The Poor are the ones preyed upon by big corporations and Governemnt
Mood:  sharp
Now Playing: Tax the poor, Steal from the poor, Jail the poor .... and more
Topic: FAILURE by the GOVERNMENT

Preying on Poverty: How Government and Corporations Use the Poor as Piggy Banks

 Published on Thursday, May 17, 2012 by TomDispatch.com  https://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/05/17-4 by Barbara Ehrenreich

Individually the poor are not too tempting to thieves, for obvious reasons. Mug a banker and you might score a wallet containing a month’s rent. Mug a janitor and you will be lucky to get away with bus fare to flee the crime scene. But as Business Week helpfully pointed out in 2007, the poor in aggregate provide a juicy target for anyone depraved enough to make a business of stealing from them

The trick is to rob them in ways that are systematic, impersonal, and almost impossible to trace to individual perpetrators. Employers, for example, can simply program their computers to shave a few dollars off each paycheck, or they can require workers to show up 30 minutes or more before the time clock starts ticking.Lenders, including major credit companies as well as payday lenders, have taken over the traditional role of the street-corner loan shark, charging the poor insanely high rates of interest.

When supplemented with late fees (themselves subject to interest), the resulting effective interest rate can be as high as 600% a year, which is perfectly legal in many states.It’s not just the private sector that’s preying on the poor. Local governments are discovering that they can partially make up for declining tax revenues through fines, fees, and other costs imposed on indigent defendants, often for crimes no more dastardly than driving with a suspended license.

And if that seems like an inefficient way to make money, given the high cost of locking people up, a growing number of jurisdictions have taken to charging defendants for their court costs and even the price of occupying a jail cell.The poster case for government persecution of the down-and-out would have to be Edwina Nowlin, a homeless Michigan woman who was jailed in 2009 for failing to pay $104 a month to cover the room-and-board charges for her 16-year-old son’s incarceration. When she received a back paycheck, she thought it would allow her to pay for her son’s jail stay.

Instead, it was confiscated and applied to the cost of her own incarceration.Government Joins the Looters of the PoorYou might think that policymakers would take a keen interest in the amounts that are stolen, coerced, or extorted from the poor, but there are no official efforts to track such figures. Instead, we have to turn to independent investigators, like Kim Bobo, author of Wage Theft in America, who estimates that wage theft nets employers at least $100 billion a year and possibly twice that.

As for the profits extracted by the lending industry, Gary Rivlin, who wrote Broke USA: From Pawnshops to Poverty, Inc. -- How the Working Poor Became Big Business, says the poor pay an effective surcharge of about $30 billion a year for the financial products they consume and more than twice that if you include subprime credit cards, subprime auto loans, and subprime mortgages.These are not, of course, trivial amounts. They are on the same order of magnitude as major public programs for the poor.

The government distributes about $55 billion a year, for example, through the largest single cash-transfer program for the poor, the Earned Income Tax Credit; at the same time, employers are siphoning off twice that amount, if not more, through wage theft.

And while government generally turns a blind eye to the tens of billions of dollars in exorbitant interest that businesses charge the poor, it is notably chary with public benefits for the poor. Temporary Assistance to Needy Families, for example, our sole remaining nationwide welfare program, gets only $26 billion a year in state and federal funds. The impression is left of a public sector that’s gone totally schizoid: on the one hand, offering safety-net programs for the poor; on the other, enabling large-scale private sector theft from the very people it is supposedly trying to help. 

At the local level though, government is increasingly opting to join in the looting. In 2009, a year into the Great Recession,

I first started hearing complaints from community organizers about ever more aggressive levels of law enforcement in low-income areas. Flick a cigarette butt and get arrested for littering; empty your pockets for an officer conducting a stop-and-frisk operation and get cuffed for a few flakes of marijuana. Each of these offenses can result, at a minimum, in a three-figure fine.

And the number of possible criminal offenses leading to jail and/or fines has been multiplying recklessly. All across the country -- from California and Texas to Pennsylvania -- counties and municipalities have been toughening laws against truancy and ratcheting up enforcement, sometimes going so far as to handcuff children found on the streets during school hours. In New York City, it’s now a crime to put your feet up on a subway seat, even if the rest of the car is empty, and a South Carolina woman spent six days in jail when she was unable to pay a $480 fine for the crime of having a “messy yard.” Some cities -- most recently, Houston and Philadelphia -- have made it a crime to share food with indigent people in public places.Being poor itself is not yet a crime, but in at least a third of the states, being in debt can now land you in jail. If a creditor like a landlord or credit card company has a court summons issued for you and you fail to show up on your appointed court date, a warrant will be issued for your arrest.

And it is easy enough to miss a court summons, which may have been delivered to the wrong address or, in the case of some bottom-feeding bill collectors, simply tossed in the garbage -- a practice so common that the industry even has a term for it: “sewer service.” In a sequence that National Public Radio reports is “increasingly common,” a person is stopped for some minor traffic offense -- having a noisy muffler, say, or broken brake light -- at which point the officer discovers the warrant and the unwitting offender is whisked off to jail.

Local Governments as Predators

Each of these crimes, neo-crimes, and pseudo-crimes carries financial penalties as well as the threat of jail time, but the amount of money thus extracted from the poor is fiendishly hard to pin down. No central agency tracks law enforcement at the local level, and local records can be almost willfully sketchy.According to one of the few recent nationwide estimates, from the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, 10.5 million misdemeanors were committed in 2006. No one would risk estimating the average financial penalty for a misdemeanor, although the experts I interviewed all affirmed that the amount is typically in the “hundreds of dollars.”

