Occupy Everywhere - Sept 17th - Day of Rage Against Wall Street and what it stands for!

[Keith Millea]

OH MY!
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[Keith Millea]

WOW...Check out the livestream from the Oakland City Council.NOW!

http://www.ustream.tv/occupyoakland

[Peter Lemkin]

WOW...Check out the livestream from the Oakland City Council.NOW!

http://www.ustream.tv/occupyoakland

Oddly, the council vote did not support the measure, due to abstentions...however, the Council and Mayor have the powers to do that anyway [call the Police to stop demonstrations and Port Closure, et al.] It was just a statement by the Council, which failed. Yes, it was quite a screaming session from the audience. Next up in Oakland is the Citizens Police Review Board.

[Keith Millea]

They don't get it.The Black Bloc does not want to make friends with you!They use violence,and hide behind the non-violent Occupy.Did Martin Luther King Jr.invite the Black Panthers to march with him?Not that I'm aware of.The Black Bloc needs to go their own way and disassociate itself from the Occupy camp.

February 08, 2012

What Gives?

A Bustle in Hedges' Row

by RANDALL AMSTER

You would be hard-pressed to find anyone on the American Left who has not either benefited from or been influenced by the writings of Chris Hedges. His is a singular and potent voice of progressive journalism, combining the best virtues of diligent reporting and unabashed advocacy for a better world. Hedges has rightfully earned many accolades for his work, and he has been an effective chronicler of the rise of people-powered social movements in the U.S. and around the world. Undoubtedly like many others, I have personally been inspired by his writings, and have appreciated his willingness to dialogue with me on occasion. Hedges, in short, represents something of an ideal for those of us who deign to wax publicly on the issues of the day.

All of which makes his latest piece so disturbing in its full implications. Hedges calls out the anarchist-influenced Black Bloc as "the cancer of the Occupy movement," and in the process vilifies with a broad brush an entire class of activists and anarchists as "not only deeply intolerant but stupid," accusing them of "hijacking" and/or seeking to destroy Occupy and other progressive movements. The problems with his analysis are numerous, including that he points to a mere handful of sensationalized episodes of alleged "violence" without subjecting them to further scrutiny or engaging the voluminous literature in social movements discourse on what even constitutes violence, as well as the utility of potentially disruptive tactics in the annals of social change. Indeed, Hedges himself seems to comprehend this, and has written favorably about it in other contexts:

"Here's to the Greeks. They know what to do when corporations pillage and loot their country. They know what to do when they are told their pensions, benefits and jobs have to be cut to pay corporate banks, which screwed them in the first place. Call a general strike. Riot. Shut down the city centers. Toss the bastards out. Do not be afraid of the language of class warfare the rich versus the poor, the oligarchs versus the citizens, the capitalists versus the proletariat. The Greeks, unlike most of us, get it."

So what gives? How is it that someone of his stature, influence, and insight has seemingly "drank the Kool-Aid" of divisiveness and internal finger-pointing that the power elite so obviously want to inculcate within our movements? Does Hedges really believe that a relatively small subset of the larger movement is somehow responsible for scuttling Occupy nationwide? Never mind the coordinated and militaristic assaults on the camps, media smear campaigns, unjustified mass arrests, or police-instigated violence in many locales better to blame those black-clad anarchists in our otherwise-equanimous midst who broke a few windows and tried to actually occupy a couple of buildings for the use of the movement and houseless people alike. Seriously? It's Greek to me.

Now, don't get me wrong: the tactics and strategies deployed within a movement are fair game for critical intervention and even open contestation if we believe them to be dangerous or misguided. There is absolutely nothing wrong with asking the hard questions and calling people to account for the consequences of their actions. In fact, Occupy itself possesses mechanisms for precisely this sort of internal reflection, through the use of consensus-based processes and the workings of the participatory General Assembly model. Anyone is free to advance a vision, air grievances, urge a course of action, engage a debate, or offer alternatives for the group's consideration. The task is to reinvigorate our collective capacities to reach agreement, rather than excise those who disagree.

