Showing posts with label peaceful protests. Show all posts
Showing posts with label peaceful protests. Show all posts
Sunday, October 13, 2013
Tuesday, September 18, 2012
Occupy's Protest Is Not Over. It Has Barely Begun
As long as the Democrats and Republicans keep pushing this economy as "the new norm," the protests will continue and the numbers will increase.--jef
Monday, September 17, 2012 by The Guardian
Monday, September 17, 2012 by The Guardian
A good many observers wonder, is Occupy over? After all, the
encampments that announced the movement a year ago have largely
disappeared, and no obviously similar protest demonstrations of young people have taken their place, at least not in the United States.
Nevertheless, I think the ready conclusion that the protests have fizzled is based on a misconception of the nature of movements, a misconception influenced by the metaphors we rely on. We think of these eruptions as something like explosions, Fourth of July fireworks perhaps that shoot into the sky, dazzle us for a moment, and then quickly fade away. The metaphor leads us to think of protest movements as bursts of energy and anger that rise in a great arc and then, exhausted, disappear.
In fact, no major American movement of the past fits that description. The great protest movements of history lasted not for a moment but for decades. And they did not expand in the shape of a simple rising arc of popular defiance. Rather, they began in a particular place, sputtered and subsided, only to re-emerge elsewhere in perhaps a different form, influenced by local particularities of circumstance and culture.
Movements that may appear to us in retrospect as a unified set of events are, in fact, irregular and scattered. Only afterwards do we see the underlying common institutional causes and movement passions that mark these events so we can name them, as the abolitionist movement, for example, or the labor movement or the civil rights movement. I think Occupy is likely to unfold in a similar way.
And it will not subside quickly. Like earlier great movements that changed the course of American history, Occupy is fueled by deep institutional lacunae and inconsistencies. The mainly young people who are Occupy represent a generation coming of age in societies marked by an increasingly predatory and criminal financial capitalism that has created mass indebtness and economic insecurity. At the same time, the policies that once softened the impact of economic change (which some commentators once thought were necessary for the "legitimation" of capitalism) are being rolled back.
Think of the bitter pill of the broken promises to young people who were told that education was the route to security and prosperity and who now graduate to unemployment and huge debts. And this is occurring in the context of amazing revelations of the corruption of always-flawed American electoral procedures.
Then, there is the looming threat of ecological disasters that threaten the future of the planet itself. These conditions reflect deep institutional problems: they are not likely to be solved or even much softened very quickly, and so long as they persist, they will fuel the protests that are an extension and continuation of Occupy, whether we give them that name or not.
A movement forceful enough to change the course of history must accomplish two great tasks. One is communicative. The movement must use its distinctive repertoire of drama and disturbance, of crowds and marches and banners and chants, to raise the issues that are being papered over by normal politics, for the obvious reason that normal politics is inevitably dominated by money and propaganda.
On this, Occupy has already made substantial headway. The slogans that assert we are the 99%, they are the 1%, named the historic increase in inequality in the United States during the past few decades as the main issue, and the movement dramaturgy of encampments and masks and general assemblies and twinkling fingers helped to give the message heft and appeal, even to the media that had at first simply disparaged the movement.
To be sure, there were lots of complaints that Occupy had failed to issue its own policy proposals – which I think it was wise not to, since to do so would have ensnared the activists in endless disputes about particulars. But that is quibbling. It is far more important that we can see the influence of the movement's main issue – extreme inequality – on the speeches at the Democratic convention, for example, or on the ongoing strike of 29,000 school teachers in Chicago who have been joined by students and parents in their demands not only for salary increases, but for a roster of improvements in the public schools. So far, good.
However, movements that make an imprint do more than communicate. They also threaten to exert a distinctive kind of power that results from refusing co-operation in the routines that institutionalized social life requires. That is the power that workers wield when they walk off the job, or that students muster when they refuse to go to class, or that tenants have when refuse to pay the rent, or that urban crowds exert when they block streets and highways. In principle, it is also the power that debtors might mobilize if they threatened to default on their loans. This sort of disruption – in essence, the strike writ large – is harder to organize than a rally or a march because people will fear reactions, which are likely to be swift and harsh. So, the protesters have to figure out how to defend themselves.
This is also the problem that other great protest movements confronted: the abolitionists had to work out how to sustain the "underground railway" in the face of southern posses, and the sit-down strikers of the 1930s had to figure out how to defend their factory occupations in the face of company police and sometimes state militia. I suspect that Occupy is struggling with that problem now, as an expanded Occupy begins to try to organize campaigns against mortgage foreclosures, student and credit card debt, and even the public debt saddling municipalities.
The stakes are large, for the 1%, and for the rest of us.
Nevertheless, I think the ready conclusion that the protests have fizzled is based on a misconception of the nature of movements, a misconception influenced by the metaphors we rely on. We think of these eruptions as something like explosions, Fourth of July fireworks perhaps that shoot into the sky, dazzle us for a moment, and then quickly fade away. The metaphor leads us to think of protest movements as bursts of energy and anger that rise in a great arc and then, exhausted, disappear.
In fact, no major American movement of the past fits that description. The great protest movements of history lasted not for a moment but for decades. And they did not expand in the shape of a simple rising arc of popular defiance. Rather, they began in a particular place, sputtered and subsided, only to re-emerge elsewhere in perhaps a different form, influenced by local particularities of circumstance and culture.
Movements that may appear to us in retrospect as a unified set of events are, in fact, irregular and scattered. Only afterwards do we see the underlying common institutional causes and movement passions that mark these events so we can name them, as the abolitionist movement, for example, or the labor movement or the civil rights movement. I think Occupy is likely to unfold in a similar way.
And it will not subside quickly. Like earlier great movements that changed the course of American history, Occupy is fueled by deep institutional lacunae and inconsistencies. The mainly young people who are Occupy represent a generation coming of age in societies marked by an increasingly predatory and criminal financial capitalism that has created mass indebtness and economic insecurity. At the same time, the policies that once softened the impact of economic change (which some commentators once thought were necessary for the "legitimation" of capitalism) are being rolled back.
Think of the bitter pill of the broken promises to young people who were told that education was the route to security and prosperity and who now graduate to unemployment and huge debts. And this is occurring in the context of amazing revelations of the corruption of always-flawed American electoral procedures.
Then, there is the looming threat of ecological disasters that threaten the future of the planet itself. These conditions reflect deep institutional problems: they are not likely to be solved or even much softened very quickly, and so long as they persist, they will fuel the protests that are an extension and continuation of Occupy, whether we give them that name or not.
A movement forceful enough to change the course of history must accomplish two great tasks. One is communicative. The movement must use its distinctive repertoire of drama and disturbance, of crowds and marches and banners and chants, to raise the issues that are being papered over by normal politics, for the obvious reason that normal politics is inevitably dominated by money and propaganda.
On this, Occupy has already made substantial headway. The slogans that assert we are the 99%, they are the 1%, named the historic increase in inequality in the United States during the past few decades as the main issue, and the movement dramaturgy of encampments and masks and general assemblies and twinkling fingers helped to give the message heft and appeal, even to the media that had at first simply disparaged the movement.
To be sure, there were lots of complaints that Occupy had failed to issue its own policy proposals – which I think it was wise not to, since to do so would have ensnared the activists in endless disputes about particulars. But that is quibbling. It is far more important that we can see the influence of the movement's main issue – extreme inequality – on the speeches at the Democratic convention, for example, or on the ongoing strike of 29,000 school teachers in Chicago who have been joined by students and parents in their demands not only for salary increases, but for a roster of improvements in the public schools. So far, good.
However, movements that make an imprint do more than communicate. They also threaten to exert a distinctive kind of power that results from refusing co-operation in the routines that institutionalized social life requires. That is the power that workers wield when they walk off the job, or that students muster when they refuse to go to class, or that tenants have when refuse to pay the rent, or that urban crowds exert when they block streets and highways. In principle, it is also the power that debtors might mobilize if they threatened to default on their loans. This sort of disruption – in essence, the strike writ large – is harder to organize than a rally or a march because people will fear reactions, which are likely to be swift and harsh. So, the protesters have to figure out how to defend themselves.
This is also the problem that other great protest movements confronted: the abolitionists had to work out how to sustain the "underground railway" in the face of southern posses, and the sit-down strikers of the 1930s had to figure out how to defend their factory occupations in the face of company police and sometimes state militia. I suspect that Occupy is struggling with that problem now, as an expanded Occupy begins to try to organize campaigns against mortgage foreclosures, student and credit card debt, and even the public debt saddling municipalities.
The stakes are large, for the 1%, and for the rest of us.
Friday, April 20, 2012
United State of Emergency: Outlawing Dissent
Under a president deemed worthy of the Nobel Peace Prize, the will of the authoritarian tyrant caste is being written permanently into American law.
H.R. 347/S1794, otherwise known as the “Federal Restricted Buildings and Grounds Improvement Act of 2011,” passed unanimously in the House and receiving only three negative votes in the Senate, makes it a felony—a crime defined by the federal government as punishable by death or imprisonment in excess of one year—to “enter or remain in” an area designated as “restricted.” The law makes no exception for demonstrators who unknowingly gather outside of federally-designated free-speech zones; you may not have willfully or knowingly done anything other than exercise your free speech and free assembly rights, but if you “in fact” “[impede] or [disrupt] the orderly conduct of Government business or official functions,” you’re going to prison. And since Obama’s ink dried on the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012 and America was declared a battleground, you could be held indefinitely.
++++
By Zakk Flash
During the 1967 Six Day War, a series of strict emergency laws were enacted across the Arab World, most notably in Egypt and Syria. Police powers became absolute while constitutional rights were suspended; any non-governmental political activity such as street demonstrations, rallies, protests, and organization of dissident political groups was quickly crushed by the iron fist of dictators. The laws were called temporary defensive measures, emergency acts that would be lifted once the nation was safe again.
The laws were simply left in place. The rulers of Egypt and Syria, content with their power, decided to concede nothing to their citizens. Tens of thousands of people found themselves imprisoned for extended periods of time, simply for demanding the principles of democracy already encoded in their constitutions or being critical of the government. The emergency laws provided these autocratic regimes with the authority to force their will onto to their people without opposition.
H.R. 347/S1794, otherwise known as the “Federal Restricted Buildings and Grounds Improvement Act of 2011,” passed unanimously in the House and receiving only three negative votes in the Senate, makes it a felony—a crime defined by the federal government as punishable by death or imprisonment in excess of one year—to “enter or remain in” an area designated as “restricted.” The law makes no exception for demonstrators who unknowingly gather outside of federally-designated free-speech zones; you may not have willfully or knowingly done anything other than exercise your free speech and free assembly rights, but if you “in fact” “[impede] or [disrupt] the orderly conduct of Government business or official functions,” you’re going to prison. And since Obama’s ink dried on the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012 and America was declared a battleground, you could be held indefinitely.