If we take an extremely lowball $200 per misdemeanor, and bear in mind that 80%-90% of criminal offenses are committed by people who are officially indigent, then local governments are using law enforcement to extract, or attempt to extract, at least $2 billion a year from the poor.

And that is only a small fraction of what governments would like to collect from the poor. Katherine Beckett, a sociologist at the University of Washington, estimates that “deadbeat dads” (and moms) owe $105 billion in back child-support payments, about half of which is owed to state governments as reimbursement for prior welfare payments made to the children. Yes, parents have a moral obligation to their children, but the great majority of child-support debtors are indigent.

Attempts to collect from the already-poor can be vicious and often, one would think, self-defeating. Most states confiscate the drivers’ licenses of people owing child support, virtually guaranteeing that they will not be able to work.  Michigan just started suspending the drivers’ licenses of people who owe money for parking tickets.  Las Cruces, New Mexico, just passed a law that punishes people who owe overdue traffic fines by cutting off their water, gas, and sewage.

Once a person falls into the clutches of the criminal justice system, we encounter the kind of slapstick sadism familiar to viewers of Wipeout. Many courts impose fees without any determination of whether the offender is able to pay, and the privilege of having a payment plan will itself cost money.In a study of 15 states, the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University found 14 of them contained jurisdictions that charge a lump-sum “poverty penalty” of up to $300 for those who cannot pay their fees and fines, plus late fees and “collection fees” for those who need to pay over time.

If any jail time is imposed, that too may cost money, as the hapless Edwina Nowlin discovered, and the costs of parole and probation are increasingly being passed along to the offender.The predatory activities of local governments give new meaning to that tired phrase “the cycle of poverty.” Poor people are more far more likely than the affluent to get into trouble with the law, either by failing to pay parking fines or by incurring the wrath of a private-sector creditor like a landlord or a hospital.

Once you have been deemed a criminal, you can pretty much kiss your remaining assets goodbye. Not only will you face the aforementioned court costs, but you’ll have a hard time ever finding a job again once you’ve acquired a criminal record. And then of course, the poorer you become, the more likely you are to get in fresh trouble with the law, making this less like a “cycle” and more like the waterslide to hell. 

The further you descend, the faster you fall -- until you eventually end up on the streets and get busted for an offense like urinating in public or sleeping on a sidewalk.I could propose all kinds of policies to curb the ongoing predation on the poor. Limits on usury should be reinstated. Theft should be taken seriously even when it’s committed by millionaire employers. No one should be incarcerated for debt or squeezed for money they have no chance of getting their hands on.

These are no-brainers, and should take precedence over any long term talk about generating jobs or strengthening the safety net. Before we can “do something” for the poor, there are some things we need to stop doing to them.

© 2012 Barbara Ehrenreich  

Newly Discovered Homeland Security Files Show Feds Central to Occupy Crackdown
Mood:  chillin'
Now Playing: Feds at Occupy around the US cordinated attacks on freedom
Topic: POLICE

Newly Discovered Homeland Security Files Show Feds Central to Occupy Crackdown

 http://october2011.org/blogs/kevin-zeese/newly-discovered-homeland-security-files-show-feds-central-occupy-crackdown

White House directed crack down on Occupy, worked to hide DHS involvement with false statements, include "background statements"

PDX - Liberation event on May Day 2012 _ Portland Oregon
Mood:  energetic
Now Playing: Empty Buildings and putting houseless folks in em
Topic: OCCUPY PORTLAND

Original Article is located here:

http://www.liberatepdx.org/?p=78

 Liberation event on May Day

Portland Oregon

4-7-12

http://www.liberatepdx.org/?p=78

 

The Portland Liberation Organizing Council (PLOC) would like to invite all members of the community join us on May 1st, 2012 in the Liberate.MayDay project where a neighborhood will leading a liberatory event.

Liberate.MayDay intends to demonstrate and begin to address the vast contradictions that we face each day – that buildings sit empty while our neighborhoods lack free, accessible indoor spaces, that banks continue tearing people out of their homes while 1 in 7 houses in the country sit vacant, that basic healthcare is unaffordable for many while corporations reap incredible profits from the industry.

We have seen that the systems creating these problems are not capable of providing real solutions. We are done waiting! Solutions come from our minds,  our hands, our relationships, and our irrepressible creative capacity to build a community (and a society) that works for us. On May Day PLOC will enact one solution – to reclaim property and put it to use with the community.

Portland needs a space where communities can grow together and nurture a healthy political system — where gardens grow food and sow the seeds of resistance; where classrooms are based on popular education; where there is free space to celebrate and organize.  We will no longer stand for developers holding land and buildings hostage for maximum profit. Community control and self-determination are more important than profit and endless growth.

We are inspired by those that took over a church-owned abandoned building in San Francisco in March, by foreclosure defenders in Minneapolis, by the Landless Peasant Movement in Brazil [MST], by the Space Liberated community in Madrid, and many more.  We stand on the shoulders of those that take direct action to elevate the rights of people above the right to keep property vacant. These social movements show us that liberation of land and our homes is not only possible, it is happening!

The broad anger against the banks that the Occupy movement has revealed demonstrates a profound willingness among ordinary people to act for our collective well-being regardless of the formalities of the law. The whirlwind of movement in the past year has renewed our belief that when we act together – we are powerful.

