Occupy LA: En anholdelse og dens baggrund

Patrick Meighan, der blandt andet er manuskriptforfatter på TV-serien “Family Guy”, fortæller om sin anholdelse sammen med resten af Occupy LA:

I was arrested at about 1 a.m. Wednesday morning with 291 other people at Occupy LA. I was sitting in City Hall Park with a pillow, a blanket, and a copy of Thich Nhat Hanh’s “Being Peace” when 1,400 heavily-armed LAPD officers in paramilitary SWAT gear streamed in. I was in a group of about 50 peaceful protestors who sat Indian-style, arms interlocked, around a tent (the symbolic image of the Occupy movement). The LAPD officers encircled us, weapons drawn, while we chanted “We Are Peaceful” and “We Are Nonviolent” and “Join Us.”

As we sat there, encircled, a separate team of LAPD officers used knives to slice open every personal tent in the park. They forcibly removed anyone sleeping inside, and then yanked out and destroyed any personal property inside those tents, scattering the contents across the park. They then did the same with the communal property of the Occupy LA movement. For example, I watched as the LAPD destroyed a pop-up canopy tent that, until that moment, had been serving as Occupy LA’s First Aid and Wellness tent, in which volunteer health professionals gave free medical care to absolutely anyone who requested it. As it happens, my family had personally contributed that exact canopy tent to Occupy LA, at a cost of several hundred of my family’s dollars. As I watched, the LAPD sliced that canopy tent to shreds, broke the telescoping poles into pieces and scattered the detritus across the park. Note that these were the objects described in subsequent mainstream press reports as “30 tons of garbage” that was “abandoned” by Occupy LA: personal property forcibly stolen from us, destroyed in front of our eyes and then left for maintenance workers to dispose of while we were sent to prison. (…)

I unlinked my arms voluntarily and informed the LAPD officers that I would go peacefully and cooperatively. I stood as instructed, and then I had my arms wrenched behind my back, and an officer hyperextended my wrists into my inner arms. It was super violent, it hurt really really bad, and he was doing it on purpose. When I involuntarily recoiled from the pain, the LAPD officer threw me face-first to the pavement. He had my hands behind my back, so I landed right on my face. The officer dropped with his knee on my back and ground my face into the pavement. It really, really hurt and my face started bleeding and I was very scared. I begged for mercy and I promised that I was honestly not resisting and would not resist.

My hands were then zipcuffed very tightly behind my back, where they turned blue. I am now suffering nerve damage in my right thumb and palm. (…)

So that’s what happened to the 292 women and men were arrested last Wednesday. Now let’s talk about a man who was not arrested last Wednesday. He is former Citigroup CEO Charles Prince. Under Charles Prince, Citigroup was guilty of massive, coordinated securities fraud.

Citigroup spent years intentionally buying up every bad mortgage loan it could find, creating bad securities out of those bad loans and then selling shares in those bad securities to duped investors. And then they sometimes secretly bet *against* their *own* bad securities to make even more money. For one such bad Citigroup security, Citigroup executives were internally calling it, quote, “a collection of dogshit”. To investors, however, they called it, quote, “an attractive investment rigorously selected by an independent investment adviser”.

This is fraud, and it’s a felony, and the Charles Princes of the world spent several years doing it again and again: knowingly writing bad mortgages, and then packaging them into fraudulent securities which they then sold to suckers and then repeating the process. This is a big part of why your property values went up so fast. But then the bubble burst, and that’s why our economy is now shattered for a generation, and it’s also why your home is now underwater. Or at least mine is.

Anyway, if your retirement fund lost a decade’s-worth of gains overnight, this is why.

If your son’s middle school has added furlough days because the school district can’t afford to keep its doors open for a full school year, this is why.

If your daughter has come out of college with a degree only to discover that there are no jobs for her, this is why.

But back to Charles Prince. For his four years of in charge of massive, repeated fraud at Citigroup, he received fifty-three million dollars in salary and also received another ninety-four million dollars in stock holdings. What Charles Prince has *not* received is a pair of zipcuffs. The nerves in his thumb are fine. No cop has thrown Charles Prince into the pavement, face-first. Each and every peaceful, nonviolent Occupy LA protester arrested last week has has spent more time sleeping on a jail floor than every single Charles Prince on Wall Street, combined.

