The Police Have Turned Bandits

The police have turned bandits from Ranjeet Tate

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See my post about OccupySF's MayDay March, from which the above photos have been taken.

OccupySF May Day March and Commune

The march began at Market and Montgomery, I walked east from Van Ness along Market in order to meet them. On the way I saw a guy wearing a 99% sticker and we fell in together. This was Leo, an early member of EarthFirst!

 On market, nearing Van Ness. The atmosphere is sunny, windy and festive.

The nice SFPD has sent the nice police people to escort us. I wonder why they have their riot helmets? I greet some of the cops and thank them for being there.

Lily had just been to the OccupyThe Farm plot in Berkeley/Albany, where there were a lot of families and programs for kids. Various established community gardens in SF are donating starters to the farm. See a great article on the Gill Tract Farm.
Extract from the "Occupy The Farm" site above: "
Occupy the Farm, a coalition of local residents, farmers, students, researchers, and activists are planting over 15,000 seedlings at the Gill Tract, the last remaining 10 acres of Class I agricultural soil in the urbanized East Bay area. The Gill Tract is public land administered by the University of California, which plans to sell it to private developers.
For decades the UC has thwarted attempts by community members to transform the site for urban sustainable agriculture and hands-on education. With deliberate disregard for public interest, the University administrators plan to pave over this prime agricultural soil for commercial retail space, a Whole Foods, and a parking lot."

Faces in the march:

The picture depicts farmers protesting against Monsanto.

See Lily's photos for May Day, and her blog posts for MayDay.

 This Colombian had just attended the AM's rally for immigrant rights in the Mission. He'd been at the pre-rally the evening before, which was supposed to have been an opportunity for Occupy and Immigrants' Rights people to get together, but, as many of you have seen, it ended up getting hijacked by violence on Valencia.

THIS MEANS YOU!

Heading north on Van Ness

Eduardo Galeano cameo appearance in the crowd.

 By the way I should mention that one of the leaders of the rally and march was a South Asian bro, a young Bangladeshi-American. The first time I met him after an OccupySF GA, he very nerdily, like a well-brought-up Indian boy, pulled out his laptop to do some classwork!

The cops lined up on the sidewalk, and didn't interfere with

the takeover of the abandoned ArchDiocese building. This is not a Liberation Theology church, it doesn't seem.

Long video (almost 4 mins) of walk through the building.

During the march, there was a police escort of 3-4 motorcycles in front, and a single file of about 30 cops on each flank of the marchers. Soon after the building had been taken over, most of the cops seemed to disappear, there were about 15 left milling about and videographing the entrance and crowd from the opposite sidewalk. But cops never mill about, they never just disappear, and I'll confess to being nervous.

The feeding of the people.

This man brought 8 trays of food to the commune.

The chain link fence was taken down peaceably, not torn down.

Why we do this: Jim Dorenkott, of VeteransForPeace. The T-shirt states "One of three homeless adults has served our country. Help house our homeless veterans." This is the practical meaning of "support our troops".

 Of course, many other vets become MERCENARIES, or whatever you want to call BlackWater/Xeon and other "private security companies". Some of you raised concerns about the amount of "my tax-money" cities are spending on Occupy related events. Do you have any idea how much money is pouring into the coffers of Mercenary companies? All are privately owned, and most are more profitable than even your most profitable SiValley Tech companies. Google the info. I find articles and post them later.

A poster inside the building, Top

Bottom.

I just loved this! You can add Bhagat Singh, Tupac Amaru, Steve Biko ...

The woman on the right is a what-passes-for-a-journalist for KGO/FOX, who went around asking what I considered antagonistic and provocative questions.

 At one point I asked her why she didn't engage with the cops and ask them why they were there, to which she responded with "Can you say 'Below low BlueBook Value' thrice?". I'll be prepared for that next time. There were multiple signs and posters designating the 2nd floor as media free, and she insisted on trying to bull-doze her way through. Yet another Anne Coulter clone, perhaps not as vituperative.

The entrance.

