Deep Politics Forum

Occupy Oakland's port shutdown has re-energised the movement

Oakland port is thriving while the city's coffers are running dry. It is the perfect target to restore Occupy's momentum

Aaron Bady
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 13 December 2011 13.53 GMT

On my way to the Occupy the port action this morning, I stopped by Oscar Grant Plaza, the tiny patch of lawn in front of Oakland's city hall where until the city evicted them for the second time on 14 November Occupy Oakland's tents, kitchen, library, and meeting place had stood. Now it's little more than a muddy swamp. The city's sprinklers run overtime to keep the soil saturated with water, so that no more tents can be put up. It's cheaper than paying police to evict the occupiers. Easier just to leave the water on all night and turn the space into a mud pit.

Ever since Occupy Oakland was evicted, the movement has been stuck in the mud. Efforts to find a new site for the camp have been less than successful, while the general assemblies have been alternately racked by controversy and sparsely attended. Shutting down "Wall Street on the Waterfront", as they've called it, is an effort to get some of their momentum back. And so far, it looks promising: perhaps a thousand community members gathered in West Oakland at 5.30am yesterday morning, marched into the port of Oakland and prevented port workers and container trucks from entering. Busloads of riot police were on the scene, but there was no riot and they went home. By late morning the port of Oakland was officially shut down: port officials cited "health and safety risks" and sent workers home, leaving container ships loaded at the docks.

Officially, the longshoreman union is not sanctioning the blockade. But then, given how firmly its hands are tied by anti-union legislation, it would be shocking if it had. While longshoremen are under no obligation to cross a community picket line, they are forbidden by law from striking except during very specific circumstances (say, during contract negotiations). If the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) had endorsed the blockade even unofficially union officials and stewards could face jail time. And so, ironically, while occupiers across the west coast are blockading ports in the name of labour in particular Los Angeles truck drivers (non-unionised) who were fired for wearing union T-shirts and ILWU workers engaged in a labour dispute against EGT in Longview, Washington labour has little power to speak in its own name here, except by refusing to cross a community picket line.

Another aspect to the blockade is the port's relationship with the city of Oakland. While Oakland's coffers are so perpetually empty that it recently voted to close five elementary schools for annual savings of a mere $2m the terms of the port's financialisation ensure that its operating revenues do little to plug the holes in Oakland's social services budget. It's the fifth largest port in the US, with operating revenues of over $27bn a year, and as Betty Olson-Jones, president of the Oakland Education Association, pointed out, a mere 1% tax on the ports operating revenue would be enough to plug almost every shortfall the city's education budget faces. But while the port operates (rent-free) on public land, all of its operating profits go to pay back the bonds that paid for its modernisation, or are reinvested in the port itself. Capital profits, as a growing number of Oakland residents are pointing out, while schools close and workers suffer.

Today, we'll have a better sense of how widespread the west coast port blockade truly was. Oakland was only one of dozens of occupations, and ports in Washington, Oregon, Vancouver and southern California, as well as in non-west coast cities such as New York and Houston, have seen significant mobilisations. But in Oakland, at least, shutting down the port seems to have given Occupy a significant shot in the arm.

Occupy Wall Street takes on Goldman Sachs; 17 arrested

[ATTACH=CONFIG]3378[/ATTACH]

Seventeen people were arrested Monday as hundreds of Occupy Wall Street protesters marched outside Goldman Sachs to show support for similar protests around the country that have been shut down in recent days.

The group marched from Zuccotti Park - its former base camp until the NYPD dismantled it last month - to the investment bank's West Street headquarters, protesting the financial firm and its bonus-paying practices.

Demonstrators dressed in squid costumes, playing off Rolling Stone writer Matt Taibbi's description of Goldman Sachs as "a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money."

Despite the tenor of the protest, the peaceful demonstration did not interfere with commuters heading to work or people entering the West Street building.

"All they do is steal people's money," said protester and Harlem resident George Machado, 20, who has been part of Occupy Wall Street since it began in September. "And we bail them out. It's pretty disgusting."

