Deep Politics Forum

[video]http://vimeo.com/nekoninja/what-if[/video]

http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/02/01/o...crackdown/
February 01, 2012

Finding Power in Solidarity
Occupy Oakland After the Crackdown

by NICK ROBINSON
The night of January 28th in Oakland left me feeling angry. I felt anger toward police for brutalizing people in the streets, illegally kettling protesters, and collectively punishing the entire march with indiscriminate use of chemical weapons and projectiles. I felt angry about protest organizers and march leaders employing completely ineffective and non-strategic tactics for realizing our goal of opening a functioning community center which would cooperatively feed, educate, and provide support for anyone who asks and about the secretive process by which a building was chosen for reopening through embarassingly fantastic hopes of what might be possible through such tactics. I was embittered at the fact that at the end of the day hundreds of people were violently subdued, arrested, and thrown into Santa Rita jail and that we were unsuccessful in what we had set out to do that morning, our momentum squandered.

And I felt angry that at the end of a day which was supposed to be about collective liberation, service through directed collectivization of material resources, and reappropriation of space to satisfy the needs of communities robbed of their most basic social, economic, and human entitlements for too long, I did not feel liberated, I felt angry.

I took from that day that anger was to be the dominant lens through which so many of us would experience the day's events, as that blinding emotion motivated a police officer to drastically overstep his authority in a disgusting display of sociopathology and knock the teeth out of a woman's mouth with his metal baton. I witnessed the power of that incredible motivator to extinguish all reason, or perhaps to amplify desperation, when plastic shields challenged kevlar armor and disparate bottles and stones freckled chemical clouds of noxious chemicals, their bearers picked off with rubber bullets traveling at sufficient velocity to rupture an inopportunely positioned spleen. My appreciation for their efforts at shielding the still less protected crowd was overshadowed by my sadness at our situational disempowerment and complete lack of strategic focus.

A conversation in the language of street battle is rendered instantly one-sided by a well-funded, overwhelming, militarized police force because that is the only language they speak, and it is phrased adeptly. And every time that happens, despite the popular outrage garnered, the movement for concrete changes in infrastructure, in access, in accountability grows weaker, as our anger at our collective inability to exert our will to make this world more hospitable for all its inhabitants clouds our ability to act strategically and with unstoppable power. Our power is not in combat with the tools of Capital and the State. That is a losing battle, lost over and over.

We will make gains for justice in direct proportion to our own ability to serve the most needy in our society. We will seize power over our collective resources as we challenge ourselves to redistribute power within our movements to those who act with a soberness unclouded by macho ideas of valor and honor. In cooking with our anger at ceaseless injustice, violence, and repression, kept simmering on the back burner, we will find the clarity to amplify our strength in popular appeal and creative solutions to social problems.

We each have limited energy and resources. Let us not squander what we have on fabricated warfare which will only end in defeat and further entrenchment into the hollows of oppression where the fury concerning our sad situation will only produce more fantastic scenarios for the achievement of our liberation. We, those of us marching in the streets in the USA, occupying plazas, parks, and buildings, are not at war, as anyone who has actually been at war would explain. Underpinning this romanticization of our situation is an understanding of the very real war on poor people, people of color, women, and LGBTQ identifying people in this city and throughout this world built on a foundation of genocide, slavery, and hatred which continues to undergird so many of our economic and social relationships. But the battlefields of that war are not solely demarcated by lines of riot cops.

Circumstances as we experienced on Saturday punctuate the power of the elite. If we can collectively commit to the work of mending bridges burned within our own communities, finding solidarity across political divides within our own movements, and amplifying the power of marginalized people in our actions, we will far less often experience a similarly disadvantaged confrontation with the police as we will find other creative ways to achieve our ends without sacrificing our dignity, our bodies, nor our limited resources.

Within the Occupy/Decolonize movement, many tactics employed successfully in prior instances now run ashore. Movements must adapt as those forces which seek to crush them adapt and employ new strategies. A true diversity of tactics should be employed and continually reassessed. A patriarchal value system with skewed interpretations of integrity, honor and courage is packed deeply within the baggage which we all carry on board our movements. A fundamentalist attachment to macho tactics which reinforce this destructive system of values is as damaging as the state violence imposed from above. A lack of openness to public dialog and creative negotiation even with those who hold power arbitrarily and use it unjustly is just as problematic as a fundamentalist attachment to pacifism.

There will not be an automatic co-optation of this movement through pursuit of any particular tactic. Cooptation is a complex process which the Occupy/Decolonize movement has been actively resisting since day one, and the intricate layers of relationships and truths upon which this movement rests can weed out attempts to misuse its awesome potential for revolutionary change. Opening a public dialog with those who control resources which the movement requires in order to function is an offensive action as it exists for all to see. So much of the power of the Occupy/Decolonize movement lies in its radical openness.