 

People on the second floor, playing music. Yes, I do realise its similarity to Munich Olympics 1972. Without comparing or judging the causes, one difference is M/C gun vs. laptop.

I did a walk through the place: there was electricity, running water in a sink in a utility room, a reception area, multiple classrooms and smaller rooms on the 1st floor, a kitchen and various sized living space on the second floor.

Puerto Rico Libre!

Messages on the sidewalk

and on the chain link fence.

Uh-oh! Front.

Right.

Left. They cleared and barricaded the sidewalk.

The black beetles had been hiding in the lobby of the posh apartment building opposite! The official SFPD resting posture - right hand playing with mouth or chin. Doesn't it indicate they are hiding something, lying? I have to say the SFPD is more racially (but not in terms of gender) heterogeneous than the Occupy movement.

Reinforcements.

The SFPD periodically would block-off the road and then open it up again, it seemed to me just so they could practising pushing people around when they opened the street up and wanted to clear it.

The embedded journalist again.

Videographer for CBS I think.

This guy's TV-journalist stated on TV that "they were right there in the midst of the Occupiers." I pointed out that just from the footage (showing the backs of the cops or with the cops off to one side, and mostly frontal, affronting shots focussed on the Occupiers and the building, no footage taken of the police preparations and the threatening atmosphere it was beginning to create) and thier physical location it was clear that they were NOT with the occupiers, they were already biased towards the cops. This was also apparent from the general big-press/police bonhomie.

An Occupier asking the police to leave.

 The street was blockaded and cleared, but most of the Occupiers seemed insouciant of the (what I felt to be ominous) police build-up. I asked some of them about it, and they responded that they knew they weren't doing anything wrong, and they had been facing this since November and had become used to it, and this played down the police threat.

More barricades.

Moving in for action from across the street.

No order to disperse had been given, but the cops were moving people around, from one side of the street to another, then they would all move in against us really quick and squeeze us into narrow spaces against the building, and move in really quickly so people were tripping over each other. There were a couple of people in wheelchairs who couldn't move fast enoiugh and the pressure from the cops led one in a wheelchair to fall over, the cops heeded no entreaties and their pressure caused another walker to also fall over.



Since the cops were using the barricades to encircle the occupied building (I'll confess to not having found the courage to stay on the inside.) and pressing people on the inside, confrontations were increasing. The cops would push the barricades in and then say, "Don't touch the barricade!". Batons were lifted and brought down on people who tried to push back against the barricades. I admire the cops for their bravery against overwhelming odds: against colorful skirts, hoop ear-rings, tattoos, masks, bandanas etc. any sane person would go armed with flak jackets, helmets, face shields, batons, guns, tear gas, rubber bullets. Did I already mention that they outnumbered the people by 2:1? To defend an unoccupied building? In a city with numerous homeless and a 60% ILLEGAL foreclosure rate? Of course "Occupy is costing the city millions.".

See a video-poetry version of the following indictment of US Police.

"Our security depends on regulation but the police have turned bandits. They don't obey the rules. (Nor their own mission statement.) They are swarming into civic life. ... The security forces have rebelled. The people are the victim of a coup. ...

Who comes here? Let me hold up my lantern. It's only the police ... just a few of them as always whistling as they go.

The faithful body public has made a mistake. ... Coming up behind are hundreds of them. Hundreds too many, armed to the teeth for a job that doesn't need doing. Not needed? With all that weaponry?

Here they come, hurtling through the lifestream trying to pick a fight. There's no one to fight but you. You're the foreign body now."
-- paraphrased from pg 115, Written on the body, Jeanette Winterson

