FIRST READ:
City of Sacramento criminalizes
peaceful Occupy protest
http://www.antipasministries.com/other/article191.htm
THE ELITES ATTEMPT TO SHUT DOWN OCCUPY WALL STREET & OTHER SIMILAR MOVEMENTS ACROSS THE COUNTRY
http://www.antipasministries.com/other/article192.htm
University of California - Davis Protestors Pepper Sprayed by Cops!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCSBVNn6ltg
Ugandan opposition leaders sprayed pink to stop rally
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-13360427
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ltU9u6_pBzA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mi5PGapdYMI
What example should President Museveni and other African autocrats follow? How can you then blame Museveni for pink spraying Walk To Work Protestors??? Western Double Standards?? Kato Mivule
Seattle Police Pepper-Spray Pastor
http://consortiumnews.com/2011/11/16/police-hit-seattle-pastor-with-pepper-spray/
November 16, 2011
U.S. authorities and major news media are quick to condemn leaders of foreign nations when they unleash police to rough up and intimidate protesting citizens, but a different standard applies inside the United States, as Rev. Rich Lang discovered when he walked with an Occupy protest in Seattle.
By the Rev. Rich Lang
You could feel the tension and raw energy crinkling throughout the air as the marchers once again began their journey into downtown Seattle.
The Occupy Movement is the prophetic voice of God calling out to the nation to “repent” and turn from its ways of corruption. Those who camp are a rag-tag, motley crew made up of mostly young adults, mostly unemployed, almost all of whom are alienated and cast out of America’s promise of liberty and justice for all.
They are … the first fruits being devoured by the Beast of Empire.
The police were once conceived to be a citizen force created to serve and protect the public. Today however, the police have been militarized and view the populace as enemy combatants, as threats to their well being. The police, like our Armed Forces, are well-trained, disciplined and exceptionally talented. They follow a chain of command and are increasingly apprenticed into a culture of institutional conformity.
Because America has always affirmed the right of dissent, the role of the police is to keep the peace. They are trained to enter the protesting arena as unfeeling protectors of property and people.
What has changed in our time is that the police are entering the arena of protest as agents of provocation. They push and shove at will, they ride their bicycles up the backs of protesters, they engage in verbal abuse. Their commanders allow this breach of discipline. Their comrades silently condone the bullying.
The police become the agitators encouraging violence. It is as if they are spoiling for a fight – a fight, mind you, against the citizenry, against the youth, the unemployed, and those who are trying to return America back to its promise, and dare I say it, return America to its covenant with God, “we hold these truths to be self evident …”
On Tuesday night, a small group of the rag-tag campers of Seattle’s Occupy Movement left their camp to protest the destruction inflicted upon the Wall Street Occupy site.
Throughout the march, I — as a Pastor in full clergy alb, stole and cross – acted as a peacekeeper placing myself between the police line and the Occupy Movement. On four occasions I stepped between verbal battles between the police and the protesters. The point being that it was evident to all who I was and what my role was in this non-violent march of the few escorted by the many.
The incident was minor in nature. A girl, dressed in Anarchist black waving the Anarchist black flag, was plastered side by side with an officer on the bike. They were jawboning each other. At one point her flag was thrust in his direction – a provocation yes – threatening? – no.
The officer grabbed the flag and in the pulling, pulled down the girl. Her friends reacted jumping in to pull her away from the officer. It was at this point that the first wave of pepper spray went off.
Point: One might think the officer acted within reason, that the officer was suddenly threatened. But with what? By whom? The friends of the offender were grabbing for the girl, they were not grabbing at the police. Basically the officer and his comrades were trigger-happy as if they couldn’t wait for just this moment. And so the spray went forth.
I leapt to the front and tried to place myself between the parties – with spray in the air the protesters were also fleeing. Separation between the police line and the protesters was clearly visible … there was certainly no threat of the “mob” suddenly rampaging into the well-armed police.
The separation had occurred (as can be clearly seen on the video captured by King 5 News). But the spray continued. I walked between the lines, I was alone, I was in full clergy dress, everyone knew who I was and what I was – with the protesters fleeing and the police line holding – with my back to the police and my hands waving the protesters to get back.