Protesters said they were upset at the banking firm for accepting bailout money, paying employees high salaries and bonuses, betting against investments and using its riches to influence politics.

"It seems like nothing has changed, even though there's been an economic collapse," explained demonstrator Cristina Winsor, 34, an NYU graduate who lives in the Meatpacking District. "Goldman Sachs needs to be held responsible."

Amid chants of "Everybody pays their tax, everyone but Goldman Sachs," some protesters used humor to stress their point. One group handed out fliers to commuters during the demonstration reading, "We're just a bunch of privileged kids who don't know what we're talking about."

[ATTACH=CONFIG]3379[/ATTACH]Join artists, musicians, and local community members for an all-day performance event in support of Occupy Wall Street and the occupation of space and reclaiming of the commons.

Freedom of expression and the right to assemble are sacred human freedoms. Through bold, courageous actions, Occupy Wall Street has renewed a sense of hope, revived a belief in community and awakened a revolutionary spirit too long silenced. To Occupy is to embody the spirit of liberation that we wish to manifest in our society.

On Saturday, December 17th the 3 month anniversary of the birth of this movement, we will gather to celebrate Occupy Wall Street and to occupy space together.

SATURDAY, DECEMBER 17th at 12PM
DUARTE SQ. PARK, 6th AVE & CANAL,
PROTECT & CELEBRATE THE OCCUPY MOVEMENT
FOR SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC JUSTICE
OCCUPY

Occupy Wall Street "Squidding" At Goldman Sachs Right Now

" 'Blood sucking squid' Goldman Sachs holding presser with translator who speaks squid"

[ATTACH=CONFIG]3380[/ATTACH]
[Update below] Several hundred Occupy Wall Street protesters are currently posted outside Goldman Sachs' headquarters "squidding." The action, not to be confused with "tenting," refers to a 2010 Rolling Stone piece by Matt Taibbi in which the journalist calls the Goldman, "a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money." The demonstration is also targeted at EGT, who along with Goldman is accused of "committing egregious tax fraud at West Coast shipping ports."

Accordingly, there are protesters outside the Port of Oakland, and though some are claiming they have shut down the port, that can't be confirmed. However, here in New York we're promised "an exciting theatrical finale" incorporating Taibbi's description. Is Lloyd Blankfein about to dust off his community theater chops?

121211ows5.jpg
Screenshot of livestream inside NYPD van[ATTACH=CONFIG]3381[/ATTACH]
[UPDATE / 12:00 p.m.] Protesters entered the atrium of the World Financial Center, a little more than a block away from Goldman's 200 West Street building, and were arrested after police instructed them to leave. A NYPD spokesperson could not confirm the number of arrests yet or the charges, just that arrests have in fact been made. One tweeter for the protesters puts the number at 68, and the person manning the Twitter account for #OccupyWallStNYC has been arrested, along with a livestreamer.

[UPDATE / 2:10 p.m.] The NYPD confirms that there were 17 total arrests inside the World Financial Center, and all were charged with criminal trespass and disorderly conduct. City Room was there, and noted that the property's owner is Brookfield Properties. Bill Dobbs, an Occupy Wall Street organizer, told the paper, "We thought we would come over and give Brookfield a direct message."

Port drivers have this to say about Occupy the Ports
In NY, an Occupy the Ports news conference was held with a translator who speaks Squid.
[ATTACH=CONFIG]3382[/ATTACH]
Today the Occupy movement is trying to shut down West Coast ports to show how a Goldman Sachs company exploits port workers and destroys the environment. Goldman Sachs, aka "the great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity," owns a stake in the largest cargo terminal operator in the U.S.

According to the twittersphere, the ports of Oakland, Long Beach and Portland are at a standstill. Neither the Teamsters nor the longshoremen's unions officially support the direct action. Four port drivers, in an open letter, explained how they feel about the shutdown:

It may be tempting for media to ask questions about whether we support a shutdown, but there are no easy answers. Instead, we ask you, are you willing to listen and learn why a one-word response is impossible?
...
Poverty and pollution are like a plague at the ports. ...the market is run by con artists. The companies we work for call us independent contractors, as if we were our own bosses, but they boss us around. ... We cannot negotiate our rates. (Usually we are not allowed to even see them.) We are paid by the load, not by the hour. So when we sit in those long lines at the terminals, or if we are stuck in traffic, we become volunteers who basically donate our time to the trucking and shipping companies. That's the nice way to put it. We have all heard the words "modern-day slaves" at the lunch stops.

