Progressive Calendar 11.28.11 /2 | <– Date –> <– Thread –> |
From: David Shove (shove001umn.edu) | |
Date: Mon, 28 Nov 2011 13:40:13 -0800 (PST) |
P R O G R E S S I V E C A L E N D A R 11.28.11 1. Rwanda 11.28 4pm 2. Ramsey budget 11.28 6:30pm 3. Naomi Wolf - The shocking truth about the crackdown on Occupy 4. Carl Gibson - America has become a fascist police state 5. ed - Obama's sword (haiku) --------1 of 5-------- andrea.m.palumbo [at] gmail.com subject: Rwanda 11.28 4pm Rwanda Truth & Reconciliation Roundtable 11/28/11 at 4:00 pm -6:00 pm Rwanda Truth and Reconciliation: The Process Begins Speakers: Paul Rusesabagina, honored for saving Hutus and Tutsis alike during the Rwandan Genocide Robert Flaten, Former U.S. Ambassador to Rwanda Professor Peter Erlinder, UNâICTR Lead Defense Counsel Special guest TBA for security reasons Moderated by Dr. Ali Galayd, Former Prime Minister of Somalia November 28, 2011 4:00 PM â 6:00 PM William Mitchell College of Law, 875 Summit Avenue, St. Paul Open to local students and faculty members with valid ID Conference will be streamed live â register at reconcileconference [at] gmail.comfor video link. --------2 of 5-------- From: Ed Davis Ramsey budget 11.28 6:30pm Public Hearing on County Budget Ramsey County is in the throes of debating the 2012-13 Budget. Details at http://www.co.ramsey.mn.us/home/index.htm Budget Pt1 http://bit.ly/rfzNJh Budget Pt2 http://bit.ly/oMCSPG Some Highlights # Change in revenue source from State & Federal Property taxes paid for 36% (2000) for 47.1% (2013) # Increase in tax levy 2.4% in 2012 and 2013 # Overall County spending is proposed to go down $7.4 million or -1.2% by the end of the 2012-2013 biennium # 134 positions removed over the biennium # 20-30 layoffs (over the biennium?) Monday, November 28, 2011 6:30 p.m. â until public testimony completed Roseville Area High School 1240 County Road B2 West Roseville, MN Contact Bonnie Jackelen at 651-266-8014 if you wish to speak at this hearing [say, on public money for a stadium -ed]The Shocking Truth About the Crackdown on Occupy By Naomi Wolf --------3 of 5-------- Naomi Wolf - The shocking truth about the crackdown on Occupy Guardian UK 26 November 11 The violent police assaults across the US are no coincidence. Occupy has touched the third rail of our political class's venality. AS citizens of all political persuasions are still reeling from images of unparallelled police brutality in a coordinated crackdown against peaceful OWS protesters in cities across the nation this past week. An elderly woman was pepper-sprayed in the face; the scene of unresisting, supine students at UC Davis being pepper-sprayed by phalanxes of riot police went viral online; images proliferated of young women â targeted seemingly for their gender â screaming, dragged by the hair by police in riot gear; and the pictures of a young man, stunned and bleeding profusely from the head, emerged in the record of the middle-of-the-night clearing of Zuccotti Park. But just when Americans thought we had the picture â was this crazy police and mayoral overkill, on a municipal level, in many different cities? â the picture darkened. The National Union of Journalists and the Committee to Protect Journalists issued a Freedom of Information Act request to investigate possible federal involvement with law enforcement practices that appeared to target journalists. The New York Times reported that "New York cops have arrested, punched, whacked, shoved to the ground and tossed a barrier at reporters and photographers" covering protests. Reporters were asked by NYPD to raise their hands to prove they had credentials: when many dutifully did so, they were taken, upon threat of arrest, away from the story they were covering, and penned far from the site in which the news was unfolding. Other reporters wearing press passes were arrested and roughed up by cops, after being â falsely â informed by police that "It is illegal to take pictures on the sidewalk." In New York, a state supreme court justice and a New York City council member were beaten up; in Berkeley, California, one of our greatest national poets, Robert Hass, was beaten with batons. The picture darkened still further when Wonkette and Washingtonsblog.com reported that the Mayor of Oakland acknowledged that the Department of Homeland Security had participated in an 18-city mayor conference call advising mayors on "how to suppress" Occupy protests. To Europeans, the enormity of this breach may not be obvious at first. Our system of government prohibits the creation of a federalised police force, and forbids federal or militarised involvement in municipal peacekeeping. I noticed that rightwing pundits and politicians on the TV shows on which I was appearing were all on-message against OWS. Journalist Chris Hayes reported on a leaked memo that revealed lobbyists vying for an $850,000 contract to smear Occupy. Message coordination of this kind is impossible without a full-court press at the top. This was clearly not simply a case of a freaked-out mayors', city-by-city municipal overreaction against mess in the parks and cranky campers. As the puzzle pieces fit together, they began to show coordination against OWS at the highest national levels. Why this massive mobilisation against these not-yet-fully-articulated, unarmed, inchoate people? After all, protesters against the war in Iraq, Tea Party rallies and others have all proceeded without