When, and if, demonstrators get released from incarceration, they will continue to suffer the long-term legal consequences termed by prisoner-rights advocates as “civil death.” Felons are barred from multitude vocations, associating with certain people or even living in particular areas, ineligible to serve on a jury or receive government assistance, and even denied the right to elect their own public servants. As of 2008, over 5.3 million people in the United States are currently left without the right to vote because of felony disenfranchisement. A sure-fire way of controlling political opposition is to deny it the ability to participate in political life.
Restricted areas spoken of in HR347, interpreted under existing law and court precedents, include any “building or grounds where the President or other person protected by the Secret Service is or will be temporarily visiting” and “a building or grounds so restricted in conjunction with an event designated as a special event of national significance.” This definition, kept intentionally broad and vague, allows anti-protest measures to be applied at the whim of the political elite. Already in Chicago, Democratic Mayor Rahm Emanuel presides over crippling restrictions on public activity brought as a result of the upcoming NATO conference—and the simultaneous anti-globalization protests—on May 20-21st, 2012.
While the laws were called a temporary response to the G8 summit taking place in Chicago alongside the NATO conference, the Obama White House made a last minute decision to move G8 to the presidential compound at Camp David, a restricted military installation. The laws in Chicago will remain. Draconian laws enacted in the name of national defense in the Other Civil War are nothing new.
On September 14, 2001, President George W. Bush declared a national emergency due to the terrorist attacks of three days earlier. The National Emergencies Act of 1976 requires the President to renew this state of emergency on an annual basis if he wishes it to remain in effect; Bush renewed it every year he was in office and Obama has continued the trend.
The laws were simply left in place. The rulers of Egypt and Syria, content with their power, decided to concede nothing to their citizens. Tens of thousands of people found themselves imprisoned for extended periods of time, simply for demanding the principles of democracy already encoded in their constitutions or being critical of the government. The emergency laws provided these autocratic regimes with the authority to force their will onto to their people without opposition.
Under a president deemed worthy of the Nobel Peace Prize, the will of the authoritarian tyrant caste is being written permanently into American law.
H.R. 347/S1794, otherwise known as the “Federal Restricted Buildings and Grounds Improvement Act of 2011,” passed unanimously in the House and receiving only three negative votes in the Senate, makes it a felony—a crime defined by the federal government as punishable by death or imprisonment in excess of one year—to “enter or remain in” an area designated as “restricted.” The law makes no exception for demonstrators who unknowingly gather outside of federally-designated free-speech zones; you may not have willfully or knowingly done anything other than exercise your free speech and free assembly rights, but if you “in fact” “[impede] or [disrupt] the orderly conduct of Government business or official functions,” you’re going to prison. And since Obama’s ink dried on the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012 and America was declared a battleground, you could be held indefinitely.
These laws would have made Martin Luther King, Jr., and other Civil Rights luminaries felons subject to indefinite detention.
When, and if, demonstrators get released from incarceration, they will continue to suffer the long-term legal consequences termed by prisoner-rights advocates as “civil death.” Felons are barred from multitude vocations, associating with certain people or even living in particular areas, ineligible to serve on a jury or receive government assistance, and even denied the right to elect their own public servants. As of 2008, over 5.3 million people in the United States are currently left without the right to vote because of felony disenfranchisement. A sure-fire way of controlling political opposition is to deny it the ability to participate in political life.
Restricted areas spoken of in HR347, interpreted under existing law and court precedents, include any “building or grounds where the President or other person protected by the Secret Service is or will be temporarily visiting” and “a building or grounds so restricted in conjunction with an event designated as a special event of national significance.” This definition, kept intentionally broad and vague, allows anti-protest measures to be applied at the whim of the political elite. Already in Chicago, Democratic Mayor Rahm Emanuel presides over crippling restrictions on public activity brought as a result of the upcoming NATO conference—and the simultaneous anti-globalization protests—on May 20-21st, 2012.
While the laws were called a temporary response to the G8 summit taking place in Chicago alongside the NATO conference, the Obama White House made a last minute decision to move G8 to the presidential compound at Camp David, a restricted military installation. The laws in Chicago will remain. Draconian laws enacted in the name of national defense in the Other Civil War are nothing new.
On September 14, 2001, President George W. Bush declared a national emergency due to the terrorist attacks of three days earlier. The National Emergencies Act of 1976 requires the President to renew this state of emergency on an annual basis if he wishes it to remain in effect; Bush renewed it every year he was in office and Obama has continued the trend.
The United States has been in a declared state of national emergency for the last 11 years.
According to Harold Relyea, a specialist working for the American government in the Congressional Research Service, the president “may seize property, organize and control the means of production, seize commodities, assign military forces abroad, institute martial law, seize and control all transportation and communication, regulate the operation of private enterprise, restrict travel, and, in a variety of ways, control the lives of United States citizens.”
Combined with Patriot Act measures enacted by Congress under George W. Bush and extended by Obama, these laws provide a framework of surveillance and control only dreamed of in some Orwellian nightmare.
The nature of neoliberal globalization virtually ensures that fascist cartels will force their monopolies onto unwilling nations or unknowing populations; plurilateral agreements like the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, or ACTA, are created in secret by leaders of a select handful of the wealthiest countries and designed with the intention of forcing them upon developing nations. ACTA includes provisions that profoundly restrict fundamental rights and freedoms, most notably the freedom of expression and communication privacy. It also severely restricts generic drug creation and use in underdeveloped countries. They are nonnegotiable.
Kader Arif, the European parliament’s rapporteur for ACTA, resigned from his position in January 2012 denouncing the treaty "in the strongest possible manner” for having “no inclusion of civil society organizations, a lack of transparency from the start of the negotiations, repeated postponing of the signature of the text without an explanation being ever given, [and] exclusion of the EU Parliament’s demands that were expressed on several occasions in [the] assembly," concluding with his intent to "send a strong signal and alert the public opinion about this unacceptable situation” and refusal to “take part in this masquerade."
As with other undemocratic measures being passed around the world, HR 347/S1794 is a ruthless and reactionary law designed to eliminate political and economic dissent.
The First Amendment to the United States Constitution states:
The Supreme Court ruled in Boos v. Barry, 485 U.S. 312, 318 (1988), that protesting outside an embassy was worthy of Constitutional protection, recognizing that freedom of speech, even if it may interfere with normal governmental activity “reflects a ‘profound national commitment’ to the principle” and “‘debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust, and wide-open.’”
It is little wonder that HR 347/S1794 has been called by Rep. Justin Amash (R-MI), one of only three members of Congress to vote against the bill, the “First Amendment Rights Eradication Act.” While the NDAA seeks to remove your 4th, 5th and 6th Amendment rights, this newest attack on self-determination is aimed at the heart of 1st Amendment rights including Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Assembly, and Freedom to Petition.
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
The Supreme Court ruled in Boos v. Barry, 485 U.S. 312, 318 (1988), that protesting outside an embassy was worthy of Constitutional protection, recognizing that freedom of speech, even if it may interfere with normal governmental activity “reflects a ‘profound national commitment’ to the principle” and “‘debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust, and wide-open.’”
While the right to free speech, assembly, and the petition of grievances is enshrined in the US Constitution, the right of government to conduct its business without dissent is not.
In 1783, twenty-four year old William Pitt, then the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, was petitioned to change the law based on the “necessity” to save the East India Company from bankruptcy. His reply was brief.
“Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.”
The arguments of a tyrannical Congress would have you believe that HR 347/S1794 is a necessity, that demonstrations against the actions of government and business cause it undue hardship. While the government’s ability to permissibly restrict expressive conduct is limited by reasonable time, place, and manner regulations, the restrictions must, by law, be narrowly tailored to prevent unconstitutional adversity.
Of course, the crypto-fascists in Congress will argue that protecting themselves from the sight of the “unwashed masses” is a compelling state interest. They wouldn’t be incorrect. The nature of power is self-preserving; by surrounding themselves with a no-free-speech zone, the State can continue its self-congratulatory paternalism, content in the false knowledge that they’re “looking out for the little guy.”
HR 347/S1794 flagrantly violates the First Amendment, since it is a broad and sweeping restriction based particularly on political speech in a public forum and not narrowly tailored to serve a compelling state interest.
The unconstitutional socio-political deprivation embedded in these authoritarian anti-Occupy laws would arguably be unfeasible without an almost complete blackout by mass media.
Media and communication play a central, perhaps even a defining, role in the ability of police-state measures to pass. Where is the outrage over the state of emergency laws that have gripped this country for almost a dozen years? How can unelected bankers wrest power from leaders in Greece, the birthplace of democracy, while the rest of the world fumbles with “austerity measures” to save their own necks? Consolidation of the global commercial media system can be easily linked to deregulation in the name of neoliberal “progress.”That deregulation—and the resulting monopoly that keeps alternate news sources like Democracy Now! and Al Jazeera English off the air—has allowed only capitalist rhetoric to flourish.
Organized labor has tried to make up for their decline in membership and economic power in recent years by abandoning any pretense of non-partisan organizing and pouring hundreds of thousands of dollars of member dues money into the campaigns of Democrats. The opponents of organized labor are allowed to paint it as a partisan special interest group in the pocket of the Democratic Party. This has proven to be the case for far too long. The Democrats, in turn, have taken labor’s vote as a matter of course and done little to advance the political agenda of the working class. The vast majority of workers who remain outside of traditional unions see no use in joining one; management sees suppression of organization as just another cost of doing business. A return of radical unionization, exemplified by the Industrial Workers of the World call to organize the entire working class into One Big Union to abolish the wage system, would do much to stop the pitting of worker against worker, allowing for people over profit, cooperation over competition. The Preamble to the IWW Constitution still reflects this.
Civil libertarian organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union, the First Amendment Coalition, and the Center for Constitutional Rights have a long history of defending the inalienable rights retained by—as opposed to privileges granted to—citizens of the United States under the Constitution. As nonpartisan organizations, they have the ability to denounce legislators of any camp for transgressions of civil liberties. It is expected that they will use test cases to undermine the illegal laws being propagated by the political elite; as part of a diversity of tactic, these kinds of cases should be applauded, even as the larger movement forges ahead with broader goals. Embracing different tactics allows radical proponents of liberty and democracy to work with mainstream advocacy groups to advance our larger strategy in accordance with our common goals. The Saint Paul Principles provide a framework for that cooperation without sectarian breakdown.
The fiscal conservatives, moderates, and libertarians who make up the Republican base have seen the party of Lincoln hijacked by social conservatives like Leo Strauss, who said the “crisis of our time” was a “permissive egalitarianism” embedded in liberal democracy and neoconservatives like Jeanne Kirkpatrick, who prompted Reagan to give financial and material support to pro-Western authoritarian regimes.
Libertarians and fiscal conservatives have little in common with the state-enforced conservative social policies pushed by the religious right wing that seems to dominate the Republican Party. The interventionist war machine driven by neoconservative thought—to say nothing of the government intrusion into privacy via the Patriot Act, REAL ID, and NSA domestic spying program—runs contrary to principles of state sovereignty and self-determination held in high esteem by traditional conservatism, principles that Thomas Paine instilled into American body politic under the phrase “Common Sense.”