I was alone in full alb, stole and cross when six officers turned their spray on me thoroughly soaking my alb and then one officer hit me full throttle in the face.
I praise the courage and compassion, the discipline and the decency of the Occupy Movement. Out of the rag-tag mob came help, grabbing my hands, leading me (I was blind by then) to the wall and administering care and concern for my well-being.
The protesters were assembled around all the wounded, and maintained the discipline of nonviolence (granted the nonviolence was in behavior but not language). And they were not afraid.
The spraying had been a baptism sealing them into the security of knowing that their prophecy of repentance was indeed the Spirit-Word through them – it is as if they did not prophecy their very bones would melt within them. Against the wall in increasing pain and burning I realized I was in the midst of church.
The police, on the other hand, were afraid. Their quick use of chemical warfare reveals how cowardly they are. The unwillingness of their commanders to maintain discipline reveals how incompetent they are becoming.
The only tool in their bag is brutality and like a drunken-raging father beating wife and kids, the police have increasingly disgraced themselves. Step by step, they are being shaped into the front face of fascism, the emerging police state that protects the property interests of the Marie Antoinette’s who have seized control of our government, commerce, media, military and increasingly the Church itself.
My question to my clergy colleagues is this: “Where are you? How much longer can you preach without practice? How dare you remain protected in your sanctuary while your people (the rag-tag mob of the least, last and lost whom Jesus loved) are slaughtered doing that which God has commissioned you to do (prophecy!).
“Where are you? Who have you become in this age of baptism by pepper spray? Do you not know how much power you have to stop our national descent into chaos? Don’t you realize that the world is your parish and right before your eyes the Spirit of God is doing a new thing?
“Can’t you hear that God’s judgment is upon the land? God is against the thieves that bankrupted our nation. God is against the armies of the Beast who pillage other lands in our name, and turn and destroy our people on our own soil.
“Are you blind? – Perhaps you need a baptism of pepper spray in your eyes to restore your vision.”
And to the police I say this: “There are always the brutal ones in our midst. As colleagues you have the moral responsibility to police your own. If your commanders order you to brutalize your people you have a Higher Command that says, ‘disarm yourself, turn away from your sin, renounce the orders of unrighteousness.’
“And in doing so, cross the line, come over and join us because we are the winning side of history. And we welcome your repentance and heal you of your shame.”
And to the church, beloved church, I say: “You cannot sing the hymns of faith if you are too afraid to live that faith. In Amos it says to silence your sacred assemblies and let JUSTICE burst forth. Our nation, with the nations of the world, are under an assault of tyranny and treason of the 1 percent against Creation itself.
“You may not worship God until and unless you care for the image of God living in those tents and prophesying on your behalf. Once the Powers sweep the Tents away, if you dare to lift your voice even a peep, you too will be swept away.”
But the destiny of the church, the Body of Christ, is not one of quiet passivity and fear, our destiny is to bear witness having no fear of the Cross because even now we have crossed over into resurrection.
A PASTORAL LAMENT FOR MY COUNTRY:
America, America, my country ‘tis of thee,
Sweet land of liberty
Of thee I sing
America, oh America
America the Beautiful has fallen.
The people versus the police
Tuesday, 15 November 2011 13:46 By Naomi Wolf
http://www.independent.co.ug/column/guest-column/4875?task=view
Would it not be easier…for the government to dissolve the people and elect another?
America’s politicians, it seems, have had their fill of democracy. Across the country, police, acting under orders from local officials, are breaking up protest encampments set up by supporters of the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement – sometimes with shocking and utterly gratuitous violence.
In the worst incident so far, hundreds of police, dressed in riot gear, surrounded Occupy Oakland’s encampment and fired rubber bullets (which can be fatal), flash grenades, and tear-gas canisters – with some officers taking aim directly at demonstrators. The Occupy Oakland Twitter feed read like a report from Cairo’s Tahrir Square: “they are surrounding us”; “hundreds and hundreds of police”; “there are armored vehicles and Hummers.” There were 170 arrests.