Og dette skrives, netop mens EU-landenes regeringer planlægger en traktat-ændring, der vil sikre, at heller ikke de europæiske finansfyrster kommer til at lide den mindste nød. Det bliver befolkningen, der kommer til at bære den byrde. Indtil altså nogen får nok og siger fra. Men så er der, som Meighans historie viser, pludselig ressourcer nok – i hvert fald inden for politiet.

Link: My Occupy LA Arrest

Tahrir-pladsen som lærestykke i decentral modstand

Den svensk-jordanske journalist Rami Abdelrahman, som vi efterhånden har citeret nogle gange – første gang, da han præsenterede sine overvejelser over, hvorfor han overhovedet var nødt til at forlade Jordan – har været på Tahrir-pladsen i Cairo og fortæller om, hvordan denne plads kan virke som en slags mikrokosmos af det mod til at ytre sig, som diktatorens fald (trods alle tilbageslag) har afstedkommet i det store land:

On Friday, the 25th of November 2011, a so-called “million-man march” was taking place.

I arrived just as a couple of hundred thousand Egyptians performed Friday prayers. In this blog post, I will revisit some of the observations I noted during my three-day activist tourism on the square. As soon as I approached the end of Talaat Harb St. leading to Tahrir Square, I came across a “control point” – youngsters have tied a rope across the street, and stood there as a human shield preventing anyone from going in without her/his ID checked and bag and pockets searched for weapons.

A young man informed me, as is the custom nowadays, that there is no reason to be offended or to feel targeted – this exercise is done to all visitors to Tahrir Square, and guarantees their safety in the occupied area. Then he said something that really struck me straight at the heart, when I asked him how they organised themselves between the different entrances to the square – he said “we’re not organised, there’s no central unit that gives out tasks, this is all done by volunteers, who keep watch, shift after shift.” True enough, even when I re-entered the square two nights later at 4:00 am in the morning, there were different volunteers guarding the same location, with one young man and one young woman tasked with searching the bags of visitors of their respective genders.

The “unorganisation” of the resistence that overthrew a dictator, took over Tahrir Square, and occupied the entrances to other key strongholds such as the Prime Ministry, the Parliament and the road to the Interior Ministry, etc, was what fascinated me the most. “The only thing that organises us is that we believe in the same thing” — that thing, being apparently a governance system of integrity and equality.

Tahrir Square was a bazaar for the newly regained freedom of expression, it had a festive feeling. Food vendors selling all sorts of street sweets, cold drinks, tea, koshari, fireworks, etc. Hundreds of thousands of demonstrators were engaging in all sorts of political debates and other trivia – with views ranging from radical islamism to ultra liberalism. The salafis had their area, press centre and clinics, and so did the seculars, and many other non-aligned groups.

The real Tahrir “revolutionists,” the disorganised organisers, seemed not to follow any particular sect, party or political ideology – but expressed rather deterministic opposition to the governance status quo, and to many of the options that the more organised parties are putting on the table.

Poverty was also something that struck me. A family consisting of two parents and their 6 children, slept on the street, simply because they received free food and blankets from the volunteers. An almost post-apocalyptic scene that I encountered at a later hour, and something that I’ll never forget.

The most fascinating aspect of it all is the joy, the determination, the pride, and the strength in many faces – the type of faces that tell you, we’re all stakeholders in this. The fresh scent of hope after decades of hopelessness. All with the modest twist of brotherly and sisterly sympathy. This last bit, is something I have never seen before, anywhere, ever. I could go into the political analysis of what is happening in Egypt, but it is irrelevant, in every possible way.  This is the very atom-heart of a long due, generational revolution that will create a parallel world order, if it doesn’t really break the rather fragile, illusionary, and patriarchal global political orders.

Mine fremhævelser. Tilbageslag eller ej, og hvor langt der end somme tider kan forekomme at være tilbage  – der er også sket noget vigtigt. Der er, som jeg så herover, dukket et mod til at være fri og kræve et frit og retfærdigt samfund.

