Violent May Day clashes in Seattle, what is May Day Anyway?!
I personally can’t stand violent anarchist protesters. I understand and respect the concept of diversity of tactics. But don’t show up and disrespect other movement’s tactics of peaceful protest or peaceful civil disobedience. A small group of violent anarchists can show up, wreak havoc, and give peaceful protesters a bad name, discrediting an entire movement with completely different goals. Go wreak havock on your own time, not during my peaceful protest that obtained march permits. I ran into this problem at many of the protests I attended through Occupy Wall Street.
The horizontal structure of OWS made it impossible for us to kick them out. And for good reason, where do you draw the line? Who gets to decide who is and isn’t included? Participatory direct democracy, contingent upon consensus building, necessitates a diverse inclusion of voices and perspectives to come up with truly unique, and original proposals, solutions and reforms.
Our Congress and Senate were predicated upon the same concept (albeit representative and not direct democracy), to include healthy debate from a variety of voices, representative of the people, and protecting the rights of the minority……However the influx of big money into politics through the Supreme Court decision Citizens United, has eroded the diversity of voices to only those capable of ‘paying’ for their speech, or bankrolling candidates for elections.
I thought with the clashes in Seattle this May Day it would be appropriate to include two different perspectives on the events. The roots of and motivation for starting this blog emerged out of the frustration I felt towards the mainstream media for their gross distortion and misrepresentation of OWS— a movement I had a deep first hand experience in.
The media continually focused on a small sub-population of hippies and anarchists, deemed undesirable social deviants by the larger culture, to be a representative whole of all those participating in OWS, which over time sucseffuly discrediting the movement. However, that could not be further from the truth on the ground, where protests and General Assemblies included a diverse group of participants of every immaginable age range, race, socioeconomic background, and education level. Some of my professors at UCSD attended with their children. Some homeless people came for the food. Veterans, teachers, and nurses donated their time and services. It wasn’t just a movement of dirty violent hippie kids.
I’ve since found it invaluable to consume media from a diverse variety of sources to obtain a more accurate and enriched reflection of current events.
The first article is from CNN and covers this year’s Seattle May Day Protest.
http://www.cnn.com/2013/05/01/us/seattle-may-day-protests/index.html
The second article offers a historical perspective on the origins of May Day, the violent clashes in Seattle in 2012 initiated by a faction of anarchist protesters among the ranks, and an academic description of real life contemporary anarchism by David Graeber. Graeber is a professor of Social Anthropology at the University of London, a respected author, and one of the first initial activists whose meeting in Bowling Green Park unknowingly sparked the emergence of the Occupy Movement months later rooted in Zuccotti Park.
Enjoy!
Freedom Is Dying Behind Closed Doors
A police state is a state in which the government exercises rigid and repressive controls over the social, economic, and political life of the population. A police state typically exhibits elements of totalitarianism and social control, and there is usually little or no distinction between the law and the exercise of political power by the executive.
The inhabitants of a police state experience restrictions on their mobility, and on their freedom to express or communicate political or other views, which are subject to police monitoring or enforcement. Political control may be exerted by means of a secret police force which operates outside the boundaries normally imposed by a constitutional state.
Let’s go back 13 years… The year is 2000, all the Y2K hubbub has just ended…
If someone told you that in 13 years it would be legal to tap Americans’ phones without a warrant, arrest and detain American citizens indefinitely without ever charging them with a crime (and without a warrant), take a history of all your calls, your text messages (even deleted ones), and even every place you have been with time stamps, from your phone, without a warrant, you’d have said they were crazy.
If they told you that all of that would be happening, and the government was also chipping away at the second amendment, practically admitting that politicians are for sale to the highest bidder as they openly tank the nation’s good standing and economy in order to satisfy a few billionaires, and that the internet would be monitored and censored, you’d think they were totally nuts.
So just imagine if they told you all of that stuff was true, plus the government would be sending flying robots to execute American citizens with no warning, no warrant, and not even charging them with a crime.