This liberatory event will be rooted in a collaborative community effort, building relationships and partnerships that we hope live far beyond May 1st.  Supporters are encouraged to come join the reclamation effort with a mind toward the collective rather than the autonomous individual. Alerts will be blasted out over email and social media on the morning of May 1st with a meetup location.

Gather round! Liberate.MayDay!

PLOC is a collaboration of radical organizations who believe that the current economic system and its systems of oppression are fundamental problems that create the disparity of wealth and resources that we see in our neighborhoods today.  We work to organize and mobilize to dismantle these exploitative systems while creating alternatives with our communities. Capitalism is not broken, it is built for someone else.

ploc@riseup.net
@LiberateMayDay
#LiberateMayDay
www.liberatepdx.org

« SF affinity group liberates a building

 

Copwatching - Tips and Rules for Filming
Mood:  chatty
Now Playing: Filming the Police seven tips in 2012 you should know
Topic: POLICE

7 Rules for Recording Police

http://gizmodo.com/5900680/7-rules-for-recording-police

VIDEO: Ralph Nader at Powells Books - Portland Oregon 4.9.12
Mood:  happy
Now Playing: Mobile T gives a report back with video from Ralph Nader speaking in PDX
Topic: NADER
 

Nader Delivers Powerful Speech @ Book Signing Event In PDX

Bradley Manning - 2 years in prison and still no trial 3.30.12
Mood:  on fire
Now Playing: Bradley Manning Still Months from Trial -- Two Years After Arrest
Topic: TORTURE

Bradley Manning

 Still Months from Trial

Two Years After Arrest

Greg Mitchell Posted: 03/30/2012

Author and Blogger for The Nation

This week marks a kind of double anniversary.

Two years ago on this date, Julian Assange was in Iceland readying the release of the shocking material that would catapult his group, WikiLeaks (and himself) to worldwide fame: the "Collateral Murder" video, an aerial view of U.S. Apache helicopters firing on Iraqi civilians and two Reuters journalists in 2007, plus celebratory dialogue from the gunners. It would be the first of four major WikiLeaks releases that year, as it was followed by the Afghanistan and Iraq "war logs" and "Cablegate."

One man has been accused of leaking all of that (and more), and we mark a separate anniversary related to PFC Bradley Manning.

A year ago this month, protests were held here and abroad, calling for Manning's release from semi-solitary confinement, under inhumane conditions, at the Quantico base in Virginia. He had been on a "perosnal injury" watch for months (despite his protests), rarely let out of his cell, forced to sleep without a standard pillow and blanket, and even at times stripped naked at night. Protesters were arrested at the White House -- and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's chief spokesman, P.J. Crowley, had been forced out when he protested these conditions.

All of this would help provoke Manning's transfer to Leavenworth prison in Kansas in April 2011, where he would enjoy more freedom and privacy. But one factor remains: nearly two years after his arrest, in May 2010, he still has not faced his court-martial trial on the 22 charges brought against him -- including "aiding the enemy," which could bring the death sentence (though likely lead to life in prison instead).

This week, a book about this two year period that I've written with Kevin Gosztola has been published: Truth and Consequences: The U.S. vs. Bradley Manning. As we point out near the close of our story: "His court martial was expected to begin this August, even though Manning's defense had been saying the government could hold the trial in May. This means that when Manning goes on trial he will have been in confinement for eight hundred days. "

The book brings this home by tracing Manning's saga from his arrest and brutal incarceration to the present day, with a day-by-day account of the hearings, including testimony by Adrian Lamo. Gosztola, who assisted me on my two previous books on this subject and now writes daily for Firedoglake.com, was one of the very few journalists who attended both of the key court martial hearings for Manning: last December and then just two weeks ago. So the book, in both print and as an e-book, is amazingly up to date.

The book concludes with Gosztola raising questions after the latest hearing in mid-March: "Goal? Aggravate and bother media to the point that they wonder if it is even worth it to cover the proceedings? Lose them somewhere along the way to the actual start of Manning's trial? That way when the date finally comes for the trial the press won't really know the scale of the games played by the government to interfere with the ability of Manning's lawyers to defend him.

"Or, more insidious, prolong the pre-trial. Make the defense choose between a speedy trial or fighting for the right to evidence and potential witnesses to mount a proper defense. It's up to Manning, but at this rate, he could be in pre-trial confinement for almost a thousand days before he finally gets to the first day of his trial."

The new Manning book is just out in both print and e-book. Mitchell's other current book is "Journeys With Beethoven." He has written a dozen previous books and blogs daily at The Nation.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/greg-mitchell/bradley-manning_b_1391097.html?utm_source=Alert-blogger&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Email%2BNotifications

 

The Illegitimacy of Violence, the Violence of Legitimacy -repost-
Now Playing: what is violence - think again its not ... "what they tell you"
The Illegitimacy of Violence, the Violence of Legitimacy^{author: Crimethinc} http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2012/03/414660.shtml 

What is violence? Who gets to define it? Does it have a place in the pursuit of liberation? These age-old questions have returned to the fore during the Occupy movement. But this discussion never takes place on a level playing field; while some delegitimize violence, the language of legitimacy itself paves the way for the authorities to employ it.