Link: From Tahrir Square: Lessons in unorganized resistance

Israel skader verdens jøder

I hvert fald de amerikanske, skriver Philip Weiss – med sin uretfærdige og brutale besættelse, sit krigsmageri og ikke mindst den tåkrummende racisme blandt ekstreme zionister. Israel har efterhånden forvandlet sig til alt, hvad amerikanske jøder ikke ønsker at være, skriver han:

A feeling has taken root deep in the American Jewish community that Israel is hurting us, hurting our standing in the world and our future. The restrictions on democracy, the curbs on women, the intransigence vis-a-vis the Palestinians when Obama has demanded movement, the indifference to the Arab Spring– Israel is a society we no longer recognize as Jewish like we’re Jewish, and worst of all, its militarism is exposing American Jews to the accusation that we are dually loyal. And we don’t like that: We’re Americans.

The straw that broke the camel’s back was clearly the oafish ad campaign that targeted Christmas and intermarriage– the ad campaign that Netanyahu cancelled. Even rightwing Israel lobbyists were stunned by how clueless the ad campaign was. But it was an expression of genuine Israeli attitudes. And that is what’s so scary: American Jews are waking up to the fact that Israeli society is nothing like ours.

We are integrators. We live in America because we want to be Jews in a diverse society. That is the spirit of American Jewish life by and large. And now these Zionists–separatists whom we never completely trusted when we were arguing with them in Eastern Europe–are quietly understood to have hijacked Jewishness and taken it to a dark ugly place. And their cake is cooked; Israel has produced “apartheid on steroids,” as a Jewish leader in the Nation wrote this fall; he wanted no part of it.

Israeli values are incompatible with American Jewish values. Even Jeffrey Goldberg says the occupation is a “moral disaster.” Well guess what, it’s been going on for 44 years! In its segregated buses and roads, in its ad campaigns that targets intermarriage and Christmas, in the refusal to end the occupation– Israel is a different society than ours.

Læs endelig det hele på MondoWeiss.

Alan Moore om bogbranchen, Occupy-bevægelsen og politik generelt

Alan Moore er naturligvis ikke hvem som helst i forhold til Occupy-bevægelsen – det var, ham, der opfandt Guy Fawkes-masken i Hollywood-filmen V for Vendetta. Det er altså på grund af Alan Moores oprindelige tegneseriefigur, at Occupy-aktivister og Anonymous bruger lige netop den maske i deres aktioner (masken blev designet af tegneren David Lloyd til Lloyds og Moores gamle tegneserie V for Vendetta, som udkom i 1980erne).

Honest Publishing har interviewet Moore om vore dages bogbranche og rigets politiske tilstand, og det kom der en hel del  interessante betragtninger ud af:

[Om bogbranchen]

The people in publishing have given up any personal integrity in favour of sales returns. This has meant that presumably there are as many great first novels as there have always been, but when publishers insist upon squandering their budgets on people that they believe to be celebrities, they’re obviously not going to have anything left to encourage new talent, even if those are talents that could potentially change the entire literary scene or world of publishing. In Private Eye, they published a very informative list of sales figures for political biographies. These are all ones that had been trailered in the national press, had been talked about on television programmes, had been given an immense amount of hype. I think from the biographies they talked about, Cherie Blair’s was the out-and-out winner. I think it sold something like 167 copies. John Prescott had sold 65 copies of his biography, Prezza. What the advances were for that book I would estimate would be getting on for the quarter million mark, something like that. For something that sold 65 copies, if there was an advance of a hundred pound, you’d be lucky to make it back. (…)

[Om Occupy og Frank Millers kritik]

As far as I can see, the Occupy movement is just ordinary people reclaiming rights which should always have been theirs. I can’t think of any reason why as a population we should be expected to stand by and see a gross reduction in the living standards of ourselves and our kids, possibly for generations, when the people who have got us into this have been rewarded for it; they’ve certainly not been punished in any way because they’re too big to fail. I think that the Occupy movement is, in one sense, the public saying that they should be the ones to decide who’s too big to fail. It’s a completely justified howl of moral outrage and it seems to be handled in a very intelligent, non-violent way, which is probably another reason why Frank Miller would be less than pleased with it. I’m sure if it had been a bunch of young, sociopathic vigilantes with Batman make-up on their faces, he’d be more in favour of it. We would definitely have to agree to differ on that one.

