Good Morning from Occupy Boston!

Stories of the Day: Chicago Police van deliberately runs into and injures NATO protester. See video footage here. Prosecutors on Saturday accused three activists who travelled to Chicago for a NATO summit of manufacturing Molotov cocktails in a plot to attack President Barack Obama’s campaign headquarters, Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s home and other targets. But defense lawyers shot back that Chicago police had trumped up the charges to frighten peaceful protesters away, telling the judge it was undercover officers known by the activists as “Mo” and “Gloves,” not his clients, who brought the firebombs to a South Side apartment where the men were arrested. “This is just propaganda to create a climate of fear,” Michael Duetsch said. “My clients came to peacefully protest.” On the eve of the summit, the dramatic allegations were reminiscent of previous police actions ahead of major political events, when officials moved quickly to prevent suspected plots but sometimes quietly dropped the charges later. For more, see Detained Protesters Accused of Chicago Terror Plot. Darrin Annussek says he walked to Chicago from Philadelphia to participate in Occupy protests, only to be seized by police in a raid on an apartment at 32nd and Morgan. “For 18 hours, we were handcuffed to a bench and our legs were shackled together,” he said. “Some of our cries for the bathroom were either ignored or met with silence.” Annusek was released Friday morning along with four others reportedly suspected of preparing molotov cocktails. At least one other detainee was released several hours later Friday. Kris Hermes, of the National Lawyers Guild said: “There is absolutely no evidence of molotov cocktails or any other criminal activity going on at this building.” A tenant who agreed to host the out-of-town protesters says the police did seize his home-brew making equipment, including buckets, beer bottles and caps. For more, see Arrested Protester Charges Mistreatment After Police Raid Apartment.  Three Occupy activists raided on May 16 and disappeared for a period of time by Chicago police were brought before a bond judge and officially charged with material support for terrorism, conspiracy to commit terrorism and possession of explosives or explosive or incendiary devices. The case marks the first time that state prosecutors have used the Illinois Terrorism law to prosecute individuals. Deutsch called the investigation, targeting and raid of these activists “worse than entrapment.” According to the NLG, two police informants infiltrated the group. The NLGE believes “they’re the ones who provoked this and they’re the ones,” who committed the “illegal activity” and had the “illegal materials.” For more, see CPD, FBI and Secret Service Claim NATO 3 Came to Chicago to Commit “Terrorist Acts of Violence.” One of the suspects, identified by police as Jared Chase, 24, is from Keene, N.H. and spent time in Boston, where he participated in the Occupy Boston protests last fall. A Facebook page bearing Chase’s name, picture, and other personal information, calls him a DJ and says he is studying 3D animation and game-programming at NHTI, a community college in Concord, N.H. For more, see NATO Suspect has New England Ties. This video shows Chicago police questioning occupiers about Occupy Chicago, the NATO protests, and threatening violence after arbitrarily pulling over their car in the Bridgeport neighborhood of Chicago earlier this week. The video went viral after the activists posted it to social media. Now, three of them are being charged with terrorism in the wake of a warrantless preemptive raid on activists’ homes in Chicago. An attorney from the National Lawyers Guild describes the video: They were driving in a car and were pulled over without any kind of justification or reason by the Chicago police department. They were surrounded by police and they were questioned for a very long period of time about what they were doing in Chicago, why they were here to protest, what their political affiliations were, how they identified politically—All kinds of absolutely outrageous questions that certainly do not indicate any kind of illegal behavior because it is not constitutional simply to accuse them of a crime because of a political belief. For more, including the video, see Free the #NATO3! And a Los Angeles man was ordered held in lieu of $10,000 bail Wednesday for allegedly punching a Chicago Police sergeant off his bike during an anti-deportation protest in the Loop. The police report did not include any mention of the officer falling off his bicycle or suffering any injuries. Five of Johnson’s fellow demonstrators came to court to show support for their friend — which police said was one of two arrests for attacking a police officer in the run up so far to the NATO Summit. Johnson was the only NATO-related protester charged with a felony. The men who came from Dallas, New York and San Diego for the NATO weekend denied Johnson punched the officer. “He never pushed anyone off the bike. He’s a non-violent person,” said Chris McKay, who is with Occupy Walk USA. “The cop grabbed him by the collar and when he turned to see who he was, his arm brushed against the officer.” For more, see Danny Johnson, Occupy Walk USA team member, arrested in Chicago. And entrapment is illegal  – but the question of whether law enforcement set up a legal sting or illegal entrapment is for a jury to decide. For more, see How FBI Entrapment is Inventing Terrorists and Letting Bad Guys Off the Hook. And as governments around the world, including our own, face more and more popular resistance, we’re witnessing a revival of the use of agent provocateurs. An agent provocateur is the well-used tactic of using undercover military or police to join a dissenting group or protest in order to provoke others in the group to carry out illegal actions and violence. The goal is to discredit the group from the inside. Sometimes the group gets discredited with those outside. Other times the group is enticed into internal divisions and collapses. For more, see How to Identify an Agent Provocateur. And in other news, a judge may have found unconstitutional the law that allows people to be held indefinitely without trial by the military, but the House of Representatives voted Friday to keep it anyway. On Wednesday, Federal Judge Katherine Forrest found that the law violates rights to free speech and due process. But House members defended it, ultimately voting 238 to 182 against an amendment to guarantee civilian trials for any terrorism suspect arrested in the United States. For more, see Bill to End Indefinite Detention Fails in House. 