There are no restrooms for drivers. We keep empty bottles in our cabs. Plastic bags too. We feel like dogs. An Oakland driver was recently banned from the terminal because he was spied relieving himself behind a container. Neither the port, nor the terminal operators or anyone in the industry thinks it is their responsibility to provide humane and hygienic facilities for us. It is absolutely horrible for drivers who are women, who risk infection when they try to hold it until they can find a place to go.

The companies demand we cut corners to compete. It makes our roads less safe. When we try to blow the whistle about skipped inspections, faulty equipment, or falsified logs, then we are "starved out." That means we are either fired outright, or more likely, we never get dispatched to haul a load again.

Even the few of us who are hired as legitimate employees are routinely denied our legal rights under this system. Just ask our co-workers who ... were axed after wearing Teamster T-shirts to work. They were protesting the lack of access to clean, indoor restrooms with running water.

...The brothers and sisters of the Teamsters have our backs. They help us make our voices heard. But we need your help too so we can achieve the day where we raise our fists and together declare: "No one could stop us from forming a union."

In solidarity,

Leonardo Mejia
SSA Marine/Shippers Transport Express
Port of Long Beach, 10-year driver

Yemane Berhane
Ports of Seattle & Tacoma
6-year port driver

Xiomara Perez
Toll Group
Port of Los Angeles, 8-year driver

Abdul Khan
Port of Oakland
7-year port driver
teamsternation.blogspot.com/

Occupy Wall Street Stirs Up Radical Ideas in Indian Country
By Dina Gilio-Whitaker December 13, 2011

The Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement may be the most significant social movement in the U.S. since the preIraq War protests in 2002, which saw tens of thousands of people take to the streets in some cities. But OWS has more in common with the activism of the civil rights era than the antiwar protests because it exposes the imbalances of American society, and while Native people are acutely aware of those imbalances, many of them are questioning the terms of the OWS debatethey wonder, for example, what it really means to "occupy" Wall Street, or any place else in America for that matter?

As many Native bloggers and activists have pointed out, Wall Street is already occupiedit was (and is) the territory of the Lenape and other First Nations. That's why some Native activists see decolonization as a more appropriate framework for any discussion of the current economic crisis. This has been expressed in many ways throughout Indian country. In Albuquerque, the OWS movement based on the campus of the University of New Mexico that had been calling itself "Occupy Burque" voted to adopt a new name: (Un)Occupy Albuquerque, linking corporate greed to the theft of Native land.

In early October, the Albuquerque (un)occupation movement enjoyed vigorous participation by the community, fueled in large part by energetic students skilled in the art of street activism. A blogger on the website DailyKos.com identified only as "evergreen2" noted that New Mexico, which is one of the most diverse states in the nation and is one of only four U.S. states with a majority-minority populationthat is, less than 50 percent whitehas a "very strong and vocal indigenous population" for whom the term occupy is problematic: "For New Mexico's indigenous people, Occupy means 500 years of forced occupation of their lands, resources, cultures, power and voices by the imperial powers of both Spain and the United States. A big chunk of the 99 percent has been served pretty well by that arrangement. A smaller chunk hasn't."

The message is clear: While the OWS movement decries the corporate state which for decades has politically and economically disenfranchised the bottom 99 percent, there are some stunning differences among those 99-percenters. Alyosha Goldstein, an associate professor of American Studies at the University of New Mexico, argues in a recent article published on Counterpunch.org that the OWS movement would do well to
LO RES FEA Photo UnOccupy HI RES IndigenousPPlsDay 2011 270x350 Occupy Wall Street Stirs Up Radical Ideas in Indian Country

Indigenous People's Resistance Day 2011

remember the messages of the 1968 Poor People's Campaignthat poverty and inequality were directly related to conditions of colonialism, racism and militarism. The coalitions that formed within a diverse spectrum of the poor and people of color coalesced during a six-week encampment in Washington, D.C. that became known as Resurrection City. Goldstein writes that "the disparate circumstances that motivated people to participate in the campaign produced multiple perspectives that could not be adequately expressed in a single set of demandssomething that perhaps The New York Times today would deride as a lack of clear messaging.' But the form of the campaign itselfwith its multiple contingents and numerous demandsunderscored the irreducibility of its parts to a unified whole."