A few months ago, when similar arguments about the "destruction of Occupy" were being raised by others in the milieu, I wrote a piece urging inclusivity rather than cashiering out conflicting actors:

"To reject someone from the open spaces of a movement that is purporting to represent the 99 percent is to consign them to where, exactly? Since they are presumably not part of the 1 percent (hired provocateurs aside), if they are banished from the 99 percent what options does that leave them? When a movement decides to self-police,' that shouldn't be confused with adopting the same punitive and illogical methods of the state. We can forge agreements and work by consensus, but that cannot be used as a wedge to weed out and expunge those who contravene our best-laid plans. Rather, the aim should be to create processes based on the best practices of restorative justice, peacekeeping, and personal healing in order to promote points of contact and ongoing dialogue among all who find their way to the movement. We won't all agree on everything, but surely we can at least maintain a perspective in which our interests are seen as broadly aligned and our common humanity remains intact…. Rather than seeing the presence of divergent elements as a threat to movement cohesion or as an exploitable image that the media will seize upon to denigrate us further, Occupy encampments can become models of communities that don't simply warehouse unpopular or difficult elements, but instead work with them to promote the creation of a society based on mutual respect and the utilization of the productive capacities of all of its members."

The issue for Hedges, as far as I can tell, seems to be a genuine concern that dangerous factions are hijacking the movement and thus, not to call for their excision is somehow cowardly. He cites the example of Martin Luther King remaining steadfastly nonviolent in the face of official repression as the key to delegitimizing official power, and potentially as creating a pathway to "win the hearts and minds of the wider public" and even perhaps "some within the structures of power." Yet King took great pains not to publicly oppose the more militant wings of the Civil Rights movement, focusing instead on developing an empathetic and healing posture toward those who would resort to tactics that he deemed unwise, immoral, or ineffective in the context of the larger movement, as reflected in this statement from Stanford University's King Papers Project:

"Although King was hesitant to criticize Black Power openly, he told his staff on 14 November 1966 that Black Power was born from the wombs of despair and disappointment. Black Power is a cry of pain. It is in fact a reaction to the failure of White Power to deliver the promises and to do it in a hurry.… The cry of Black Power is really a cry of hurt.'''

In many ways this is the essence of nonviolence, as longtime advocate and practitioner George Lakey observed in an email message discussing the implications of Hedges' recent piece:

"Let's decide now not to use Chris Hedges as a model for how to respond to the Black Bloc. Demonizing, calling them names, using the giveaway metaphor cancer' (I've had cancer) is about as far away from effectively opposing a tendency one disagrees with as it's possible to get. We have such good models in our tradition. Dr. King, James Lawson, John Lewis, and so many others in the civil rights movement who had to respond to pro-violence activists showed us how to do it. They were themselves mentored by people like A. J. Muste whose largeness of spirit in dealing with pro-violence forces went all the way back to the 1919 Lawrence, MA, textile strike…. Reducing a group of people who are not monolithic and are themselves frightened and trying to learn how to express their deep convictions in effective ways to a demonic force is beneath us. Hedges writes like someone badly frightened, and is way over the line…. We get enough of the Be very afraid' stuff from the Right Wing."

As one commenter ("swaneagle") on Truthout similarly observed in response to Hedges:

"The situation with the black bloc is indeed very serious. How we deal with it will decide the course of our current international struggle. We are all so deeply interconnected now. We cannot afford to throw all those involved with the misguided DOT [diversity of tactics] away as cancerous. Rather, we must proceed with deep love, care and intelligence in shaping something that more precisely represents the goals and dreams we all can share in. This is not just the vision of people engaging in more domineering bully behaviors, but the joint efforts of each one of us. Please reconsider what you deem cancerous Chris Hedges, for it may rise out of this current turmoil as key to [a] solution for us all. It is our challenge and our sacred duty to face this with all we know with all our hearts and all the voices still excluded."

Going forward, I believe we should heed these calls to embrace the actor while critically engaging the action. As difficult as this practice may be, we might consider applying its teachings not only to the challenging cadres within our movements, but even toward the 1 percent and their agents as well. Isn't it possible that their inner fears and human failings are driving them, too? Every great peacemaker throughout history has counseled us to strive to see the essential humanity of those appearing as adversaries or even antagonists. We don't have to accept their divisive and destructive actions, yet the task of refusing to replicate them is incumbent upon us as we forge a new society.