A campaign with populist support for specific strategic resource acquisition is not a foray into "representative" politics where supplicants make demands and autarchs make choices. Public demands for strategic ends have an entire gradient of tactics to back them up, to enforce those demands and to acquire positions of power within the discourse, and to provide a wedge for individuals with significant power in society to make an easier and less costly choice than deploying riot police. Very importantly, the exposure of persistent injustices inherent to lack of just action by those who control government bureaucracies and wealth streams destabilizes already tenuous societal power structures, based upon lies, during a context of already widespread mistrust and disillusionment with the status quo

Movements occur en masse. But resources, property, and land can be acquired through an array of tactics, all of which can intersect and be mutually supportive. Let's leverage everything we have available to us to acquire what we need in order to keep building this movement and a new society based upon helping those in need to help themselves. Police lines will be meager within the deluge of human solidarity we have potential to unleash.

Nick Robinson lives in the Bay Area.

An Occupy Wall Street activist in New York City has revealed prosecutors have subpoenaed records of his usage of the social networking site, Twitter. Malcolm Harris says Twitter sent him a copy of a subpoena this week seeking all of his user information and three months' worth of tweets from his account. Harris was one of hundreds of people arrested in October while marching on the Brooklyn Bridge.

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/02/02-5

Published on Thursday, February 2, 2012 by WhoWhatWhy

Close Reading: The Saudis, a Twitter Investment, and the End of Arab Spring?

by Russ Baker

Is Twitter (a) a leading vehicle for freedom movements, or (b) primed to control and shut down open discourse throughout the world?

This question emerged recently when we learned that the global messaging service was planning to abide by the rules of each country in terms of content it carries. Here's New York Times: Twitter said it would also "give ourselves the ability to reactively withhold content from users in a specific country while keeping it available in the rest of the world.""

Now, you may be one of those people who very proudly have not incorporated Twitter into your life, but this development is still of enormous relevance to you and your world. Why? Simply because Twitter, with its declared 175 million registered users (many of whom, it must be said, are inactive) has become one of the most powerful forces in communication today, arguably more relevant to more people than even traditional heavyweights like The New York Times, CNN, and the BBC.

That's why we at WhoWhatWhy use Twitter as one of our basket of social media tools. It allows individuals and groups to communicate directly with other individuals, in groups, on an instantaneous basis. As such, it was a vital tool for activists in Egypt and elsewhere (including the Occupy Movement in the United States) to quickly mobilize and have an impact.

Thus, Twitter is viewed as a tremendous opportunity by those who seek to regain the upper hand from the small elites that dominate the political and economic systems throughout most if not all of the world. To those elites, however, Twitter spells doom.

Unless they can neutralize it.
***
Enter the Saudi royal family.

The Saudi royal family has been very, very lucky. So far, none of the ferment in the rest of the world has yet manifested itself on their home turf to the extent to which this dictatorial, brutal, Western-backed extended clan has an immediate crisis. A modest but significant uprising in their own country was dutifully ignored by the Western media, including the vaunted "alternative press." Demonstrated connections to the 9/11 hijackers, arguably the biggest story in the world on the 10[SUP]th[/SUP] anniversary of the September 11 attacks, were again studiously ignored by the Western media, again including the "alternative press."

So the Saudi One Percent have it pretty good. Except for Twitter. If Twitter were to become a powerful tool in the hands of ordinary Saudis, one can pretty quickly figure out the consequences. The royal family would have to scramble to their villas in the South of France or their Park Avenue aeries.
***
With this background, it was interesting to note the news item that Saudi prince Walid bin Talal had invested $300 million in Twitter. Twitter, which is privately held, willingly chose to sell him this substantial stake.

Twitter's market valuation is something like $10 billion (choose what huge number you prefer.) Given that, why would this company, which is all about empowering ordinary people to communicate unfiltered and thereby get control of their lives and their governments, sell a big chunk to a representative of one of the quintessential repressive forcesan element that has a stake in preventing exactly the sort of communication that defines Twitter?

The very, very little media interest in this development is yet another sign of the degradation of journalistic inquirywhich in turn surely has to do with exactly these kinds of problematical investments.

When the New York Times covered the Saudi Twitter investment back in December, it wrote: Ayayay. This is a royal family dangling by threads, and they have no reason to want to control the very instrument that could see them overthrown? Well, it didn't take very long for the other shoe to drop, did it?

In its recent article about the new Twitter restrictions, the Times did briefly visit both the Twitter restriction announcement and the Saudi investment, but chose to bury near the end of the article what matters most, and to water it down to "nothing here, folks": You have to go back to near the top of the article to find out that Mr. Macgillivray is not some knowledgeable and independent expert, but "the general counsel at Twitter." Exactly the guy who would rough the Times up if it published something Twitter did not like. ( I mean, at least re-identify the guy together with the denial!)