Wow, all in less than 13 years.“The liberal class refused to resist the devolution of the U.S. democratic system into what Sheldon Wolin calls a system of inverted totalitarianism. Inverted totalitarianism, Wolin writes, represents “the political coming of age of corporate power and the political demobilization of the citizenry.” Inverted totalitarianism differs from classical totalitarianism, which revolve around a demagogue or charismatic leader. It finds its expression in the anonymity of the corporate state. The corporate forces behind inverted totalitarianism do not, as classical totalitarianism movements do, replace decaying structures with new, revolutionary structures. They do not import new symbols and iconography. They do not offer a radical alternative. Corporate power purports, in inverted totalitarianism, to honor electoral politics, freedom, and the Constitution. But these corporate forces so corrupt and manipulate power as to make democracy impossible.” -Chris Hedges
Switzerland is such an amazing example of what and how the U.S. could do to change the culture of corporate corruption and plutocracy in the U.S.
“Swiss voters have overwhelmingly backed proposals to impose some of the world’s strictest controls on executive pay, final referendum results show.
Nearly 68% of the voters supported plans to give shareholders a veto on compensation and ban big payouts for new and departing managers.
Business groups argued the proposals would damage Swiss competitiveness.
But analysts say ordinary Swiss are concerned about a growing economic divide in the country.
The vote came just days after the EU approved measures to cap bankers’ bonuses.
‘Fat cat initiative’
The final results showed that all 26 Swiss cantons backed the proposals.
In all, 1.6 million voters said “Yes” against 762,000, who rejected the idea.
#bbc#occupy wall street#switzerland#swiss#banks#2008 bail out#plutocracy#democracy#socialism#social movement#protest#protesters#world revolution#99%#1%#corruption#bankers#banksters#EU#fat cat iniative#corporate#corproations#citizens united#glass-stegal#reinstate glass stegal#Daniel Vasella#Brigitte Moser Harder#competition#wages#salary
Steven Colbert: Standards & Poor’s Ratings Lawsuit (Clip 2) — David Leonhardt interview
The New York Times Washington bureau chief discusses S&P’s defense, private bank suits and the AIG bailout.
Zero Bankers in jail. If they are ‘To Big to Fail, and To Big to Jail’, do any laws apply to banks?
What I was doing a year ago. Occupy LA. How I miss thee. Funny thing is, everyone I met there, everyone who was there, who was a part of it all is still out there, and chances are they still have a fire raging in their heart just like me. All that passion, all that desire for change, and desire to work together is still all out there…we’re just all separated again. I want nothing more than to experience the empowerment of seeing thousands of strangers come out of their houses and into the streets, and sitting endlessly on pavement through hours of General Assemblies with an honest desire to make things better.
Like I said, all that energy, all that passion, all that love for our country, this world the environment, and one another is still out there. Just because they separated us with pepper spray, rubber bullets, riot police and fraudulent arrests (overturned in innumerable court cases since), doesn’t mean we’re not still here. You can’t arrest an idea. We will coalesce into something bigger and better, all the dispersed isolated individuals will come back together and unite again. We have to, you can’t experience something like that and not be changed, not crave that unity once more. OWS shed the feelings of isolation and despondency I had for the state of the world, as it did for countless others I met from all walks of life. We’re all still out there —that fire burning in our hearts for something better.
Happy 1 year Birthday Occupy Wall Street.
(via mainstreamrevolution)
Tampa, Florida police preparing to fight against your right to peaceably assemble and petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
Your tax dollars hard at work — how police respond to peaceful protesters. One might ask, why does the Tampa police department have a tank on standby?!
npr:
Answering The Question ‘What Was It A Good Year For?’
We asked for your input — and hundreds of readers responded with their suggestions of the things that had a good 2011. Then we took the results and used them to seed a Word Cloud.
I love this.
A protester stares down riot police on College Street behind the Hilton Hotel on Sunday, July 29. Hundreds of protesters turned out for demonstrations against the 26th Annual Conference of New England Governors and Eastern Canadian Premiers, which begins Monday.
Burlington police in riot gear shot protesters with what they described as “pepper balls” and “stingball pellets” as a large, peaceful demonstration turned violent and ugly Sunday afternoon.
At 3:30 Sunday afternoon they were in front of Burlington’s Hilton Hotel on Battery Street to make their voices heard, “No tar sand pipeline.” They flattened themselves on the pavement to create a symbolic human oil spill.
More from:
(via socialdemocracy)