We can surmise that someone of Hedges' caliber is aware of this. Despite ruffling some feathers with his caustic words, he has provided us with an object lesson in the need for renewed empathy.

Randall Amster, J.D., Ph.D., is the Graduate Chair of Humanities at Prescott College. He serves as Executive Director of the Peace & Justice Studies Association and as Contributing Editor forNew Clear Vision. Among his recent books are Lost in Space: The Criminalization, Globalization, and Urban Ecology of Homelessness (LFB Scholarly, 2008), and the co-edited volume Building Cultures of Peace: Transdisciplinary Voices of Hope and Action (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009).

http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/02/08/a...edges-row/

[Keith Millea]

Debate at KPFA:

Letters and Politics
Chris Hedges and Kristof Lopaur of Occupy Oakland debate black bloc, militancy and tactics.


http://www.kpfa.org/archive/id/77663

[Keith Millea]

February 09, 2012

Hedges' Hypocrisies

The Surgeons of Occupy

by PETER GELDERLOOS

In his February 6 article entitled, "The Cancer of Occupy,"Chris Hedges attempts to analyze the political beliefs and practices of the black bloc, a group he characterizes as the scourge of the Occupy movement. Although Mr. Hedges evidently conducted at least a little to research his article, he does not quote a single proponent or participant of a black bloc, neither within the Occupy movement nor from any of the many other black blocs that have been organized in the United States. Such research would not have been difficult. There are a plethora of anarchist blogs, websites, newspapers, and magazines that discuss Occupy, the black bloc, and even the use of the black bloc within Occupy protests.

Despite this major failing, I cannot accuse Mr. Hedges of laziness. He does, after all, dig up an anarchist magazine published in Oregon ten years earlier and he quotes one particular article extensively. The magazine, Green Anarchy, is tied in to Hedge's tirade on the basis of the unsupported and inaccurate assertion that anarcho-primitivist John Zerzan, one of the magazine's former editors, is "one of the principal ideologues of the Black Bloc movement". In fact, the black bloc evolvedas a tactic, not a movementin Europe and came to the United States without any input from Zerzan. Zerzan's only link to the bloc is as one of the few public figures to have endorsed it.

So why does he appear at all in Hedges' article? Presumably to provide the link to Green Anarchy. And why Green Anarchy? Of all the anarchists and others who have participated in black blocs in the last decades, green anarchists or anarcho-primitivists have only been one small part. Labor union anarchists, anarcha-feminists, social anarchists, indigenous anarchists, Christian anarchists, as well as plain old, unaffiliated street youth, students, immigrants, parents, and others have participated in black blocs.

However, for a mainstream audience susceptible to fear-mongering, the anarcho-primitivists can easily be portrayed as the most extreme, the most irrational, and this kind of crass emotional manipulation is clearly Mr. Hedges' goal.

Despite the tenuous to null connection between Green Anarchy and the use of the black bloc within the Occupy movement, he uses a skewed presentation of that magazine to frighten his readers away from a reasoned consideration of the political arguments on which the black bloc is based. For the more intrepid readers, he finishes off the job with inaccurate and unreferenced generalizations such as, "Black Bloc anarchists oppose all organized movements [...] They can only be obstructionist."

Hedges introduces the widely read Zerzan merely as an apologist for the ideas of Ted Kaczynski (The Unabomber). Referred to by one NBC reporter as "probably one of the smartest individuals I have encountered" and "very low key, reasoned, and non-threatening," Zerzan is a far more complex figure, but such details fall outside of Hedges' plan of attack. His characterization of Green Anarchy, and by extension, of all black bloc anarchists, is based on a single article that only appeared in GA as a reprint some ten years ago. Neither does Hedges admit that the article itself, "The EZLN are Not Anarchist," generated considerable controversy and debate among anarchists, nor that GA itself published a response by several Zapatistas, which criticized the article for "a colonialist attitude of arrogant ignorance".

The openness to debate and criticism present in GA, is totally absent from Hedges' latest work of journalism. The manipulation, cherry picking, and dishonesty that underlie his arguments show that for this award-winning journalist, fairness is only a courtesy one extends to those rich or powerful enough to press libel charges. This conception certainly abounds in the pages of the New York Times, Hedges' longtime employer.