The legacies of slavery, war and international trade agreements that favor corporations over people reverberates today in the widespread social displacement and poverty for African Americans, Mexican Americans and the ever-growing numbers of other ethnic minority populations. For them, the American Dream has turned out to be more mythology than reality. And the same is true for American Indians, and has been for more than 500 years now. Any American Dreamreal or imaginedbuilt on Indian lands obtained through violence is a constant reminder of the historical reality of colonialism and, from an indigenous perspective, shifts the terms of the OWS debate.

Put another way, perhaps OWS isn't radical enough. Journalist and best-selling author Christopher Hedges, for example, believes that liberals who once stood for values like civil rights and equality for all have been co-opted by the corporate state "by having refused to question the utopian promises of unfettered capitalism and globalization and by condemning those who did."

Hedges argued in a column on TruthOut.com that "hope in this age of bankrupt capitalism comes with the return of the language of class conflict and rebellion, language that has been purged from the lexicon of the liberal class, language that defines this new movement. This does not mean we have to agree with Karl Marx, who advocated violence and whose worship of the state as a utopian mechanism led to another form of enslavement of the working class, but we have to learn again to speak in the vocabulary Marx employed."

Invoking the M word is enough to send most liberals scurrying, but for others it heralds a welcome return to the radical politics of the civil rights era. For Indian country (and arguably all Indigenous Peoples) Marxism can send a mixed and confusing message because of varying interpretations of Marx's writings. His early work is often criticized as being Eurocentric and espousing a view of the inevitability of the development of the nationalist state, which assumes the necessary (if unfortunate) subjugation of Indigenous Peoples. However, his later work, after he had done an in-depth study of Haudenosaunee societies, reflects his admiration for American Indian cultures and their superiority to the industrialized West. For Marx, capitalism's biggest threat was its obsession with turning land into private property, a conversion the West accelerated by dispossessing Indians of their lands. Since colonialism paved the way for capitalism to flourish in the New World, a Marxist critique of capitalism can be instructive for Native communities. Pointing out that colonialism made possible the institutions of today's corrupt capitalist system naturally leads to a talk of decolonization. In the Bay Area, Native activists and intellectuals have seized upon this as part of their campaign to Decolonize Oakland.

But decolonization is not part of the OWS movement, which is why Native people must demand that they are included in this public dialogue now swirling around OWS. Decolonization is inevitably connected with capitalist exploitation, especially when Native lands are at stake. The Keystone XL Pipeline is a recent example of Indigenous Peoples alerting the public at large to problems created by capitalism in the context of colonial domination, and in a way that was significant for everyone concerned. In early November, people in Vancouver, British Columbia, led by First Nations people, marched in a protest against the Kerr-Sulphurets-Mitchell mine on the Unuk River in Canada. One banner read defend the landfrack capitalism, a reference to the environmental risks posed by the mining practice of fracking. Also in November, a summit of the Asian-Pacific Economic Cooperation in Hawaii sparked large protests and counter-summit meetings held by Native Hawaiian intellectuals and academics to address the abuses of transnational trade agreements in Pacific Rim and Asian nations and their impacts on indigenous populations. Many Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiians) raised the issue of U.S.'s illegal annexation of the Hawaiian Islands and demanded that lands be given back.

While it's unlikely that Hawaii will be returned to the Kanaka Maoli and the Kingdom of Hawaii restored anytime soon, such demands from Indigenous Peoples demonstrate their tenacity and commitment to justice in a capitalist world build on colonial exploitation. If OWS aspires to bring on truly radical change, it should take a cue from Indigenous Peoples and rethink the idea of occupation altogether.

