Cecily McMillan's Occupy trial is a huge test of US civil liberties. Will they survive?

The US constitution's Bill of Rights is envied by much of the English-speaking world, even by people otherwise not enthralled by The American Way Of Life. Its fundamental liberties – freedom of assembly, freedom of the press, freedom from warrantless search – are a mighty bulwark against overweening state power, to be sure.

But what are these rights actually worth in the United States these days?

Ask Cecily McMillan, a 25-year-old student and activist who was arrested two years ago during an Occupy Wall Street demonstration in Manhattan. Seized by police, she was beaten black and blue on her ribs and arms until she went into a seizure. When she felt her right breast grabbed from behind, McMillan instinctively threw an elbow, catching a cop under the eye, and that is why she is being prosecuted for assaulting a police officer, a class D felony with a possible seven-year prison term. Her trial began this week.

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Testimony of Pete Seeger before the House Un-American Activities Committee, August 18, 1955

This is how you stand up to abuse of power.
. . . Mr. TAVENNER: The Committee has information obtained in part from the Daily Worker indicating that, over a period of time, especially since December of 1945, you took part in numerous entertainment features. I have before me a photostatic copy of the June 20, 1947, issue of the Daily Worker. In a column entitled “What’s On” appears this advertisement: “Tonight—Bronx, hear Peter Seeger and his guitar, at Allerton Section housewarming.” May I ask you whether or not the Allerton Section was a section of the Communist Party? Mr. SEEGER: Sir, I refuse to answer that question whether it was a quote from the New York Times or the Vegetarian Journal.
Mr. TAVENNER: I don’t believe there is any more authoritative document in regard to the Communist Party than its official organ, the Daily Worker.
Mr. SCHERER: He hasn’t answered the question, and he merely said he wouldn’t answer whether the article appeared in the New York Times or some other magazine. I ask you to direct the witness to answer the question.
Chairman WALTER: I direct you to answer.
Mr. SEEGER: Sir, the whole line of questioning—

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10 Disruptors: People Who Really Shook Up the System in 2013

Americans live in a country lorded over by corporate and banking power. Our big business culture is accompanied by a pervasive and extraordinarily expensive military dominating the globe, ensuring our economic hegemony and protecting our interests. Meanwhile, there is a steady push to privatize as much of the public sector for private profit as achievable, especially in the education sphere.

 

In addition, the intelligentsia, the hipsters and the most progressive people embrace the corrupt company that is Apple; we are seduced by the beautiful functionality and design of its products, ignoring the fact that Apple is a corporation that is not friendly to America. Despite its rank at the top of the most profitable corporations, Apple gives almost no money to charity—a legacy of Steve Jobs—and as  Business Insider describes: Apple avoids $17 million in taxes everyday "through a ballsy... tax avoidance scheme." 

 

As consumers we often shop and eat at huge companies like Walmart, Dardens and McDonald's—companies that don't pay their employees living wages, or remotely what they could, given the  historic profits they're earning. 

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For 200 Hours And Counting, Sit-In At Florida Capitol Demands Stand Your Ground Repeal

For more than eight days, a group of activists and students organized by the Dream Defenders have occupied the Florida Capitol, right outside Florida Governor Rick Scott’s (R) office. The activists say they plan to occupy the Capitol until the governor calls a special session to review the state’s Stand Your Ground law, racial profiling, and the school-to-prison pipeline, and consider what they call the Trayvon Martin Act. But after meeting with the protesters last week, Scott announced he has no intention to review Stand Your Ground, which played a role in jury deliberations that led to George Zimmerman’s acquittal.

“That’s very disappointing on our part,” Dream Defenders legal and policy director Ahmad Abuznaid told ThinkProgress. “We are attempting to get Governor Rick Scott and the state leadership here to be real leaders and so far they have not stepped up to the plate. So far, we have decided to hold our own legislative session to show them how it’s done.”

Next Tuesday, Dream Defenders plan mock legislative sessions where civic leaders and juvenile experts will weigh the pros and cons of Trayvon’s law.

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Will Pussy Riot Get The Last Laugh?