This issue transcends traditional party politics. Political opposition will be outlawed immediately. Pro-life rallies will effectively end with ban on public demonstrations, as well as pro-choice demonstrations. The government will not hesitate to prohibit any and all organizations it defines as dissenting or subversive, including alternative parties, labor unions, veterans’ associations, and others. Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party can both kiss the promise of reforming government goodbye.
Congress has already declared America a battleground. They now want to silence us. It is time to bring the battle home.
American anarchist Noam Chomsky, long known for his critiques of U.S. policy, has often written about the “manufacture of consent,” something propaganda maven (and Freud nephew) Edward Bernays happily called the art of manipulating people. In his criticism of the global commercial media system, Chomsky posits that mass media, as a profit-driven institution, tends to serve and further the agendas and interests of dominant, elite groups over the social well-being of entire societies. His writing firmly rejects the kinds of censorship that HR 347/S1794 proposes.
The business interests that control the mainstream media are the same that control the United States government. They will allow no dissent as they continue their war on liberty.
What does this mean for us? Simply put, this is not a battle of the Left versus the moderate Right. This is a direct attack on the United States Constitution, a charter written expressly to limit the government’s power over its citizens.
“If you believe in freedom of speech, you believe in freedom of speech for views you don’t like. Goebbels was in favor of freedom of speech for views he liked. So was Stalin. If you’re in favor of freedom of speech, that means you’re in favor of freedom of speech precisely for views you despise.”
Around the world, the working and middle classes have risen up against the duplicity of their governments, the engineering of political realities by corporate interests, and the social stratification enforced by capitalist exploitation. In the United States, both Occupy Wall Street and the libertarian wing of the Tea Party have demonstrated against the excesses of the US federal government. These protests, however, have been relatively small compared to the injustice being perpetrated upon the American people.
This is a war of the authoritarian oligarchy upon the principles of democracy.
Organized labor has tried to make up for their decline in membership and economic power in recent years by abandoning any pretense of non-partisan organizing and pouring hundreds of thousands of dollars of member dues money into the campaigns of Democrats. The opponents of organized labor are allowed to paint it as a partisan special interest group in the pocket of the Democratic Party. This has proven to be the case for far too long. The Democrats, in turn, have taken labor’s vote as a matter of course and done little to advance the political agenda of the working class. The vast majority of workers who remain outside of traditional unions see no use in joining one; management sees suppression of organization as just another cost of doing business. A return of radical unionization, exemplified by the Industrial Workers of the World call to organize the entire working class into One Big Union to abolish the wage system, would do much to stop the pitting of worker against worker, allowing for people over profit, cooperation over competition. The Preamble to the IWW Constitution still reflects this.
Organized labor can, and should be, a force to reckon with. It cannot do so, however, as long as it continues to blindly support a party that has forgotten the farmers, laborers, labor unions, and minorities that have made up its traditional base. Regardless of whether organized labor feels it must undergo a transitional program from capitalism to participatory economics, it must divorce itself from unwavering allegiance to the Democrats. Labor would be more effective supporting individual politicians who promote a working class agenda, whether they are Green Party, Libertarians, Social Democrats, or independents.
“The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of the working people and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things of life. Between these two classes a struggle must go on until the workers of the world organize as a class, take possession of the means of production, abolish the wage system, and live in harmony with the Earth.”
Civil libertarian organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union, the First Amendment Coalition, and the Center for Constitutional Rights have a long history of defending the inalienable rights retained by—as opposed to privileges granted to—citizens of the United States under the Constitution. As nonpartisan organizations, they have the ability to denounce legislators of any camp for transgressions of civil liberties. It is expected that they will use test cases to undermine the illegal laws being propagated by the political elite; as part of a diversity of tactic, these kinds of cases should be applauded, even as the larger movement forges ahead with broader goals. Embracing different tactics allows radical proponents of liberty and democracy to work with mainstream advocacy groups to advance our larger strategy in accordance with our common goals. The Saint Paul Principles provide a framework for that cooperation without sectarian breakdown.
The fiscal conservatives, moderates, and libertarians who make up the Republican base have seen the party of Lincoln hijacked by social conservatives like Leo Strauss, who said the “crisis of our time” was a “permissive egalitarianism” embedded in liberal democracy and neoconservatives like Jeanne Kirkpatrick, who prompted Reagan to give financial and material support to pro-Western authoritarian regimes.
Libertarians and fiscal conservatives have little in common with the state-enforced conservative social policies pushed by the religious right wing that seems to dominate the Republican Party. The interventionist war machine driven by neoconservative thought—to say nothing of the government intrusion into privacy via the Patriot Act, REAL ID, and NSA domestic spying program—runs contrary to principles of state sovereignty and self-determination held in high esteem by traditional conservatism, principles that Thomas Paine instilled into American body politic under the phrase “Common Sense.”
Communist Karl Marx borrowed the term “proletariat” as a description for the working class from the Ancient Roman Empire, whose rulers believed the only contribution the masses could make to Roman society was the ability to raise children to colonize new territories. The crypto-fascist authority today, encompassing both the Democratic and Republican Parties, continues this view; to capitalists, workers are not individuals but only the rungs of a ladder designed to lift them higher on the pyramid scheme of capitalist economics.
As encroachments on personal privacy and individual liberties continue, both the Democratic and Republican parties have forgotten their base: the working and middle class.
H.R. 347/S1794, rightly nicknamed the “First Amendment Rights Eradication Act,” has been passed by both chambers of Congress. It now sits on President Obama’s desk, awaiting his signature. If his capitulation to the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012—and its promise of indefinite detention—is any indication of his future action, he’ll sign it.
The time has come for the American middle and working classes to join their comrades in the campaign for liberty currently sweeping the globe.
This issue transcends traditional party politics. Political opposition will be outlawed immediately. Pro-life rallies will effectively end with ban on public demonstrations, as well as pro-choice demonstrations. The government will not hesitate to prohibit any and all organizations it defines as dissenting or subversive, including alternative parties, labor unions, veterans’ associations, and others. Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party can both kiss the promise of reforming government goodbye.
Congress has already declared America a battleground. They now want to silence us. It is time to bring the battle home.
Wednesday, April 4, 2012
Monday, March 19, 2012
Police State Blues
Monday, March 19, 2012 by Common Dreams
"Our rights do not end where the caprice of authoritarian bullies begins."
"Our rights do not end where the caprice of authoritarian bullies begins."
by Phil Rockstroh
At mid-evening, on Saturday, March 17, upon the six-month anniversary of the occupation of Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan, the NYPD -- because the department suffered no ill consequences from their search and destroy mission launched, in the late fall of 2011, to scour Liberty Square of liberty -- initiated another brutal operation to expel OWS activists from the premises, and to discourage, in general, those who might venture attempts to exercise their right to free assembly and free expression across the whole of the city of New York as winter proceeds into spring.
In a police state, unjust actions by authoritarian bullies, operating at the behest of privileged bullies in power, act by caprice and will escalate their level of brutality by the degree that the public at large reacts with support and indifference to the state's assaults on civil liberties and common decency.
Bear in mind, police agencies, devoid of oversight, comprise a legal form of gang activity; therefore, when one is witness to their acts of brutality, and, as outraged protesters are apt to do, shower their ranks with taunts of "shame, shame, shame" -- rather than experiencing feelings of remorse, brutish individual officers regard the scolding as a badge of honor.
Why? Because they view OWS as a rival gang -- not a force of democratic passion and outrage.
The defining creed of a violent gang, such as the NYPD, is to ensure their own survival by the modus operandi of violently crushing perceived rivals.
If rank and file police officers ever surrender their arms and change sides, this event will have come to pass because the institutions of power that direct their actions (and that issue their paychecks) will begin to collapse. Anything you can do to challenge and to help facilitate the end of the reign of exploitation and terror that is the neoliberal international superstate will, in turn, prove helpful in achieving the goal of ceasing the brutality inherent to the U.S. police state.
But, and I hope I'm wrong in positing this dismal augury, there will be much blood lacquering the pavements of the city of New York, and scores of other municipalities, worldwide, before that day arrives.
Although not widely acknowledged by mainstream opinion shapers, the struggle to retake the public commons by activists facing hostile local municipalities and their police enforcers and the imperative to reduce mankind's destruction of the ecological balance of the earth are related issues, of which the implications extend far beyond the political realm. The unfolding of these matters determines how you spend your days…from when you rise in the morning, to what you eat, to which locations you proceed during the day, to when and how you sleep at night…right down to the state of your health and the condition of your soul.
To those who proffer the excuse, "in my heart, I know you're right, but I have to be a realist about this": you're letting a crackpot realist mindset falsely frame the matter. Given that the heart is more than a pump -- it is the alpha and omega point of the soul of the world i.e., animus mundi, perhaps, you are confused regarding the nature of reality.
Moreover, you sound like George F. Babbitt…giving a book report on Hannah Arrent's conception of the banality of evil from Eichmann in Jerusalem, and you have missed the point. Apropos: Evil is maintained by mundane means, by people who see themselves as normal and who live ordinary lives.
And it seems to be what you're actually trying to express is closer to the following: I feel overwhelmed and powerless about the situation. Addressing it makes me feel uncomfortable, so I'll just accept the matter, maybe grouse about it a bit, but I'll continue to accept the small comforts the system proffers and I'll hope that will serve as balm to my empty, troubled soul.
The Cartesian fallacy that one's joy and suffering are almost exclusively a private matter -- the idea that the process all takes place in one's own mind and body and has no connection to any larger order -- has diminished perception and has stressed the environment to the tipping point. This is the dismal litany of Industrial/Commercial Age false consciousness: the paramount function of the intellect is to reduce the vast and proliferate criteria of life down to the "bottom line."
But anyone who posits the concept that life can and should be reduced to only self-serving, mechanistically controllable verities has much to learn from 20th century death camps, and, moreover, should take note of our present day analogs of Auschwitz: the so-called industrial "farming industry"; the practices of deep sea "fishing" by trawlers (i.e, strip-mining the world's oceans); deep water oil-drilling practices; and fracking. The list goes on and on, and finds an analog in the mechanistic suppression of dissent by militarized police forces.
Yet the agenda of the corporate/police/commercial/militarist state is to preserve and expand these practices, the very practices that keep its populace alienated, locked into benumbing, destructive habits that leave individuals hollow, anomie-prone, and addicted to distraction. Withal, the acceptance of a way of life that is dependent on a habitual disengagement from the very acts that maintain one's culture necessitates the construction of an imprisoning wall of psychological separation between oneself and reality.
To awaken to reality is to suffer…allowing oneself to experience feelings of despair, powerlessness, and rage. Speaking the truth sets you free, because emotion engenders motion.
If witnessing peaceful protesters being beaten by police, manacled with zip cuffs (a device that by its structural makeup ensures a loss of circulation) and transported to jail on trumped-up charges, fails to get your blood up, then your absent soul can be located exchanging banalities at a mental dinner party with Adolf Eichmann.