this coordinated crackdown. Is it really the camping? As I write, two hundred young people, with sleeping bags, suitcases and even folding chairs, are still camping out all night and day outside of NBC on public sidewalks â under the benevolent eye of an NYPD cop â awaiting Saturday Night Live tickets, so surely the camping is not the issue. I was still deeply puzzled as to why OWS, this hapless, hopeful band, would call out a violent federal response. That is, until I found out what it was that OWS actually wanted. The mainstream media was declaring continually "OWS has no message". Frustrated, I simply asked them. I began soliciting online "What is it you want?" answers from Occupy. In the first 15 minutes, I received 100 answers. These were truly eye-opening. The No 1 agenda item: get the money out of politics. Most often cited was legislation to blunt the effect of the Citizens United ruling, which lets boundless sums enter the campaign process. No 2: reform the banking system to prevent fraud and manipulation, with the most frequent item being to restore the Glass-Steagall Act â the Depression-era law, done away with by President Clinton, that separates investment banks from commercial banks. This law would correct the conditions for the recent crisis, as investment banks could not take risks for profit that create kale derivatives out of thin air, and wipe out the commercial and savings banks. No 3 was the most clarifying: draft laws against the little-known loophole that currently allows members of Congress to pass legislation affecting Delaware-based corporations in which they themselves are investors. When I saw this list â and especially the last agenda item â the scales fell from my eyes. Of course, these unarmed people would be having the shit kicked out of them. For the terrible insight to take away from news that the Department of Homeland Security coordinated a violent crackdown is that the DHS does not freelance. The DHS cannot say, on its own initiative, "we are going after these scruffy hippies". Rather, DHS is answerable up a chain of command: first, to New York Representative Peter King, head of the House homeland security subcommittee, who naturally is influenced by his fellow congressmen and women's wishes and interests. And the DHS answers directly, above King, to the president (who was conveniently in Australia at the time). In other words, for the DHS to be on a call with mayors, the logic of its chain of command and accountability implies that congressional overseers, with the blessing of the White House, told the DHS to authorise mayors to order their police forces â pumped up with millions of dollars of hardware and training from the DHS â to make war on peaceful citizens. But wait: why on earth would Congress advise violent militarised reactions against its own peaceful constituents? The answer is straightforward: in recent years, members of Congress have started entering the system as members of the middle class (or upper middle class) â but they are leaving DC privy to vast personal wealth, as we see from the "scandal" of presidential contender Newt Gingrich's having been paid $1.8m for a few hours' "consulting" to special interests. The inflated fees to lawmakers who turn lobbyists are common knowledge, but the notion that congressmen and women are legislating their own companies' profitsis less widely known â and if the books were to be opened, they would surely reveal corruption on a Wall Street spectrum. Indeed, we do already know that congresspeople are massively profiting from trading on non-public information they have on companies about which they are legislating â a form of insider trading that sent Martha Stewart to jail. Since Occupy is heavily surveilled and infiltrated, it is likely that the DHS and police informers are aware, before Occupy itself is, what its emerging agenda is going to look like. If legislating away lobbyists' privileges to earn boundless fees once they are close to the legislative process, reforming the banks so they can't suck money out of fake derivatives products, and, most critically, opening the books on a system that allowed members of Congress to profit personally â and immensely â from their own legislation, are two beats away from the grasp of an electorally organised Occupy movement â well, you will call out the troops on stopping that advance. So, when you connect the dots, properly understood, what happened this week is the first battle in a civil war; a civil war in which, for now, only one side is choosing violence. It is a battle in which members of Congress, with the collusion of the American president, sent violent, organised suppression against the people they are supposed to represent. Occupy has touched the third rail: personal congressional profits streams. Even though they are, as yet, unaware of what the implications of their movement are, those threatened by the stirrings of their dreams of reform are not. Sadly, Americans this week have come one step closer to being true brothers and sisters of the protesters in Tahrir Square. Like them, our own national leaders, who likely see their own personal wealth under threat from transparency and reform, are now making war upon us. --------4 of 5-------- America Has Become a Fascist Police State By Carl Gibson, Reader Supported News 26 November 11 Reader Supported News | Perspective George Orwell's "1984" wasn't meant to be an instruction