The medical language of Hedges' title, referring to the anarchists as a "cancer," should immediately ring alarm bells. Portraying one's opponents as a disease has long been a tactic of the state and the media to justify the repression. This language was used against the Native Americans, against the Jews, against communists, and many others. Recently the police and the right wing used this same language of hygiene to talk about the occupations around the country as health threats so as to justify their eviction and generate disgust and repulsion.

In sum, Chris Hedges deals with the "Black Bloc anarchists" with fear-mongering manipulation and without the slightest glimmer of solidarity. But beneath the black masks, anarchists have been an integral part of the debates, the organizing, the cooking and cleaning in dozens of cities. Anarchists also participated in preparing the original call-out for Occupy Wall Street, and they played a key role in organizing and carrying out the historic Oakland general strike and the subsequent West Coast port blockadesprobably the strongest actions taken by the Occupy movement to date.

The very fact that Occupy Oakland got out 2,000 people to fight the police for hours in an attempt to occupy a building, at a time when Occupy in other cities is dwindling or dead, contradicts the parallel claims that anarchists are trying to "hijack" Occupy and that their tactics turn people away. On the contrary, anarchists are part and parcel of the Occupy movement and their methods of struggle resonate with many people more than the staid, hand-wringing pacifism and middle-class reformism of careerists like Chris Hedges.

It would be useful to debate the appropriateness of aggressive tactics in demonstrations, and anarchists themselves have often encouraged this debate, but Hedges has passed over the critique and gone straight for the smear. He calls the black bloc anarchists "a gift from heaven for the surveillance and security state," choosing conspiracy theory paranoia to distract from the public record, filled with cases of government officials and the media alternately serenading and threatening the Occupy movement into an acceptance of nonviolence.

Its proponents in the Occupy movement have generally protected nonviolence from an open debate, instead imposing it through manipulation, fear-mongering, and, when all else fails, turning their opponents over to the police. Hedges himself implies that illegal or aggressive tactics cannot exist in a space where "mothers and fathers [feel] safe", ignoring the many militant movements built around the needs of mothers and fathers, such as his own favorite example, the Zapatistas. He also dismisses the concept of a diversity of tactics as a "thought-terminating cliché", demonstrating a willful ignorance ofto name just one examplethe many weeks of thoughtful debate that went into the "St. Paul principles" that allowed hundreds of thousands of people with a huge diversity of political practices to come together in 2008 and protest the Republican National Convention.

Predictably, Chris Hedges uses the name of Martin Luther King, Jr., to gain legitimacy for his stance, again contradicting his argument that the "corporate state" wants protestors to fight police and destroy property, given that this same corporate state venerates King (or at least a well managed version of King) while demonizing or silencing the equally important Malcolm X or Black Panthers. Just as predictably, Chris Hedges does not mention that King vocally sympathized with the urban youths who rioted, youths whose contemporary equivalent Hedges calls "stupid" and a "cancer." Ironically, Hedges refers to the famous Birmingham campaign attributed with achieving the end of segregation. What Hedges and pacifist ideologues like him fail to mention is that Birmingham was a repeat of King's Albany campaign, which ended a total failure, all its participants locked up, and no one slightly moved by the supposed dignity of victimhood. The difference? In Birmingham, the local youths got fed up, rioted and kicked police out of large parts of the city for several days. The authorities chose to negotiate with King and replace de jure segregation with de facto segregation in order to avoid losing control entirely.

It's also hypocritical that on the one hand Chris Hedges utilizes King and parades the dignity of nonviolent suffering while on the other hand he uses the fear of getting injured by police or spending a few nights in jail to mobilize his comfortable, middle class readership to reject the black bloc and the dangers it might bring down on them. "The arrests last weekend in Oakland of more than 400 protesters [...] are an indication of the scale of escalating repression and a failure to remain a unified, nonviolent opposition." He goes on to detail the horrible ways police attacked demonstrators, and the conditions in jail.