An opportunity to ask why Twitter chose a Saudi royal out of all the prospective investors was squandered. Good reportingremember that?would start with finding out if Twitter had no choice but to hold its nose and take this tainted money. (It's true that Twitter is not the company with the informal motto "Don't be evil," but it does like to make itself out to be a good citizen.)

The Times's weak-kneed approach to this potentially earth-rattling development can be explained. The papermade its own peace with another foreign source of fundingthe Mexican billionaire (and possibly world's richest person) Carlos Slim Helu, who made a good part of his fortune by swooping in on cheap pickings during Mexico's economic crash in the early 80s. Slim now controls about seven percent of the Times. Just as there's precious little hard-hitting reporting in the Times on Slim, we assume that Prince Walid's investment in Twitter has not come without a price.

And the fact that Twitter made its announcement on a Friday, traditionally when folks are paying the least attention, is telling. Clearly, Twitter knew it was a problematical stance. But it has been extraordinarily lucky in how the world's corporate media have played along.
***
Some commentators have dismissed any criticism of Twitter's move, saying it was simply a sign of the young tech company's maturation.

Well, sure, Twitter is a business, and needs to do whatever it can to have good business relationships in every country. But since so many countries are dominated byand laws written to favorsmall elites, the very fact of "country by country compliance" by default compromises the essential value of Twitter's service.

In a world more wary than ever of the uses of money to thwart democracy and threaten freedom, outfits like Twitter need to be subject of the same scrutiny as, say, the Koch Brothers or the Burmese government.

The bottom lineand one that we trumpet regularly at WhoWhatWhy (which is itself a nonprofit)is that the most essential elements of democracy, including education and information dispersal, should not be left only or even primarily in the hands of institutions out for a profit.

Tennis shoes, frozen yogurt, even air travel, ok. But when our ability to safeguard or increase our freedoms is dependent on people taking money from tyrants who wish to suppress speech, we've got a problem. If any elements with a philanthropic bent, nonprofit orientation and the requisite technical skills and resources would like to discuss an alternative to Twitter, we would certainly be interested.
In the meantime, please, Twitter, don't cancel our account. Thank you.

© 2012 WhoWhatWhy

Corporations Have No Use for Borders
Posted on Jan 30, 2012
AP / Carolyn Kaster

A police officer holds a tear gas launcher at the ready during a standoff with protesters at the G-20 Summit in Toronto in June 2010.

By Chris Hedges

What happened to Canada? It used to be the country we would flee to if life in the United States became unpalatable. No nuclear weapons. No huge military-industrial complex. Universal health care. Funding for the arts. A good record on the environment.

But that was the old Canada. I was in Montreal on Friday and Saturday and saw the familiar and disturbing tentacles of the security and surveillance state. Canada has withdrawn from the Kyoto Accords so it can dig up the Alberta tar sands in an orgy of environmental degradation. It carried out the largest mass arrests of demonstrators in Canadian history at 2010's G-8 and G-20 meetings, rounding up more than 1,000 people. It sends undercover police into indigenous communities and activist groups and is handing out stiff prison terms to dissenters. And Canada's Prime Minister Stephen Harper is a diminished version of George W. Bush. He champions the rabid right wing in Israel, bows to the whims of global financiers and is a Christian fundamentalist.

The voices of dissent sound like our own. And the forms of persecution are familiar. This is not an accident. We are fighting the same corporate leviathan.

"I want to tell you that I was arrested because I am seen as a threat," Canadian activist Leah Henderson wrote to fellow dissidents before being sent to Vanier prison in Milton, Ontario, to serve a 10-month sentence. "I want to tell you that you might be too. I want to tell you that this is something we need to prepare for. I want to tell you that the risk of incarceration alone should not determine our organizing."

"My skills and experienceas a facilitator, as a trainer, as a legal professional and as someone linking different communities and movementswere all targeted in this case, with the state trying to depict me as a brainwasher' and as a mastermind of mayhem, violence and destruction," she went on. "During the week of the G8 & G20 summits, the police targeted legal observers, street medics and independent media. It is clear that the skills that make us strong, the alternatives that reduce our reliance on their systems and prefigure a new world, are the very things that they are most afraid of."


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The decay of Canada illustrates two things. Corporate power is global, and resistance to it cannot be restricted by national boundaries. Corporations have no regard for nation-states. They assert their power to exploit the land and the people everywhere. They play worker off of worker and nation off of nation. They control the political elites in Ottawa as they do in London, Paris and Washington. This, I suspect, is why the tactics to crush the Occupy movement around the globe have an eerie similarityinfiltrations, surveillance, the denial of public assembly, physical attempts to eradicate encampments, the use of propaganda and the press to demonize the movement, new draconian laws stripping citizens of basic rights, and increasingly harsh terms of incarceration.