Read more:http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.co...ntry-67100 http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.co...z1gR0abdKc

Bankers Are the Dictators of the West

By Robert Fisk, The Independent UK

12 December 11

riting from the very region that produces more clichés per square foot than any other "story" - the Middle East - I should perhaps pause before I say I have never read so much garbage, so much utter drivel, as I have about the world financial crisis.

But I will not hold my fire. It seems to me that the reporting of the collapse of capitalism has reached a new low which even the Middle East cannot surpass for sheer unadulterated obedience to the very institutions and Harvard "experts" who have helped to bring about the whole criminal disaster.

Let's kick off with the "Arab Spring" - in itself a grotesque verbal distortion of the great Arab/Muslim awakening which is shaking the Middle East - and the trashy parallels with the social protests in Western capitals. We've been deluged with reports of how the poor or the disadvantaged in the West have "taken a leaf" out of the "Arab spring" book, how demonstrators in America, Canada, Britain, Spain and Greece have been "inspired" by the huge demonstrations that brought down the regimes in Egypt, Tunisia and - up to a point - Libya. But this is nonsense.

The real comparison, needless to say, has been dodged by Western reporters, so keen to extol the anti-dictator rebellions of the Arabs, so anxious to ignore protests against "democratic" Western governments, so desperate to disparage these demonstrations, to suggest that they are merely picking up on the latest fad in the Arab world. The truth is somewhat different. What drove the Arabs in their tens of thousands and then their millions on to the streets of Middle East capitals was a demand for dignity and a refusal to accept that the local family-ruled dictators actually owned their countries. The Mubaraks and the Ben Alis and the Gaddafis and the kings and emirs of the Gulf (and Jordan) and the Assads all believed that they had property rights to their entire nations. Egypt belonged to Mubarak Inc, Tunisia to Ben Ali Inc (and the Traboulsi family), Libya to Gaddafi Inc. And so on. The Arab martyrs against dictatorship died to prove that their countries belonged to their own people.

And that is the true parallel in the West. The protest movements are indeed against Big Business - a perfectly justified cause - and against "governments". What they have really divined, however, albeit a bit late in the day, is that they have for decades bought into a fraudulent democracy: they dutifully vote for political parties - which then hand their democratic mandate and people's power to the banks and the derivative traders and the rating agencies, all three backed up by the slovenly and dishonest coterie of "experts" from America's top universities and "think tanks", who maintain the fiction that this is a crisis of globalisation rather than a massive financial con trick foisted on the voters.

The banks and the rating agencies have become the dictators of the West. Like the Mubaraks and Ben Alis, the banks believed - and still believe - they are owners of their countries. The elections which give them power have - through the gutlessness and collusion of governments - become as false as the polls to which the Arabs were forced to troop decade after decade to anoint their own national property owners. Goldman Sachs and the Royal Bank of Scotland became the Mubaraks and Ben Alis of the US and the UK, each gobbling up the people's wealth in bogus rewards and bonuses for their vicious bosses on a scale infinitely more rapacious than their greedy Arab dictator-brothers could imagine.

I didn't need Charles Ferguson's Inside Job on BBC2 this week - though it helped - to teach me that the ratings agencies and the US banks are interchangeable, that their personnel move seamlessly between agency, bank and US government. The ratings lads (almost always lads, of course) who AAA-rated sub-prime loans and derivatives in America are now - via their poisonous influence on the markets - clawing down the people of Europe by threatening to lower or withdraw the very same ratings from European nations which they lavished upon criminals before the financial crash in the US. I believe that understatement tends to win arguments. But, forgive me, who are these creatures whose ratings agencies now put more fear into the French than Rommel did in 1940?

Why don't my journalist mates in Wall Street tell me? How come the BBC and CNN and - oh, dear, even al-Jazeera - treat these criminal communities as unquestionable institutions of power? Why no investigations - Inside Job started along the path - into these scandalous double-dealers? It reminds me so much of the equally craven way that so many American reporters cover the Middle East, eerily avoiding any direct criticism of Israel, abetted by an army of pro-Likud lobbyists to explain to viewers why American "peacemaking" in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict can be trusted, why the good guys are "moderates", the bad guys "terrorists".

