Dan Siegel: Totally futile to try shutting down 'Occupy' protests

Oakland Mayor Jean Quan's legal adviser and longtime friend, Dan Siegel, explained to MSNBC host Rachel Maddow on Monday night why he decided to resign his post.

Siegel was very unhappy with the police raid on the "Occupy Oakland" encampment on October 25 but had hoped the protesters would be allowed to continue their demonstration. Early Monday morning, Oakland police raided the camp site to evict the protesters from Frank H. Ogawa Plaza.

He claimed city officials across the country didn't understand the scope of the "Occupy Wall Street" movement.

"This is a tremendous movement, a productive movement," Siegel continued. "It's a progressive movement of people who've been passive for years in the face of economic attacks, homelessness, joblessness, foreclosures, crushing student debt, and so on. I think it has the potential to really remake American society and if that's true, then people who run cities, and particularly cities like Oakland -- where the 99 percent live -- should be supportive of those movements and should not think that they can control them."

"To me it seems like a totally useless and futile activity to spend millions of dollars to take people out of tents, to create situations where there is bloodshed in our streets and lots of chaos for days, because they're going to come back," he added.

Siegel said that Mayor Quan was under "tremendous" pressure from city officials and others to shut down the demonstration.

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