Supporters of feminist punk band Pussy Riot hold posters reading 'I believe in justice!' outside a court building in Moscow on August 17, 2012. (ANDREY SMIRNOV/AFP

The prison sentence against the radical feminists chills freedom of speech but the backlash against the verdict might chill Putin as well. 

Russian summer doldrums were enlivened this year by the high-profile trial of three young women: Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, Maria Alyokhina and Yekaterina Samutsevich. Members of a radical feminist “performance art” collective named Pussy Riot, the three were ultimately sentenced to two years in a penal colony for the “hate crime” of performing in a priests-only section of Moscow's premier Orthodox cathedral an obscenity-laced “punk prayer” that called upon the Virgin Mary to rid Russia of Vladimir Putin.

Pussy Riot, formed about a year ago, is a breakaway group from Voina (War), whose politically charged (and sometimes vicious) street theater since 2005 has included actions like throwing live cats over the counter in a Moscow McDonald's restaurant “to break up the drudgery of the workers' daily routine,” and painting a giant penis on the side of a St. Petersburg drawbridge. They've had constant brushes with Russian law enforcement for activities that have sometimes caused genuine property damage, including the 2011 destruction of a police vehicle with a Molotov cocktail—which the group titled “Bonfire of the Vanities.”

But the Russian government had mostly treated them as a nuisance, and it had never before risked the exposure of a big public trial. Nor did Pussy Riot's early performances, including an impromptu anti-Putin “concert” in Red Square in January, earn them more than brief detentions. Indeed, when the three women were escorted out of Moscow's Cathedral of Christ the Savior last February 21 after performing their 40-second “punk prayer” in the nearly empty church, police initially let them go.

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UK Commission on 2011 Riots Points to Poor Parenting Instead of Police Violence

The Riots, Communities and Victims Panel released its final report yesterday, concluding, “after the riots, we must give everyone a stake in society.”

The panel, appointed by British Prime Minister David Cameron to examine the August 2011 riots that Scotland Yard described as the worst urban violence in the UK in living memory, focused on the country’s “500,000 forgotten families,” arguing that a lack of institutional support for young people, as well as poor parenting, were among the factors that led to rioting in Birmingham, London Manchester and other English cities. Darra Singh, Chair of the Riots Communities and Victims Panel, said in a press statement:

There are people ‘bumping along the bottom’, unable to change their lives. When people don’t feel they have a reason to stay out of trouble, the consequences for communities can be devastating – as we saw last August.

The report estimates that up to 15,000 people, most of them under the age of 24, participated in the riots.

On broad youth participation in the riots, the report notes:

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You Can’t Occupy This

The government says the anti-protest bill was just a small tweak of the existing law. Don’t believe it.

In post-Occupy America, it’s often hard to know whether new citizen protest laws signal the end of free speech or a mere tweak of the machine. That looks to be the case with the new anti-protest bill that passed the House of Representatives overwhelmingly two weeks ago and was signed into law by the president soon thereafter. On its face, the new legislation doesn’t change a whole lot. Yet the Occupy protesters are in an uproar that the bill both targets them and also signals a radical shift in free speech law. Almost nobody else seems to have noticed it at all. Who’s right?

That all depends on what you want to protest and where.

H.R. 347, benignly titled the Federal Restricted Buildings and Grounds Improvement Act, passed the House 399-3. Such a lopsided vote suggests that nobody in Congress is bothered by this, on either side of the aisle. When President Obama signed it on March 8, almost nobody seems to have cared.

Simply put, the way the bill will “improve” public grounds is by moving all those unsightly protesters elsewhere. The law purports to update an old law, Section 1752 of Title 18 of the United States Code, that restricted areas around the president, vice president, or any others under the protection of the Secret Service. The original law was enacted in 1971 and amended in 2006. At first blush, the big change here is that while the old law made it a federal offense to "willfully and knowingly" enter a restricted space, now prosecutors need only show that you did it "knowingly"—that you knew the area was restricted, even if you didn’t know it was illegal to enter the space. This has been characterized in some quarters as a small technical change that hardly warrants an arched eyebrow, much less a protest.

