The Truth About Police Misconduct at Occupy Wall Street West | NationofChange

The Truth About Police Misconduct at Occupy Wall Street West

Brian Walker talks with Sonia Alexander-White about her experience with law enforcement during protests in San Francisco.

Friday 27 January 2012   Nation of Change

Photo: Steve Rhodes

Na­tion of Change’s Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Di­rec­tor, Sonia Alexan­der-White, re­counts ex­ces­sive use of po­lice force she wit­nessed and ex­pe­ri­enced last week dur­ing Oc­cupy Wall Street West:

Brian: Were you par­tic­i­pat­ing in protest when you were ar­rested on Jan­u­ary 20th? Why did law en­force­ment con­front you?

Sonia: I was ac­tu­ally just ob­serv­ing oc­cupy par­tic­i­pants and when law en­force­ment locked down the alley way I asked to be let out. I was asked to step back from the of­fi­cer line and I asked why I couldn’t be let out to the street ac­cess. That was when the head of­fi­cer re­moved me into cus­tody after grab­bing my coat and throw­ing me.

Brian: What were you doing at the oc­cupy and what were you try­ing to do?

Sonia: I was con­duct­ing in­ter­views and tak­ing pic­tures with my cam­era phone just be­fore they formed a riot line that locked me in.

Brian: Were the po­lice vi­o­lent against you in any way?

Sonia: Yes. They tried to in­tim­i­date me while be­hind the line as if I were a crim­i­nal. When I tried to speak they yelled louder for me to stay still. When I asked to be let out be­cause I was look­ing for our cam­era man they put their hands on me and threw me to the po­lice van.

Brian: What were law en­force­ment in the area doing be­fore they en­cir­cled and ar­rested you?

Sonia: They were putting riot gear on and get­ting their clubs out. The of­fi­cer that threw me was walk­ing bank ex­ec­u­tives from a lo­ca­tion across the street to the en­trance of the Wells Fargo build­ing. Pro­test­ers were only march­ing in that lo­ca­tion and not con­fronting any em­ploy­ees. The po­lice then formed 3 troupes that locked the area down and one large group with a set of po­lice on mo­tor­cy­cles that went into the street forc­ing them­selves against pro­test­ers that were just chant­ing the 99% mes­sage.

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Milton Lee Norris> Christianity Is Not a Jewelry Store ¦ OpEdNews

• Christianity is about loving; I believe that when you don’t love then you’re committing a slow suicide because there is nothing to nurture your soul. Love is L ife, O pportunity , V oice and E xpression. Wake up and find the strength to love your sons, daughters and others who are different; they are God’s gifts to you and to our world, that’s what Christianity is all about.

• Gay marriage – a Lutheran leader’s plea to Catholic bishops

• The Gospel of the Penniless, Jobless, Marginalized and Despised

Milton Lee Norris, OpEdNews.com   

Submitted by David Culver¦

This article is about Christianity and Christians, real vs. so-called Christians. It speaks of Christianity as not being a jewelry store where people get to pick and chose whom they should love. It speaks of the rock b/w Christianity and God’s love. It points out how Gays and the LGBT people aren’t the real dilemma of the Christian Church but plainly how being evil and hateful are the real issues.

When I think of Christianity I think of God, love and goodness; when thinking of what doesn’t fall into the realm of Christianity many other things enter my mind.   It comes to light that Christianity is not like going to a jewelry store or to an exclusive retail store; we don’t get to pick and choose which way is the right way to love. We cannot go into a store and pick out people to love like diamonds, gold, silver, cell phones, PCs or any other electronic equipment; people are not things. Jesus’ example of love is simple; “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.”

More…

Related:

Gay marriage – a Lutheran leader’s plea to Catholic bishops, Herbert W. Chilstrom, Minneapolis (MN) Star Tribune
May I share a word with all of you who now lead the Roman Catholic community of faith in Minnesota?