It's election year. Those who still have faith in the system, or those whose paychecks are signed by the major unions, the Democratic Party, progressive NGOs, or the left wing of the corporate media, know it's their job to forcibly convert any popular movement into a pathetic plea to be made at the ballot box. The unmediated, experimental politics of the Occupy movement must give way to symbolic protest and dialogue with the existing "structures of power" whose members must be brought "to our side". For the Occupy movement to be sanitized and converted into a recruiting tool for the Democratic Party, it will have to be neutralized as a space for real debate, experimentation, and conflict with authority. Its more revolutionary elements will have to be surgically removed. It is an operation the police, the media, and some careerist progressives have been engaged in for months, and Hedges' contribution is just the latest drop in the bucket.

This form of co-optation and manipulation is nothing new for a movement that cynically harvested a few images from Tahrir Squarean unfinished popular uprising in which hundreds of thousands of people defended themselves forcefully from the cops, ultimately torching dozens of police stationsto declare a victory for nonviolence.

Around the world, people are fighting for their freedom and resisting the depredations of the rich and powerful. In the United States, there is plenty of cause to join this fight, but as long as people continue enact a fear-driven, Not-In-My-Backyard pacifism, and to pander to the corporate media as though they would ever show us in a positive light, the rich and the powerful will have nothing to worry about.

Peter Gelderloos is the author of several books, including Anarchy Works and How Nonviolence Protects the State, which is available for free download.
[URL="http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/02/09/the-surgeons-of-occupy/"]
http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/02/09/t...of-occupy/[/URL]

[Peter Lemkin]

Hedges can and will defend himself....I wonder who will be allowed to hear him......the big guns are being brought out to stop the stopping of Occupy.

[Keith Millea]

Hedges can and will defend himself

Yes,in that KPFA non-debate,Kristof Lopaur had nothing but weak responses to Chris.And wow,the comments section at Common Dreams was over 650 at last count,with the Trolls out in force.:monkeypiss:

[Keith Millea]

Published on Friday, February 10, 2012 by Common Dreams

'Hose Streets? Our Streets!' Belgian Firefighters Turn Their Ire (and Hoses) on Austerity

-Common Dreams staff report

In a great reversal from most recent street protests, Belgian firefighters today, who were out in force to voice their opposition to government proposed cuts to their retirement plans, turned their firehoses on the prime minister's office.

According to the Associated Press in Brussels:

Several hundred Belgian firefighters have broken through police lines in Brussels and hosed down the prime minister's office in protest at the government's tougher retirement plans.
The firefighters want to keep their early retirement age at 58, arguing their arduous job does not allow them to work into their 60s.

RT added in a report:

The law enforcement men tried to hide behind their Plexiglas shields, but to little avail; they were all soaked within minutes. Showing a rather wicked sense of humor, the firemen then turned to fire extinguishers and the soaked representatives of Belgium's police force were swallowed by a cloud of white foam, emerging unharmed but completely blanketed in the substance.

Firefighters want to keep their early retirement age at 58, arguing their arduous job does not allow them to work into their 60s. Such demands run counter to government plans to have the overwhelming majority of people work two years beyond 65, so the government can afford an ever-increasing pension bill as Belgium's population ages.

[Peter Lemkin]

Published on Friday, February 10, 2012 by Common Dreams

'Hose Streets? Our Streets!' Belgian Firefighters Turn Their Ire (and Hoses) on Austerity

-Common Dreams staff report

In a great reversal from most recent street protests, Belgian firefighters today, who were out in force to voice their opposition to government proposed cuts to their retirement plans, turned their firehoses on the prime minister's office.

According to the Associated Press in Brussels:

Several hundred Belgian firefighters have broken through police lines in Brussels and hosed down the prime minister's office in protest at the government's tougher retirement plans.
The firefighters want to keep their early retirement age at 58, arguing their arduous job does not allow them to work into their 60s.

RT added in a report:

The law enforcement men tried to hide behind their Plexiglas shields, but to little avail; they were all soaked within minutes. Showing a rather wicked sense of humor, the firemen then turned to fire extinguishers and the soaked representatives of Belgium's police force were swallowed by a cloud of white foam, emerging unharmed but completely blanketed in the substance.

Firefighters want to keep their early retirement age at 58, arguing their arduous job does not allow them to work into their 60s. Such demands run counter to government plans to have the overwhelming majority of people work two years beyond 65, so the government can afford an ever-increasing pension bill as Belgium's population ages.

And in Brazil's Rio they had to call out the Military to deal with the Police, who are on strike!....may it happen in the USA - either or both above!