Other Occupies/Protests: The Twin Cities activists who had their homes raided by the FBI last September are starting to learn more about why they’re being investigated by a Chicago grand jury in relation to material support of terrorism. Lawyers for the activists have learned from prosecutors that the feds sent an undercover law enforcement agent to infiltrate the Twin Cities Anti-War Committee in April 2008, just as the group was planning its licensed protests at the Republican National Convention. Last fall the Justice Department’s Inspector General released a scathing report that criticized the FBI for invoking anti-terrorist laws to justify their investigations and harassment of groups including Greenpeace, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, and the Catholic Worker. “This is exactly what the Inspector General’s report was talking about,” Sundin told City Pages this morning. “The FBI doesn’t have the right to spy on us. It’s an abuse of our democratic rights. We’re supposed to have freedom of association, not, ‘You can associate but we’re going to spy on you.'” For more, see Secret Government Informer Infiltrated Minnesota Activist Groups.

“‎I can’t understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I’m frightened of the old ones.” John Cage

Continue reading “Occupy Boston Daily Digest NATO edition 5/20/12” »

Good Morning from Occupy Boston!

Stories of the Day: If you’re going to the NATO protest, please read this information from the ACLU: Protesting NATO: What to Know About the Secret Service and H.R. 347. Inequality isn’t only plaguing America—the Arab Spring flowered because international capitalism is broken. In From Cairo to Wall Street: Voices from the Global Spring, edited by Anya Schiffrin and Eamon Kircher-Allen, Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz says the world is finally rising up and demanding a democracy where people, not dollars, matter—the best government that money can buy just isn’t good enough. … What the protests tell us is that there was outrage and that outrage gives hope. For more, see The 99 Percent Wakes Up. We have been, like nations on the periphery of empire, colonized. We are controlled by tiny corporate entities that have no loyalty to the nation and indeed in the language of traditional patriotism are traitors. They strip us of our resources, keep us politically passive and enrich themselves at our expense. … The colonized are denied job security. Incomes are reduced to subsistence level. The poor are plunged into desperation. Mass movements, such as labor unions, are dismantled. The school system is degraded so only the elites have access to a superior education. Laws are written to legalize corporate plunder and abuse, as well as criminalize dissent. And the ensuing fear and instability—keenly felt this past weekend by the more than 200,000 Americans who lost their unemployment benefits—ensure political passivity by diverting all personal energy toward survival. … A change of power does not require the election of a Mitt Romney or a Barack Obama or a Democratic majority in Congress, or an attempt to reform the system or electing progressive candidates, but rather a destruction of corporate domination of the political process. For more, see Colonized by Corporations. And: David Graeber likes to say that he had three goals for the year: promote his book, learn to drive, and launch a worldwide revolution. The first is going well, the second has proven challenging, and the third is looking up. Graeber is a 50-year-old anthropologist…He’s also an anarchist and radical organizer, a veteran of many of the major left-wing demonstrations of the past decade … This summer, Graeber was a key member of a small band of activists who quietly planned, then noisily carried out, the occupation of Lower Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park, providing the focal point for what has grown into an amorphous global movement known as Occupy Wall Street. For more, see David Graeber, the Anti-Leader of Occupy Wall Street. And here’s an article by David Graeber, who says: “Occupy is shedding its liberal accretions and rapidly turning into something with much deeper roots, creating alliances that promise to transform the very notion of revolutionary politics in America. …  In endorsing a vision of universal equality, of the dissolution of national borders, and democratic self-governing communities, nurses, bus drivers, and construction workers at the heart of America’s greatest capitalist metropolis are signing on to the vision, if not the tactics, of revolutionary anarchism.” For more, see Occupy’s Liberation From Liberalism.