[Om, hvad der bør laves om i det her samfund]

Everything. I believe that what’s needed is a radical solution, by which I mean from the roots upwards. Our entire political thinking seems to me to be based upon medieval precepts. These things, they didn’t work particularly well five or six hundred years ago. Their slightly modified forms are not adequate at all for the rapidly changing territory of the 21st Century.

We need to overhaul the way that we think about money, we need to overhaul the way that we think about who’s running the show. As an anarchist, I believe that power should be given to the people, to the people whose lives this is actually affecting. It’s no longer good enough to have a group of people who are controlling our destinies. The only reason they have the power is because they control the currency. They have no moral authority and, indeed, they show the opposite of moral authority.

Link: Del 1, del 2.

Økonomisk liberalisme for dummies

Markedet ordner det hele, hører vi ofte. Hvis bare man tager folks sygesikring og kontanthjælp fra dem, skal de nok finde et job, det virker jo så godt i USA og Indien. Er der andre end mig, der har svært ved at følge med i, hvordan det virker?

Så er det godt, vi har Bad Tux, der tilbyder et lynkursus:

Okay, first of all, economies are like magic zoos, see. There are lions and tigers and bulls and bears, oh my, and stuff goes in and stuff goes out and like everybody lives happily ever after and such. So how do these “economy” thingies work? Well, first of all, meet the Free Market Fairy:


Now, the first thing the Free Market Fairy does is, like, jizz magic free market fairy dust all over the place by waving her (his?) magic wand around. This free market fairy dust is then gathered together by the Invisible Hand (no picture, because the Invisible Hand is, like, invisible, like God and Dick Cheney’s conscience and stuff like that), which turns it into magical Competition Unicorns which then excrete magical substance called Choice that makes all goods cheap and widely available. Here is a picture of a Competition Unicorn:

Now, as you can see, the magical substance is excreted at the nether end and then consumers get all the benefit of this “Choice” thingy, which is, like, rainbows and sunshine and puppy dogs, oh my, and guarantees that you’ll always get great service at a great price, sort of like those TV preachers who guarantee that if you send them a million billion dollars you’ll go to a place where magic unicorns live and some hairy old dude has a lot of mansions for everybody to live in.So anyhow, these magic unicorns poop this “choice” stuff and then we get all the benefits of low prices and good service. Like, at my house, I have a lot of this Choice stuff when it comes to high speed Internet — I have Comcast, and I have, err, Comcast. Hmm. I must be wrong, because these magic Competition unicorns are EVERYWHERE, even though nobody’s ever seen them outside of narrow marketplaces for consumer baubles, and thus there’s ALWAYS a choice, just like my choice between Comcast and, err, Comcast, for high speed Internet. The Competition Unicorn *does* exist, like Santa Claus, magically bringing gifts to all the deserving people. And if you don’t get gifts from this magic competition unicorn, why, it just means you’re a bad person and probably deserve to get coal in your Christmas stocking, ho ho ho!

And that’s right wing economics in a nutshell.

Link: Right wing economics in a nutshell.

Ulandsbistand – til ulande?

Følgende fakta burde få enhver illusion om Danmark som et specielt civiliseret og ulands-venligt land til at fordufte:

690 millioner nåede i 2010 ikke længere end til Sandholm Lejren.
Cop15-mødet i København modtog flere penge fra u-landsbistanden, end hvad børnenes ulandskalender har kunnet samle ind i løbet af de sidste 50 år.
400 millioner bistandskroner blev brugt til at købe sikkerhed i Afghanistan.

Burde man ikke bruge ulandsbistanden på ulandene,frem for Lars Løkkes PR-fremstød i København? Støt Billig Bistand kampagnen og giv en underskrift her: