My friend Legba Carrefour has been working with DC Students for a Democratic Society and Students for a Democratic Society for some time, now (he’s 27), and has served as a great window for me into the world of public demonstrations and their regular suppression. A conversation got started on my email list, Media-Squatters, about the protests at the DNC last week, and a number of us were surprised by reports of police brutality – as well as how little any of this was broadcast on the major networks. (Here’s a link to the most famous of the brutality episodes in the Rocky Mountain News.
Here’s some of Legba’s report to us:
I have to first mention that I’m wasn’t at the DNC protests nor am I going to the RNC protests. I’m staying in DC doing media support and jail support from afar. I went to NYC for the 2004 RNC protests and I was, in the following order, beaten with a nightclub, wrapped in a giant orange net by the cops, set on fire (swear I’m not making that up), beaten again, arrested, put in a cage, hit by a cop car. So I’m taking it easy this time around.
The protests at the DNC are being organized under a couple of different umbrella groups. Broadly, it includes everything from progressives to anti-authoritarian radicals, with a lot of students
and youth under 30 and vets.
The conditions were pretty poor. The police had also erected a mini-Gitmo of free-speech zones–protest pens–into which to corral the bulk of demonstrators and any kind of activity was almost
immediately curbed. The other major problem was that there was effectively zero press coverage, even among liberal bloggers. I spent my week seeing liberal blogs excitedly gush about what was going on inside the convention and rail about Republican radicalism of the last eight years while I was cradling a phone in my hand listening to friends tell me stories of being beaten up a couple of blocks away.
That lack of coverage in a lot of respects really emboldens the police and allows them to get away with just about anything, aside from it absolutely impoverishing our ability to engage in a reasoned analysis of how power works and whether the Democrat vs. Republican frame actually depicts anything even close to reality.
And, speaking of police brutality, it’s pretty notable that they’ve been consistently targeting press. There was a documented incident where an ABC news producer was knocked down and arrested trying to get footage of delegates and donors. The police also detained and seized the equipment of the Glass Bead Collective (a well-known indymedia group). There was also the knocking down and detainment of a Code Pink member–probably the worst bit was seeing her get shoved down, the footage then cutting to her being interviewed by journalists, and then the cop walking up and grabbing her in the middle of the interview and dragging her off.
But that kind of one-time sensational pushing doesn’t really capture the full scale of what was going on. Marches were immediately surrounded by walls of police, people were told to leave, and then
they weren’t given any exit to leave and those who tried were arrested. There was a 100+ person mass arrest after the police simply decided that a large group of people milling about looked “suspicious” and were carrying rocks (which were never found, naturally), a convergence space was raided, and vehicles were simply stopped and searched and equipment was seized.
My connection to this is that I’m part of DC Students for a Democratic Society, which is part of the national Students for a Democratic Society organization. We’ve become known for an event called Funk theWar, which is a Reclaim the Streets style event–we like to call it a Militant Mobile Disco, and we’ve been called “suburban terrorists” by a couple of right-wing writers, which is offensive as we all live in DC. A good chunk of people in my chapter and a lot of people in SDS went to the DNC and are also going to the RNC protests.
I have to note though that this hasn’t stopped with the end of the DNC. In the Twin Cities, where the RNC is taking place, there was a massive raid on a convergence space with all inside (several hundred) detained in handcuffs (including a four-year-old) for hours simultaneous to a raid of three private homes around the area and then a raid on the base of I-Witness Video, a documentary outfit that specializes in recording incidents of police brutality and proved instrumental in getting people’s charges dropped after the 2004 RNC. The police called the whole thing a “criminal enterprise” and a
handful of individuals have been charged with “conspiracy to riot”, but no evidence has actually been found as far as anyone can tell.
I’m gonna cut this short because I’m going on a bit, but I think one really important thing comes out of this and this is really what I feel like you’d be interested in: What the police are doing here isn’t
stopping the demonstrations. They’re getting us to change the frame of discussion. Since these raids started, we’ve all switched from talking about the war, about capitalism, about the system, and about what we want in place of all this. We’re now talking about police brutality and we’re all getting a certain amount of titillation out of that. But it effectively completely sidelines why my friends are out there on the streets and why they’re willing to risk being beaten and arrested. Police action against doesn’t just shut down our march or cast a chill over organization activity–it helps us forget why we’re fighting and that scares me more than anything else. I saw the same thing happen to the anti-globalization movement after 9/11 hit and I hope we’re strong enough this time around to inoculate ourselves against this sort of attack.