 

The Illegitimacy of Violence, the Violence of Legitimacy What is violence? Who gets to define it? Does it have a place in the pursuit of liberation? These age-old questions have returned to the fore during the Occupy movement. But this discussion never takes place on a level playing field; while some delegitimize violence, the language of legitimacy itself paves the way for the authorities to employ it. "Though lines of police on horses, and with dogs, charged the main street outside the police station to push rioters back, there were significant pockets of violence which they could not reach." -The New York Times, on the UK riots of August 2011 During the 2001 FTAA summit in Quebec City, one newspaper famously reported that violence erupted when protesters began throwing tear gas canisters back at the lines of riot police. When the authorities are perceived to have a monopoly on the legitimate use of force, "violence" is often used to denote illegitimate use of force—anything that interrupts or escapes their control. This makes the term something of a floating signifier, since it is also understood to mean "harm or threat that violates consent." This is further complicated by the ways our society is based on and permeated by harm or threat that violates consent. In this sense, isn't it violent to live on colonized territory, destroying ecosystems through our daily consumption and benefitting from economic relations that are forced on others at gunpoint? Isn't it violent for armed guards to keep food and land, once a commons shared by all, from those who need them? Is it more violent to resist the police who evict people from their homes, or to stand aside while people are made homeless? Is it more violent to throw tear gas canisters back at police, or to denounce those who throw them back as "violent," giving police a free hand to do worse? In this state of affairs, there is no such thing as nonviolence—the closest we can hope to come is to negate the harm or threat posed by the proponents of top-down violence. And when so many people are invested in the privileges this violence affords them, it's naïve to think that we could defend ourselves and others among the dispossessed without violating the wishes of at least a few bankers and landlords. So instead of asking whether an action is violent, we might do better to ask simply: does it counteract power disparities, or reinforce them? This is the fundamental anarchist question. We can ask it in every situation; every further question about values, tactics, and strategy proceeds from it. When the question can be framed thus, why would anyone want to drag the debate back to the dichotomy of violence and nonviolence? The discourse of violence and nonviolence is attractive above all because it offers an easy way to claim the higher moral ground. This makes it seductive both for criticizing the state and for competing against other activists for influence. But in a hierarchical society, gaining the higher ground often reinforces hierarchy itself. Legitimacy is one of the currencies that are unequally distributed in our society, through which its disparities are maintained. Defining people or actions as violent is a way of excluding them from legitimate discourse, of silencing and shutting out. This parallels and reinforces other forms of marginalization: a wealthy white person can act "nonviolently" in ways that would be seen as violent were a poor person of color to do the same thing. In an unequal society, the defining of "violence" is no more neutral than any other tool. Defining people or actions as violent also has immediate consequences: it justifies the use of force against them. This has been an essential step in practically every campaign targeting communities of color, protest movements, and others on the wrong side of capitalism. If you've attended enough mobilizations, you know that it's often possible to anticipate exactly how much violence the police will use against a demonstration by the way the story is presented on the news the night before. In this regard, pundits and even rival organizers can participate in policing alongside the police, determining who is a legitimate target by the way they frame the narrative. On the one-year anniversary of the Egyptian uprising, the military lifted the Emergency Laws—"except in thug-related cases." The popular upheaval of 2011 had forced the authorities to legitimize previously unacceptable forms of resistance, with Obama characterizing as "nonviolent" an uprising in which thousands had fought police and burned down police stations. In order to re-legitimize the legal apparatus of the dictatorship, it was necessary to create a new distinction between violent "thugs" and the rest of the population. Yet the substance of this distinction was never spelled out; in practice, "thug" is simply the word for a person targeted by the Emergency Laws. From the perspective of the authorities, ideally the infliction of violence itself would suffice to brand its victims as violent—i.e., as legitimate targets.[1] So when a broad enough part of the population engages in resistance, the authorities have to redefine it as nonviolent, even if it would previously have been considered violent. Otherwise, the dichotomy between violence and legitimacy might erode—and without that dichotomy, it would be much harder to justify the use of force against those who threaten the status quo. By the same token, the more ground we cede in what we permit the authorities to define as violent, the more they will sweep into that category, and the greater risk all of us will face. One consequence of the past several decades of self-described nonviolent civil disobedience is that some people regard merely raising one's voice as violent; this makes it possible to portray those who take even the most tentative steps to protect themselves against police violence as violent thugs. "The individuals who linked arms and actively resisted, that in itself is an act of violence... linking arms in a human chain when ordered to step aside is not a nonviolent protest." -UC police captain Margo Bennett, quoted in The San Francisco Chronicle, justifying the use of force against students at the University of California at Berkeley The Master's Tools: Delegitimization, Misrepresentation, and Division Violent repression is only one side of the two-pronged strategy by which social movements are suppressed. For this repression to succeed, movements must be divided into legitimate and illegitimate, and the former convinced to disown the latter—usually in return for privileges or concessions. We can see this process up close in the efforts of professional journalists like Chris Hedges and Rebecca Solnit to demonize rivals in the Occupy movement. In last year's Throwing Out the Master's Tools and Building a Better House: Thoughts on the Importance of Nonviolence in the Occupy Revolution," Rebecca Solnit mixed together moral and strategic arguments against "violence," hedging her bets with a sort of US exceptionalism: Zapatistas can carry guns and Egyptian rebels set buildings on fire, but let no one so much as burn a trash can in the US. At base, her argument was that only "people power" can achieve revolutionary social change—and that "people power" is necessarily nonviolent. Solnit should know that the defining of violence isn't neutral: in her article "The Myth of Seattle Violence," she recounted her unsuccessful struggle to get the New York Times to stop representing the demonstrations against the 1999 WTO summit in Seattle as "violent." In consistently emphasizing violence as her central category, Solnit is reinforcing the effectiveness of one of the tools that will inevitably be used against protesters—including her—whenever it serves the interests of the powerful. Solnit reserves particular ire for those who endorse diversity of tactics as a way to preclude the aforementioned dividing of movements. Several paragraphs of "Throwing Out the Master's Tools" were devoted to denouncing the CrimethInc. "Dear Occupiers" pamphlet: Solnit proclaimed it "a screed in justification of violence," "empty machismo peppered with insults," and stooped to ad hominem attacks on authors about whom she admittedly knew nothing.