The Gospel of the Penniless, Jobless, Marginalized and Despised, Chris Hedges, Common Dreams

• “If you are gonna worship somebody that was nailed to a tree, you must know that the life of a disciple of that person is not going to be easy. It will make you end up on that tree. And so in this sense, I just want to say that we have to take seriously the faith or else we will be the opposite of what it means.” –James Cone

• How the GOP Tries to Transform America into a Selfish, Souless Place

The Price of War> Estimated U.S. cost: $4 trillion

| FROM EXPLORATIONS | BY SUSAN SELIGSON    Bostonia> Boston University   Fall 2011

“These wars have been financed mostly by borrowing, so they are like no other war in U.S. history,” says CAS’ Neta Crawford.  Photo by Cydney Scott

Neta Crawford hopes to deepen the public’s understanding of the staggering ripple effects—human, economic, and environmental—of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and the counterinsurgency efforts in Pakistan. The College of Arts & Sciences professor of political science is the coauthor of a far-reaching study that pegs the cost of these wars to the United States at $4 trillion.

Launched under the auspices of the Eisenhower Institute at Gettysburg College, a center for leadership and public policy, the Costs of War study took more than a year to complete. Crawford, who directed the study with Catherine Lutz, a Brown University professor of anthropology and international studies, says it pooled the efforts of economists, anthropologists, lawyers, and political scientists. Crawford’s scholarship focused on the civilian death toll, which stands at 137,000. The report puts the total war deaths of those in and out of uniform at 225,000, and notes that the conflict in Pakistan has cost as many lives as that in Afghanistan. Since September 11, 2001, the wars have claimed the lives of 6,000 U.S. troops and 2,300 contractors, and the number of displaced Afghans and Iraqis is eight million.

Graphic by Joseph Chan

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Lawrence Lessig> After the Battle Against SOPA—What’s Next?

After the Battle Against SOPA—
What’s Next?

by Lawrence Lessig    January 26, 2912   The Nation

January 18, 2012 could prove to be an incredibly important day, and not just for copyright policy or the Internet. On that day, two critically important things happened: First, with its 6-2 decision in Golan v. Holder, the Supreme Court shut the door, finally and firmly, on any opportunity to meaningfully challenge a copyright statute constitutionally.

Second, millions from the Internet opened the door, powerfully if briefly, on the powers that dominate policy-making in Washington, and effectively stopped Hollywood’s latest outrage to address “piracy”—aka, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), and the Protect IP Act (PIPA).

The constitutional battle began over a decade ago. Conservatives on the Supreme Court had long rumbled about the need to respect the “original intent” of the “framers” of our Constitution by enforcing the affirmative limits of the Constitution. In 1995, a 5-4 Court decision shocked conventional wisdom by striking a law regulating commerce because, as the Court found, it exceeded those original limits. Three years later, the Court did the same, this time with a law regulating violence against women. The Court seemed eager to read the Constitution the way the framers wrote it, regardless of how the current Congress read it.

So beginning in 1999, copyright activists started to ask the Court to apply the same reasoning to copyright law. (Disclosure: I was one of those activists). In a challenge to the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act—a statute that extended the terms of existing copyrights by twenty years—the plaintiffs argued that the authors of the Copyright Clause, which expressly limited Congress’s power to grant copyright terms for “limited times” only, would never have sanctioned Congress’s current practice of extending terms again and again. The framers gave us a copyright term of fourteen years, renewable once. The current Hollywood-financed Congress has given us the term of life of the author plus seventy years.

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Polly Mann> That’s No Harvest Moon in the Sky, Honey

That’s No Harvest Moon in the Sky, Honey

By Polly Mann  WAMM Newsletter   December/January   2011/2012

That’s a predator drone.

Those objects in the sky are what you might be seeing if you’re somewhere near the Canadian or Mexican borders. They’re out scouting for illegal immigrants, drug runners or terrorists. They can remain airborne for 30 hours, though missions typically run eight or nine hours. A Predator system – the plane, sensors, control consoles, and antennas – costs $18.5 million. The operation center is contained within the ground control trailer. A pilot and sensor operator sit side by side at consoles that include four screens each, a joystick, keyboard, several levers, and rudder pedals. The pilot does the flying. The sensor operator works the equipment.