Were you aware that all this had been going on during the DNC?
Posted on 2 September '08 by Douglas, under censorship. 7 Comments.
Everyone, including Obama, is supposed to reject and repudiate everything that Reverend Wright has said about America and white people. Problem is, most of what he’s saying is true, or at least arguable.
Claim 1. American foreign policy was responsible for the 9-11 attacks.
Well, I rejected this idea the day after 9-11, when I first saw it posted on a prominent Internet list called NetServe. Having watched the buildings fall and seen some real blood, I was just in too much shock. But a few weeks later, having calmed down a bit, I could not deny that American foreign policy was at least part of the reason behind the attack. Al Qaeda is mad about US army bases in Saudi Arabia, and America’s propping up of dictators in the Middle East. We can argue whether or not it’s appropriate for the US to have bases near Mecca, but it’s inarguable that these policies are at least in part responsible for the war in which we’ve found ourselves.
Claim 2. America is bad to blacks, and black Americans might better sing “God damn America” than God Bless America.
According to the NYTimes, by 2004, 21 percent of black men who had not completed college were incarcerated. By their mid-30′s, 6 in 10 black men who had dropped out of school had spent time in prison. In the inner cities, more than half of all black men do not finish high school. We also shouldn’t forget that a great majority of black Americans are the descendants of slaves who were brought to this country against their will, and who built a great portion of the cities and infrastructure they are still not entitled to enjoy today, thanks largely to land management and employment policies that excluded them for more than a century.
Claim 3. AIDS is a man-made virus.
I don’t agree with this one, personally. But throughout the 80′s and early 90′s, this was still considered a leading theory for the virus’s origins. Controversial but well-researched journalists, such as Spin’s Celia Farber, still present credible alternatives to the HIV-causation theory of AIDS. The theory that AIDS migrated to humans as we ate monkey-brain is far from proved, and the virus still behaves and mutates in a fashion that confounds researchers. Two medical researchers with whom I’ve spoken over the years have told me that AIDS “doesn’t act like a natural virus.” Beyond this, the government’s slow response to the AIDS crisis was similar to its reaction to Hurricane Katrina – and it did seem as though the victims were regarded with a similar lack of urgency because they were mostly blacks and gays.
Claim 4. The US Government puts drugs on the streets.
This one most probably came from the well-publicized series of articles in the San Jose Mercury News about the CIA importing drugs and selling them on US streets. Although the New York Times later found the evidence scant, the mythology behind these claims is compelling and persistent. While no proof has been found that arms were given to contra fighters in exchange for drugs, we do know that the same people bringing the illegal arms from the USA to Nicaragua were bringing back drugs to the US on the same small planes. Further, the US occupation of Afghanistan has led to the largest crop of poppies and export of heroin in that nation’s history. Either through intentional policy or incompetency, America fosters the Afghan heroin industry.
White Americans are still afraid of blacks because they know that black rage is justifiable. If anything, whites are probably surprised that blacks aren’t more angry for the way they were and are still treated. Obama is acceptable as long as he represents an easy way out of the racial injustice from which we’ve been attempting to extricate ourselves for almost two centuries. As Thomas Jefferson said of slavery, “it’s like having a wolf by the ears.” Until now, Obama has represented a way out of karmic debt. Wright reminds us that even if Obama is elected, there will still be black people angry for the continued culture and policy of racism in this country.
The real lesson to be learned from Obama’s association with Wright and subsequent scandal is how ludicrous it is for us to demand that our elected leaders be Christians at all. (I can only guess that a man as intelligent as Obama joined the church to begin with as a way of engendering himself to Chicago’s black community – itself a cynical charge.) Religion can no longer be a prerequisite for political office, and in the age of YouTube, the silly and dangerous superstitions espoused by our religious leaders will now come to light. Religions were created, in part, as repositories for ethnocentrism – as ways of justifying our wars against other tribes and nations. It’s part of their most central programming.
Should Hillary Clinton reject and repudiate her pastor’s belief that me and my family are damned to hell for not accepting Jesus as Lord? Have you ever listened to the words of the prayers the Senator Joe Leiberman says out loud every Saturday morning? Why didn’t all conservatives reject Pat Robertson’s support when he blamed 9-11 not on US foreign policy, but on the gays and non-believers of New York who brought the attack on themselves? Had they never heard him say stuff like this before?