[2] As anyone can readily ascertain, the majority of "Dear Occupiers" simply reviews the systemic problems with capitalism; the advocacy of diversity of tactics is limited to a couple subdued paragraphs. Why would an award-winning author represent this as a pro-violence screed? Perhaps for the same reason that she joins the authorities in delegitimizing violence even when this equips them to delegitimize her own efforts: Solnit's leverage in social movements and her privileges in capitalist society are both staked on the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate. If social movements ever cease to be managed from the top down—if they stop policing themselves—the Hedges and Solnits of the world will be out of a job literally as well as figuratively. That would explain why they perceive their worst enemies to be those who soberly advise against dividing movements into legitimate and illegitimate factions. It's hard to imagine Solnit would have represented "Dear Occupiers" the way she did if she expected her audience to read it. Given her readership, this is a fairly safe bet—Solnit is often published in the corporate media, while CrimethInc. literature is distributed only through grass-roots networks; in any case, she didn't include a link. Chris Hedges took similar liberties in his notorious "The Cancer in Occupy," a litany of outrageous generalizations about "black bloc anarchists." It seems that both authors' ultimate goal is silencing: Why would you want to hear what those people have to say? They're violent thugs. The title of Solnit's article is a reference to Audre Lorde's influential text, "The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House." Lorde's text was not an endorsement of nonviolence; even Derrick Jensen, whom Hedges quotes approvingly, has debunked such misuse of this quotation. Here, let it suffice to repeat that the most powerful of the master's tools is not violence, but delegitimization and division—as Lorde emphasized in her text. To defend our movements against these, Lorde exhorted us: "Difference must be not merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark... Only within that interdependency of different strengths, acknowledged and equal, can the power to seek new ways of being in the world generate, as well as the courage and sustenance to act where there are no charters." If we are to survive, that means: "... learning how to stand alone, unpopular and sometimes reviled, and how to make common cause with those others identified as outside the structures in order to define and seek a world in which we can all flourish... learning how to take our differences and make them strengths. For the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house." It is particularly shameless that Solnit would quote Lorde's argument against silencing out of context in order to delegitimize and divide. But perhaps we should not be surprised when successful professionals sell out anonymous poor people: they have to defend their class interests, or else risk joining us. For the mechanisms that raise people to positions of influence within activist hierarchies and liberal media are not neutral, either; they reward docility, often coded as "nonviolence," rendering invisible those whose efforts actually threaten capitalism and hierarchy. The Lure of Legitimacy When we want to be taken seriously, it's tempting to claim legitimacy any way we can. But if we don't want to reinforce the hierarchies of our society, we should be careful not to validate forms of legitimacy that perpetuate them. It is easy to recognize how this works in some situations: when we evaluate people on the basis of their academic credentials, for example, this prioritizes abstract knowledge over lived experience, centralizing those who can get a fair shot in academia and marginalizing everyone else. In other cases, this occurs more subtly. We emphasize our status as community organizers, implying that those who lack the time or resources for such pursuits are less entitled to speak. We claim credibility as longtime locals, implicitly delegitimizing all who are not—including immigrants who have been forced to move to our neighborhoods because their communities have been wrecked by processes originating in ours. We justify our struggles on the basis of our roles within capitalist society—as students, workers, taxpayers, citizens—not realizing how much harder this can make it for the unemployed, homeless, and excluded to justify theirs. We're often surprised by the resulting blowback. Politicians discredit our comrades with the very vocabulary we popularized: "Those aren't activists, they're homeless people pretending to be activists." "We're not targeting communities of color, we're protecting them from criminal activity." Yet we prepared the way for this ourselves by affirming language that makes legitimacy conditional. When we emphasize that our movements are and must be nonviolent, we're doing the same thing. This creates an Other that is outside the protection of whatever legitimacy we win for ourselves—that is, in short, a legitimate target for violence. Anyone who pulls their comrades free from the police rather than waiting passively to be arrested—anyone who makes shields to protect themselves from rubber bullets rather than abandoning the streets to the police—anyone who is charged with assault on an officer for being assaulted by one: all these unfortunates are thrown to the wolves as the violent ones, the bad apples. Those who must wear masks even in legal actions because of their precarious employment or immigration status are denounced as cancer, betrayed in return for a few crumbs of legitimacy from the powers that be. We Good Citizens can afford to be perfectly transparent; we would never commit a crime or harbor a potential criminal in our midst. And the Othering of violence smooths the way for the violence of Othering. The ones who bear the worst consequences of this are not the middle class brats pilloried in internet flame wars, but the same people on the wrong side of every other dividing line in capitalism: the poor, the marginalized, those who have no credentials, no institutions to stand up for them, no incentive to play the political games that are slanted in favor of the authorities and perhaps also a few jet-setting activists. Simply delegitimizing violence can't put an end to it. The disparities of this society couldn't be maintained without it, and the desperate will always respond by acting out, especially when they sense