To express indifference or to be an apologist for the quotidian evils of our time is reprehensible. Like the "good Germans" of the 1930's, you might believe your codified hatreds and commodified longings, manifested by the industrial and military power of the state, will deliver and preserve freedom…but these beliefs, maintained by systems of mechanized force, will, in time, come to debase everything you hold dear.
How can an individual gain a modicum of empathy for the plight of the planet and for those brutalized by the operatives of state oppression when he refuses to gaze upon his own degraded condition?
At this point, the awakening of your heart comes down to a cultural imperative. Even if you don't quite know where you're going at first, by moving in the direction of what your heart yearns for, you begin to reveal to yourself who you are. Thus, you wander off the banal path of empty obligation and self-serving rationalization -- then, even in moments of doubt and confusion, you can make a home in being lost.
"Show your wounds," exhorted artist Joseph Bueys. The wound becomes the womb, poets tell us.
Pain and sorrow can induce one to seek out and to join the chorus of a larger order…to give full-throated sorrow to songs emanating from the suffering earth.
You can join this chorus or elect to be self-cast as a supernumerary in a lethal farce that assigns you the dubious role of being both oppressor and oppressed.
The earth's song, at this juncture, is one of soul-rending lamentation and sacred vehemence.
This song needs you to lend your voice.
And I submit this lyric as the song's refrain, a riff of the blues inspired by the less than inspired acts of our men and woman uniformed in blue: "Our rights do not end where the caprice of authoritarian bullies begins."
At mid-evening, on Saturday, March 17, upon the six-month anniversary of the occupation of Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan, the NYPD -- because the department suffered no ill consequences from their search and destroy mission launched, in the late fall of 2011, to scour Liberty Square of liberty -- initiated another brutal operation to expel OWS activists from the premises, and to discourage, in general, those who might venture attempts to exercise their right to free assembly and free expression across the whole of the city of New York as winter proceeds into spring.
In a police state, unjust actions by authoritarian bullies, operating at the behest of privileged bullies in power, act by caprice and will escalate their level of brutality by the degree that the public at large reacts with support and indifference to the state's assaults on civil liberties and common decency.
Bear in mind, police agencies, devoid of oversight, comprise a legal form of gang activity; therefore, when one is witness to their acts of brutality, and, as outraged protesters are apt to do, shower their ranks with taunts of "shame, shame, shame" -- rather than experiencing feelings of remorse, brutish individual officers regard the scolding as a badge of honor.
Why? Because they view OWS as a rival gang -- not a force of democratic passion and outrage.
The defining creed of a violent gang, such as the NYPD, is to ensure their own survival by the modus operandi of violently crushing perceived rivals.
If rank and file police officers ever surrender their arms and change sides, this event will have come to pass because the institutions of power that direct their actions (and that issue their paychecks) will begin to collapse. Anything you can do to challenge and to help facilitate the end of the reign of exploitation and terror that is the neoliberal international superstate will, in turn, prove helpful in achieving the goal of ceasing the brutality inherent to the U.S. police state.
But, and I hope I'm wrong in positing this dismal augury, there will be much blood lacquering the pavements of the city of New York, and scores of other municipalities, worldwide, before that day arrives.
At our best, as a species, we human beings use our minds and imaginations to bring less suffering to the world; at our worst, we use said attributes to rationalize causing so much of it.
Although not widely acknowledged by mainstream opinion shapers, the struggle to retake the public commons by activists facing hostile local municipalities and their police enforcers and the imperative to reduce mankind's destruction of the ecological balance of the earth are related issues, of which the implications extend far beyond the political realm. The unfolding of these matters determines how you spend your days…from when you rise in the morning, to what you eat, to which locations you proceed during the day, to when and how you sleep at night…right down to the state of your health and the condition of your soul.
To those who proffer the excuse, "in my heart, I know you're right, but I have to be a realist about this": you're letting a crackpot realist mindset falsely frame the matter. Given that the heart is more than a pump -- it is the alpha and omega point of the soul of the world i.e., animus mundi, perhaps, you are confused regarding the nature of reality.
Moreover, you sound like George F. Babbitt…giving a book report on Hannah Arrent's conception of the banality of evil from Eichmann in Jerusalem, and you have missed the point. Apropos: Evil is maintained by mundane means, by people who see themselves as normal and who live ordinary lives.
And it seems to be what you're actually trying to express is closer to the following: I feel overwhelmed and powerless about the situation. Addressing it makes me feel uncomfortable, so I'll just accept the matter, maybe grouse about it a bit, but I'll continue to accept the small comforts the system proffers and I'll hope that will serve as balm to my empty, troubled soul.
The Cartesian fallacy that one's joy and suffering are almost exclusively a private matter -- the idea that the process all takes place in one's own mind and body and has no connection to any larger order -- has diminished perception and has stressed the environment to the tipping point. This is the dismal litany of Industrial/Commercial Age false consciousness: the paramount function of the intellect is to reduce the vast and proliferate criteria of life down to the "bottom line."
But anyone who posits the concept that life can and should be reduced to only self-serving, mechanistically controllable verities has much to learn from 20th century death camps, and, moreover, should take note of our present day analogs of Auschwitz: the so-called industrial "farming industry"; the practices of deep sea "fishing" by trawlers (i.e, strip-mining the world's oceans); deep water oil-drilling practices; and fracking. The list goes on and on, and finds an analog in the mechanistic suppression of dissent by militarized police forces.
Yet the agenda of the corporate/police/commercial/militarist state is to preserve and expand these practices, the very practices that keep its populace alienated, locked into benumbing, destructive habits that leave individuals hollow, anomie-prone, and addicted to distraction. Withal, the acceptance of a way of life that is dependent on a habitual disengagement from the very acts that maintain one's culture necessitates the construction of an imprisoning wall of psychological separation between oneself and reality.
To awaken to reality is to suffer…allowing oneself to experience feelings of despair, powerlessness, and rage. Speaking the truth sets you free, because emotion engenders motion.
If witnessing peaceful protesters being beaten by police, manacled with zip cuffs (a device that by its structural makeup ensures a loss of circulation) and transported to jail on trumped-up charges, fails to get your blood up, then your absent soul can be located exchanging banalities at a mental dinner party with Adolf Eichmann.
To express indifference or to be an apologist for the quotidian evils of our time is reprehensible. Like the "good Germans" of the 1930's, you might believe your codified hatreds and commodified longings, manifested by the industrial and military power of the state, will deliver and preserve freedom…but these beliefs, maintained by systems of mechanized force, will, in time, come to debase everything you hold dear.
How can an individual gain a modicum of empathy for the plight of the planet and for those brutalized by the operatives of state oppression when he refuses to gaze upon his own degraded condition?
At this point, the awakening of your heart comes down to a cultural imperative. Even if you don't quite know where you're going at first, by moving in the direction of what your heart yearns for, you begin to reveal to yourself who you are. Thus, you wander off the banal path of empty obligation and self-serving rationalization -- then, even in moments of doubt and confusion, you can make a home in being lost.
"Show your wounds," exhorted artist Joseph Bueys. The wound becomes the womb, poets tell us.
Pain and sorrow can induce one to seek out and to join the chorus of a larger order…to give full-throated sorrow to songs emanating from the suffering earth.
You can join this chorus or elect to be self-cast as a supernumerary in a lethal farce that assigns you the dubious role of being both oppressor and oppressed.
The earth's song, at this juncture, is one of soul-rending lamentation and sacred vehemence.
This song needs you to lend your voice.
And I submit this lyric as the song's refrain, a riff of the blues inspired by the less than inspired acts of our men and woman uniformed in blue: "Our rights do not end where the caprice of authoritarian bullies begins."
Thursday, March 8, 2012
Tuesday, March 6, 2012
The More Violence, the Less Revolution
If power is to be restored to the people away from the corporate fascist oligarchs who control the US, it must be done so without any violence by the people. It worked for Ghandi, Dr. Martin Luther King, and it can work toward the overthrow of corporate fascism. Peaceful civil disobedience: it only means lying down and going limp in protest. The corporate govt has the pepper spray and the weapons and all sorts of laws recently passed to restrict our first amendment rights, but power is for the people. The people will control the govt, and corporate personhood will become just another blotch on our history. We can be the model for a democratic republic once again--especially once we get rid of all the democrats and republicans in office.--jef
Tuesday, March 6, 2012 by Waging Nonviolence
by George Lakey
In the discussion within the Occupy movement on whether violence is necessary for making change in the United States, the debate has so far conflated three of the movement’s possible goals. Are we talking about using violence to produce regime change? Or do we really mean “regime change with democratic institutions following the change”? Or is what we really mean “regime change followed by democracy in which the 1 percent lose their grip on power”?
Movements have sometimes produced regime change with no real democracy and the same 1 percent still in charge. The American Revolution did that: King George was booted out and the resulting government, to its credit highly innovative, was still not a democracy for women, the enslaved, and working class people. A couple of centuries later, the 1 percent are still running the United States. A number of other anti-colonial struggles had a similar result.
Many regimes are so oppressive that people will give their lives to change them, even without guarantees that the new regime will be a whole lot better. But as we consider what we want out of our sacrifices to the cause, we should ask: What’s the track record of movements that depend on violence to overthrow their regimes?
Political scientists (and Waging Nonviolence contributors) Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan analyzed 323 attempts at regime change between 1900 and 2006. They were curious about the comparative success of violent and nonviolent campaigns, among other things. They found that violent campaigns succeeded 26 percent of the time, and that nonviolent campaigns succeeded 53 percent of the time.
The good news is that regimes can be overthrown, even though dictators bring out the police and army to try to stay in power. The bad news is that the people didn’t always win; when they used violence they won only one time in four. They did, however, double their chances of success when they used a nonviolent strategy.
In our research for the Global Nonviolent Action Database, my students and I found a number of cases in which movements first tried violence, found it didn’t work, and then switched over to nonviolent struggle and won.
Researcher Anthony Phalen tells us, for example, that the Latvians tried guerrilla war against domination by the Soviet Union for years without success, then switched to a nonviolent strategy and succeeded.
In El Salvador, the military dictatorship of Hernandez Martinez had been in power for ten years and in 1944 was still strong enough to defeat a military revolt. Researcher Aden Tedla writes that university students then decided to try nonviolent struggle, even making a special point of the nonviolence, calling their campaign huelga de brazos caÃdos (strike with arms at your sides). The students catalyzed a massive insurgency, and won.
In the early 1970s, the United States got worried about Chile’s democratically-elected government led by left-leaning Salvador Allende. By 1973 the CIA joined the Chilean military to throw Allende out and install General Augusto Pinochet in his place. An armed struggle then developed against Pinochet’s military dictatorship, but it was expel him. ResearchersShandra Bernath-Plaistad and Max Rennebohm describe what worked: a nonviolent people’s struggle succeeded in ousting Pinochet in 1988. The movement succeeded even though Pinochet used the existence of the Chilean armed struggle as a justification to use violence against the nonviolent campaign.
It says a lot about people’s flexibility that, even after losing lives in a violent struggle for change, they can be pragmatic and switch to something that works better. There is more and more evidence that, other things being equal, nonviolent action is more powerful than violent action.
In Serbia in 2000, the young people of Otpor! overthrew dictator Milosevic nonviolently, but failed to establish a solid democracy. Egyptians are working on that same problem right now, tackling a military that seems to want to be the new Mubarak.
Perhaps this problem can be solved with violence. Maybe movements forcing regime change using violent means are only half as effective as nonviolent ones, but what if they make up for their deficiencies by increasing the likelihood that, when violent movements win, democracy more often follows the change? In fact, Chenoweth and Stephan found the opposite.
They found it much more likely that nonviolent campaigns would lead to democratic societies after the regime was forced out. They also found that those societies where movements used nonviolent action were less likely to end up in civil war.
I interviewed South Koreans about their 1986–87 nonviolent campaign to overthrow the dictatorship of Chun Doo Hwan, who was one of a series of dictators backed by the U.S. government. For the first three years of that decade, the government tried to “cleanse” the society of activists, purging or arresting thousands of professors, teachers, pastors, journalists and students. That wave of repression so aroused public hostility that Chun Doo Hwan felt forced to remove military police from campuses and pardon political prisoners.
Instead of restricting themselves to complaints that the government was making only small changes, the movement took advantage of its opportunity. Labor unions created a pro-democracy alliance and students organized themselves nationally. Action built on action, bringing in churches, farmers and civil society groups. Participation in mass rallies rose to 700,000.
The threatened government once again tried a wave of repression, including torture. When word got out that a student was tortured to death, ordinary Koreans joined the radical opposition and momentum increased. Hunger strikes followed and even more massive demonstrations. After a student hit by tear gas bomb fragments died, a million people marched—including middle-class elements who had held back before then.
People power put South Korea solidly on the road to democracy, reflected in 1997 when an opposition candidate, Kim Dae Jung, became president for the first time in Korean history.
South Korea, however, is one of the many examples of regime change in which democratic institutions replaced dictatorship but the same 1 percent continued to hold power. Decades of experiences like that in the 19th and 20th centuries, in which countries liberalized their governance under the pressure of largely nonviolent social movements while the 1 percent hung on to dominance, encouraged communist vanguards to assert that they had the solution to the problem of the super-rich.
A number of the movements that followed the Leninist path of armed struggle in the Soviet Union did indeed eliminate the power of the 1 percent in their countries. However, they didn’t establish democracy. In fact, their improved efficiency as authoritarians over the previous regimes often shrank the already-small space for individual freedom. There were sexual minorities, for example, who under the new regime looked back with nostalgia to the “good old days” of dictatorships that largely left them alone.
Actually, I can’t think of any countries where movements successfully
Bottom line: for those around the world who are committed to change and are considering violence as the way to get it, a track record is still a track record. Movements relying on violence were only half as likely as nonviolent movements to win a new regime, and even then didn’t do as well as their nonviolent cousins in establishing democracy in the new society. There’s no reason to link “violence” with that fine word “radical”—especially if by radical you mean democratic and egalitarian. Yes, violence has accomplished a lot of change in the world, but its track record is mediocre when it comes to the goals of the Occupy movement.
When he wrote The Conquest of Violence in the 1930s, Bart de Ligt didn’t have the data amassed by Chenoweth and Stephan, or the GNAD’s student researchers at Swarthmore, Georgetown and Tufts. But that Dutch revolutionary still got it right when we wrote, “The more violence, the less revolution.”
Tuesday, March 6, 2012 by Waging Nonviolence
by George Lakey
In the discussion within the Occupy movement on whether violence is necessary for making change in the United States, the debate has so far conflated three of the movement’s possible goals. Are we talking about using violence to produce regime change? Or do we really mean “regime change with democratic institutions following the change”? Or is what we really mean “regime change followed by democracy in which the 1 percent lose their grip on power”?
 |
"The Storming of the Bastille," Jean-Pierre Houël (1735-1813). |
Movements have sometimes produced regime change with no real democracy and the same 1 percent still in charge. The American Revolution did that: King George was booted out and the resulting government, to its credit highly innovative, was still not a democracy for women, the enslaved, and working class people. A couple of centuries later, the 1 percent are still running the United States. A number of other anti-colonial struggles had a similar result.
Many regimes are so oppressive that people will give their lives to change them, even without guarantees that the new regime will be a whole lot better. But as we consider what we want out of our sacrifices to the cause, we should ask: What’s the track record of movements that depend on violence to overthrow their regimes?
Political scientists (and Waging Nonviolence contributors) Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan analyzed 323 attempts at regime change between 1900 and 2006. They were curious about the comparative success of violent and nonviolent campaigns, among other things. They found that violent campaigns succeeded 26 percent of the time, and that nonviolent campaigns succeeded 53 percent of the time.
The good news is that regimes can be overthrown, even though dictators bring out the police and army to try to stay in power. The bad news is that the people didn’t always win; when they used violence they won only one time in four. They did, however, double their chances of success when they used a nonviolent strategy.
In our research for the Global Nonviolent Action Database, my students and I found a number of cases in which movements first tried violence, found it didn’t work, and then switched over to nonviolent struggle and won.
Researcher Anthony Phalen tells us, for example, that the Latvians tried guerrilla war against domination by the Soviet Union for years without success, then switched to a nonviolent strategy and succeeded.
In El Salvador, the military dictatorship of Hernandez Martinez had been in power for ten years and in 1944 was still strong enough to defeat a military revolt. Researcher Aden Tedla writes that university students then decided to try nonviolent struggle, even making a special point of the nonviolence, calling their campaign huelga de brazos caÃdos (strike with arms at your sides). The students catalyzed a massive insurgency, and won.
In the early 1970s, the United States got worried about Chile’s democratically-elected government led by left-leaning Salvador Allende. By 1973 the CIA joined the Chilean military to throw Allende out and install General Augusto Pinochet in his place. An armed struggle then developed against Pinochet’s military dictatorship, but it was expel him. ResearchersShandra Bernath-Plaistad and Max Rennebohm describe what worked: a nonviolent people’s struggle succeeded in ousting Pinochet in 1988. The movement succeeded even though Pinochet used the existence of the Chilean armed struggle as a justification to use violence against the nonviolent campaign.
It says a lot about people’s flexibility that, even after losing lives in a violent struggle for change, they can be pragmatic and switch to something that works better. There is more and more evidence that, other things being equal, nonviolent action is more powerful than violent action.
In Serbia in 2000, the young people of Otpor! overthrew dictator Milosevic nonviolently, but failed to establish a solid democracy. Egyptians are working on that same problem right now, tackling a military that seems to want to be the new Mubarak.
Perhaps this problem can be solved with violence. Maybe movements forcing regime change using violent means are only half as effective as nonviolent ones, but what if they make up for their deficiencies by increasing the likelihood that, when violent movements win, democracy more often follows the change? In fact, Chenoweth and Stephan found the opposite.
They found it much more likely that nonviolent campaigns would lead to democratic societies after the regime was forced out. They also found that those societies where movements used nonviolent action were less likely to end up in civil war.
I interviewed South Koreans about their 1986–87 nonviolent campaign to overthrow the dictatorship of Chun Doo Hwan, who was one of a series of dictators backed by the U.S. government. For the first three years of that decade, the government tried to “cleanse” the society of activists, purging or arresting thousands of professors, teachers, pastors, journalists and students. That wave of repression so aroused public hostility that Chun Doo Hwan felt forced to remove military police from campuses and pardon political prisoners.
Instead of restricting themselves to complaints that the government was making only small changes, the movement took advantage of its opportunity. Labor unions created a pro-democracy alliance and students organized themselves nationally. Action built on action, bringing in churches, farmers and civil society groups. Participation in mass rallies rose to 700,000.
The threatened government once again tried a wave of repression, including torture. When word got out that a student was tortured to death, ordinary Koreans joined the radical opposition and momentum increased. Hunger strikes followed and even more massive demonstrations. After a student hit by tear gas bomb fragments died, a million people marched—including middle-class elements who had held back before then.
People power put South Korea solidly on the road to democracy, reflected in 1997 when an opposition candidate, Kim Dae Jung, became president for the first time in Korean history.
South Korea, however, is one of the many examples of regime change in which democratic institutions replaced dictatorship but the same 1 percent continued to hold power. Decades of experiences like that in the 19th and 20th centuries, in which countries liberalized their governance under the pressure of largely nonviolent social movements while the 1 percent hung on to dominance, encouraged communist vanguards to assert that they had the solution to the problem of the super-rich.
A number of the movements that followed the Leninist path of armed struggle in the Soviet Union did indeed eliminate the power of the 1 percent in their countries. However, they didn’t establish democracy. In fact, their improved efficiency as authoritarians over the previous regimes often shrank the already-small space for individual freedom. There were sexual minorities, for example, who under the new regime looked back with nostalgia to the “good old days” of dictatorships that largely left them alone.
Actually, I can’t think of any countries where movements successfully
The only movements that established democracy and curbed the dominant power of the 1 percent were those that used nonviolent revolution to overthrow the governing power. I’ve so far written about two: Norway and Sweden. Both countries are works in progress; there are visionary Norwegians and Swedes who would like them to go farther in refining democracy and reducing the power of their economic elites, though to a U.S. activist they have already gone a long way beyond us. (Free higher education, anyone?)
- used violence to get regime change
- and established democracy afterward
- and curbed the dominant power of the 1 percent.
Bottom line: for those around the world who are committed to change and are considering violence as the way to get it, a track record is still a track record. Movements relying on violence were only half as likely as nonviolent movements to win a new regime, and even then didn’t do as well as their nonviolent cousins in establishing democracy in the new society. There’s no reason to link “violence” with that fine word “radical”—especially if by radical you mean democratic and egalitarian. Yes, violence has accomplished a lot of change in the world, but its track record is mediocre when it comes to the goals of the Occupy movement.
When he wrote The Conquest of Violence in the 1930s, Bart de Ligt didn’t have the data amassed by Chenoweth and Stephan, or the GNAD’s student researchers at Swarthmore, Georgetown and Tufts. But that Dutch revolutionary still got it right when we wrote, “The more violence, the less revolution.”
Tuesday, February 21, 2012
Occupy Movement Targets Corporate Interest Group "ALEC"
Tuesday, February 21, 2012 by Common Dreams
With Ties to Legislators, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) will face ire of the 99%
A coalition of Occupy groups, led by Occupy Portland in Oregon, is calling on people "to target corporations that are part of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC)" with direct actions and public events later this month. The Occupy groups, organizing under the banner Shut Down the Corporations, sees ALEC as the "prime example of the way corporations buy off legislators and craft legislation that serves the interests of corporations and not people." ALEC was instrumental in creating the anti-labor legislation in Wisconsin last year and the racist bill SB 1070 in Arizona, among many other measures pushed or passed in state houses across the country. ALEC uses its large coffers and wealthy membership to spread free-market, corporate-friendly laws around the country.
The day of action is slated for Leap Day, February 29th.