Bad stuff goes down. Someone on the inside of the building climbed onto the top of the roof and stood there crowing. At some point he picked up some bricks, and periodically held them aloft. The cops took no action, they did not respond to this (for at least 15 minutes) leave alone anticipate this - there were numerous higher vantage points on buildings the cops could have climbed up onto.
We were in the street, facing the building, with the cops lined up 1-2 deep in front of us, any observer would have thought they were protecting us. There were people in the crowd who were shouting to the guy on the roof to get off, that he was not one of us, that he did not represent us. At some point the idiot on the roof, with no warning, threw a brick, I would assume at the cops. The idiot aimed high, the brick sailed over the impassive cops' heads, but only a couple of feet over. I could see it coming in, in seeming slow motion, rotating slowly, I seemed to think there was plenty of time to react, to yell a warning to the guy one person removed from me in the crowd, to move around and push him out of the way. In that millisecond after I spotted the brick over the heads of the very very smartly dressed cops, it was over! The brick smashed into the face of the guy, he fell down, unconscious, two people in the crowd quickly grabbed him, supported his head and dragged him to the sidewalk and started aiding him, with his head on one person's lap.

I didn't have time to respond, I was frozen, didn't see the brick until it was above the cops. Q: Weren't even some of them looking up at the roof, at the idiot in plain sight? A: They hadn't been ordered to. Q: Could none of them, with all their training, have anticipated the brick, responded to it by trying to block it? A: They hadn't been ordered to. Q: Could none of them, helmeted and flak jacketed (and nattily dressed) as they were have thrown their body on the line to save a fellow citizen, as the soldiers in the war movies seem to throw their bodies on a grenade to save their comrades? A: We aren't their comrades. A cop who'd done any of the above would have deserved a commendation for bravery, but ...

Someone in the crowd had called an ambulance, but the surrounding streets had been blocked by cops. It took the cops themselves two minutes to realise someone had been hurt, and one turned around and asked me whether the victim was okay and where he was. I said, "He's right there on the sidewalk.". Five feet away.

In the meantime, an experienced occupier had climbed up on the roof, disarmed the brick-throwing idiot and gotten him to disappear. The crowd yelled deprecations up at the brick-thrower, one young woman next to me was crying, "He doesn't represent us, he's not one of us!" See also OccupySF's response to the violence on Valencia.

So now the cops pulled out their guns (tear-gas and rubber bullets, I was told) and aimed them at the Occupier who'd controlled the brick-thrower. Some of the cops then lowered their sights and aimed them at the people in the windows on the second floor. I and others yelled at the cops to please lower their weapons,  that the guy now on the roof had eliminated the cockerel brick-thrower. No avail.

.

Soon we were herded onto a street corner, and then off the sidewalk onto the street! Just earlier, I'd noticed the motto on the arm-badge:

ORO EN PAZ, FIERRO EN GUERRA
(GOLD IN PEACE, IRON IN WAR).
I'd started shouting their motto back at them, repeating it three times, sometimes in English, and then adding, "ESTO NO ES GUERRA, ESTO ES PAZ, QUE SEAIS DE ORO." (THIS IS NOT WAR, THIS IS PEACE, BE GOLD!)
A police higher up approached me, I told him, "You are stronger than us, hold your peace." He said he was only moving us off the street (?), "Everything had changed."

The civil suit is a reporter.

The senior officer approached me again, put his hands on my back, and when I turned around, said, "You seem to be a leader, call that guy off the roof." What is it about me that makes me such an obvious "leader"? My grey hair? My age? My green kurti? My sloganeering?

The brave, the few.

You've watched it on the news, you know how it ended. Homeless individuals and homeless families were evicted from what could and should have been a safe haven.

Huffington Post

So an empty building has been rescued from use by homeless via the massive deployment of police force. Was that expense necessary, given the situation of the homeless in SF?

Meanwhile in Oakland

FreeDharunRaviOriginalAppeal

After reading this, I hope you will be motivated to understand why we should act for judicial justice and some very simple examples (inform yourself, stand up and be counted, donate your time or money) of what you can do.


I do NOT endorse the original appeal! I am including it for completeness, so people can see the original appeal and I can explain why it bothered me: 

1) Utter triviality of this individual case (which doesn't mean that DR shouldn't get a fair trial, but that there are 100,000 others who should, which means we have to reform the system).

2) Dissipation of energy and political capital on isolated case of otherwise privileged Indian-American whose parents can probably afford a decent lawyer. If it shouldn't depend on being able to buy a good lawyer then reform the system and in the meantime contribute to the SouthernPovertyLawCenter.