manual. One word that emerged from the novel was the word "doublespeak," where truth is deliberately obfuscated through clever wording. In some cases, the meaning of a word is reversed entirely. Oceania, the totalitarian regime in Orwell's book, used doublespeak as a matter of course. The Ministry of Truth specialized in propaganda. The Ministry of Love was a secretive torture complex. In the early years of public school, or in public addresses by politicians, America is touted as the Land of the Free, or the Land of Opportunity, or the Greatest Country on Earth. We're taught from near-infancy that this country was founded on the right to say what you want, whenever, wherever, to whomever. We're told we have the freedom to assemble peacefully, to petition our leaders for a redress of grievances. We're taught that if you're apprehended by the law, you have the right to a fair trial and legal representation. Yet, today we live in a country where government aids the corporate takeover of elections. Here, banks who fraudulently took Americans' homes for profit can get bailed out by the taxpayers, and use the money to pay themselves 12-figure bonuses. This is a country where even US citizens can be detained without due process, tortured, and even assassinated overseas. Today, in the Land of the Free, nonviolent political protesters using their First Amendment rights to speak out against all of the above can be beaten, tasered, and maced by heavily-militarized police forces, using military-grade equipment, without any provocation. âStudents sitting down in the quad at UC Davis were covered with military-grade pepper spray, before cops in riot gear knelt on them and sprayed indiscriminately down student's throats according to Professor Nathan Brown of UC Davis. âAt UC Berkeley, Robert Hass, a former poet laureate, was clubbed by police while nonviolently protesting with students. âIn Seattle, cops clad in riot gear pepper-sprayed an 84-year-old woman and an expectant mother. âIn Oakland, veterans who served overseas to allegedly protect the rights we hold dear come home and get aggressively beaten without warning, and shot in the face with tear-gas canisters. Oakland police even threw a flash-bang grenade at people rushing to give medical attention to the wounded vet. The recent Black Friday mobs of consumers pitching tents in parking lots and rioting over $2 waffle irons were met with silence from the police. Yet, 10 people speaking out in a Wal-Mart about the company's CEO making $19,000 per hour while his employees are forced to work on a holiday for less than poverty-level wages apparently provokes police to tackle and arrest the citizens nonviolently encouraging shoppers to buy local. In today's America we can Occupy for Capitalism, but not for Democracy. Oakland Mayor Jean Quan has openly admitted that the recent police crackdowns on Occupy Wall Street solidarity encampments were the result of careful coordination between mayors on a series of conference calls. There are also reports that the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI gave advice on the crackdowns, encouraging municipalities to deploy large numbers of police, equip them with riot gear, and break up encampments when the media were least likely to be present. Reports from New York allege that reporters were asked to raise their hand if they had press credentials, before being penned in an area far from the protests. Those trying to get through were arrested, and told that it was illegal to "take pictures on the sidewalk." It is no longer extreme to say we now live in a fascist police state. Thanks to the Patriot Act, the SCOTUS' Citizens United decision, and a complacent electorate, our First Amendment rights of free speech and free assembly now only exist on paper. In Tienanmen Square, the Chinese government also censored the press and violently cracked down on peaceful protesters. All that's missing here are the tanks. Mussolini said, "Fascism should be more accurately called corporatism, because it is a merger of state and corporate power." It is Orwellian doublespeak to call this country "free" while freedom is actively suppressed with aid from a corporate-owned government. The people are not free if their leaders are actively making war with them. Carl Gibson, 24, of Lexington, Kentucky, is a spokesman and organizer for US Uncut, a nonviolent, creative direct-action movement to stop budget cuts by getting corporations to pay their fair share of taxes. He graduated from Morehead State University in 2009 with a B.A. in Journalism before starting the first US Uncut group in Jackson, Mississippi, in February of 2011. Since then, over 20,000 US Uncut activists have carried out more than 300 actions in over 100 cities nationwide. You may contact Carl at carl [at] rsnorg.orgThis e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it . Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News. --------5 of 5-------- When defending the people, Barack Obama wields a no-edged sword. BO wouldn't want to *hurt *anybody, and besides, so long as he *looks*like he would defend them, that lets them off the hook for the 2008 vote, and lets them do it again in 2012. Otherwise they'd have to dump the two-party "choice" and become *radicals.* And they will believe *anything *rather than that. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Shove Trove
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