The Arabs have at least begun to shrug off this nonsense. But when the Wall Street protesters do the same, they become "anarchists", the social "terrorists" of American streets who dare to demand that the Bernankes and Geithners should face the same kind of trial as Hosni Mubarak. We in the West - our governments - have created our dictators. But, unlike the Arabs, we can't touch them.

The Irish Taoiseach, Enda Kenny, solemnly informed his people this week that they were not responsible for the crisis in which they found themselves. They already knew that, of course. What he did not tell them was who was to blame. Isn't it time he and his fellow EU prime ministers did tell us? And our reporters, too?

A Federal Judge in Colombia, South Carolina ruled that Occupy's tents on the State House lawn were integral to their free speech and First Amendment Rights - and thus the State's attempt to have them removed would be denied. The State is now going to pass various laws about use of the lawn around the State House no doubt...and it will soon be back in the same Court...but still for now a VICTORY. Judge understood that a 'similar' protest without the tents was not the same and that they were not camping, but petitioning the Government with their grievances as specified as a Constitutional Right. :dancingman:

This story was written by Jason Leopold and originally published on Truthout.
The photograph on the cover of Andrew Kolin's book is all too familiar. [ATTACH=CONFIG]3384[/ATTACH]
Police officers dressed in riot gear, gripping batons, square off against protesters in what appears to be a tense situation that is on the brink of turning violent. Although the photograph was shot during a protest on the streets of Pittsburgh 2009, it's an image that is now seared into the public's consciousness following the brutal crackdowns by local law enforcement on the Occupy movement in Oakland and New York City last month.
Important questions have been raised about what role, if any, the federal government has played in dismantling the Occupy encampments around the country and what the protesters and civil liberties groups say is ultimately an attempt to stifle dissent.
While we wait for those answers, Kolin, a political science professor at Hilbert College in Buffalo, New York, has done a masterful job of tracing the origins of the "political repression of mass-based movements" and the rise of the "police state" in his exhaustively researched book, "State Power and Democracy: Before and During The Presidency of George W. Bush." (Click here to read an excerpt.)
In an interview with Truthout, Kolin said, all police states, "and Germany in the [1930s] is the classic example," develop by "crushing democracy."
The goal of a police state, Kolin said, is to "modernize state functions and concentrate control over society through the creation of specialized departments."
It was Watergate, Kolin said, that became a "dress rehearsal" for the police state under which US citizens currently live.
"There was cause for optimism with the Church Committee hearings exposing the criminality of the Nixon administration," Kolin said. "But again, as I discuss in my book, the reform that came out of the Church Committee that actually made a police state more possible was the creation of the secret [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance] court, which for the first time, made government surveillance legal. Then, president after president sought to reassert their power post-Watergate in domestic and foreign policy."
In the introduction to "State Power," Kolin explains how the national security policies implemented by Bush and embraced by Obama, such as the Patriot Act, which authorized the warrantless wiretapping of US citizens, were the culmination of extraordinary tension between state power and democracy dating back to the founding of the Republic.
The expansion of state power over the course of US history came at the expense of democracy. As state power grew, there developed a disconnect between the theory and practice of democracy in the United States. Ever-greater state power meant it became more and more absolute. This resulted in a government that directed its energies and resources toward silencing those who dared question the state's authority. Such questioning of state power had emanated as a response to mass-based political movements striving to further democracy with an increase in freedom, especially for the downtrodden. This put mass movements in direct confrontation with the elite politics of policy makers. So, over time, as the US government continued on its course of seeking to increase state power by extending ever-greater control over people and territory, it also meant it worked toward a goal to diminish mass-based political movements.
This is an important history lesson, especially for the generation who became politically aware during Bush's presidency and view the crackdown on the Occupy protests as somewhat unprecedented.
Kolin argues that the roots of such "political repression" can be traced back to the end of the Revolutionary War, beginning with "the conquest of North America and by the start of the twentieth century," when the US government began to implement policies "intended to eliminate democracy inside and outside the United States."