3) Anti-"activist" attitude, that only serves to display the political ignorance and conservatism of the Indian-American community. Case in point, the most name-recognizable Indian-Americans are Nikki Haley and Bobby Jindal!

4) Lack of meaningful action on any other "justice" issue indicates motivation from narrow, parochial, communitarian interest.

5) I don't understand what "tough decision" (one that is tough on us) we are making, nor showing "compassion, understanding and sympathy" for anyone in less privileged situations than we are in, other than for a straight, Indian, brown, Hindu, child of privilege, apolitical, male, "fool when young" like us.

Contrast: We need your help to get charges dropped against Dharun Ravi and his 400 fellow-citizens who were wrongfully arrested by the Oakland Police during a peaceful (non-violent until the cops showed up in battle gear) exercise of free speech. The marchers were attempting to take over an underused public building paid for with tax dollars so they could continue to provide food, shelter, education and healthcare to those who most need it. The marchers were given illegal and inadequate warning to disperse, were physically constrained so they couldn't disperse;  they were beaten, tear-gassed and smoke-bombed till they had to be hospitalised (numbers are unavailable because they were taken by friends to diverse locations and many were simply treated at home). They were falsely accused of breaking and entering etc (no evidence of damage to locks or doors has been found, the one flag some protesters tried to burn, they took it outside in order to prevent property damage!). Many were held in prison for more than 3 days without access to a lawyer or charges being filed (How did that happen? While we were pissing around with the "copyright act" so we coud still download music for free, some legislation passed which gives from Obama down to local cops quite a free hand in incarcerating any American.) As of now, it is clear that 388 were wrongfully arrested for no cause, since only 12 have been charged. The actions of the Oakland Police are under review.

Of course, the above didn't happen - NO young Indian-Americans participate in social justice movements. (I do wish to be corrected, so stand up and be counted.)

Update on May Day: One of the leaders of OccupySF's  May Day attempt to make a community home, and as I learned, a long-time participant in OccupySF, was a young Bangladeshi-American. I've met four other Indian-Peninsulars at various Occupy related events, two Bengali men and a couple of Gujarati women. Of our IIT-classmates, I know of only two who are actively involved in social justice issues. 

Just yesterday I heard an Indian proudly proclaim that the Indian-American community is the richest and most educated ethnicity (or whatever) in the US. If our definition of ethnicity is loose, I recall that the honor actually belongs to the Jewish-American community. You don't need actual numbers to contrast, qualitatively, the difference in participation rates of the two communities in civic life in general and social justice movements in particular. How many Indian-Peninsulars do we know who've marched in favour of human rights, attended anti-war rallies or defended a PP clinic?    

 ---------------------------------------

Original Appeal: 

We need your help ASAP in support of Dharun Ravi by signing this petition ASAP.  Please share with as many friends as possible: 25000 signatures in 2 wks gets a response from Pres Obama.

Overview article-

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/02/06/120206fa_fact_parker

Petition Site:

·         Short URL: http://wh.gov/NM1

·         Long URL: https://wwws.whitehouse.gov/petitions/!/petition/address-fact-media-driving-justice-system’s-decisions-18-year-old-rutgers-student-dharun-ravi-not/jqlNR9lP

Detailed Reasoning Behind This Petition:

In 2010, Dharun Ravi, an 18 yearold Rutgers student, secretly recorded his roommate Tyler Clementi while he was with another man and posted it on the internet for everyone to see.  For the next two years this is what the world was told by every media outlet, politician, activists worldwide and we accepted it as the truth.  He was prejudged. 

Two years later, we know none of this is true, nothing was ever recorded, nothing was broadcast over the internet.  Yet Ravi was robbed of one of the most fundamental rights guaranteed by the United States Constitution: presumption of innocence.  No one treated Ravi as though he was innocent until proven guilty.

The prosecutor's office has taken advantage of a faulty law that can prosecute any citizen for the thoughts of others along with misplaced political pressure from activist groups to convict Ravi on Bias charges, a law that even the judge admitted was muddled.

He now faces up to 20 years in jail.

