G20 in Pittsburgh

[Ed Jewett]

G-20 Pittsburgh


http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/09263/999463-482.stm
[URL="http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/09263/999463-482.stm"]
[/URL]
http://www.examiner.com/x-10661-Pittsburgh-Grassroots-Examiner~y2009m9d20-G20-Visitors-guide-and-schedule-of-events Note the links listed down the right side too….



http://www.examiner.com/x-10661-Pittsburgh-Grassroots-Examiner~y2009m9d18-G20-Psychic-cops-seize-wrong-PVC-again-KDKA-wants-to-believe

A list of blogs with G-20 Pittsburgh tags
http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch?...sburgh+g20[/FONT]

[Ed Jewett]

see Chris Hedges at TruthDig
Globalization Goes Bankrupt

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/2009...s_bankrupt

[Ed Jewett]

Mobilizing the Masses In Defense Of the Planet:

Posted by thomaspainescorner on September 20, 2009

Change you can act for
by Frank Joseph Smecker

[Magda Hassan]

Hey, Ed, are they doing their pre-emptive arrests yet?

[Ed Jewett]

I haven't seen anything terribly specific or verifiable coming out of the place. If I had the time and the resources, I'd contact some people out there. There is some stuff I've seen which is the usual surrounding argumentation, and I've seen a reference to a march, and a "wake-up call" street theatre kind of thing, and a picture of a confrontation with one protestor and one very well-armed-and-armored member of the gendarmerie (but I couldn't absolutely verify that it took place recently in Pittsburgh, so it might have been 'flavor' to marinate things).

I have set a Google search for the events and news but that might be akin to waiting for late-breaking insightful information about 9/11 from the Cheney family. And I don't yet have Google Earth installed... and I don't "get" that a call to KDKA will get me far.

[Magda Hassan]

Is there a local IndyMedia covering events?

[Magda Hassan]

Our local Slack Bastard has this to say on Pittsburgh:

PITTSBURGH, Pennsylvania — Pittsburgh is beefing up security with thousands of extra anti-capitalist, anti-globalization, anti-war, anti-government and anti-poverty activists as police, politicians and technocrats descend on it for the G20 summit.
Politicians say they prefer to disguise their plans to further “the undemocratic way in which the G20 operates and the decisions the group makes, which affect the more than six billion inhabitants of this planet.”
Ordinary citizens gather in this once rough-and-tumble US steel town on Tuesday through to Friday, and while most of the politicians are expected to be peaceful, 29-year-old unemployed worker Ruke Lavenstahl is taking no chances.
He wants Pittsburgh to show off its proud history. Once known for union militancy, the southwest Pennsylvania city on the Ohio river has undergone a rebirth to emerge as a haven for greenwashing and yuppies.
The fear in the minds of residents, unofficials and dissident forces is that violent police such as those seen in 1999 in Seattle — where citizens were arrested and beaten by police for days, disrupting meetings of opponents of the World Trade Organization — will be necessitated by the G20 summit.
“I hope popular struggle can keep at least some of the police under control so Seattle doesn’t repeat itself,” said resident Prancy Novil.
Lavenstahl has said police will be allowed to violate citizens’ constitutional freedom of speech and assembly “within sight and sound” of the summit venue.
It turns out this will be in a strictly delineated area outside of the downtown cultural area where the likes of US President Barack Obama and China’s Hu Jintao will be sitting down with other leading world criminals.
Lavenstahl has also called in 4,000 highly committed anarchists to back up local residents during the summit.
“We know that there will be some individuals who will seek to do harm to our city,” said Pittsburgh director of public safety Hichael Muss.
The bill for ensuring repression during the summit is expected to be in the region of 18 million dollars, but the two-day meeting of the world’s top criminals is likely to cost the global population much more than that.
While citizens were busy gearing up for the summit, the police were, too.
The Pittsburgh police, in conjunction with Federal authorities, have conducted COINTELPRO-style workshops for selected members throughout the course of the last six months, and will conduct practical workshops throughout the coming week.
“It’s really about upholding the right of politicians to say one thing and to do another, and also ‘how-to’ demobilize popular participation,” Yatrick Poung of POG, a statist group, told AFP.
“There are questions you want worker-consumers to ask themselves before they participate in any form of political dissent, do you really want to put yourself through considerable emotional and physical turmoil, and what kind of legal and medical preparations do you want to make before coming to a major demonstration.”
Establishment groups around Pittsburgh have been trying to sabotage housing for the thousands of citizens from around the world who are expected to stream into the city for the summit resistance.
The Pittsburgh G20 Repressive Project (PGRP) is relying on the military-industrial-entertainment complex and dozens of corporate websites where readers can find disinformation on everything from where to get a meal to how many people have been arrested, and why.
At least four major marches and rallies have been scheduled in Pittsburgh in the build-up to and during the criminal summit. The first is a “March for Jobs” on Sunday, which is expected to draw several thousand people.
On the eve of the summit on Wednesday, workers of one sort or another will be attending a pop concert, which 10,000 people are expected to attend, according to Poung.
The following day around 1,000 people are expected to march towards the summit venue in a protest denounced by the Pittsburgh G20 Repressive Project (PGRP).
“We’ve received a nod and a wink from state authorities, but we hope pre-emptive arrests will kill off most of the more militant protest well before then,” said Poung.
And on Friday, as the summit winds down, citizens have been called to take part in the main event: a mass march on “institutions that pepper the landscape where the G-20’s worldview manifests… the places that symbolize the kind of world the G-20 works to protect and sustain,” according to the PGRP website.
“It’s important that we show the world that the G7 is a body that is self-annointed,” said Edith Bell, a member of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom who, at the age of 85, hardly fits the media-endorsed stereotypes of anti-G20 activists.
The G20 comprises the political leadership of the G7 states, plus that of the European Union superstate and other leading world economies, supported by an army of well-paid technocrats. However, corporate/state media prefer to report that the G20 comprises the G7, plus the European Union and other leading world economies, thus eroding any concession to class distinctions in the real world.
See also : G20 comes to Pittsburgh (September 17, 2009).
Bonus!