The aircraft are credited with apprehending more than 7,500 would-be immigrants since they were first deployed some six years ago. ”It’s like any other law enforcement platform,” said Lothar Eckardt, director of the Office of Air and Marine’s Predator operation at Corpus Christi, Texas. Predator drones patrol a 900-mile strip from the vicinity of Spokane, Washington, to the Lake of the Woods area of Minnesota. The U.S. Customs and Border Protection will add its sixth drone on the Southwest border when another drone is placed in Arizona. Within the United States the Houston Police Department used one in conducting a drug bust northwest of Austin.

The 30-foot ground control trailer which holds the equipment is just that – a 30-foot trailer. But you would never mistake it for your “happy camper” trailer. In connection with it are a couple of sensors that appear to be about 20 feet in diameter.

Who knows but that within a few years every metropolitan police force of any size will be able to point to its individual drone with pride as they are used to apprehend speeders, growers of marijuana, and writers of graffiti?.

Polly Mann is a co-founder of Women Against Military Madness and a regular contributor and columnist for the WAMM newsletter. She is active in the organization and serves on the WAMM Newsletter Committee.

 © 2011 Women Against Military Madness. All rights reserved.  Used with permission.

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Poster> Join us in Washington, DC, beginning on March 30 for NOW DC and Occupy Power!

The National Occupation of Washington, DC: Occupy Power!

Submitted by Margaret Flowers on Sat, 01/14/2012 – 19:14  NOWDC.org

March 30, 2012, people from across the country will gather for an American Spring in Washington, DC. The National Occupation of Washington, DC (NOW DC) opposes the corruption of both parties in conducting U.S. domestic and foreign policies. Our most precious safeguard, the Bill of Rights, has been effectively destroyed, and the Supreme Court has allowed the Constitution to be perverted. This cannot be allowed to stand unopposed. We are uniting against a corporate-controlled government which has failed abysmally to promote the public well-being, and in doing so we will demonstrate our commitment to creating a new world where the people, not the 1%, rule.

 NOW DC invites any occupiers who are interested and dedicated to the NOW DC mission to join in organizing NOW DC. Let’s work together to create a very creative, informative and powerful event!!

Watch for the organizing calls on InterOccupy.org and join in.

 NOW DC—education, protest and mobilization—will begin with an inspiring Occupy Social Forum to bring together the experience, knowledge and thinking of the 99%. Occupiers from across the country will present workshops on socially relevant areas, including political and policy issues, strategies for shifting power from the 1% to the 99%, ending wars and militarization, and the strengths and weaknesses of the Occupy movement, as well as concrete descriptions of how to organize communities, hold General Assemblies, live-stream and create your own media and other practical necessities for successful occupations.

The civil resistance of NOW DC will focus on the power structure in Washington, DC. The first phase of the Occupy Movement showed that people acting in solidarity have power and can change the direction of the country. NOW DC aims to unite occupations in a focused campaign to demonstrate to elected officials in Washington, DC, and K Street and corporate interests that the people no longer trust or accept their rule, that a radical transformation to a participatory democracy operating under the rule of law is essential.

The reign of money in government has fostered policies that throw people out of their homes and drive families into bankruptcy, impoverish whole communities, deny access to medical treatment and wage unending wars abroad. Worst of all, the policies of greed are literally destroying our planet. All this must change soon and change dramatically. The political puppets now occupying public space will not bring about this change. Only a united, courageous and enlightened public can do this.

Join us in Washington, DC, beginning on March 30 for NOW DC and Occupy Power!

“I pledge to support the nonviolent occupation of Washington, DC, in Freedom Plaza, participating either in person on Freedom Plaza or from wherever I am, as we nonviolently resist a corporate-driven war-and-Wall-Street government that exploits people and the planet for the 1%. I commit to supporting this resistance until we have a real democracy and our resources are invested in human needs and environmental protection.”

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Book Review> The End of Victory Culture: Cold War America and the Disillusioning of a Generation | Books | TomDispatch

The End of Victory Culture: Cold War America and the Disillusioning of a Generation

By Tom Engelhardt   TomDispatch

JUST PUBLISHED: 2007 second edition with a new preface and an afterword on how America’s “victory culture” returned in the George W. Bush era, only to crash and burn in Iraq. An updated analysis of the demise of victory culture, from Hiroshima to the Global War on Terror.

In a substantial new afterword to his classic account of the collapse of American triumphalism in the wake of World War II, Tom Engelhardt carries that story into the twenty-first century. He explores how, in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, the younger George Bush headed for the Wild West (Osama bin Laden, “Wanted, Dead or Alive”); how his administration brought “victory culture” roaring back as part of its Global War on Terror and its rush to invade Saddam Hussein’s Iraq; and how, from its “Mission Accomplished” moment on, its various stories of triumph crashed and burned in that land.

This book is an autopsy of a once vital American myth: the cherished belief that triumph over a less-than-human enemy was in the American grain, a birthright and a national destiny. The End of Victory Culture is a compelling account of how America’s premier story – of inevitable triumph against all odds – underwent a dizzying decomposition from Hiroshima to Iraq. As Tom Engelhardt reconstructs a half-century of the crumbling borderlands of American consciousness, he also offers a striking portrait of a post-Vietnam, and then Iraq-mired nation living an afterlife amid the ruins of its national narrative.

Reviews

Praise for the new edition of The End of Victory Culture:

Juan Cole at his Informed Comment website: ”It is in some ways an answer to Frederick Jackson Turner’s conundrum– if the Frontier had been so central to American identity, what would happen now that (in the 1890s) the frontier was closing up? Engelhardt’s work has two implications. First, the frontier has just been projected abroad, and other ‘native’ peoples substituted for the ‘Injuns.’ And, second, that frontier gets old fast, too. (There is a reason we don’t watch shows like Gunsmoke in prime time any more, folks). So, the American Right takes refuge in myths like ‘we could have won in Vietnam’ and remembers its boyhood games when heroes and villains were so easy to tell apart. Engelhardt’s book is a must read.”

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Forced Military Testing in America’s Schools

There is great reluctance in American society to stand up to the U.S. military, particularly concerning the way it runs a dozen programs in the nation’s schools. Calls for transparency are met with silence and indignation, a terrible lesson for American high school students.

Pat Elder, Common Dreams

Submitted by David Culver

The invasion of student privacy associated with military testing in U.S. high schools has been well documented by mainstream media sources, like USA Today and NPR . The practice of mandatory testing, however, continues largely unnoticed.

The Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery, or ASVAB is the military’s entrance exam that is given to fresh recruits to determine their aptitude for various military occupations. The test is also used as a recruiting tool in 12,000 high schools across the country. The 3 hour test is used by military recruiting services to gain sensitive, personal information on more than 660,000 high school students across the country every year, the vast majority of whom are under the age of 18. Students typically are given the test at school without parental knowledge or consent. The school-based ASVAB Career Exploration Program is among the military’s most effective recruiting tools.

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William J. Astore> Weapons ‘R’ Us Making Warbirds Instead of Thunderbirds

Weapons ‘R’ Us
Making Warbirds Instead of Thunderbirds 

By William J. Astore    January 24, 2012   TomDispatch

Perhaps you’ve heard of “Makin’ Thunderbirds,” a hard-bitten rock & roll song by Bob Seger that I listened to 30 years ago while in college.  It’s about auto workers back in 1955 who were “young and proud” to be making Ford Thunderbirds.  But in the early 1980s, Seger sings, “the plants have changed and you’re lucky if you work.”  Seger caught the reality of an American manufacturing infrastructure that was seriously eroding as skilled and good-paying union jobs were cut or sent overseas, rarely to be seen again in these parts.

If the U.S.auto industry has recently shown sparks of new life (though we’re not making T-Birds or Mercuries or Oldsmobiles or Pontiacsor Saturns anymore), there is one form of manufacturing in which Americais still dominant.  When it comes to weaponry, to paraphrase Seger, we’re still young and proud and makin’ Predators and Reapers (as in unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones) and Eagles and Fighting Falcons (as in F-15 and F-16 combat jets), and outfitting them with the deadliest of weapons.  In this market niche, we’re still the envy of the world.

Yes, we’re the world’s foremost “merchants of death,” the title of a best-selling exposé of the international arms trade published to acclaim in theU.S.in 1934.  Back then, most Americans saw themselves as war-avoiders rather than as war-profiteers.  The evil war-profiteers were mainly European arms makers likeGermany’sKrupp,France’sSchneider, orBritain’sVickers. 