Every single witness testified unequivocally that Dharun Ravi had absolutely no hatred towards with gays/homosexuals, however the prosecution decided that he did, they decided what was in his mind despite all the evidence saying otherwise.

This is not the precedence we want to set.

Instead of drawing lines in the sand and taking sides, let's come together as people and prove that we can make tough decisions and show some compassion, understanding, and sympathy.

Please sign this if you believe that equality and tolerance should be achieved through honest, open communication and not through a vicious and vengeful prosecution that only serves to fuel tempers and alienate us even further.

WhyActForJudicialJustice

After reading this, please learn what you can do to act for judicial justice.

A couple of weeks ago a petition to “Save Dharun Ravi” appeared to get wide circulation amongst the Indian and Indian American community. The group on which I first saw this is not given to any kind of political commentary, petitioning or action. In spite of the seeming broad-mindedness of the original appeal :

“Instead of drawing lines in the sand and taking sides, let's come together as people and prove that we can make tough decisions and show some compassion, understanding, and sympathy.

Please sign this if you believe that equality and tolerance should be achieved through honest, open communication and not through a vicious and vengeful prosecution that only serves to fuel tempers and alienate us even further.”,
I questioned the motives of the re-broadcasters:
RST: “There are tens of thousands of other innocents in US jails and on death row, why
does this one in particular deserve my attention and the withdrawal of that
attention from the more general problem? Why is it more important to appeal one
_flawed_ instance of justice than to overturn the systemic racial and class bias
in US Justice?

If this was some poor Appalachian white boy, a Hispanic gang-banger or an inner
city black would any of us give a shit? Have any of us given a shit? I haven't
so far, why should I start now?”

To which, a response was

H8': “First they came for the Hispanic gang banger and I did not speak out.  Then they came for the Applachian white boy and I did not speak out.  Then they came for the inner city black kid and I did not speak out.  Then they came for Dharun Ravi and I said,

why should I start now?”

I thought there seemed to be some misunderstanding, and tried to explain:

RST: “My point, and Niemöller's, is precisely the opposite of how you seem to construe it. If you wait to protest until they come for you (or someone "sufficiently" like you - are not most other human beings sufficiently like you?) it is TOO LATE. You should speak out against injustice when it starts, you should protest injustice when you first become aware of it, and you should make yourself aware of it (by distrusting the MSM, authority, the official line; by being skeptical of what you hear) so as to not be caught unawares. By all means go ahead and sign the petition to Obumama pleading for Dharun Ravi if you are so moved,  but I fear that we, the Indian community, will only come across as insular, ignorant, idiots for attempting to use our clout over such a triviality.

Unless ...

Unless we use this as a starting point for getting involved in something bigger than ourselves, to see this incident as a reason to question authority, use this incident as a catalyst to inform ourselves of the institutional racist and classist biases and to show that we do also care about Hispanic and Native American men sentenced to death on trumped up charges and planted evidence, that we care about black men sentenced to death in spite of contrary genetic evidence.”

H8': “What you are saying seems to be that there are so many injustices out there so if one doesn't take up cudgels to oppose all of them, one has no standing to protest when one is stirred by a particular "sufficiently close" injustice.”

RST: No, what I am saying, by way of analogy, is that prevention (of an epidemic) is better than amelioration (of individual cases).

H8': “Tate,

 Look at all the attention you have given already.
If you have the time, you can give attention to every innocent. I would like to do the same, but probably won't be able to find the time.”

RST: The right wing strategy on this and every other issue is to force us to dissipate our energy and bandwidth on individual cases (and states), and it explains your apathy, “I can't do everything, so I will do nothing.”

H8': “Honestly, this one got my attention only because of the Indian origin, and it is a college close to my current home, where children of many friends study.”

RST: Nuff said?

H8': “I agree I would probably not give my attention if he was of a different country or origin. But I am sure that for them, their friends/country folks must be doing what I am trying to do.”

RST: Ummm, see Martin Niemöller.

