
Another driver got out of his truck and confronted the protesters. One of the female protesters told him, "Don't touch me or I'm going to call the police."
Meanwhile, city crews set about cleaning up the city's beleaguered downtown early Thursday, where graffiti and debris cover almost every surface near the corner of 14th and Broadway.
Downtown was the scene of melees, when dozens were arrested after night fell on Wednesday's mostly peaceful general strike.
Late in the evening, protesters temporarily took over a vacant building on 16th Street, started fires and used homemade bomb launchers to fire M80s at police. The action continued until 3 a.m. as police and protesters played cat-and-mouse between the concussive booms of flashbang grenades, arcs of tear-gas canisters and smoke from the protesters' fires.
Both sides settled into an uneasy truce by 3:30 a.m., with a line of police facing off against a line of protesters near Frank G. Ogawa Plaza in front of City Hall, until protesters began to file away in clumps.
Occupy Oakland protesters remove barricade at port entrance - San Jose Mercury News
Of course, this in no way addresses OWS' complaints about "corporate greed" or wealth inequality or any of the other slogans some of its supporters want to believe OWS is about. The city of Oakland and its ordinary citizens will have to pay the cost of this mindless rampage, but the banks, the corporations and national politicians remain untouched by it. Today, the poor in Oakland are not growing poorer because the rich are growing richer, they are growing poorer because they have to pay the cost of these OWS temper tantrums.