Our solidarity should be with activists who march on Tahrir Square in Cairo or set up encampamentos in Madrid. These are our true compatriots. The more we shed ourselves of national identity in this fight, the more we grasp that our true allies may not speak our language or embrace our religious and cultural traditions, the more powerful we will become.

Those who seek to discredit this movement employ the language of nationalism and attempt to make us fearful of the other. Wave the flag. Sing the national anthem. Swell with national hubris. Be vigilant of the hidden terrorist. Canada's Minister of Natural Resources Joe Oliver, responding to the growing opposition to the Keystone XL and the Northern Gateway pipelines, wrote in an open letter that "environmental and other radical groups" were trying to "hijack our regulatory system to achieve their radical ideological agenda." He accused pipeline opponents of receiving funding from foreign special interest groups and said that "if all other avenues have failed, they will take a quintessential American approach: sue everyone and anyone to delay the project even further."

No matter that in both Canada and the United States suing the government to seek redress is the right of every citizen. No matter that the opposition to the Keystone XL and Northern Gateway pipelines has its roots in Canada. No matter that the effort by citizens in the U.S. and in Canada to fight climate change is about self-preservation. The minister, in the pocket of the fossil fuel industry like the energy czars in most of the other industrialized nations, seeks to pit "loyal" Canadians against "disloyal" Canadians. Those with whom we will build this movement of resistance will not in some cases be our own. They may speak Arabic, pray five times a day toward Mecca and be holding off the police thugs in the center of Cairo. Or they may be generously pierced and tattooed and speak Danish or they may be Mandarin-speaking workers battling China's totalitarian capitalism. These are differences that make no difference.

"My country right or wrong," G.K. Chesterton once wrote, is on the same level as "My mother, drunk or sober."

Our most dangerous opponents, in fact, look and speak like us. They hijack familiar and comforting iconography and slogans to paint themselves as true patriots. They claim to love Jesus. But they cynically serve the function a native bureaucracy serves for any foreign colonizer. The British and the French, and earlier the Romans, were masters of this game. They recruited local quislings to carry out policies and repression that were determined in London or Paris or Rome. Popular anger was vented against these personages, and native group vied with native group in battles for scraps of influence. And when one native ruler was overthrown or, more rarely, voted out of power, these imperial machines recruited a new face. The actual centers of power did not change. The pillage continued. Global financiers are the new colonizers. They make the rules. They pull the strings. They offer the illusion of choice in our carnivals of political theater. But corporate power remains constant and unimpeded. Barack Obama serves the same role Herod did in imperial Rome.

This is why the Occupy Wall Street movement is important. It targets the center of powerglobal financial institutions. It deflects attention from the empty posturing in the legislative and executive offices in Washington or London or Paris. The Occupy movement reminds us that until the corporate superstructure is dismantled it does not matter which member of the native elite is elected or anointed to rule. The Canadian prime minister is as much a servant of corporate power as the American president. And replacing either will not alter corporate domination. As the corporate mechanisms of control become apparent to wider segments of the population, discontent will grow further. So will the force employed by our corporate overlords. It will be a long road for us. But we are not alone. There are struggles and brush fires everywhere. Leah Henderson is not only right. She is my compatriot.

The long established and 'permitted' Washington D.C. encampment is being dismantled by the US Park Police [with help by LOTS of other Police] right now....very sad. Welcome to the Police State Matrix...more on this tomorrow after it is all over.....:mistress:

OK, Even though the Park Police and Authority had given permission for tents and a camp-protest, they have declared the tents as 'biohazards' and gotten around the 'rules' they wrote....nice...fascist thinking. One protestor who ONLY told a police captain he was a liar [for the above] was arrested for saying that to a police officer. Others were tazed or beaten. Obama does nothing a mile away.... BUT, the police are allowing a protest against the Occupy protest!...how about that for fair! Fascisti! The FEMA camps are coming up real soon!...I'd guess about April.

The police are now searching through the encampment library.....lets see if they destroy all the books, as they did in NYC and in D.C once before...that information...gotta control the info! And they just arrested the unofficial camp photographer....things are going from bad to worse. Fast.

Now they are removing the media....only two are left - both non-pro livestreamers...guess the bad stuff is about to come down...!:mexican: The Nation's Capitol is now its toilet and it has just been flushed!:fullofit:

You can watch your liberties flushed down the toilet here. Some man was either shot or fainted or who-knows-what...rather than the police getting a medic for him the rolled him over and handcuffed him. [URL="http://www.occupystreams.org/item/occupied-air"]http://www.occupystreams.org/item/occupied-air

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