H8': “I cannot possibly "overturn the systemic racial and class bias in US Justice" ”

RST: I agree, neither can I; not as isolated individuals, but together perhaps, we can. And, “a good fight should be fought for its merits, not abandoned because of its unwinnability.” - which is what Krishna said to Arjun in the Gita (or should have).

H8': “But this small thing, yes I can do.”

RST: Wonderful! And you can do much more!

A supportive friend rightly pointed out my high-mindedness in this and challenged me to come up with an action on the broader issues I raised that we as a community could participate in. But he immediately cast doubt on the viability of anything beyond the “Dharun Ravi” petition by wondering whether it would get any traction within the Indian-American community.

The answer to that doubt, I don't know. It will be determined by how you respond and act. Let's show that we can act from a higher principle, that of human rights for all, in the tradition established by Ashoka, promulgated by Akbar and eloquently described by Amartya.

Inform yourself, involve yourself and ACT!
(Will send you to a post with links to 'action' websites.)

ActForJudicialJustice

This is mostly directed at the Indian and Indian-American community, that circulated a petition to "Free Dharun Ravi".

The history behind my appeal here.

Let's show that we can act from a higher principle, that of human rights for all, in the tradition established by Ashoka, promulgated by Akbar and eloquently described by Amartya.
 

Here are just three of the most effective organizations working on miscarriage of justice, racially skewed sentencing, prison conditions, death penalty, prosecutorial abuse etc. For all three, I give some combination of examples of what is the problem, what is being done to fix it and what you can do to help.

If you want to join me in any local action, or even just to observe and counteract the MSM brain-washing we've already undergone, I've included links to various OccupyOakland sites.

Finally, links to The Nation (which H.C.Baxi got me hooked onto). Other reading is obvious: Harper's, Mother Jones, TomDispatch …

A. Amnesty International:

A few of Amnesty International's actions in the US:

Arizona prison conditions : Arizona's maximum security prisons fall below international standards for humane treatment, windowless cells for 22 to 24 hours a day in conditions of reduced sensory stimulation, with little access to natural light and no work, educational or rehabilitation programs, prisoners spend years in such conditions, AI calls for :

• reducing the number of prisoners in isolation;
• improving conditions in the SMU and similar units;
• removing prisoners with serious mental illness from SMU or similar units;
• taking measures to reduce the number of suicides in Arizona’s prisons, and
• barring children under 18 from being held in solitary confinement.  
  

Death Penalty: United States stayed in its dubiously bad place … behind China, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Iraq

Simple things you can do: Educate yourself on the issues, 10 ways to get involved : sign a petition, donate,

attend an event and put your body on the line.

What AI has to say about Mumbai slums

 

B. Southern Poverty Law Center: The Southern Poverty Law Center is a nonprofit civil rights organization dedicated to fighting hate and bigotry, and to seeking justice for the most vulnerable members of society.

Get informed: e.g. walking while black, “Sub-human. Disposable. Even in the larger world.

Trayvon was returning from buying candy and iced tea at a nearby convenience store, walking through a gated community in Sanford where his father was staying. He was presumed to be up to no good. His assailant, George Zimmerman, has been presumed by local police to have acted in self-defense.”

Get involved: stand up and be counted,

donate, learn how to speak out against bigotry

C. The Innocence Project : The Innocence Project works to exonerate the wrongfully convicted through postconviction DNA testing; and develop and implement reforms to prevent wrongful convictions.

Know (reading list),

Understand e.g., Government Misconduct

Common forms of misconduct by law enforcement officials include:

•    Employing suggestion when conducting  identification procedures
•    Coercing false confessions
•    Lying or intentionally misleading jurors about their observations
•    Failing to turn over exculpatory evidence to prosecutors
•    Providing incentives to secure unreliable evidence from informants

Common forms of misconduct by prosecutors include:

•    Withholding exculpatory evidence from defense
•    Deliberately mishandling, mistreating or destroying evidence
•    Allowing witnesses they know or should know are not truthful to testify
•    Pressuring defense witnesses not to testify
•    Relying on fraudulent forensic experts
•    Making misleading arguments that overstate the probative value of testimony 

Fix, simplest way to get-involved and make a difference is to join

and to donate

Act Locally: If there is one local group you will join

OccupyOakland : This is the other side of the coin: without grassroots protest and action, organizations like the above will continue to exist and have to fight individual cases. And to change the system, the grassroots (we, us, you and I) need you to participate.