"It is no coincidence that as the state enacted measures to crush democracy, there appeared federal agencies with an antidemocractic mission…," Kolin writes. "Nonetheless, political repression ebbed and flowed, often determined by historical factors and the ability of progressive movements to affect social change during periods of unrest."
Kolin said the leaderless Occupy movement, like political uprisings in the US that preceded it, has a simple goal: "the excluded seeking to be included, which is the one thing standing in the way of mass democracy."
"It's eerily disturbing how history is once again repeating itself," Kolin said, as he watches law enforcement, which he noted is beginning to look increasingly "like a civilian branch of the military," and local government officials are "trampling upon the rights of citizens and doing so in ways that are becoming more violent," in order to "repress dissent."
A report published earlier this week by Business Insider may help explain why local police forces are beginning to appear more and more militarized.
Credit a "little-known endeavor called the 1033 Program that gave more than $500 million of military gear to U.S. police forces in 2011 alone," Business Insider reported.
1033 was passed by Congress in 1997 to help law-enforcement fight terrorism and drugs, but despite a 40-year low in violent crime, police are snapping up hardware like never before. While this year's staggering take topped the charts, next year's orders are up 400 percent over the same period.
This upswing coincides with an increasingly military-like style of law enforcement most recently seen in the Occupy Wall Street crackdowns.
One member of Congress, however, is speaking up about police tactics used against protesters. On Tuesday, Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-New York), the ranking member on the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, sent a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder urging him to launch a full-scale investigation "into law enforcement activities surrounding the Occupy Wall Street protests and similar events in other cities, to determine whether the unlawful use of force, or the unlawful targeting of individuals [via surveillance] based on their participation in constitutionally protected activities, occurred."
Still, Kolin is highly critical of the Obama administration for remaining completely silent as disturbing images of peaceful protesters, such as the University of California, Davis, students who were pepper sprayed by campus police as they sat with their arms linked, flashed across television screens and went viral on the Internet.
"We don't want a government that is representative of the one percent," Kolin said. "But the silence by this administration speaks volumes and indicates, to me, that this is a movement the government wants to crush."
However, "in spite of political repression on the federal, state, and local levels, for much of the twentieth century," Kolin writes in "State Power," "many mass-based movements persisted for two reasons: one, they appealed to many Americans, and two, as political repression was mounted against these movements, eventually the government believed that the political crisis that triggered such movements had ended."
Kolin admits that he had believed Obama would eventually "correct the self-destruction of the Bush police state through piecemeal reforms" after he was sworn into office nearly three year ago.
Instead, Obama's executive power grab went further. To cite one example, the president authorized the targeted assassination of a US citizen living in Yemen, Anwar al-Awlaki, who was suspected of inspiring failed terrorist attacks against the US and being a top member of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. Awlaki, despite his US citizenship, was not entitled to due process under the Constitution, the administration concluded.
Kolin said Awlaki's assassination underscores one of the problems with a two-party system: Democrats and Republicans "fall in line when it comes down to certain issues."
"Democrats march in lockstep with their Republican counterparts," Kolin said. "We saw that during the Bush administration and we're seeing it again when it comes to economic and national security issues under Obama. I don't see much difference between the two parties. I really don't. Obama has proven to be just like his predecessors. He's interested in the powers he inherited from Bush and the new powers he acquired. And he continues to fulfill the wishes of Wall Street and the financial backers who bankrolled his election."
Kolin said the struggle for economic democracy will form the basis of his future research.
"One cannot have political democracy in the absence of economic democracy," he said. "By that, I mean that without worker control of the workplace, political decisions will continue to be made by the economic elite."
In the meantime, he believes the erosion of the police state, where "mass based democracy, which rules for the masses, not political and economic elites," is still a possiblity and he sees the Occupy movement playing a crucial role.
"Keep in mind that police states are by their inherent nature dysfunctional," Kolin said. "The Occupy movement is hope of a return to mass democracy as a countervailing force to the police state and to it's possible breakdown."


Article:
http://pubrecord.org/nation/9918/occupy-...lice-state