My own recent arrest, while obeying the terms of a permit and standing peacefully on a street in lower Manhattan, brought the reality of this crackdown close to home. America is waking up to what was built while it slept: private companies have hired away its police (JPMorgan Chase gave $4.6 million to the New York City Police Foundation); the federal Department of Homeland Security has given small municipal police forces military-grade weapons systems; citizens’ rights to freedom of speech and assembly have been stealthily undermined by opaque permit requirements.
Suddenly, America looks like the rest of the furious, protesting, not-completely-free world. Indeed, most commentators have not fully grasped that a world war is occurring. But it is unlike any previous war in human history: for the first time, people around the world are not identifying and organising themselves along national or religious lines, but rather in terms of a global consciousness and demands for a peaceful life, a sustainable future, economic justice, and basic democracy. Their enemy is a global “corporatocracy” that has purchased governments and legislatures, created its own armed enforcers, engaged in systemic economic fraud, and plundered treasuries and ecosystems.
Around the world, peaceful protesters are being demonised for being disruptive. But democracy is disruptive. Martin Luther King, Jr., argued that peaceful disruption of “business as usual” is healthy, because it exposes buried injustice, which can then be addressed. Protesters ideally should dedicate themselves to disciplined, nonviolent disruption in this spirit – especially disruption of traffic. This serves to keep provocateurs at bay, while highlighting the unjust militarization of the police response.
Moreover, protest movements do not succeed in hours or days; they typically involve sitting down or “occupying” areas for the long hauls. That is one reason why protesters should raise their own money and hire their own lawyers. The corporatocracy is terrified that citizens will reclaim the rule of law. In every country, protesters should field an army of attorneys.
Protesters should also make their own media, rather than relying on mainstream outlets to cover them. They should blog, tweet, write editorials and press releases, as well as log and document cases of police abuse (and the abusers).
There are, unfortunately, many documented cases of violent provocateurs infiltrating demonstrations in places like Toronto, Pittsburgh, London, and Athens – people whom one Greek described to me as “known unknowns.” Provocateurs, too, need to be photographed and logged, which is why it is important not to cover one’s face while protesting.
Protesters in democracies should create email lists locally, combine the lists nationally, and start registering voters. They should tell their representatives how many voters they have registered in each district – and they should organise to oust politicians who are brutal or repressive. And they should support those – as in Albany, New York, for instance, where police and the local prosecutor refused to crack down on protesters – who respect the rights to free speech and assembly.
Many protesters insist in remaining leaderless, which is a mistake. A leader does not have to sit atop a hierarchy: a leader can be a simple representative. Protesters should elect representatives for a finite “term,” just like in any democracy, and train them to talk to the press and to negotiate with politicians.
Protests should model the kind of civil society that their participants want to create. In lower Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park, for example, there is a library and a kitchen; food is donated; kids are invited to sleep over; and teach-ins are organized. Musicians should bring instruments, and the atmosphere should be joyful and positive. Protesters should clean up after themselves. The idea is to build a new city within the corrupt city, and to show that it reflects the majority of society, not a marginal, destructive fringe.
After all, what is most profound about these protest movements is not their demands, but rather the nascent infrastructure of a common humanity. For decades, citizens have been told to keep their heads down – whether in a consumerist fantasy world or in poverty and drudgery – and leave leadership to the elites. Protest is transformative precisely because people emerge, encounter one another face-to-face, and, in re-learning the habits of freedom, build new institutions, relationships, and organisations.
None of that cannot happen in an atmosphere of political and police violence against peaceful democratic protesters. As Bertolt Brecht famously asked, following the East German Communists’ brutal crackdown on protesting workers in June 1953, “Would it not be easier…for the government to dissolve the people and elect another?” Across America, and in too many other countries, supposedly democratic leaders seem to be taking Brecht’s ironic question all too seriously.
Naomi Wolf is a political activist and social critic whose most recent book is Give Me Liberty: A Handbook for American Revolutionaries.
Inside the American Dream
Tuesday, 15 November 2011 13:03 By Andrew M. Mwenda
http://www.independent.co.ug/the-last-word/the-last-word/4872?task=view
The folly and delusions of a nation that has forgotten the concerns of its ordinary citizens
And so it was that on Nov. 4, I flew to New York City from London via Amsterdam. Upon landing at JFK International Airport, I entered the longest queue in the history of international travel and immigration clearance; there, a hoard of not less 4,000 human beings snaked inside the terminal building waiting for clearance.
The process of entering this “free” country is possibly the most excruciating. First, you have to go through the most rigorous security checks at the port of boarding; in my case London.
Each passenger is individually taken out of the queue, questioned by a US government agent, documents thoroughly checked and finally cleared to go through security.
Going through security is itself another slow and agonising experience. Passengers have to remove everything piece by piece: wallets, handkerchiefs, watches, belts, shoes, laptops and iPads. They have to surrender any drinks or perfumes or lotion, enter a gigantic security X-machine, raise one’s hands in surrender as this piece of equipment takes a digital picture of your body, all your body.
And even then, with this ultra-modern technology, the process is not yet done. Once out of the machine, a security officer begins the process afresh, checking you slowly and meticulously by touching and feeling your body from shoulders to toes, emphasising areas around your pelvic region, literary feeling your dick – well because a Nigerian boy tried to use an underwear to blow up a plane. Funny that the security officials largely put in place measures to deal with past experiences rather than predict future ones. Why would the next terrorist use the methods that were used before and are therefore on the security radar screen? Anyway, after about 10 minutes, one is finally free to board the plane to visit America.
For most non-Americans, the agony of entering America today actually begins when applying for a visa. It takes a minimum three months to get an appointment online; as I write this article the nearest appointment for Kampala is in March 2012. Then one also has to fulfill cumbersome visa requirements: an invitation letter with a bank statement of your host to prove they can feed and house you; submit your own bank statements to show that you earn sufficient income at home etc. The visa application forms are clear that one is presumed a potential illegal immigrant into the US until they prove themselves otherwise. Although consular officials exempt me from all this (due to my regular travel to the US) most Ugandans go through it.
Then for your passport photo, you need a special size taken without your glasses if you wear them; otherwise the embassy will turn you away. And you have to submit your fingerprint and a picture of your eyes. The first time my fingerprint and picture were taken this way was when I was going to jail; the second was when I was applying for a visa to America and when I was entering the country. Now even at Entebbe airport, this process has begun. The world isn’t free anymore.
As I have been travelling to the US more than five times every year for the last five years, I have grown wary of what is happening to this country’s free spirit. Increasingly, I encounter a paranoid nation ruled by opportunistic politicians so desperate to cling onto or take a grab at power that they govern by pandering to public sentiments. Rather than lead on the basis of a set of values, they are instead led by public opinion, itself that changes every hour. And all the time, those who control the platforms of expression have perfected the art of selling fear to the population.
Americans are told from morning to evening that everyone hates them (and that everyone loves them at the same time). The politicians sing fear, the journalist repeat the chorus. All debate on terrorism is about fear and hence how to design even more draconian controls on how people travel. There is almost no debate to challenge the current obsession with tighter and ever tighter security arrangements.
In this free country with supposedly independent media, it is often difficult to distinguish the word of the government from the word of the journalist – one is a spokesperson of the other. It is also difficult to find people in academia and civil society who challenge these self aggrandising rules of the security system. Yet this is not a fear of death per se but rather a fear of a particular type of death – terrorism – that politicians and journalists have made a taboo even at the price of taking away peoples liberties.
For instance, over 115 Americans die daily in car accidents, that is over 43,000 per year. Over 2.9 million get injured in car accidents per year. Over 30,000 die per year of gunshot wounds. To date plane crashes – even with terrorists looming everywhere – hardly kill anyone in this country. So if it is the desire to protect life, surely, there should be a large campaign against drunk and other forms of reckless driving in America and there should be a large campaign against the Second Amendment on the right to keep and bear arms.
America’s response to protecting its citizens from another terrorist attack is disproportionate to the threat the country faces. The country is becoming one vast prison of fear; its freedom of speech greatly compromised by political correctness, its space for policy alternatives undermined by the hegemonic influence of a distorted free market ethic and the myth of “the American dream” and its politics polarised along this very narrow spectrum of policy ideas.
America today is almost a one party state and that one party is divided into two factions; one calling itself Republican, the other Democratic. The irony is that the two sides are increasingly finding it very difficult to compromise on almost nonexistent policy differences. In the battle for the American voter, each side sells fear perhaps because a paranoid population is easier to control than a free one.
Back to the queue to enter America at the JFK terminal: There, I watch hoards of humanity walking slowly and impatiently to the immigration desks; immigration officials painstakingly take their fingerprints, photograph the inside of their eyes, check their documents and finally stamp their passports. The unlucky ones are pulled out and taken to private rooms for questioning especially Muslim or anyone who writes articles critical of America. I suppose they keep such writers’ names in their databases so that when you are entering the country, you are taken care of.
I can feel the suppressed rage of all these non-American visitors to America – the sense that these procedures are far too out of proportion with the threat of terrorism. However, no one dares speak out for fear that the FBI may pick you out of the queue for questioning or that your visa might be cancelled. So when I attempt to share my irritation with a white couple next to me, they simply answer that all these excruciating processes are meant for our safety. An Australian businessman next to me interjects rejecting this defensive answer by announcing that this is his last time to America. “I just cannot stand this abuse of my rights anymore,” he says.
It is difficult not to imagine you are entering a Stalinist state, something akin to North Korea when you are entering the United States these days. The exception is that the flat screens on the walls have CNN reporting the trial of Michael Jackson’s former doctor. There, I watch Americans busy arguing and dissecting every bit of the trial – free, passionate and proud. This vibrancy of freewheeling debate brings back the America I dreamed of as a child, adored as teenager, embraced as an adult and are now growing to realize is only one aspect of that nation’s life.
But it is the America I want, not the one I am suffering. It also reflects the complexity of America’s political life – a combination of a growing Stalinism alongside Jeffersonian democracy; the existing sense of freedom but largely in entertainment, itself perhaps to divert Americans from loss of free debate about security.
The tragedy of America is the failure of its mass media, journalists, intellectuals and civil society to challenge the growing Stalinism of the security-industrial complex; the systematic dismantling of many individual liberties, the uncalled for intrusion into people’s privacy through wiretapping and other forms of electronic surveillance in the name of security.
Finally I leave the airport and begin driving to New York City. On radio, another heated debate about new regulations to govern city cabs; it is heated and polarizing but again reflects the America that I admire - an America of a free and proud people – vibrant and competitive. How has the concern over security blighted this once proud and courageous society to behave paranoid like cowards?
America is suffering from a crisis of leadership. It reflects Athens after the death of Pericles in 429BC. The democratic process produced a string of politicians who pandered to public sentiment. Unable to develop a vision for the city state, the leaders resorted to exchanging intellectual blows at the Ecclesia, or general assembly, in entertaining fashion to win popular approval rather than to provide solutions. Every intellectual argument would be cheered like the steady blows of boxers and wrestlers at the Olympic and Pethian games.
Thus, as philosophy gave way to oratory, Athens degenerated into mob justice. It was rule by the eloquent rather than the intelligent; sentiment overtook reason as the basis of decision making. Thus Athens went from one tragedy to another until, after 27 years of the Peloponnesian war it surrendered to Sparta. The defeat of Athens ended the democratic experiment and plunged the country into a tyranny of the council of 30 under Critius. And when the democrats wrestled power militarily back into their hands, their first objective was to kill Socrates – the one sane voice who stood consistently in opposition to the decisions of the mob.
As I drive to Manhattan, I encounter another ignored America: the Occupy Wall Street movement. For many years, the upper classes of this country have promoted the one-sided story of a prosperous nation and an invisible economy built on free market capitalism. It seems this message, more than the reality in people’s lives, has sustained the legitimacy of this arrangement for the last three decades.