According to their call to action:
What is ALEC?
ALEC describes itself as a “unique,” “unparalleled” and “unmatched” organization. The Center for Media and Democracy (CMD), which studies and tracks the group at its ALEC Exposed website, agrees. They say that ALEC should not be considered a lobbyist group or a corporate front group, but something altogether worse. "It is as if a state legislature had been reconstituted," ALEC Exposed explains on their website, "yet corporations had pushed the people out the door."
Through ALEC, behind closed doors, corporations hand state legislators the changes to the law they desire that directly benefit their bottom line. Along with legislators, corporations have membership in ALEC. Corporations sit on all nine ALEC task forces and vote with legislators to approve “model” bills. They have their own corporate governing board which meets jointly with the legislative board. (ALEC says that corporations do not vote on the board.) Corporations fund almost all of ALEC's operations. Participating legislators, overwhelmingly conservative Republicans, then bring those proposals home and introduce them in statehouses across the land as their own brilliant ideas and important public policy innovations—without disclosing that corporations crafted and voted on the bills. ALEC boasts that it has over 1,000 of these bills introduced by legislative members every year, with one in every five of them enacted into law.
You can search for and review ALEC-influenced bills in your state by using the ALEC Exposed wiki here.
According to a report in The Guardian:
With Ties to Legislators, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) will face ire of the 99%
A coalition of Occupy groups, led by Occupy Portland in Oregon, is calling on people "to target corporations that are part of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC)" with direct actions and public events later this month. The Occupy groups, organizing under the banner Shut Down the Corporations, sees ALEC as the "prime example of the way corporations buy off legislators and craft legislation that serves the interests of corporations and not people." ALEC was instrumental in creating the anti-labor legislation in Wisconsin last year and the racist bill SB 1070 in Arizona, among many other measures pushed or passed in state houses across the country. ALEC uses its large coffers and wealthy membership to spread free-market, corporate-friendly laws around the country.
The day of action is slated for Leap Day, February 29th.
According to their call to action:
Occupy Portland calls for a national day of non-violent direct action to reclaim our voices and challenge our society’s obsession with profit and greed by shutting down the corporations. We are rejecting a society that does not allow us control of our future. We will reclaim our ability to shape our world in a democratic, cooperative, just and sustainable direction.
We call on the Occupy Movement and everyone seeking freedom and justice to join us in this day of action.
There has been a theft by the 1% of our democratic ability to shape and form the society in which we live and our society is steered toward the destructive pursuit of consumption, profit and greed at the expense of all else.
What is ALEC?
ALEC describes itself as a “unique,” “unparalleled” and “unmatched” organization. The Center for Media and Democracy (CMD), which studies and tracks the group at its ALEC Exposed website, agrees. They say that ALEC should not be considered a lobbyist group or a corporate front group, but something altogether worse. "It is as if a state legislature had been reconstituted," ALEC Exposed explains on their website, "yet corporations had pushed the people out the door."
Through ALEC, behind closed doors, corporations hand state legislators the changes to the law they desire that directly benefit their bottom line. Along with legislators, corporations have membership in ALEC. Corporations sit on all nine ALEC task forces and vote with legislators to approve “model” bills. They have their own corporate governing board which meets jointly with the legislative board. (ALEC says that corporations do not vote on the board.) Corporations fund almost all of ALEC's operations. Participating legislators, overwhelmingly conservative Republicans, then bring those proposals home and introduce them in statehouses across the land as their own brilliant ideas and important public policy innovations—without disclosing that corporations crafted and voted on the bills. ALEC boasts that it has over 1,000 of these bills introduced by legislative members every year, with one in every five of them enacted into law.
You can search for and review ALEC-influenced bills in your state by using the ALEC Exposed wiki here.
According to a report in The Guardian:
Alec was founded in September 1973 as a "nonpartisan membership association for conservative state lawmakers". The organisation, which counts the conservative billionaire Koch brothers among its financial backers, has a membership some of the largest companies in America.
One of the better known examples of Alec's influence can be found in Arizona's SB 1070 bill. The legislation, seen as one of the strictest anti-illegal immigrant laws in America's history and criticised by Barack Obama, was modelled on Alec's "No Sanctuary Cities for Illegal Immigrants Act", which had been approved by an Alec task force made up, in part, of prison companies that stood to benefit from the act being passed.
Democratic lawmakers in Arizona and Wisconsin are seeking to introduce the Alec Accountability Act in their states, which would require Alec to register as a lobbying organisation and subsequently disclose its financiers.
Mark Pocan, a Democratic member of the Wisconsin state assembly who is gunning for Congress in in Wisconsin's 2nd Congressional District, is behind the proposed Wisconsin legislation.
"Alec is like a giant corporate dating service [for] lonely legislators and their special interest corporate allies," Pocan told the Guardian. "Alec operates best when it operates in the shadows. Once people find out that it's really nothing but a front for corporate special interests you start to know that the ideas they put forward aren't in the public good."
According to The Guardian, the nationwide protest at the end of the month:
... is being co-ordinated by Occupy Portland, with activists across the country due to take part – including from Occupy Wall Street and Occupy Oakland. [...]
David Osborn, from Occupy Portland, said "non-violent direct action" was being encouraged, including protests, rallies and sit-ins.
"In different places it's going to look really different," he said. "In some places it's going to be more of a rally, or a protest outside a corporation that's involved with Alec, whether that's Bank of America, or Pfizer, Altria, or whatever. In other places, and certainly here in Portland, it's going to take more of the form of civil disobedience or direct action, where people will be doing a sit-in or other creative things to disrupt business as usual."
Tuesday, January 31, 2012
Thousands @OccupyOakland #J28 Protest, Police respond with Kettling & Tear Gas; 300 Arrested
January 29, 2012 - theCORPORATIONblog
By Jennifer Slattery
Violent police clashes again rocked the city of Oakland January 28th (#J28) as Occupy Oakland protestors attempted to occupy a vacant building. Their announcement, via a letter to the Mayor referring to the action as Move-In Day, declares their intent to use the building:
“As a social center, convergence center, headquarters, free kitchen, and place of housing for Occupy Oakland. Like so many other people, Occupy Oakland is homeless while buildings remain vacant and unused. For Occupy this is in large part because of yourselves, having evicted us twice from public space that was rightfully ours. For others it is because of the housing bubble, predatory lending, the perpetual crises of capitalism, and far reaching histories of imperialism and systemic violence.”
By the end of a long day of marches and failed occupation attempts, three hundred people, from a crowd that swelled at times to 2,000, were arrested. Much of the corporate media reporting on the start of the violence points the finger squarely at the protestors who are alleged to have begun the violence by pelting officers with rocks, bottles and even Improvised Explosive Devices. The claim that peaceful protestors used IEDs is on it’s face false and inflammatory, as first hand accounts and live streaming video footage of the event seems to show that protestors only threw some debris as a reaction to being pelted with explosive percussion grenades, rubber bullets, and tear gas canisters:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=sFaviIoy4rg
Via Occupy Oakland’s twitter feed:
#OccupyOakland #OO OPD claim they ordered us to disperse, after blocking us in & arresting us. Chanting "this is a hostage situation."
"For their first attempt at a kettle, the cops charged the group with police lines from the front and back. They ran towards us aggressively. Us being 1000+ peaceful marching protesters. The group was forced to move up a side street. The police moved quickly to surround the entire area; they formed a line on every street that the side street connected to. Police state status: very efficient. They kettled almost the entire protest in the park near the Fox theater. AFTERWARDS, as in after they surrounded everyone, they declared it to be an unlawful assembly BUT OFFERED NO EXIT ROUTE. Gas was used, could of been tear or smoke gas."
Similar claims that law enforcement "had to deploy gas in order to stop the crowd and people from pelting us with bottles and rocks." after the violentclearing of the original Occupy Oakland camp had to be walked back, because there was no evidence that any such violence by Occupy had occurred:
“Oakland PD's Chief of Staff, Sgt. Chris Bolton conceded that the department was unable, at this time, to substantiate claims made by Jordan that gas was deployed in order to protect law enforcement personnel from violent demonstrators, despite the Chief's unqualified claim that evening that "the deployment of gas was necessary to protect our officers and protect property around the area and to protect injuries to others as well."
Instead, Bolton softened Jordan's initial claim. The sergeant described it as "the Chief's preliminary belief.”
The claims of the Oakland PD are especially hard to swallow after internal emails show that interim police chief Johnson lied to paint Occupy Oakland as a crime problem in order to garner support for their actions:
“In the days leading up to the Nov. 2 march on the Port of Oakland, city leaders warned about the drain on police resources.
When Jordan received an update that crime was actually down 19 percent in the last week of October, he wrote an email to one of Mayor Jean Quan's advisers.
"Not sure how you want to share this good news," he wrote. "It may be counter to our statement that the Occupy movement is negatively impacting crime in Oakland."
Police and the city said Occupy has had an ongoing impact on their ability to respond to crime.
In all of the emails there was not a single one written by Quan.”
This may be the only way to correct the course of a police department that has long since gone off the rails and has not found the leadership from the Police Chief or the Mayor to make the badly needed reforms. As the San Francisco chronicle noted:
“It's a step away from surrendering responsibility for the city's police to federal management. If the city doesn't clean up its act - which doesn't look likely given all the other crises Oakland now faces - the judge made it clear that receivership will be the next step.”
I lived in Oakland during the time of the Oscar Grant murder and subsequent protests, and personally throw my support behind this action to get the department functioning for the people again. Even in basic everyday interactions, the civility required by the men and women on the force is lacking. This is creating a gap between the police and citizens that endangers all, and the department has had more than enough time to right it's own ship.
Occupiers across the country are mounting solidarity actions today (#J29) to show support for Oakland. The Rise Up Festival announced in the Move in Day letter is confirmed to still be on for today, according to Occupy Oakland’s twitter feed. The group is also asking for supporters to donate as much as they can to the Occupy Oakland bail fund.
By Jennifer Slattery
“As a social center, convergence center, headquarters, free kitchen, and place of housing for Occupy Oakland. Like so many other people, Occupy Oakland is homeless while buildings remain vacant and unused. For Occupy this is in large part because of yourselves, having evicted us twice from public space that was rightfully ours. For others it is because of the housing bubble, predatory lending, the perpetual crises of capitalism, and far reaching histories of imperialism and systemic violence.”
By the end of a long day of marches and failed occupation attempts, three hundred people, from a crowd that swelled at times to 2,000, were arrested. Much of the corporate media reporting on the start of the violence points the finger squarely at the protestors who are alleged to have begun the violence by pelting officers with rocks, bottles and even Improvised Explosive Devices. The claim that peaceful protestors used IEDs is on it’s face false and inflammatory, as first hand accounts and live streaming video footage of the event seems to show that protestors only threw some debris as a reaction to being pelted with explosive percussion grenades, rubber bullets, and tear gas canisters:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=sFaviIoy4rg
Via Occupy Oakland’s twitter feed:
#OccupyOakland #OO OPD claim they ordered us to disperse, after blocking us in & arresting us. Chanting "this is a hostage situation."
"For their first attempt at a kettle, the cops charged the group with police lines from the front and back. They ran towards us aggressively. Us being 1000+ peaceful marching protesters. The group was forced to move up a side street. The police moved quickly to surround the entire area; they formed a line on every street that the side street connected to. Police state status: very efficient. They kettled almost the entire protest in the park near the Fox theater. AFTERWARDS, as in after they surrounded everyone, they declared it to be an unlawful assembly BUT OFFERED NO EXIT ROUTE. Gas was used, could of been tear or smoke gas."
Similar claims that law enforcement "had to deploy gas in order to stop the crowd and people from pelting us with bottles and rocks." after the violentclearing of the original Occupy Oakland camp had to be walked back, because there was no evidence that any such violence by Occupy had occurred:
“Oakland PD's Chief of Staff, Sgt. Chris Bolton conceded that the department was unable, at this time, to substantiate claims made by Jordan that gas was deployed in order to protect law enforcement personnel from violent demonstrators, despite the Chief's unqualified claim that evening that "the deployment of gas was necessary to protect our officers and protect property around the area and to protect injuries to others as well."
Instead, Bolton softened Jordan's initial claim. The sergeant described it as "the Chief's preliminary belief.”
The claims of the Oakland PD are especially hard to swallow after internal emails show that interim police chief Johnson lied to paint Occupy Oakland as a crime problem in order to garner support for their actions:
“In the days leading up to the Nov. 2 march on the Port of Oakland, city leaders warned about the drain on police resources.
When Jordan received an update that crime was actually down 19 percent in the last week of October, he wrote an email to one of Mayor Jean Quan's advisers.
"Not sure how you want to share this good news," he wrote. "It may be counter to our statement that the Occupy movement is negatively impacting crime in Oakland."
Police and the city said Occupy has had an ongoing impact on their ability to respond to crime.
In all of the emails there was not a single one written by Quan.”
Indeed it seems that the Interim Police Chief is not the man to solve the problems plaguing the Oakland Police Department. The Oakland PD is now facing a Federal Receivership in March. While several cities have had to have Federal Monitors installed, this would be the first time in United States history that a department has been completely turned over to Federal control. The Federal Judge ruling in the case expressed his astonishment that the OPD is continuing using controversial and violent tactics in the face of reforms demanded almost a decade ago that still have not been implemented:
"The court remains in disbelief that Defendants have yet - nine years later - to achieve what they themselves agreed was doable in no more than five years," U.S. District Court Judge Thelton Henderson wrote.”
"The court remains in disbelief that Defendants have yet - nine years later - to achieve what they themselves agreed was doable in no more than five years," U.S. District Court Judge Thelton Henderson wrote.”
This may be the only way to correct the course of a police department that has long since gone off the rails and has not found the leadership from the Police Chief or the Mayor to make the badly needed reforms. As the San Francisco chronicle noted:
“It's a step away from surrendering responsibility for the city's police to federal management. If the city doesn't clean up its act - which doesn't look likely given all the other crises Oakland now faces - the judge made it clear that receivership will be the next step.”
I lived in Oakland during the time of the Oscar Grant murder and subsequent protests, and personally throw my support behind this action to get the department functioning for the people again. Even in basic everyday interactions, the civility required by the men and women on the force is lacking. This is creating a gap between the police and citizens that endangers all, and the department has had more than enough time to right it's own ship.
Occupiers across the country are mounting solidarity actions today (#J29) to show support for Oakland. The Rise Up Festival announced in the Move in Day letter is confirmed to still be on for today, according to Occupy Oakland’s twitter feed. The group is also asking for supporters to donate as much as they can to the Occupy Oakland bail fund.
Sunday, January 8, 2012
Police State Targeted by New Year’s Eve Demos
If mainstream media reports on a New Year’s Eve demonstration in
downtown Bloomington, Indiana are given any credibility, the only crimes
committed that evening were perpetrated by a couple protesters, and the
city’s lightweight mayor may take away Occupy Bloomington’s tents for
their indiscretions.
But mainstream media reports on social justice issues, especially on the police, have little to no credibility. By institutional design, they are propaganda for the economic elite, managed by law enforcement to shock the masses (and produce profits for media companies). The real news from Bloomington is that the “noise demo” that took place along its streets as the year turned was part of a coordinated, ongoing, global struggle against the corporate police state.
“Noise demos outside of prisons in some countries are a continuing tradition, a way of expressing solidarity for people imprisoned during the New Year, remembering those held captive by the state,” said a nationwide call for the New Year’s Eve actions posted on websites like 325.
Before the new year was 24 hours old, first-person accounts of noise demos from Sydney, Seattle, Chicago, Portland, Pittsburgh, Atlanta, New York and Baltimore, as well as Bloomington, had been posted on the Anarchist news dot org website.
The Bloomington account began, “Saturday night, around 50 people gathered at the Occupy Bloomington camp in People’s Park for a roving dance party and noise demonstration outside the Monroe County jail. The party left the park just before 11 p.m., heading west on Kirkwood Avenue toward the square.”
The mood, it said, was festive, as street dancers traded greetings of ‘Happy New Year!’ with other revelers on the sidewalks, in cars and in windows overlooking the square. Followed all the while by the police, the march arrived at the jail at around 11:30 p.m., where the dancing continued, and squad cars sealed off the streets.
“One comrade read a statement through a megaphone expressing solidarity with those people locked inside the jail and against this prison society,” the account continued. “It was inspiring to hear pounding on the windows from the inside as we cheered from the outside. Just before midnight a banner that read ‘Break Your Chains’ was dropped from the Hilton hotel across the street from the jail.”
The New Year’s Eve noise demo in Bloomington was at least the third
such action in the city since summer 2011. One was held in October, as a
court-ordered limit on the jail’s prisoner population was set to
expire. Another was held August to show solidarity with striking
prisoners in the Indiana Department of Correction. Occupy Bloomington
marches all stop at the jail.
The Monroe County Jail, renamed Monroe County Correctional Center, was opened in 1986 with a maximum prisoner capacity of 126. By September 2008, the inmate population had reached 312, Monroe County Sheriff Jim Kennedy told The Bloomington Alternative at that time for an investigative reporting series called Going to Jail.
That series ran 10 months after an inmate sued the county over the inhumane and unconstitutional conditions caused by jail overcrowding. The lawsuit, filed by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of inmate Trevor Richardson, was settled in December 2009.
The federal court order set a “cap” of 278 prisoners in the facility.
As the agreement’s Oct. 1, 2011, expiration date arrived, the group Decarcerate Monroe County issued a news release inviting the public to a parade called “Get Loud: De-Crowd!” to recognize the settlement’s expiration, jail conditions and the impact that incarceration has on everyone in the community.
“The majority of people held at the Monroe County jail pose no threat to the community,” the release said. “On the contrary, the security of those incarcerated and their families is threatened because being in jail means losing your ability to work and care for your family.”
The Decarcerate release said county judges in September had begun allowing non-violent offenders to be released from jail without bond as a step to reduce the crowding.
The Herald-Times reported on Oct. 1, 2011, that the jail population was 243, still almost twice the design capacity. The article said Kennedy had written a letter asking federal-court approval of a one-year extension to the cap. It also announced the Get Loud: DeCrowd! March.
Searches on The Herald-Times Online produced no follow-up stories on either story angle.
The Bloomington New Year’s Eve demo proceeded from the jail “toward
the newest hipster bar in town,” as tourists and revelers watched, the
Bloomington Anarchist dot org account continued.
“Upon arriving at the hipster bar, our numbers swelled to well over 100 and maybe 150 as well-groomed partiers came out to dance and be seen in the street,” the post said. “While the whole scene was being closely monitored by over a dozen cops, it looked as if they were going to let the party ride out and fizzle on its own accord. But that’s not what happened.”
The crowd dropped back to about 50 as “last call” summoned the drinkers back inside, the account said. “Somewhere in the mix a bottle was broken on the sidewalk,” after which an officer jumped out of his car and tackled a protester, “punching him in the head as he lay helplessly below the much larger cop.”
Protester efforts to retrieve the man from custody were unsuccessful, which led to verbal confrontations between police and protesters, the account said. “More cops, including university cops, BPD and Monroe County, showed up. The march turned east on Kirkwood, as 15 cops or so followed on foot, ordering people out of the street.”
Two more protesters were arrested during the demo, which ended about 1:30 a.m. Prosecutors have charged one man with two felonies for the altercation with police.
Charges against another were dropped. The third was charged with public intoxication.
Occupy Bloomington issued a statement on Jan. 3 saying the arrested men had no connection to the local group.
In August, Bloomington activists acted in solidarity with prisoners
at Indiana state prisons, where similar conditions contribute to
increased tensions, violence and rebellion, according to a post titled “Bloomington solidarity actions with prisoners in struggle” on the Rififi Bloomington website.
According to the post, Indiana state prisons were put on system-wide lockdown in July, using as a pretext “the stabbing of an Aryan Brother (a member of a prison gang that often acts in collusion with guards and administrators) in Pendleton.”
The real reason, the post says, was to prevent a “rebellion.”
At the end of July, prisoners in the Secure Housing Unit (SHU) at Indiana’s Wabash Valley Correctional Facility organized a protest against the shutdown and the inhumane conditions, which included no water for sanitation or cleansing. SHU’s are solitary-confinement prisons within prisons.
The strike caught the attention of national prison reform activists, who on Aug. 3 organized a national call-in day to support Wabash Valley prisoners, the Reififi post said. Fifteen Bloomington activists passed out fliers and covered the town in chalked messages to raise awareness of the prisoners’ protest.
In early August the SHU protest ended inconclusively. “Prisoners remain on lockdown, but the rebels win an improvement of conditions, including the restoration of water for sanitation and washing up,” the post said.
An Aug. 10 noise demo was held outside the Bloomington jail, “making a ruckus for Prisoner Justice Day,” the post said. “It’s dedicated to prisoners killed and tortured inside every prison, but especially the local jail and the Wabash Valley SHU.”
The lockdown ended in mid-August. A search for “Secure Housing Unit” on the H-T website produced no results.
But mainstream media reports on social justice issues, especially on the police, have little to no credibility. By institutional design, they are propaganda for the economic elite, managed by law enforcement to shock the masses (and produce profits for media companies). The real news from Bloomington is that the “noise demo” that took place along its streets as the year turned was part of a coordinated, ongoing, global struggle against the corporate police state.
“Noise demos outside of prisons in some countries are a continuing tradition, a way of expressing solidarity for people imprisoned during the New Year, remembering those held captive by the state,” said a nationwide call for the New Year’s Eve actions posted on websites like 325.
Before the new year was 24 hours old, first-person accounts of noise demos from Sydney, Seattle, Chicago, Portland, Pittsburgh, Atlanta, New York and Baltimore, as well as Bloomington, had been posted on the Anarchist news dot org website.
