A GOP convention protester’s playbook covers pepper spray to prison time

Each person in an affinity group would have a job. Someone might be a driver, another in charge of supplies, like water. Several needed to be willing to get arrested, if it came to that. Someone else needed to be willing to handle the affairs of those who were taken into custody, like walking the dog or arranging bail. Part of being in an affinity group was protecting it from infiltration by a police informant, which made them cagey about their plans.

Maria’s group, which also included several unemployed people, a couple of students and a few homeless, was trying to lay the groundwork for a march in August by the Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign, a movement to abolish poverty. It was starting to look like a giant obstacle course.

Not only was Tampa trying to create a vast zone around downtown with special rules for protesters, there was also a federalized zone around the convention that was protected by the U.S. Secret Service. It would be difficult to get close to the delegates.

Wright said the Poor People’s Campaign wasn’t going to bother getting a permit. “We’ve already decided we’re marching regardless,” he said.

http://tinyurl.com/74l2ebb

‘The economic elite has launched a class war against us and they have indicated every intention of seeing it continue’

This epic of financial capitalism has produced little real wealth but it has been an effective tool for shifting existing wealth from those who produced it to a small group of plutocrats via a state / financial nexus. The only proposed solutions emanating from the plutocrat / state are for more of the same policies that have destroyed the American economy, polity and culture. The sad truth is that the economic elite benefit from our declining wages and the looting of our social resources in direct proportion to what we lose. The economic elite has launched a class war against us and they have indicated every intention of seeing it continue.

Current circumstances are understood in a general sense by most of us and in some great detail by a significant number. Legal scholars and current and former criminal prosecutors have identified a large number of actionable financial, war and environmental crimes committed by the financial and political elite that have gone un-prosecuted and unpunished. A social division exists where the rich and the politically connected have impunity for theirs crimes while the police and the surveillance state are used as tools of social control and political repression against the rest of us. Were redress available through the established order, criminal prosecutions of culpable elites would already have taken place.

Meanwhile, a set of concrete economic proposals that would immediately improve the lives of those most affected by the current economic crisis, as well those of the long-term dispossessed, exists without being enacted and with no impetus for enacting them from either major political party.

http://tinyurl.com/7blgr3h

Economists’ Malign Influence on Taxes

Free market economic “literature” as economists call it – and their papers frequently are works of fiction – gave succor and intellectual respectability to the decades of deregulation and tax cuts that have bankrupted the country. Congress is compromised, to be sure, but lobbyists and members need economic studies as cover for what they are doing.

The United States is a plutocracy, with an income and wealth distribution that rivals South America’s worst cases, but economists refuse to acknowledge that these outcomes are attributable to ill-advised public policies on taxation, regulation, trade, and education spending over the last several decades.

Economists bleat about “globalization” as though it were inevitable rather than a set of deliberate policy choices. Markets are political creations, so results produced by them are not inviolable or free from question. And they don’t always produce equilibrium.

http://tinyurl.com/6n2gl5t

Occupy the American Psychiatric Industry solidarity rally in Boston, Saturday, May 5th, 2 pm

MPOWER in MA is planning a May 5th action in solidarity with Philadelphia activists. Our “Occupy the American Psychiatric Industry” will take place on May 5, 2012 at 2 pm at the Arbour Hospital in the Jamaica Plain neighborhood of Boston: Arbour Hospital, 49 Robinwood Avenue, Boston, MA 02130

http://tinyurl.com/d7huntf

Occupy the American Psychiatric Association

On May 5th, a reform psychiatric organization called Mindfreedom has organized a rally in Philadelphia and a march to “occupy” the American Psychiatric Association, which is holding its ritzy, drug industry funded yearly convention at the Pennsylvania Convention Center.  MindFreedom states that it represents those who say they have been harmed or even helped by organized psychiatry but find that recent proposed changes to the DSM will lead to increased practices of over or wrongful diagnoses and over-medicating with drugs that carry severe side effects. Among the scheduled speakers will be activist attorney Jim Gottstein, founder of Psychrights, who lobbies against forced institutionalization and drugging and exposed the dangers of atypical antipsychotics frequently prescribed for individuals with autism.

Autism parents have trouble enough attending their own dental appointments much less rallies but the way this event is organized, there is nothing to stop anyone from carrying a sign protesting the proposed changes the DSM’s autism category.  There is also an occupy rally in Boston on the same day in solidarity with the Philadelphia event.

http://tinyurl.com/clp3r77

PHOTOS: Boston May Day 2012 Rally at City Hall Plaza

Following a march from Copley Square, over 100 activists from Occupy Boston, Boston May Day Committee, Student Anarchist Federation, and several other progressive organizations held a traditional May Day rally at Boston City Hall Plaza on Tuesday at lunchtime. Many attendees then proceded to an immigrant march from East Boston to Everett later the same afternoon.

There was a moderate police presence, no incidents and no arrests. The event was one of several May Day 2012 activities in Boston. Organizers said steady rain kept numbers low throughout the day. (Open Media Boston)

http://tinyurl.com/ckqz2db