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Santorum+OCCUPY Hecklers=Tasered by Cops

Ricky didn't like the Occupy Tacoma protesters at his speech in Tacoma yesterday. He called them radicals, called the protesters intolerant, and said Obama supported the 99% over the 1% (though some of the occupy movement members might object to that characterization of the President and Democrats in general). In general, he essentially called the Occupy Tacoma members heckling him scum of the earth.

The former Pennsylvania senator was cheered by the largest public outdoor rally in Western Washington that a Republican White House hopeful has seen in years. But Santorum fought to make himself heard over chants from protesters.

The candidate tried to link together President Obama and the demonstrators, declaring: "They're fundamentally trying to remake our country into a country that our Founders wouldn't recognize."

The Santorum rally, at the Washington State History Museum, was the state's the most raucous political event since conservative talk radio activists provided a loud bump in the 1994 Hillary Clinton health care caravan. [...]

The 9th Circuit decided anyone who disagrees with these folk," said Santorum, apparently referring to marriage equality supporters among the hecklers, "is irrational and bigoted . . . What they represent is true intolerance, (that) the only possible reason to disagree is that they are a hater or bigoted."

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Is one of these guys really going to be the GOP candidate for President. Wow. Tom

Protests Boost Sales and Fears of Sonic Blaster

QUANTICO, Va.—Police deployment of sonic blasters at Occupy Wall Street and G-20 protest rallies is fueling both sales and criticism of the devices, which emit beams of sound with laser-like intensity.

In this photo taken Sept. 14, 2011, Lt. Col. Jeffrey Bevington, requirements officer with the Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Directorate, demonstrates one of the military's latest voice projection system and instant translation technologies, that can project a human voice a mile away and instantly translate from English to another language, at the Marine Base in Quantico Va. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)

More U.S. police and emergency-response agencies are using the so-called Long-Range Acoustic Devices instead of megaphones or conventional loudspeakers for crowd control, according to news reports and leading manufacturer LRAD Corp. of San Diego.

But the products, which the makers developed as nonlethal options for military use, are prompting outcries from people on the receiving end, who call them "sound cannons." The city of Pittsburgh is fighting an American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit claiming the piercing tone from a police blaster during the 2009 G-20 summit permanently damaged a woman's hearing. At least one Occupy Wall Street protester says New York City police also used the punishing alert tone, although police say they have used the device only to broadcast messages.

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UC Davis Pepper-Spray Video Shows Importance of Civilian Oversight of Police

Video of the Nov. 18 incident tells a different story. It shows a group of Occupy Davis student protesters sitting peacefully with arms interlocked while a UC Davis police officer walks back and forth, dousing them at close range with liberal amounts of pepper spray. There is an awful contemptuousness in his bearing. He could be spraying weeds in his garden or roaches in his kitchen.

The victims of this assault have described the pain in searing terms. They speak of burning skin and vomiting, of the inability to breathe, of feeling as if acid had been poured into their faces. Two cops involved with this atrocity and the chief of police have been suspended — with pay. One hopes this is preparatory to a summary dismissal.

As we grapple with this vandalism of the First Amendment, we should ask ourselves this: What if there had been no cameras on hand? What if we had only the word of the protesters and their sympathizers that this happened versus the word of authority figures that it did not? Is it so hard to imagine the students' claims being dismissed, the media attention being a fraction of what it is, the public's outrage falling along predictable ideological lines and these cops getting a walk?

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Police remove Occupy tents from St. James Park

Dressed in rain coats rather than riot gear, dozens of Toronto police officers gathered before dawn downtown this morning for the largely non-confrontational eviction of Occupy Toronto protesters from their camp at St. James Park.

At about 6:45 a.m., officers who had earlier ringed the park began to slowly circle the 100 or so tents that remained there, looking for occupants. One lifted a tent flap and said, “Hello? Police.”

Officers posted number codes on tents, apparently to aid their later retrieval by their owners, and marked them with fluorescent orange spray paint.

As dawn broke, a big blue garbage compactor arrived. Police hoisted rubbish and trashed tents into it.

By 8 a.m., the large media tent – one of the few winterized Mongolian yurts in the encampment – was empty.