I don’t know whether I’d be more worried about a candidate whose minister believed that US policy was in part responsible for 9-11 (it was), or one whose minister believed that the world was created by a supreme being in six days, a few thousand years ago. Or, as in the case of our president, that the end of the world as predicted in the Revelations will occur in our lifetimes.
Just because the rage behind such destructive visions is expressed by a calm white person instead of an angry black one doesn’t make it any less violent and inappropriate.
I hate to admit it, and it could be from my own lack of sleep as my daughter loses her afternoon nap, but I find myself seeing voter fraud as the simplest explanation for the New Hampshire primary results.
Consider this compelling statistic on the difference in results between paper and computer polling places in New Hampshire. The paper polling districts correspond to the pollsters’ predictions. The computer districts do not:
News Updates from Citizens for Legitimate Government 09 Jan 2008
http://www.legitgov.org/
Where Paper Prevailed, Different Results
By Lori Price 09 Jan 2008
2008 New Hampshire Democratic Primary Results –Total Democratic Votes: 286,139 –
Machine vs Hand (RonRox.com) 09 Jan 2008
Hillary Clinton, Diebold Accuvote optical scan: 39.618%
Clinton, Hand Counted Paper Ballots: 34.908%
Barack Obama, Diebold Accuvote optical scan: 36.309%
Obama, Hand Counted Paper Ballots: 38.617%
Machine vs Hand:
Clinton: +4.709% (13,475 votes)
Obama: -2.308% (-6,604 votes)
2008 New Hampshire Republican Primary Results –Total Republican Votes: 236,378
Machine vs Hand (RonRox.com) 09 Jan 2008
Mitt Romney, Diebold Accuvote optical scan: 33.075%
Romney, Hand Counted Paper Ballots: 25.483%
Ron Paul, Diebold Accuvote optical scan: 7.109%
Paul, Hand Counted Paper Ballots: 9.221%
Machine vs Hand:
Romney: +7.592% (17,946 votes)
Paul: -2.112% (-4,991 votes)
Posted on 11 January '08 by Douglas, under censorship, politics. No Comments.
An intense writing schedule will keep me from most holiday parties this year. But here’s one that simply can’t be missed: the annual Members Party for the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund.
These are tough times for the Bill of Rights, and comics are just one of many canaries in the mine shaft (leading indicators). But they are a great litmus test for free speech, a highly accessible and fertile forum for ideas that simply can’t be disseminated through other mainstream media, and – perhaps most importantly – a way to share important concepts and ways of thinking with young people.
Join me, Paul Pope, Dan Goldman, Dean Haspiel, Moby, Alex Maleev, Jeff Newelt, as well as a number of other comics writers, artists and friends, as we celebrate and support freedom of expression in the original bottom-up mass medium.
Monday, December 10th, Village Pourhouse, 64 Third Ave @ 11th Street, 7pm. (The party is free, but requires a year’s membership in the CBLDF, which costs 25 bucks and is a worthy cause.)
Posted on 5 December '07 by Douglas, under censorship, comics. No Comments.
I’m still getting some great email from all sides for that piece against 9-11 conspiracies I wrote for Arthur magazine a few months ago.
Just so people know I’m an equal opportunity meme-smith, here’s a post from the Simian Think Tank in which Kevin Barret of MUJCA some of the ideas in my book Coercion to make the opposite argument. Compelling stuff, and it applies whether 9-11 was perpetrated by the US government (as they contend) or simply exploited by ‘shock capitalists’ (as I would).
“Rushkoff’s Coercion is a sizzling exposé of mind control, American style. Unlike Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent, Rushkoff’s book provides a detailed guide to the nuts-and-bolts techniques employed against us every day by advertisers, marketers, public relations specialists, Hollywood filmmakers, salespeople, pyramid-scam artists, and cult leaders–the very same techniques applied for decades, and gradually perfected, by CIA interrogators and psychological warfare experts. These techniques are designed to disable rational thought and manipulate behavior at the unconscious and emotional levels. Anyone curious about why so many otherwise rational people have believed the official story of 9/11 for so long, in the teeth of the overwhelming evidence against it, should start by reading Coercion.