Justice related issues: sexual harassment lawsuit against Alameda County Chief Probation Officer, Human Trafficking measure for CA ballot, “Oscar Grant, Trayvon Martin, and the protection of ‘police murder’ in America (Opinion)”

Related Activism: courts, prisoners : April 24^th, 4 PM, Oscar Grant Plaza, Oakland.

“Mumia Abu Jamal, Leonard Peltier, Angela Davis” if these names make your blood boil, you have a minimum GAWAS-ness of 8.

Articles from The Nation: I consider this a central clearing house for information and activism on human rights, social justice and progressive issues. Typically at least 3 months ahead of the NYT.

(HCBaxi was the one who led me to subscribe to and read The Nation, basically by ripping out articles for me to read, from his copies. After the WTC attacks, The Nation (amongst a few others) was the only US print media I could bear to read: they condemned the violence (not the “loss of innocent lives”), analyzed and acknowledged the causes and discussed possible responses. I pledged to subscribe to it lifelong.)

On “License to Kill”

On YOUR tax dollars at work for Arizona's private prisons

On abolishing the US Death Penalty

Patricia Williams Reason for doubt. Can't read it? Subscribe, $18 a year for online

How to end the Drug Wars

Reliable news on Occupy : if you only listen to NPR, you are NOT hearing it all.

_____________________________
This is meant for those of you who want to do something, but don't know what nor how. For the rest, please explore on your own, I do not want to influence or mediate your reading any further. Find your own articles with contrary viewpoints, for example those defending inhumane conditions, the death penalty, violent vigilantism, law enforcement and prosecutorial fraud, and those promulgating hate and bigotry. 

A morning in India

Thomas Friedman's head is flat

Elsa, our 15-month old, is up soon after 5AM. She is calm, so I keep hoping she will go back to sleep, but after an hour of her tossing and turning next to me, raising her head up to check if I am awake, I pick her up onto my chest, where she starts patting me. The light is now coming in, our jet-lagged 6-year old is up too, up to going for an early morning walk up to the gate defining this gated community.

Elsa sits in a sling on my hip, we draw a lot of curiosity – very few men can be seen carrying a child. Unlike in the U.S., where strangers compliment me essentially for doing my job, here the curiosity is silent. Elsa warbles and barks at birds in trees and dogs being walked by their owners' servants. Maya plucks a flower off each tree and names some – powder-puff , hibiscus, pomegranate – that she has learned from my mother and sister. I show her the yellow bougainvillea sprawling 25' up the silver oak and the tamarind with unplucked fruit only on the higher branches. Isa points upwards into a bamboo grove and we see the double hole of a half-finished baya-bird's nest, abandoned.

On the roads in the society, we pass domestic maids in 9 yard saris on their way in to work, gardeners on bicycles, the newspaper deliveryman and the milkmen on their motorscooters. From the main road a 100 or so yards away, we can hear the near-incessant high-pitched braying of the auto-rickshaws and the insistent baritone of trucks' horns. If you filter out the distant sounds of traffic, you can hear numerous birds – a flock of “seven sisters” exchanging family gossip, totas – the ubiquitous long-tailed green Indian parakeets, various finches and flycatchers and others unknown to me.

The air is still cool as we spot the sun glutinously disconnecting itself from the horizon, orange-red from the dust ¾ ever-present. Soon we will rotate further under it; freed of the dust, it will regain its familiar white and the silent heat will beat down. Just outside the gate, we see cowherds pulling out the neat garbage bags from the trash container, ripping them open and tossing them to their cows, who will munch the previous days Sensex numbers and produce milk to feed the kids of the global Indians – both NRIs and RNIs.