Other Occupies/Protests: Tents belonging to some of the most persistent Occupy protesters in North America will be removed Wednesday morning if demonstrators won’t leave a downtown park, the mayor of St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada, said Tuesday. Dennis O’Keefe has asked Occupy protesters in Harbourside Park to leave by midnight or city officials will dismantle their tents at around 8 a.m. “I don’t use the term ’evict’ because we’re not evicting them,” O’Keefe said, stressing that protesters can use the popular seaside meeting place during daylight and evening hours. “The only thing is, they can’t continue to live in the park — any more than I can.” For more, see Occupy Newfoundland Kicked Out. In more news from Canada: A court order had forced a Quebec college to reopen; as a result, some teachers and parents helped striking students form a picket line to keep other kids out; riot police then burst through to help enforce the court order; and, in the end, the school closed again because teachers weren’t prepared to teach. The height of Tuesday’s standoff at College Lionel-Groulx saw riot police use pepper spray and physical force to help 53 students return to class after winning a court injunction. For more, see Riot Cops Open School, Staff Shuts it Down. And in more school news: a 16-year-old Bronx boy was slapped with a disorderly conduct ticket inside his high school after trying to hand out flyers protesting the city’s plan to shut down the school. Malik Ayala, a sophomore at Lehman High School in Schuylerville, was summoned to the dean’s office last month after being ordered by school staffers to stop handing out copies of a letter he had written urging students to unite and stand up for the school. The Education Department is in the process of closing it. “What will happen if all the public schools get shut down?” Ayala, who is a member of the school’s Student Leadership Council, wrote in the flyers, which featured the Black Panther Party icon at the top, along with the words, “Power to the People …Then and Now.” … “They’re turning our schools into penitentiaries,” added Ayala, who said he has was issued a second ticket at a Bronx subway station April 18 while videotaping police officers conducting stop-and-frisks. For more, see Bronx Student Ticketed After Handing Out Flyers Protesting School Closure.

“Poverty is not an accident. Like slavery and apartheid, it is man-made and can be removed by the actions of human beings.” Nelson Mandela

Good Morning from Occupy Boston!

Attention Digest Fans! The amount of time it takes to put the Digest together is too much for one person to keep doing it 7 days a week. So, starting May 16, the Daily Digest will be published on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. If you are requesting that an event be listed in the Daily Digest, please give 2-3 days advance notice, or realize that your item may not be appearing until 2-3 days after you send it to me. Thank you.

Stories of the Day: University of California police arrested nine people Monday morning in a raid designed to end the occupation of the Gill Tract (Occupy the Farm) and allow the university to begin research preparations this week, officials said. One young man, who appears to be in his late teens or early 20s, remained on the property as of 9:44 a.m. about 15 feet up in a tree, said University of California spokesman Dan Mogulof. Authorities were in communication with him, and he didn’t appear to have any gear or supplies. Urban farming activists took over the university-owned field three weeks ago to plant crops and advocate for a publicly-accessible community farm on the land. The Gill Tract has historically been used for scientific research, but has long been eyed by urban farming advocates as a prime location for a community farm. For the story, see Nine Arrested After Early-Morning Raid. And Indonesia became the first country to suspend imports of U.S. beef following the discovery of an American dairy cow infected with mad cow disease. “We will lift the ban as soon as the U.S. can assure us its dairy cows are free of mad cow disease,” said Indonesia’s Vice Agriculture Minister Rusman Heriawan. For more, see Indonesia Halts U.S. Beef Imports Over Mad Cow Concern. And Several Minnesota moms who facilitate access to local farm food are planning to act despite the risk of criminal charges laid out in warnings from the Minnesota Department of Agriculture (MDA). The MDA has threatened several of them, and has already conducted investigations against them. The letters warn that if they continue helping provide fresh food to their friends and neighbors, the MDA will press criminal charges and prosecute. The MDA holds that the mothers are violating food-handling regulations. Here, Melinda Olsen discusses the ordeal in detail – she only helps the farmer for free by storing goods in her garage for others. No commerce. Yet, she is ominously threatened by MDA for food crimes. For more, see Fresh Food Moms Threatened with Criminal Charges Scheduled to Disobey. And genetic engineering is a threat to food security, especially in a changing climate. The introduction of genetically manipulated organisms by choice or by accident grossly undermines sustainable agriculture and in so doing, severely limits the choice of food we can eat. Once GE/GMO plants are released into the environment, they are out of control. If anything goes wrong – they are impossible to recall. GE contamination threatens biodiversity respected as the global heritage of humankind, and one of our world’s fundamental keys to survival. For a short informative video from Greenpeace on the risks of GE/GMO foods, click here. In other news, the FBI is quietly pushing its plan to force surveillance backdoors on social networks, VoIP, and Web e-mail providers, and that the bureau is asking Internet companies not to oppose a law making those backdoors mandatory. For more, see Backdoors for Government Surveillance. And here’s an ugly story: Gun range targets meant to resemble dead Florida teen Trayvon Martin are offensive enough. But what’s more disturbing is that the Florida entrepreneur’s distributor reportedly sold out his entire stock in two days. The seller says he ‘wanted to make money’ off of Martin’s controversial shooting by George Zimmerman. For more, see Man Sells Out of Trayvon Martin Targets. After that, here’s a bit of inspiration: my friend Venus Cumara performing her  powerful poem Occupy Your Heart, Reclaim Love for Occupy London. For the video, click here.