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The occupy movement can’t be sprayed away

Pepper spray can’t be washed off with water. The intense burning it causes — the stinging, the redness, the swelling, the coughing and gagging and gasping — will only subside with time, usually several hours. It can cause tissue damage and respiratory attacks. A study of its most commonly prescribed remedies found that none of them really work. It has been prohibited in war by the Chemical Weapons Convention, so our enemies don’t have to experience it on the battlefield. If only our citizens were so lucky.

Over the past several weeks police have been using pepper spray with alarming frequency in the United States against peaceful protesters. The injured include an 84-year-old woman, a pregnant woman, a priest and an Iraq war veteran. Over the weekend, we had to add to that list a group of college students, gathered nonviolently on the campus of the University of California at Davis.

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London, Ont., police remove Occupy tents from city park

Police in London, Ont., moved into a city park early Wednesday to remove structures after a deadline passed for protesters to do so themselves.

Several hundred people remained in Victoria Park after a 6 p.m. ET deadline passed for Occupy London protesters to remove their tents.

Mayor Joe Fontana had issued the deadline earlier Tuesday, some 2½ weeks after protesters first began setting up tents in the park.

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Whey the sudden coordinated effort to remove occupiers in so many different cities. Is the one percent getting nervous? Tom

A tale of two cities

In New York, Mayor Bloomberg is sending in the police to mace and bludgeon protesters and journalists alike:

MYFOXNY.COM - While covering the Occupy Wall Street protests on Wednesday night, Fox 5 photographer Roy Isen was hit in the eyes by mace from a police officer and Fox 5 reporter Dick Brennan was hit by an officer's baton.

The protests on Wall Street continued to grow all day. The rallies and their participants are showing no signs of slowing down.

In the evening, crowds surged past barriers and NYPD officers moved in to contain the protesters. By many accounts, mayhem broke out.

Officers, many wearing white shorts indicating supervisor rank, swatted protesters with batons and sprayed them with mace, video from the scene showed.

Meanwhile in Los Angeles, mayor Antonio Villaraigosa is officially backing the protests, handing out rain ponchos to the protesters:

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Wonder how Rob Ford is going to treat the "Occupy Toronto" crowd. tom

The Real Reason Why Police Cage Peaceful Protestors

With Occupy Wall Street protesters kettled on the Brooklyn Bridge this weekend, we look at how kettling was used on protesters during the London riots earlier this year.

Editor's note: On Saturday, the Occupy Wall St. movement marched on the Brooklyn bridge in New York. Police officers cut the demonstrators off from the exits, entrapping them on the bridge, in the rain, before carting off as many as 700 to jail. In the story below, British journalist Dan Hancox writes about how corralling peaceful protestors, or "kettling," was used by Britain's conservative government to steamroll resistance to their drastic austerity agenda. As the Occupy Wall St. movement spreads to cities all over America, we may see much more of this type of policing of public space to quell protests.

Across the western world, the public is losing a battle for territory. In the UK, publically owned health care, housing, welfare and education are being cut, broken up and sold off for private profit by David Cameron's Conservative government with audacious speed. This has a very physical manifestation-- in the suffocating of peaceful protest through a technique that has become known as "kettling," in which protestors are contained for five, seven or 10 hours without food, water, toilets, or hope of release.

Kettling has become synonymous with the enforcement of the Conservative government's radical austerity and privatization program. In November and December 2010 a student uprising in Britain larger than that of May 1968 saw over 40,000 students take to the streets of London on four separate occasions to protest against the government. They occupied countless university buildings during this period, and linked up with the anti-cuts movement UK Uncut (which I've written about for AlterNet).

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If it Bleeds, it Leads: Why it Took Police Violence to Make the Media Notice 'Occupy Wall Street'

A bit after 10 p.m. on Saturday night in occupied Liberty Plaza, there was a celebration around the media tables. Photocopied facsimiles of Sunday’s New York Daily News were being passed around and photographed. After having held the plaza with hundreds of protesters at any given time for a week, and having kept the blocks surrounding the Stock Exchange barricaded by police all the while, the protest was finally getting serious news coverage.