Not that Americadidn’t have its own arms merchants.  As the authors ofMerchants of Death noted, early on our country demonstrated a “Yankee propensity for extracting novel death-dealing knickknacks from [our] peddler’s pack.”  Amazingly, the Nye Committee in the U.S. Senate devoted 93 hearings from 1934 to 1936 to exposing America’s own “greedy munitions interests.”  Even in those desperate depression days, a desire for profit and jobs was balanced by a strong sense of unease at this deadly trade, an unease reinforced by the horrors of and hecatombs of dead from the First World War.

We are uneasy no more.  Today we take great pride (or at least have no shame) in being by far the world’s number one arms-exporting nation.  A few statistics bear this out.  From 2006 to 2010, the U.S.accounted for nearly one-third of the world’s arms exports, easily surpassing a resurgent Russia in the “Lords of War” race.  Despite a decline in global arms sales in 2010 due to recessionary pressures, the U.S. increased its market share, accounting fora whopping 53% of the trade that year.  Last year saw the U.S. on pace to deliver more than $46 billion in foreign arms sales.  Who says America isn’t number one anymore?

For a shopping list of our arms trades, try searching the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute database for arms exports and imports. 

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Tomgram: William Astore, Confessions of a Recovering Weapons Addict

Posted by William Astore at 8:55AM, January 24, 2012.   TomDispatch

Editor’s Note:  See William Astore’s article, “Weapons ‘R’ Us” in a separate posting.

The twenty-first century hasn’t exactly been America’s greatest moment.  Still, there remain winners, along with all the losers you might care to mention.  If, in fact, you were to sum up the first decade-plus of the next “American Century” in manufacturing terms, you might say that — Steve Jobs aside — this country has mainly been successful at making things that go boom in the night. 

Start with Hollywood.  Its action and superhero films – the very definition of what goes boom in the night — continue to capture eyeballs and dominate global markets in ways that should impress and that have left national movie industries elsewhere in the proverbial dust.  And then, of course, there’s that other group of winners, the arms-makers of the military-industrial-homeland-security complex.  They’ve had the time of their lives these last boom years (so to speak), with national security budgets soaringannually beyond all imagination.

Even now, in the toughest of tough times and despite the headlines about gigantic Defense Department spending cuts, President Obama recently reassured arms-makers (and the rest of us) that the Pentagon budget would, in his words, “still grow, because we have global responsibilities that demand our leadership.  In fact, the defense budget will still be larger than it was toward the end of the Bush administration.”  In response, his Republican opponents lambasted him as weak on defense for promising so little.  Which tells you just who the winners of the last decade were and who the winners of the next one are likely to be.

Of course, in any situation there are always winners and losers, but it is striking that our losing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have proven a gold mine for a small set of crony corporations and weapon-makers, producing a group of real winners at home with names like Lockheed Martin, KBR, and General Dynamics.

TomDispatch regular and retired Air Force Lieutenant Colonel William Astore points, for instance, to the end results of our debacle in Iraq: the new Iraqi government is planning to purchase$11 billion in American weapons (and training), including F-16fighter jets.  A little history of American dreams for the Iraqi Air Force might be in order.

When the Bush administration launched its invasion in 2003, it imagined an American-garrisoned Iraq fordecades to come and a reconstituted Iraqi military “lite,” a force of perhaps 40,000 lightly armed troops “without an air force,” who would patrol the borders of their part of an American-dominated Middle East.

In those halcyon days, there were no plans to recreate an Iraqi Air Force (though Saddam Hussein’s had once been one of the biggest in the world).  Or rather, U.S. planners saw no need to do so because the “Iraqi Air Force” already existed and was settling into Balad Air Base north of Baghdad.  It was, of course, the U.S. Air Force.

Consider it now a sign of defeat that almost the last military link between Iraq and the U.S. military will be the delivery of those new weapons and the years of training and support that will go with them.  We didn’t win in Iraq, but someone here did!  Let Astore tell you all about it. (To catch Timothy MacBain’s latest Tomcast audio interview in which Astore discusses the thrill of weaponry in pop culture and how it faded for him, click here, or download it to your iPod  .)      — Tom

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