State authorities have developed and continue to implement (and to revise) a fairly standard repertoire of repressive tactics inre (anti-)summit protests. In addition to reinforcing otherwise routine forms of infiltration and surveillance of protest movements, authorities:
i) conduct propaganda campaigns — in conjunction with state/corporate media, selected public figures and media and political commentators — aimed at transforming the image of the ‘good’ protester into that of the ‘bad’ terrorist, raising expectations of ‘protester violence’, and thus justifying and providing a pretext for paramilitary-style policing;
ii) introduce new or augment existing laws in order to provide for a wider range of offences and greatly increased penalties inre protest activities;
iii) ensure police are able to perform their duties either with virtual legal immunity for their actions or in the reasonable expectation of having the responsibility for any unfavourable legal outcomes assumed by the state;
iv) identify and target for arrest presumed ‘leaders’ (either before, during or after protest activity);
v) construct (temporary) walls and establish perimeters around summit locations, often including the designation of particular areas as being under special laws;
vi) conduct pre-emptive strikes upon convergence spaces, frequently involving mass arrests, and invariably the identification of those present and the collation of (other) materials leading to the identification of (other) participants;
vii) sever, on the basis of tactical differences, links between groups operating in coalition;
viii) destroy and/or seriously damage and/or confiscate materials intended to be used in the course of protest or during its organisation;
ix) obstruct the activities of independent media, legal monitoring and medical aid in particular.
http://slackbastard.anarchobase.com/?p=8016

[Magda Hassan]

With Global Capitalism Exposed as a Sham, All the Global Elite Have Left Is Pure Force
By Chris Hedges, Truthdig. Posted September 22, 2009.