In reality, however, even during the boom years of the Clinton administration, the real income of the average American has been declining, not growing. The vast majority of Americans have therefore enjoyed prosperity by association, not in their pockets. Instead, most of the growth in real incomes has gone to the top 20 percent of the population. The rest are kept hoping against hope that they too will benefit through the myths of the American dream. And because their incomes are not growing, the financiers of Wall Street decided to make them beneficiaries of this dream largely through credit – hence the rapid growth of consumer debt, now over 150 percent of an individual American’s annual income.
US democracy has been significantly undermined by these developments. For example, the top two percent control 20 percent of national income; the top 20 percent take 80 percent of total income. So 80 percent of Americans share only 20 percent of its income. The rich who take most of the benefits of growth have adeptly used the political process to block the benefits of a free market system from reaching those on the bottom of the ladder. Even my hero Frederic Von Hayek would not agree that a free market society should look like America.
The rich in America own the mass media and therefore control public opinion. They finance think tanks and therefore control the production of alternative policies. They fund universities and therefore control the production of knowledge. They pay for the campaigns of politicians to congress and the White House and therefore control power. And they hire lobbyists to promote the policies they want. The voice of the ordinary American is missing in almost every aspect of public life in this country as the rich goad themselves in opulence.
While in New York, I decided to use subway (underground train system) and that brings you face to face with the indifference of the rich to the concerns of the ordinary people of this wealthy nation. The tracks are littered with garbage and flowing with muddy water or sewage or both. The walls are peeling, the roofs leaking, the steel rusting, the wood rotting, the staircases breaking and the trains old and tired. Those who rule New York above drive in fancy cars and know little or nothing about the plight of the majority of their fellow citizens who use this subway – stuffy and smelly.
But why are most ordinary Americans content with the existing political system? Occupy Wall Street is not a big movement – I visited them and they are as few as it gets. Antonio Gramci had the answer in his famous concept of hegemony. The American political system has been extremely successful in “manufacturing the consent” (the phrase is from Noam Chomsky) of its citizens to the existing political and economic framework – largely using the power of propaganda (through the mass media), the production of knowledge (through the control of think tanks and universities) and the power of Christianity (by promising rewards in heaven).
amwenda@independent.co.ug
Ugandan opposition leaders sprayed pink to stop rally
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-13355229
10 May 2011 Last updated at 14:29 ET
Ugandan police have sprayed opposition leaders with a pink liquid to stop them holding a banned rally in the capital.
After the drenching, Democratic Party leader Norbert Mao was then arrested.
This week, opposition parities have stepped up their campaign over high prices, which has led to recent clashes between the police and protesters.
Meanwhile, President Yoweri Museveni has said to curb riots he wants a new law to deny bail for six months to those arrested while protesting.
Mr Museveni, who has been in office for 25 years, is due to be sworn in again as president on Thursday.
Uganda's main opposition leader Kizza Besigye lost to Mr Museveni in February in polls he says were rigged.
Dr Besigye is in Kenya where he was receiving treatment after being assaulted in April by police during a "walk-to-work" protest over the rising cost of living,
The opposition have been taking part in a campaign for protesting about the high cost of fuel and food
The BBC's Joshua Mmali in Uganda's capital, Kampala, says the police and military blockaded the entrance to the city's Constitutional Square where the opposition parties wanted to hold their rally.
The police then intercepted the opposition leaders' procession, which was heading towards the square, with dogs.
When this failed to stop them, they were drenched in the pink liquid sprayed from nearby trucks.
Before Mr Mao was hauled into a police van he told the BBC there was "no justification" for the police action.
"I don't know what liquid it is. I don't know whether it is lethal or not, but there was no justification for pouring those liquids on us," he said.
"We were simply accessing this place and the police needed to exercise restraint."
The police first intercepted the opposition leaders' procession with dogs
The police say political gatherings have been banned at the square since 2007.
Last month, riots broke out in Kampala in protest at the rough treatment meted out to Dr Besigye by the security services during his arrest on 29 April.
Plain-clothed policemen beat up his supporters, smashed the window of his car and doused the inside with pepper spray and tear gas before manhandling him into a vehicle and driving off.
The authorities say Dr Besigye provoked them - and he was charged with inciting violence.
Before the polls, Dr Besigye had called for Egypt-style uprisings in the event of fraud.