“The Daily News!” I heard someone say on the plaza. “It’s because this is a sustained occupation.”

Exclaimed one of those doing media relations, “We’ve already won!”

Just a few hours earlier, it seemed certain that a full-on police dispersal would come that night. Contingency plans were being discussed by the protesters’ General Assembly. But now the Daily News cover and the presence of TV vans seemed like guardian angels, ensuring that they’d make it until morning.

So what occasioned the media’s sudden interest? To what do these protesters, who purport to represent “the 99 percent” of Americans disenfranchised by a corrupt corporate and political elite, owe these headlines?

Police violence, of course.

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Are the police behaving at the pipeline protest? Tom

Police embroiled in violent battles with G20 protesters

Alexandra Frean in Pittsburgh and David Byers

Anti-G20 protesters rampaged through the city centre of Pittsburgh tonight, smashing up shops and throwing rocks at police, as officers used tear gas and baton-charges in an attempt to bring them under control.

In riots which continued through evening rush hour, about 300 protesters were reported to have remained from an initial crowd of 2,000 in Bloomfield, Pittsburgh’s Little Italy.

Frustrated in their attempts to reach the venue where world leaders are meeting the crowd, many of whom wore face-masks and armed themselves with rocks, broke windows at fast-food restaurants, a BMW dealership and a bank in the area, about a mile from the fenced-off convention centre.

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Check out the video. There is also a report that the police are using "accoustic weapons" for the first time on American soil. Lots of practice with these weapons in Iraq and Afghanistan no doubt. Tom

Could the Global Meltdown Spark a Great Revolution?

By Ben Protess, Christian Science Monitor. Posted August 4, 2009.

A look at mass protests during the past 500 years reveals surprising clues.

For the first time in generations, people are challenging the view that a free-market order -- the system that dominates the globe today -- is the destiny of all nations. The free market's uncanny ability to enrich the elite, coupled with its inability to soften the sharp experiences of staggering poverty, has pushed inequality to the breaking point.

As a result, we live at an important historical juncture -- one where alternatives to the world's neoliberal capitalism could emerge. Thus, it is a particularly apt time to examine revolutionary movements that have periodically challenged dominant state and imperial power structures over the past 500 years.

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, which laid the foundation for liberal democratic elections and the expansion of the free-market system throughout the world, revolution and protest seemed to lose some of their potency.

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Protest Bush on May 29, 2009

Come and get waterboarded at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre

Rally outside Bush speaking engagement. Friday May 29, 3 PM to 6 PM. Metro Toronto Convention Centre, 255 Front Street West, TO ONT.

Volunteers needed at Toronto Coalition to Stop the War.

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This will be an interesting protest on Friday. For the past months the Toronto Police have been demonstrating enormous good sense and restraint while policing the Tamil protests in Toronto. Crimbrary hopes they show the same restraint and good sense on Friday. Not one Tamil has been tasered in these past months. One hopes that not one anti-war, anti-war crime, protester gets tasered on Friday. And if one does what will that say about the Toronto police and their attitude towards legitimate anti-war protest? The website at the above link loads slowly. Tom

Tasers Are the New Killers: Watch Their Popularity Surge!

As protesters descend upon London's financial district to demonstrate the G-20 summit this week, they are being met by thousands of Metropolitan police officers carrying out what has repeatedly been described as the biggest police operation ever undertaken in the capital. Pre-emptive arrests were made earlier this week and despite the mainly nonviolent protests -- overshadowed by media reports of a "seige" on the Bank of England -- by Wednesday night, more than 60 people had been arrested and one man was dead.

Police in London have been gearing up for these clashes for months, attracting press attention for the “unprecedented” security deployment and the various tools at their disposal. Among them are so-called "non-lethal weapons" of the sort that have become biquitous crowd control devices. "Scotland Yard is to deploy officers armed with 50,000-volt Taser stun guns to deal with violent demonstrators," the Times Online reported earlier this week, noting that police were gearing up for any "anarchist elements" "likely to stir up trouble."

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Tasers no doubt are getting a real workout at the G20 summit. Tom