that they've been abandoned to their fate. But this kind of delegitimization can create a gulf between the angry and the morally upright, the "irrational" and the rational, the violent and the social. We saw the consequences of this in the UK riots of August 2011, when many of the disenfranchised, despairing of bettering themselves through any legitimate means, hazarded a private war against property, the police, and the rest of society. Some of them had attempted to participate in previous popular movements, only to be stigmatized as hooligans; not surprisingly, their rebellion took an antisocial turn, resulting in five deaths and further alienating them from other sectors of the population. The responsibility for this tragedy rests not only on the rebels themselves, nor on those who imposed the injustices from which they suffered, but also upon the activists who stigmatized them rather than joining in creating a movement that could channel their anger. If there is no connection between those who intend to transform society and those who suffer most within it, no common cause between the hopeful and the enraged, then when the latter rebel, the former will disown them, and the latter will be crushed along with all hope of real change. No effort to do away with hierarchy can succeed while excluding the disenfranchised, the Others. What should be our basis for legitimacy, then, if not our commitment to legality, nonviolence, or any other standard that hangs our potential comrades out to dry? How do we explain what we're doing and why we're entitled to do it? We have to mint and circulate a currency of legitimacy that is not controlled by our rulers, that doesn't create Others. As anarchists, we hold that our desires and well-being and those of our fellow creatures are the only meaningful basis for action. Rather than classifying actions as violent or nonviolent, we focus on whether they extend or curtail freedom. Rather than insisting that we are nonviolent, we emphasize the necessity of interrupting the violence inherent in top-down rule. This might be inconvenient for those accustomed to seeking dialogue with the powerful, but it is unavoidable for everyone who truly wishes to abolish their power. Conclusion: Back to Strategy But how do we interrupt the violence of top-down rule? The partisans of nonviolence frame their argument in strategic as well as moral terms: violence alienates the masses, preventing us from building the "people power" we need to triumph. There is a kernel of truth at the heart of this. If violence is understood as illegitimate use of force, their argument can be summarized as a tautology: delegitimized action is unpopular. Indeed, those who take the legitimacy of capitalist society for granted are liable to see anyone who takes material steps to counteract its disparities as violent. The challenge facing us, then, is to legitimize concrete forms of resistance: not on the grounds that they are nonviolent, but on the grounds that they are liberating, that they fulfill real needs and desires. This is not an easy matter. Even when we passionately believe in what we are doing, if it is not widely recognized as legitimate we tend to sputter when asked to explain ourselves. If only we could stay within the bounds prescribed for us within this system while we go about overthrowing it! The Occupy movement was characterized by attempts to do just that—citizens insisting on their right to occupy public parks on the basis of obscure legal loopholes, making tortuous justifications no more convincing to onlookers than to the authorities. People want to redress the injustices around them, but in a highly regulated and controlled society, there's so little they feel entitled to do. Solnit may be right that the emphasis on nonviolence was essential to the initial success of Occupy Wall Street: people want some assurance that they're not going to have to leave their comfort zones, and that what they're doing will make sense to everyone else. But it often happens that the preconditions for a movement become limitations that it must transcend: Occupy Oakland remained vibrant after other occupations died down because it embraced a diversity of tactics, not despite this. Likewise, if we really want to transform our society, we can't remain forever within the narrow boundaries of what the authorities deem legitimate: we have to extend the range of what people feel entitled to do. All the media coverage in the world won't help us if we fail to create a situation in which people feel entitled to defend themselves and each other. Legitimizing resistance, expanding what is acceptable, is not going to be popular at first—it never is, precisely because of the tautology set forth above. It takes consistent effort to shift the discourse: calmly facing outrage and recriminations, humbly emphasizing our own criteria for what is legitimate. Whether we think this challenge is worthwhile depends on our long-term goals. As David Graeber has pointed out, conflicts over goals often masquerade as moral and strategic differences. Making nonviolence the central tenet of our movement makes good sense if our long-term goal is not to challenge the fundamental structure of our society, but to build a mass movement that can wield legitimacy as defined by the powerful—and that is prepared to police itself accordingly. But if we really want to transform our society, we have to transform the discourse of legitimacy, not just position ourselves well within it as it currently exists. If we focus only on the latter, we will find that terrain slipping constantly from beneath our feet, and that many of those with whom we need to find common cause can never share it with us. It's important to have strategic debates: shifting away from the discourse of nonviolence doesn't mean we have to endorse every single broken window as a good idea.. But it only obstructs these debates when dogmatists insist that all who do not share their goals and assumptions—not to say their class interests!—have no strategic sense. It's also not strategic to focus on delegitimizing each other's efforts rather than coordinating to act together where we overlap. That's the point of affirming a diversity of tactics: to build a movement that has space for all of us, yet leaves no space for domination and silencing—a "people power" that can both expand and intensify. Further Reading Debating Tactics: Remember to Ask, "What Works?" Historicizing "Violence": Thoughts on the Hedges/Graeber Debate "Those who said that the Egyptian revolution was peaceful did not see the horrors that police visited upon us, nor did they see the resistance and even force that revolutionaries used against the police to defend their tentative occupations and spaces: by the government's own admission, 99 police stations were put to the torch, thousands of police cars were destroyed, and all of the ruling party's offices around Egypt were burned down. Barricades were erected, officers were beaten back and pelted with rocks even as they fired tear gas and live ammunition on us . . . if the state had given up immediately we would have been overjoyed, but as they sought to abuse us, beat us, kill us, we knew that there was no other option than to fight back." - Solidarity statement from Cairo to Occupy Wall Street, October 24, 2011  http://www.crimethinc.com/texts/recentfeatures/violence.php

 

No Child Left Behind - War Machine Recruiter Farce continues in 2012
Mood:  don't ask
Now Playing: Military recruiters dirty bloody claws in our school system
Topic: WAR
As many of you know, under No Child Left Behind, schools receiving federal funding MUST release students' personal information to military recruiters if they are to continue to receive funding.  Students (and their families) may "opt-out" of this provision of the No Child Left Behind Act during their annual fall high school registration.  While Opt-Out is an important first step, there are other insidious ways in which the military can gain access to student information.

Please read the petition below and "sign on" as you feel appropriate by clicking on the link.

Just some explanation of terms:
NNOMY:  National Network Opposing Militarization of Youth
ASVAB:  Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (test)

For more information on the "issues,"  please see:
http://www.themmob.org/lmca ("Leave My Child Alone!"), which has information on Opt-Out, JAMRS (the Pentagon consumer database) and ASVAB
http://www.asvabtest.org/optout1.htm

An excellent article appeared in MOTHER JONES in September, 2009, entitled, "A Few Good Kids?  How the No Child Left Behind Act allowed military recruiters to collect info on millions of unsuspecting teens."
http://motherjones.com/politics/2009/09/few-good-kids

Thanks very much for supporting students' rights to privacy.

You cant repeat this nor share it - says who? ISP and Police State-ism
Mood:  accident prone
Now Playing: ISP and copyright - Intellectual property
Topic: TECHNOLOGY

Whiskey & Gunpowder
by Jeffrey Tucker
March 16, 2012
Auburn, Alabama, U.S.A.

ISPs as Hirelings for the Police State

-  :: the original article was found here ::  -

^{http://whiskeyandgunpowder.com/isps-are-hirelings-for-the-police-state/}

Remember that battle over SOPA, in which the world's largest websites beat back a congressional threat that would have changed the Internet forever? It was pretty obvious within a day after this Pyrrhic victory that the existing laws in place were enough to give the government the power to wreck the digital world. But how would it happen? How would government end digital freedom?

Well, the excuse is obvious. It is "intellectual property." This phrase serves the same purpose for would-be censors that "terrorism" does for warmongers. It is a way to ramp up government control while kicking sand in the faces of those who would oppose such control. Are you for terrorism? Are you for theft?

It's rather easy to detect normal theft. One day, I have a planter on my porch. The next day, the planter is on your porch, and it got there without my permission. Or one day, I'm driving my car. The next day, you are driving my car because you took it from me in the night. This is the way normal theft occurs. You can tell when it has happened. And the means of redress are obvious.

Now imagine a different scenario. One day, the paragraph above appears on the website for Laissez Faire Books. The next day, it appears on your Facebook page or blog. But it is not thereby removed from lfb.org. Instead, it is copied. A second instance of the paragraph has been created, taking nothing from me. My paragraph still exists. And let's say this happens 10 billion times in the course of a few minutes, as can happen in the digital world.

Is this a case of mass looting, or is it a mass compliment to me?

Copyright law sees this as theft. But how can that be? The whole merit of the digital world rests on the remarkable scalability of everything digitized. That's the basis of the economy of the Internet. Its capacity for inspiring and achieving infinite emulation and sharing is unparalleled in history. It's what makes the Internet different from parchment, vinyl or television. Remove that, and you gut the unique energy of the medium.

Intellectual property law became universal only about 120 years ago. It was gradually expanded over the course of the century, invading the digital realm in the 1980s and expanding its coverage ever since. How do you make copies illegal in a medium that specializes in its capacity for sharing, multiplying, linking and community formation? You need totalitarian control.

But how is the government going to do it? Well, consider how the government went about ramping up the tax state during the 1940s. Instead of just taxing people directly, it leaned on private businesses to do it, via the "withholding tax." Business was forced to become the tax collector for the state. And it was the same with health care. Instead of just mandating universal coverage, it leaned on private business to do the government's bidding. Business became the health care provider through mandate.

The same is now happening with the enforcement of intellectual property on the Web. All the latest reports say that ISPs (Internet service providers) have struck at deal with old-line media companies to start policing the way users of the Internet surf, upload, download and link.

There will be several warnings, and then, presumably, after some point, access will be cut off. They will do this based on the IP address of the user. In other words, ISPs will be doing the dirty work for the state. Probably, they struck the deal just because 1) the laws are already in place, and 2) they are probably trying to avoid a worse fate.

To be sure, some of this is already going on. If you use WordPress or Blogger for blogging, you probably already know this. Open and aggressive violators are presented with notices, whether the violation took place knowingly or not. For several years, YouTube has been blanking out the audio on home videos if the music is under copyright. And innumerable upload sites blast away anything that is under question, presuming guilt before it is proven.

Even an open Creative Commons announcement that grants permission to copy is not always enough. The presumption is that every duplication is a crime. Every upload is suspect, and every download is, too.

And contrary to what people claim, it is not always easy to tell the difference between protected property and common property. Copyright law is notoriously difficult to figure out. Sometimes the answer is obvious, as with material published before 1922. But there is this huge land of publication between that time and 1963 in which renewals are sometimes fuzzy, especially when multiple authors are involved.