The Bloomington account began, “Saturday night, around 50 people gathered at the Occupy Bloomington camp in People’s Park for a roving dance party and noise demonstration outside the Monroe County jail. The party left the park just before 11 p.m., heading west on Kirkwood Avenue toward the square.”
The mood, it said, was festive, as street dancers traded greetings of ‘Happy New Year!’ with other revelers on the sidewalks, in cars and in windows overlooking the square. Followed all the while by the police, the march arrived at the jail at around 11:30 p.m., where the dancing continued, and squad cars sealed off the streets.
“One comrade read a statement through a megaphone expressing solidarity with those people locked inside the jail and against this prison society,” the account continued. “It was inspiring to hear pounding on the windows from the inside as we cheered from the outside. Just before midnight a banner that read ‘Break Your Chains’ was dropped from the Hilton hotel across the street from the jail.”
***
The Monroe County Jail, renamed Monroe County Correctional Center, was opened in 1986 with a maximum prisoner capacity of 126. By September 2008, the inmate population had reached 312, Monroe County Sheriff Jim Kennedy told The Bloomington Alternative at that time for an investigative reporting series called Going to Jail.
That series ran 10 months after an inmate sued the county over the inhumane and unconstitutional conditions caused by jail overcrowding. The lawsuit, filed by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of inmate Trevor Richardson, was settled in December 2009.
The federal court order set a “cap” of 278 prisoners in the facility.
As the agreement’s Oct. 1, 2011, expiration date arrived, the group Decarcerate Monroe County issued a news release inviting the public to a parade called “Get Loud: De-Crowd!” to recognize the settlement’s expiration, jail conditions and the impact that incarceration has on everyone in the community.
“The majority of people held at the Monroe County jail pose no threat to the community,” the release said. “On the contrary, the security of those incarcerated and their families is threatened because being in jail means losing your ability to work and care for your family.”
The Decarcerate release said county judges in September had begun allowing non-violent offenders to be released from jail without bond as a step to reduce the crowding.
The Herald-Times reported on Oct. 1, 2011, that the jail population was 243, still almost twice the design capacity. The article said Kennedy had written a letter asking federal-court approval of a one-year extension to the cap. It also announced the Get Loud: DeCrowd! March.
Searches on The Herald-Times Online produced no follow-up stories on either story angle.
***
“Upon arriving at the hipster bar, our numbers swelled to well over 100 and maybe 150 as well-groomed partiers came out to dance and be seen in the street,” the post said. “While the whole scene was being closely monitored by over a dozen cops, it looked as if they were going to let the party ride out and fizzle on its own accord. But that’s not what happened.”
The crowd dropped back to about 50 as “last call” summoned the drinkers back inside, the account said. “Somewhere in the mix a bottle was broken on the sidewalk,” after which an officer jumped out of his car and tackled a protester, “punching him in the head as he lay helplessly below the much larger cop.”
Protester efforts to retrieve the man from custody were unsuccessful, which led to verbal confrontations between police and protesters, the account said. “More cops, including university cops, BPD and Monroe County, showed up. The march turned east on Kirkwood, as 15 cops or so followed on foot, ordering people out of the street.”
Two more protesters were arrested during the demo, which ended about 1:30 a.m. Prosecutors have charged one man with two felonies for the altercation with police.
Charges against another were dropped. The third was charged with public intoxication.
Occupy Bloomington issued a statement on Jan. 3 saying the arrested men had no connection to the local group.
***
According to the post, Indiana state prisons were put on system-wide lockdown in July, using as a pretext “the stabbing of an Aryan Brother (a member of a prison gang that often acts in collusion with guards and administrators) in Pendleton.”
The real reason, the post says, was to prevent a “rebellion.”
At the end of July, prisoners in the Secure Housing Unit (SHU) at Indiana’s Wabash Valley Correctional Facility organized a protest against the shutdown and the inhumane conditions, which included no water for sanitation or cleansing. SHU’s are solitary-confinement prisons within prisons.
The strike caught the attention of national prison reform activists, who on Aug. 3 organized a national call-in day to support Wabash Valley prisoners, the Reififi post said. Fifteen Bloomington activists passed out fliers and covered the town in chalked messages to raise awareness of the prisoners’ protest.
In early August the SHU protest ended inconclusively. “Prisoners remain on lockdown, but the rebels win an improvement of conditions, including the restoration of water for sanitation and washing up,” the post said.
An Aug. 10 noise demo was held outside the Bloomington jail, “making a ruckus for Prisoner Justice Day,” the post said. “It’s dedicated to prisoners killed and tortured inside every prison, but especially the local jail and the Wabash Valley SHU.”
The lockdown ended in mid-August. A search for “Secure Housing Unit” on the H-T website produced no results.
Thursday, January 5, 2012
Occupy Wall Street's Livestream Operators Arrested
Wednesday, January 4, 2012 by The Atlantic Wire
Occupy Wall Street is in the middle of one of its day-long marches in New York Tuesday, protesting the National Defense Authorization Act,
but for those following along on the Global Revolution livestream (located in the column on the right--jef), the
real action is happening in the broadcast studio itself. That's because
police have apparently just raided the Brooklyn studio of Globalrevolution.tv and taken some of the project's key volunteers into custody.
The raid Tuesday follows a notice to vacate that police delivered to the Bushwick studio on Monday night. Victoria Sobel, a Global Revolution volunteer, said Vlad Teichberg and a guy named Spike, both of whom maintain the live feed aggregator, had been taken into custody by police, along with four or five others.
In Manhattan, about 100 Occupy protesters (according to Animal New York's Twitter) marched to the offices of New York senators Kirsten Gillibrand and Chuck Schumer, where they told stories and made impassioned cases for the wrongness of the NDAA. They plan a final rally at Grand Central station at 5 p.m., which should make for some fun interactions with hurried commuters. Lots of people were watching the proceedings on live feeds operated by Globalrevolution.tv, but now that site has stopped broadcasting the New York protest and is showing footage of Occupy Maui.
If you were following along earlier today, you may have been startled at about 1:45 p.m. to see the live feed cut away from the street-level action and to the face of Vlad Teichberg, one of the main organizers of Global Revolution. The new shot showed a large, graffittied space where Teichberg and a couple of colleagues were confronting a man they identified as the landlord, who had apparently broken in their door. They put the camera on him, he threatened to call the police, they said he had no right to come into the space by force, and he eventually left.
But Sobel said that was just the start of the day's conflict. Shortly after the confrontation, the police arrived. "Within the past hour, the police came in and removed people that were inside the studio," she said. "I believe the police just began knocking on the door and saying they would kick the door down and saying they would arrest people on the spot." The Global Revolution studio is now locked, Sobel said. The live feed has finished its Hawaiian broadcast and is playing a pre-recorded video. "The message is that even if they take the space, the [broadcast] will continue to be maintained," Sobel said. But right now, it seems to be out of commission.
Police and buildings department officials had served the Buswhick,
Brooklyn space with notices to vacate on Monday night, declaring
it "imminently perilous to life." The blog A Great Big City picked up this photo of the notice to vacate from the studio from the Twitter stream of Glass Bead Collective:
There is a handful of live streams that regularly cover Occupy events, such as Tim Pool's The Other 99 and Spencer Mills's OakFoSho. But Global Revolution is considered the main channel. It's an aggregator of live streams worldwide, borne of the Occupy Wall Street protest in Zuccotti Park. And this wouldn't be the first time the headquarters had moved.
In an Oct. 4 profile, The New Yorker's Andrew Marantz wrote: "For the first few weeks of the protest, Global Revolution operated from under a tarp in Zuccotti Park, using wireless hot spots. Two weeks ago, the group, frustrated with the amount of equipment they were losing to theft and rain, moved to NoHo." Global Revolution operated from a building at Lafayette and Bleeker while journalists such as New York's John Heilemann and Wired's Sean Captain profiled it. Heilemann's Nov. 27 piece described the 39-year-old Teichberg as "so jacked in to the electronic grid that he comes across like a character out of Neuromancer."
By Dec. 11,, when The New York Times wrote about the rise of live feeds in publicizing the Occupy protests, the Global Rev. headquarters had moved to Bushwick, Brooklyn.
The raid Tuesday follows a notice to vacate that police delivered to the Bushwick studio on Monday night. Victoria Sobel, a Global Revolution volunteer, said Vlad Teichberg and a guy named Spike, both of whom maintain the live feed aggregator, had been taken into custody by police, along with four or five others.
In Manhattan, about 100 Occupy protesters (according to Animal New York's Twitter) marched to the offices of New York senators Kirsten Gillibrand and Chuck Schumer, where they told stories and made impassioned cases for the wrongness of the NDAA. They plan a final rally at Grand Central station at 5 p.m., which should make for some fun interactions with hurried commuters. Lots of people were watching the proceedings on live feeds operated by Globalrevolution.tv, but now that site has stopped broadcasting the New York protest and is showing footage of Occupy Maui.
If you were following along earlier today, you may have been startled at about 1:45 p.m. to see the live feed cut away from the street-level action and to the face of Vlad Teichberg, one of the main organizers of Global Revolution. The new shot showed a large, graffittied space where Teichberg and a couple of colleagues were confronting a man they identified as the landlord, who had apparently broken in their door. They put the camera on him, he threatened to call the police, they said he had no right to come into the space by force, and he eventually left.
But Sobel said that was just the start of the day's conflict. Shortly after the confrontation, the police arrived. "Within the past hour, the police came in and removed people that were inside the studio," she said. "I believe the police just began knocking on the door and saying they would kick the door down and saying they would arrest people on the spot." The Global Revolution studio is now locked, Sobel said. The live feed has finished its Hawaiian broadcast and is playing a pre-recorded video. "The message is that even if they take the space, the [broadcast] will continue to be maintained," Sobel said. But right now, it seems to be out of commission.
Police and buildings department officials had served the Buswhick,
Brooklyn space with notices to vacate on Monday night, declaring
it "imminently perilous to life." The blog A Great Big City picked up this photo of the notice to vacate from the studio from the Twitter stream of Glass Bead Collective:There is a handful of live streams that regularly cover Occupy events, such as Tim Pool's The Other 99 and Spencer Mills's OakFoSho. But Global Revolution is considered the main channel. It's an aggregator of live streams worldwide, borne of the Occupy Wall Street protest in Zuccotti Park. And this wouldn't be the first time the headquarters had moved.
In an Oct. 4 profile, The New Yorker's Andrew Marantz wrote: "For the first few weeks of the protest, Global Revolution operated from under a tarp in Zuccotti Park, using wireless hot spots. Two weeks ago, the group, frustrated with the amount of equipment they were losing to theft and rain, moved to NoHo." Global Revolution operated from a building at Lafayette and Bleeker while journalists such as New York's John Heilemann and Wired's Sean Captain profiled it. Heilemann's Nov. 27 piece described the 39-year-old Teichberg as "so jacked in to the electronic grid that he comes across like a character out of Neuromancer."
By Dec. 11,, when The New York Times wrote about the rise of live feeds in publicizing the Occupy protests, the Global Rev. headquarters had moved to Bushwick, Brooklyn.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)