Other Occupies/Protests: From Occupy Wall Street: Anti ACTA, SOPA, PIPA, CCI, CISPA, MPAA, RIAA, MPA, ARAA, internet ID, censorship protest June 9, 2012. Occupy Wall Street, Liberty Plaza, New York, NY 10006. NATIONWIDE, CALLING ALL OCCUPIERS!!!! Knowledge should be free. This is a serious threat to education of people lower on the caste system. It will damage opportunity for all greatly. It also promotes monopoly and greed within governance as well as control of the people. This protest is to take place on the same date as a similar protest taking place in Paris France. MAKE YOUR VOICES HEARD. SUPPORT FAIR USE AND EDUCATION! Facebook event page:  http://www.facebook.com/events/287232521354857.

Good Morning from Occupy Boston!

Stories of the Day: Protesters in Moscow have adopted new tactics, “dilemma protests” and flash mobs, to avoid the mass arrests. In a primer on nonviolent protest, “Sharp’s Dictionary of Power and Struggle,” Gene Sharp, an American intellectual, described a “dilemma protest” as a performance of an action so inchoate and unorthodox that police are trapped. If they let it happen, they are encouraging it, but if they arrest people they risk looking either silly or arbitrary and unjust, which is the point. The tactic has found wide appeal in Belarus, where activists gather to clap, eat ice cream cones, set their cellphone alarms to ring in chorus or simply stand silently. For more, see Protesters in Moscow Alter Approach to Avoid Arrests. And  more than 200,000 long-term jobless Americans will lose their unemployment checks this week, when eight states roll off the federal extended benefits program. “The hundreds of thousands of long-term unemployed who are being abruptly pushed off the extended benefits program are just the latest wave of jobless workers forced to survive without basic financial protections,” said George Wentworth, senior staff attorney at the National Employment Law Project, an advocacy group. For the story, see Jobless Americans to Lose Unemployment Benefits. And when people talk about “austerity,” they only ever talk about the pain the general population should voluntarily accept, in the form of reduced services and curtailed “stimulus.” No one ever says the financial services sector should have to cut back on its access to easy money, and there hasn’t been much in the way of serious plans to restore some sanity and prudence to the lending and investing business. Read more: Austerity Can’t Be Just for Regular People. And cruelty comes in many forms, whether it’s exacted at the hand of a high school bully or in a nation’s capitol. This weekend, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney is still on defense over the cruelty he exhibited as a student. Social Darwinism is executed on the back of severe austerity measures like those seen across Europe and those sought by Romney and his party. It is the ultimate bullying tactic. It is using the brute strength of elected power (usually paid for by wealthy campaign contributors) to grab weakened middle class and impoverished families by the shoulders and slam them against the wall just to see what change might shake out of their pockets. For more, see Austerity, Bullies, and Broken Spirits. And on a lighter note: the Class War comes to Sesame Street: The Muppets have been accused by Fox News of being communists, to which they responded at a press conference. Now, watch as they sing N.W.A.’s classic, “F- tha Police.” For the video, see Muppets with Attitude.

Other Occupies/Protests: From Occupy Wall Street: September 17, 2012, The People’s Picket on Wall Street, 7am-10am. We will form a massive moving picket line on our one-year anniversary, and continue the conversation we started One year prior with boots on the ground. People from all over the world get ready to shut it down. And: masses of chanting “indignant” activists poured into the streets across Spain on Saturday in a vast show of strength one year on from igniting a global protest against economic injustice. Tens of thousands packed Madrid’s central Puerta del Sol square, the emblematic birthplace of their popular movement against inequality, sky-high unemployment and spending cuts that shook the political establishment. Many had marched to the square for hours in separate columns of protesters from all directions and defied an official warning that they must disperse after 10pm. For more, see One Year On, Spain’s “Indignants” Take to the Streets. And the Guardian UK published this “GlobalMay Manifesto of the Occupy Movement,” (although they didn’t mention if it was endorsed by any Occupy), saying “the global Occupy movement wants a better world. Such a world is possible, and here’s how … ”

Good Morning from Occupy Boston!