Delegates from the world's wealthiest nations gather this week for G-20, walled off from protesters by a National Guard combat battalion recently returned from Iraq.
The rage of the disposed is fracturing the country, dividing it into camps that are unmoored from the political mainstream. Movements are building on the ends of the political spectrum that have lost faith in the mechanisms of democratic change. You can't blame them. But unless we on the left move quickly this rage will be captured by a virulent and racist right wing, one that seeks a disturbing proto-fascism.
Every day counts. Every deferral of protest hurts. We should, if we have the time and the ability, make our way to Pittsburgh for the meeting of the G-20 this week rather than do what the power elite is hoping we will do-stay home. Complacency comes at a horrible price.
"The leaders of the G-20 are meeting to try and salvage their power and money after everything that has gone wrong," said Benedicto Martinez Orozco, co-president of the Mexican Frente Autentico del Trabajo (FAT), who is in Pittsburgh for the protests. "This is what this meeting is about."
The draconian security measures put in place to silence dissent in Pittsburgh are disproportionate to any actual security concern. They are a response not to a real threat, but to the fear gripping the established centers of power. The power elite grasps, even if we do not, the massive fraud and theft being undertaken to save a criminal class on Wall Street and international speculators of the kinds who were executed in other periods of human history. They know the awful cost this plundering of state treasuries will impose on workers, who will become a permanent underclass. And they also know that once this is clear to the rest of us, rebellion will no longer be a foreign concept.
The delegates to the G-20, the gathering of the world's wealthiest nations, will consequently be protected by a National Guard combat battalion, recently returned from Iraq. The battalion will shut down the area around the city center, man checkpoints and patrol the streets in combat gear. Pittsburgh has augmented the city's police force of 1,000 with an additional 3,000 officers. Helicopters have begun to buzz gatherings in city parks, buses driven to Pittsburgh to provide food to protesters have been impounded, activists have been detained, and permits to camp in the city parks have been denied. Web sites belonging to resistance groups have been hacked and trashed, and many groups suspect that they have been infiltrated and that their phones and e-mail accounts are being monitored.
Larry Holmes, an organizer from New York City, stood outside a tent encampment on land owned by the Monumental Baptist Church in the city's Hill District. He is one of the leaders of the Bail Out the People Movement. Holmes, a longtime labor activist, on Sunday led a march on the convention center by unemployed people calling for jobs. He will coordinate more protests during the week.
"It is de facto martial law," he said, "and the real effort to subvert the work of those protesting has yet to begin. But voting only gets you so far. There are often not many choices in an election. When you build democratic movements around the war or unemployment you get a more authentic expression of democracy. It is more organic. It makes a difference. History has taught us this."
Our global economy, like our political system, has been hijacked by a tiny oligarchy, composed mostly of wealthy white men who serve corporations. They have pledged or raised a staggering $18 trillion, looted largely from state treasuries, to prop up banks and other financial institutions that engaged in suicidal acts of speculation and ruined the world economy. They have formulated trade deals so corporations can speculate across borders with currency, food and natural resources even as, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, 1.02 billion people on the planet struggle with hunger. Globalization has obliterated the ability of many poor countries to protect food staples such as corn, rice, beans and wheat with subsidies or taxes on imported staples. The abolishment of these protections has permitted the giant mechanized farms to wipe out tens of millions of small farmers-2 million in Mexico alone-bankrupting many and driving them off their land. Those who could once feed themselves can no longer find enough food, and the wealthiest governments use institutions such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the World Trade Organization like pit bulls to establish economic supremacy. There is little that most governments seem able to do to fight back.
But the game is up. The utopian dreams of globalization have been exposed as a sham. Force is all the elite have left. We are living through one of civilization's great seismic reversals. The ideology of globalization, like all utopias that are sold as inevitable and irreversible, has become a farce. The power elite, perplexed and confused, cling to the disastrous principles of globalization and its outdated language to mask the political and economic vacuum before us. The absurd idea that the marketplace alone should determine economic and political constructs caused the crisis. It led the G-20 to sacrifice other areas of human importance-from working conditions, to taxation, to child labor, to hunger, to health and pollution-on the altar of free trade. It left the world's poor worse off and the United States with the largest deficits in human history. Globalization has become an excuse to ignore the mess. It has left a mediocre elite desperately trying to save a system that cannot be saved and, more important, trying to save itself. "Speculation," then-President Jacques Chirac of France once warned, "is the AIDS of our economies." We have reached the terminal stage.
"Each of Globalization's strengths has somehow turned out to have an opposing meaning," John Ralston Saul wrote in "The Collapse of Globalism." "The lowering of national residency requirements for corporations has morphed into a tool for massive tax evasion. The idea of a global economic system mysteriously made local poverty seem unreal, even normal. The decline of the middle class-the very basis of democracy-seemed to be just one of those things that happen, unfortunate but inevitable. That the working class and the lower middle class, even parts of the middle class, could only survive with more than one job per person seemed to be expected punishment for not keeping up. The contrast between unprecedented bonuses for mere managers at the top and the four-job families below them seemed inevitable in a globalized world. For two decades an elite consensus insisted that unsustainable third-world debts could not be put aside in a sort of bad debt reserve without betraying Globalism's essential principles and moral obligations, which included an unwavering respect for the sanctity of international contracts. It took the same people about two weeks to abandon sanctity and propose bad debt banks for their own far larger debts in 2009."
The institutions that once provided alternative sources of power, including the press, government, agencies of religion, universities and labor unions, have proved morally bankrupt. They no longer provide a space for voices of moral autonomy. No one will save us now but ourselves.
"The best thing that happened to the Establishment is the election of a black president," Holmes said. "It will contain people for a given period of time, but time is running out. Suppose something else happens? Suppose another straw breaks? What happens when there is a credit card crisis or a collapse in commercial real estate? The financial system is very, very fragile. The legs are being kicked out from underneath it."
"Obama is in trouble," Holmes went on. "The economic crisis is a structural crisis. The recovery is only a recovery for Wall Street. It can't be sustained, and Obama will be blamed for it. He is doing everything Wall Street demands. But this will be a dead end. It is a prescription for disaster, not only for Obama but the Democratic Party. It is only groups like ours that provide hope. If labor unions will get off their ass and stop focusing on narrow legislation for their members, if they will go back to being social unions that embrace broad causes, we have a chance of effecting change. If this does not happen it will be a right-wing disaster."
http://www.alternet.org/story/142788/wit...age=entire

[Ed Jewett]

[Ed Jewett]

http://dprogram.net/2009/09/23/video-g-2...-protests/