Patent is an even worse case. Right now, everyone is suing everyone else for whatever. It has become a wicked game in which the competition takes place not in the arena of consumer service, but in the courts via various forms of trolling and legal blackmail.

In the end, all these disputes are won by the companies with the deepest pockets. I've seen copyright disputes that are settled on this basis alone, regardless of the merits of the case. In the end, it is too expensive for the little guys to defend themselves against large corporate interests, so the little guys invariably relent to avoid super-costly litigation.

This is the way it will be in the future. The big boys will run the show, doing for the state what the state is unable to do for itself, and they will do it on behalf of big corporate interests. This does terrible things to the competitive culture. It does even worse things to the culture of community sharing that has created a vast world of miracles and marvels available to the whole of humanity. It is a case of man's cruelty to man, serving no purpose except the material interests of large corporations that are determined to slow the path of progress for humanity.

However, it is not all dark. Every legal imposition creates incentives for the geeks of the world to find the workaround. There will always be a way. Just as the speak-easies remained open in the 1920s, there will always be zones of freedom in the digital world. And I have no doubt that, in the end, the freedom of information will win this. The tragedy is that there will be many speed bumps along the way to victory.

Regards,

Jeffrey Tucker
Executive editor, Laissez Faire Books

---

 

2 suggested Zebra3 Report links:

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/03/15/american-isps-to-launch-massive-copyright-spying-scheme-on-july-12/

and

http://torrentfreak.com/piratebox-takes-file-sharing-off-the-radar-and-offline-for-next-to-nothing-120311/

---

 

Thinking Positive and Creative Outlooks from Ivysea
Mood:  lyrical
Now Playing: Ivysea information on life changes and uncertainty
Topic: SMILE SMILE SMILE
http://www.ivysea.com/pages/Seazine_current.html ADOPTING A SPIRIT OF CREATIVE ADVENTUREWe don't always see tension or transition as an invitation to creative adventure, do we?

It can be hard when we're caught up in the stress of change or that place of creative tension, standing at the precipice of the unknown, to see the possibilities for something new and wonderful wanting to be born and experienced, and to give ourselves over to it.

No matter how many times I've been immersed in the creative process, or found myself in that tense, creative transition-space between something ending and something new beginning, I've felt the tension and an almost unbearable restlessness in it.

After all, creativity and stepping into the unknown take a lot of courage, along with a sense of heartful conviction and a strong vision. And we find all of these within us.

There have been times, in that 'unknown' place, when I've retreated to the known and seemingly comfortable. But sometimes, I've found the courage to wait there in that tension, step into the unknown, and let some new thing find expression through me.

When I've found my way to the latter, it's because I've immersed myself in inspiration.

Recently, I've found inspiration from the late Irish Poet, John O'Donohue, who wrote in his book, Beauty, that when 'we begin to awaken to the light of soul … we learn to befriend our complexity and see the dance of opposition within us not as a negative or destructive thing but as an invitation to creative adventure."

The 'light of soul' that O'Donohue speaks of must be tended, nourished, and brought back to life through regular inspiration.

These are often parts of ourselves -- inspiration, imagination, our wild and creative hearts -- that have been exiled in our focus on the 'business of survival', yet they're vital to our creativity, expression, authenticity, and deep meaning.

Yet when we heed their call and begin to reclaim them, we begin to feel whole again -- we feel the depth of inspiration returning to us, awakening our hearts so that we may bring our fuller selves into our relationships, our work, and all else that we do.

Between each of the stages in the creative cycle, we feel the tension and friction that gives heat to the creative process. It can be almost unbearable to wait in that place of tension, and we feel the pull to return to the familiar, the old.

Yet O'Donohue also wrote, in his poem 'For the Interim Time':

"As far as you can, hold your confidence.
Do not allow confusion to squander
This call which is loosening
Your roots in false ground,
That you might come free
From all you have outgrown."

If we have the courage and patience to wait, to engage that place of tension as 'creative adventure', something new -- something that has long awaited to finds its voice and expression through us -- can be born. And then, we find ourselves free, and rooted in 'true ground'. EMBRACING UNCERTAINTY?There's a whole lot going on with most of us these days, isn't there?Navigating change and uncertainty is, to me, a real art, and takes an artist's perspective.Just like with art, it takes inspiration and lots of practice, as well as a willingness to be taken on a journey whose destination isn't quite clear.Over the years, whether I've liked it or not, whether I felt ready for it or not, I've had a lot of practice when it comes to change and uncertainty.The fear that gets stirred up, the fatigue, and the constricted mind-chatter have sometimes been too familiar to me.I've known well the constriction in my body and breathing, too, once the fear-chatter gets triggered.But there's something else, too: an unexpected excitement when I can relax the constriction and find a certain perspective -- and shift the stories and 'broken record' chatter that I'm holding about what's going on.That's where the art and the practice come in -- a sort of creative, curious 'beginner's mind' that also makes good use of the resources and tools I've gathered along the way.And stoking the courage that's tucked away inside of me, too.I'm still practicing, because these days, it seems that there's always something changing, and some new challenge popping up just to keep me on my toes.Does this sound familiar to you?You'll find an article below on one 'mind shift' or perspective that I always find helpful, even if I have to remind myself daily and practice some more.The article includes one of my favorite bits of wisdom from the fab John O'Donahue.  This inspiration was copied from: http://www.ivysea.com/pages/Seazine_current.html