Further along, we see a couple of donkeys browsing the dry brown grass of the posted army land between our society and the village. Isa pulls out the camera and manages to frame a donkey between the scraggly branches of a thorn tree, cutting out in the foreground the man squatting in the drain and in the background the shiny glass buildings of the local outsource city – software complexes and call centres – filled with the appropriately accent-corrected, newly upper middle class “Sid” and “Angie”, gorged and pudgy from burgers and pizzas like the Americans whose jobs they are in-draining.

As the day warms up, you can hear a one-per-second “twoop-twoop-twoop”, the meta-period is: on for a few minutes, off for a couple. I imagine the chakki, the flour mill in the village, its canvas belt a little loose, slipping regularly on the pulley, women bringing in their grain bought in bulk to be ground to order, queueing up, getting a light coating of the flour as they wait their turn. It is a sound I have heard seemingly all my life in the towns of the plains and plateaus of India. Later, at home, I ask my mother about it, thinking it would be nice to show Maya a flour mill. My mother looks at me with a quizzical smile and says, “That's not a chakki, that's a woodpecker!”

What else am I so grossly mistaken about?

OccupyWallStWest - why both you and I should go.

Excerpts from "Crowd Politics" by Andy Merrifield in Sept/Oct 2011 New Left Review. (Italics mine.)

Article is also available at Harpers

...what social change really needs: people risking life and limb, as with ... the black civil rights movement ... the physicality of bodies being present in space.

... the relative conformity of the world's urban populations today: ... cut off from the past yet somehow excluded from the future, deadened by hustling a living.

The politics of the encounter... can overcome the inertia of apparent mass and individual powerlessness...

... people start to recognize ... one another not always directly, but through a mode of relating to the world, through unstated forms of solidarity.

... "class" perhaps evokes a ... ruling elite, but the rest of us, those who do not rule, are an assorted and fragmented layering of people who are neither conscious of class nor motivated to act in its name.

(You are working class if you are driven by) the need "to sell your labor in order to live" - "to look at yourself in the mirror and think, 'Now what have I got that I can sell?'"

...any moment of encounter ... creates its own historical space ... an illicit rendezvous of human bonding (not bondage) and solidarity ... in which something disrupts and intervenes in the paralysis.

But what kind of human ... will you be, and what kind of new social networks hold the key for a 21st century politics of militant democracy? In what forms will the Joycean everybuddy begin to express itself, as it challenges the crisis-ridden neoliberal order?

http://www.occupywallstwest.org/wordpress/

In response to Andrew Sullivan's article

Thanks Chris for bringing this to my attention.

AS brings up in his article something I have been feeling over the last two days listening to various right wing bloviators (e.g.on On Point with Tom Ashbrook (?)) argue against a fed trial - the elephant in the room that they fail to mention - they are afraid that most evidence will be thrown out or it be ruled a mistrial because of TORTURE. As someone arguing in favor of a fed trial pointed out, those on the right who want the trial to take place in the deeply flawed, ineffective and inexperienced US Military court (3 terror cases tried in 8 years, Vs. ~ few hundred in fed courts with a 93% conviction rate) are simply afraid that KSM could walk free. They want a trial that will guarantee conviction, but that is nothing other than a kangaroo court - you might as well just lynch KSM on the Glenn Beck show.

The other nonsense spouted on On Point, that went unchallenged, was that somehow the trial would damage the federal court system and that it would set a dangerous precedent. This was repeated numerous times, without any other explanation of why or how the fed system would or could be damaged nor any clarification of what exactly the precedent was going to be. Then there is the national security issue, "We will have to disclose various unconventional classified "information-gathering" techniques (probably illegal!) and hence they will become ineffective, because the "terrorists" will train themselves to withstand them (which is why KSM was water-boarded 183 times - "Oh it didn't work a 182 times, let's do it again" - this is the mark of what?), and also we will be stopped from using them, not that we did ever did use anything of the sort."

What balderdash, the CIA is capable only of grasping "micro-intelligence" (so-and-so is at a wedding party  let's do the predator kowabunga!, or evidence that some handshake somewhere took place or not) and is fundamentally incapable of seeing macro-intelligence on a societal or historic scale. So they can be trusted to big time EFF UP Pakistan!