Stories of the Day: Two Fullerton, Calif., police officers will be tried in the death of a mentally ill homeless man, who had not even broken any laws, and whose apparent beating by six police officers was captured on a security camera video, a judge ruled May 9. The victim suffered from schizophrenia and was not fluent in English. The apparent beating lasted nine minutes and 40 seconds and ended with Thomas’ limp body in handcuffs. The officers had responded to the Fullerton Transportation Center after receiving a call that a homeless man was seen looking into car windows and pulling on door handles. For more, see Cops to Be Tried in Alleged Fatal Beating of Homeless Man Caught on Video. And thanks to police officer Enoch Clark, Beaumont, California resident Monique Hernandez will never see her ten-year-old daughter again. On February 21, Clark conducted a traffic stop involving Hernandez, who was suspected of drunk driving. When Clark attempted to handcuff her, Hernandez resisted. The officer responded by using a JPX device at point-blank range — a weapon that uses a gunpowder charge to fire a stream of pepper spray at roughly 400 miles an hour. The payload of weaponized OC spray is propelled over the prescribed distance at less than three one-hundredths of a second, making it “too fast to avoid…. The effect is immediate; there is no chance to resist.” For the story, see Beaumont, California Woman Blinded for “Contempt of Cop.” And if you’re going to the NATO protests, please be careful. Police in Chicago have spent $1 million on riot-control equipment in the last few months ahead of next month’s Nato summit, which is expected to attract thousands of anti-war protesters.  Officers are also preparing to use the controversial long-range acoustic device, or LRAD, a sonic weapon which can cause permanent hearing loss, during the operation. For more, see Chicago police bulk up with $1m in riot gear for peaceful NATO summit protests. Let’s take a look at some of the new weapons of the police state: The American military have presented the world with a new weapon, informally named the heat ray or microwave cannon. The “Active Denial System” is a non-lethal weapon primarily designed for crowd control. The Active Denial System (ADS) beams a high-frequency, man-sized electromagnetic wave 1,000 meters. ADS fires a high-powered beam of high-frequency millimeter waves at 95 GHz (a wavelength of 3.2 mm). Similar to the same way that a microwave oven heats food at 2.45GHz, the millimeter waves excite the water and fat molecules in the body, instantly heating them via dielectric heating and causing intense pain. While microwaves will penetrate into human tissue about 17mm (0.67″), the millimeter waves used in ADS only penetrate the top layers of skin, with most of the energy being absorbed within 0.4 mm (1/64″). For more, see Microwave Goodbye Weapon: Heat-Ray Crowd Dispersal Cannon Unveiled. And according to British paper The Telegraph, police are currently testing a shoulder-mounted laser cannon that can project a virtual wall of blinding light from nearly 500 meters away.  Originally developed to help cargo ships repel pirate attacks, the device temporarily blinds incoming attackers with a band of light that’s 10 meters wide. While the United Nations has banned laser weapons that cause permanent blindness, lasers that only cause temporary vision impairment, or blindness by accident, are still acceptable. Police would not be deploying the weapon on the British public unless it could be confirmed that it does not cause permanent blindness, the paper said. Police were also testing a long-range electronic device, similar to a Taser, that can incapacitate targets from a distance. Another less-lethal weapon category, “long-range chemical irritant projectiles,” was also being examined, The Telegraph noted. For more, see Shoulder-Mounted Lasers, Long-Range Tasers Among New U.K. Riot Gear. And here’s a weapon that can literally silence protesters: a silence gun.  A strange and unsettling new gun being developed by Japanese researchers shoots sound waves in an effort to disrupt and silence anyone who dares speak out of turn. The gun operates based on the concept of delayed auditory feedback. An attached microphone picks up the sound being made by the target and plays it back 0.2 seconds later. The effect is incredibly confusing to the human brain, making it all but impossible to talk or hold a conversation. The device doesn’t cause the person it’s being used on any physical harm — it simply messes with their head. For more, see Silence Gun: Strange Weapon of the Future Immediately Quiets You, Whether You Like it or Not. And for some dark comedy: you may have heard people in Occupy Boston singing “I Really Like the Cops.” This song was written by the activist Brad Will, who was killed by police in Mexico during a protest. Click here for a video of him singing the song.