“The secret of mind-control is simple–so simple that Rushkoff can sum it up in one sentence: “In whatever milieu coercion is practiced, the routine follows the same basic steps: Generate disorientation, induce regression, and then become the target’s transferred parent figure” (64). Hard-sell car salesmen, CIA interrogators and psychwar ops, and cult leaders have long used this technique. Under coercion, millions of otherwise rational people can be persuaded to act against their own interests–whether by shelling out big bucks for an overpriced lemon, betraying a comrade and a cause, or allowing a gang of criminals to destroy their nation’s Constitution and launch criminal wars of aggression.”
The Internet can be a nasty place – particularly online discussions and the comments sections of blogs. But is the recent increase in online hostilities really an indication of some groundswell of American rage, or are there just a few bad eggs determined to make it look that way?
There’s a relatively new phenomenon occurring online these days – an illusion of populist group hostilitiy I’ve come to call “Sock Mobs,” after the “sock puppets” people use to feign multiple identities in online conversations. It works like this:
An anonymous poster picks a fight with his presumed enemy. Whether or not that enemy responds, a number of other posters appear to chime in – agreeing to whatever the accusation might be. “This guy is a commie.” “This doctor is a quack.” “This guy wants Israel to be abolished.” “This professor is corrupting college students.” The accusation comes along with twisted supporting evidence. Every once in a while, an underinformed but real person agrees with the accusations; after all, it appears from the posts that this enemy of all things good and proper really might be a threat. All this makes it look like there’s a lot of upset people.
The accused party might respond, explain, and clarify, but the original poster always ignores the facts presented and reframes the argument to his liking – always polarizing, exaggerating, or even misquoting the defendee. Then, again, all those voices of agreement pile on. Eventually, the defendee goes away – having said pretty much all he or she can say – and the original anonymous angry poster claims victory: see? the accused can’t have an open discussion because he is guilty.
It turns out, however, that many of these “gangs” of seemingly unrelated, individual posters are just one person. In most cases, it’s a shill of a lobby, a “campus protection” organization, or an offshoot of a political party. He logs in from multiple computers, spoofs IP addresses, and sometimes even fakes responses by his target. All in an effort to make it appear that a real grassroots mob of regular folk are taking a stand against the evil communist, market critic, or God-hating evolutionist. College students are hired to troll message boards and engage in this behavior. Of course in other cases it’s just a lonely, obsessed, anti-fan.
That’s right: it’s not a smart mob at all, but a faux mob, constructed for no other purpose than net propaganda. Think “Swift Boat Veterans,” but on a smaller, more diffuse scale. It’s a tactic I’ve seen used in one form or another against Richard Dawkins, Mark Crispin Miller, Naomi Klein, and Tony Kushner, to name just a few. It’s even been tried on me a few times – and i’ve fallen for it more than once, engaging in conversations with mobs of one, who have no desire whatsoever to engage – only to discredit.
It’s nasty, but it’s a cheap, effective way of keeping someone from doing his more important work, and to create an illusion of controversy that might get colleges or other organizations to think twice about letting that person teach or speak. That is, if people really read and respect such anonymous activity from blogs. For the most part, I don’t think they do.
But it’s an interesting lesson and conundrum. And as a media theorist, I feel obliged to help figure out a way to advise others who want to avoid getting entangled in this kind of disinformation. My advice would be:
1 – Unless you’re really a politician or public figure (Obama, et al) – don’t attempt to quash conversations in which you are dissed by anonymous posters. They are simply baiting you.
2 – To avoid people spoofing your identity, only participate in a few public forums, and limit those to ones where you are confident that you can keep track of anything posted in your name, and where the registration process seems rigorous enough to prevent anyone with a Hotmail account from picking a name close to your own.
3 – Don’t engage with people who clearly don’t mean to engage with you. There’s no way to win an argument or, better, get enlightened by engaging with someone who would rather do you harm than change your mind.
For the record, from now on you won’t see me posting to conversations anywhere online except here, John Brockman’s Edge.org and Warren Ellis’s Engine – sites whose owners I trust, and whose administration is secure. And anything else you do see with my name on it in some open online discussion – it isn’t me.
(special thanks to Howard Rheingold and Mark Frauenfelder for helping me come up with a name for this phenomenon)
Posted on 6 January '07 by Douglas, under censorship. No Comments.
