I have gone to the Salon.com website with Glenn Greenwald’s posting where I watched the most disturbing videos of the invasion of so-called “hippy homes” in a St. Paul neighborhood, by the Ramsey County sheriff’s office, early this morning. These police raids can only be described as brutal and unjustified home invasions. They handcuffed innocent young people, average age 20, and took their computers, laptops and personal papers. They carried search warrants so generic they could have barged in to the “Father Knows Best” household. Most unusual is the fact the warrants authorized confiscation of bomb-making materials, glass bottles, incendiary devices, plastic boxes, cardboard, twine– none of which were found…. Do you have any of these things at home? Most likely.

This is not a tiny event. This ought to be a huge national news story, and the Republican National Convention should be called to task for this unprecedented police action. McCain should answer for it! This is worse than the already terrible arrests of journalists covering protest marches.

I’m going to forward this message to as many media folks as I know. You should do the same, or write your own. McCain’s wife said, about Hurricane Gustav, “We need to take off our Republican hats and put on our American hats.” How about we put on our “Safe in Our Homes and Free to peacebly assemble” hats!!!

Accessibly yours,
Paul Berg, Executive Director
Weston Community Media Center, Inc.
Weston, MA

Paul Berg asked “Did Amy have press credentials for the RNC?”

All the arrested Democracy Now crew had valid RNC press credentials, Amy is said to have had a convention floor pass - the most privileged and difficult to obtain. And yes - getting press credentials for these spectacles is a nearly impossible task - especially for someone like Amy who was booted from White house press corp access in the past for asking too many difficult questions.

But one has to wonder (OK - maybe not) where the mainstream press is during these conventions (though an AP photographer was also arrested yesterday). They’re certainly not in the streets with the ordinary people and the hundreds of protesting Iraqi vets. Obviously there is an approved script for the convention coverage and the mainstream press is staying well within the agreed upon boundaries. It’s much like the moment early in the Bush administration when the White House told the press corp that this administration was creating it’s own reality and they could either get on-board or be cut off. Virtually all drank the kool-aid and stayed on to ride the terror bus.

Sadly, the days of Murrow, Cronkite and even Rather are long past and irretrievable. The fourth estate under rule of a corporate state has two very demanding masters and neither are the public. Compliant anchors (who are no longer trained as journalists) are now manufactured in schools around the country can be replaced as easily as their dentures. The late Herb Schiller’s characterization of this as the consciousness industry is truer and more chilling today than when he wrote it some 30 years ago.

Mike and those at St. Paul Neighborhood Network - sorry to hear your windows got smashed. Hope you had a surveillance system. if so, there’s probably a 50/50 chance it was an uncover cop masked in black block garb (and yes - that would be rather impossible to ascertain). But this has been the pattern since the WTO protests of Seattle in 1999 and has been well documented (and unreported) in various globalization protests around the world. One of the flaws of anonymous affinity groups as an organizing tactic is that police provocateurs and saboteurs can easily pose as masked activists and provoke or engage in the requisite violence and property damage when it’s deemed necessary. Police have already admitted to infiltrating convention organizing groups prior to the conventions - this is relatively small step beyond that bit of intelligence gathering groundwork.

I know that sounds overly conspiratorial and you’re thinking “wow - Michael’s gone whack again”, but these abuses have been documented on video by independent media activists and the evidence and eyewitness accounts are quite compelling. That’s probably one of the reasons a group like iWitness Video who do counter-surveillance on the police were targeted early on in St Paul - and probably why their local NYC colleagues, The Glass Bead Collective, had all their gear seized in Denver. Fifteen years ago, showing up at a protest with a camera could be an effective deterrent against police misconduct, a form of self-defense - today it only makes you a potential target.

Four years later, the civil suits over the mass arrests in NYC during the RNC four years ago are still running their course through the courts. It’s very likely the courts will decide in the favor of those unlawfully arrested and award substantial damages (since nearly all the charges were thrown out as unwarranted - particular in light of the IMC and iWitness video documentation). This happened recently for nearly 60 who were illegally arrested in a legal protest outside the Carlye Group in 2003 (2 million dollars in damages were awarded). We have numerous instances of a security state and legal system that collude to willingly and systematically violate the law through illegal arrests and detentions to manage short-term ‘image and publicity crisis’ - knowing full well that large sums of money will have to paid later in civil suits. This is the new cost of managing dissent in this country. The problem is, it’s the taxpayers who are getting billed for being bound and gagged by their own government.

Hmm - the ‘world as we know it’ actually already ended, it just hasn’t been reported as reality yet.

- Posted by Michael Eisenmenger

I remember when I was sixteen years old. That was 1968. I remember the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, NOT dominated by the hapless nominee, Hubert Humphrey, but rather by two things: what went on in the streets of Chicago, and how the national network news covered it.

I remember “the most trusted man in America,” Walter Cronkite stumbling for words to express his surprise and dismay that heavily-armed, stick-wielding police were basically beating the shit out of (mostly young) protesters in the streets of Chicago. In his black Clark Kent glasses, his starched blue shirt and ever so properly tied tie, he harrumphed: “Let us go now to Garrett Utley who is on the streets of Chicago following what has become a riot in response to this convention.”

History has since deemed it a “police riot.” This term has become increasingly more prevalent as ill-trained and (worse) ill-instructed police officers approach public assemblies (guaranteed by the Constitution, incidentally) as simply “crime problems” which need to be subdued and suppressed.

Thank You, Mike Wassenar for sending the story and video of Amy Goodman being arrested in St. Paul, home of the RNC convention. Our hopes and prayers go out to her and her also-arrested crew members.

Here is what Wikipedia says about the presidential election of 1968, in case you forgot or are too young to remember…

The United States presidential election of 1968 was a wrenching national experience, and included the assassination of Democratic candidate Robert F. Kennedy, the assassination of civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. and subsequent race riots across the nation, the violence at the 1968 Democratic National Convention, and widespread demonstrations against the Vietnam War across American university and college campuses. The election also featured a strong third-party effort by former Alabama governor George Wallace; although Wallace’s campaign was frequently accused of promoting racism, he would prove to be a formidable candidate, and was the last third-party candidate to win an entire state’s electoral votes. In the end, Republican Richard M. Nixon narrowly won the election over Democrat Hubert H. Humphrey on a campaign promise to restore “law and order”. The election of 1968 was a realigning election that ended the Democratic realignment started by Franklin Roosevelt in 1932.

I watched the video of Amy being arrested, and watched the faces of the cops “just doing their jobs.” I heard one cop say, “Step over this line and you are arrested.”

So much for probable cause! So much for freedom to assemble.

Questions. Did Amy have press credentials for the RNC, or did she and her crew risk their freedom in trying to shoot a video report without “the ticket.” If Amy did not have credentials, why not? Does one need to be a bloated corporate media pig to get press credentials to the RNC? Perhaps being a Republican helps. I suspect Amy is not.

The point of this rant is that the Alliance needs to pay close attention to the ruling of Judge Ponsor, in a Superior Court case in Massachusetts. Unfortunately, one of our sister access centers was the defendant. The case involved a local “video gadfly” who shot footage of a zoning commissioner up to unapproved building activities in his own back yard. The access corporation suddenly changed their rules to say that because the video gadfly did not have a talent releases from said zoning commissioner, the video could not be shown again. Judge Ponsor, after an eloquent definition of what “public access” is said this: A person “filming” segments for a public access show should enjoy the same First Amendment rights as those enjoyed by “bone fide news gatherers.”

I confess I am not a big fan of Amy Goodman. I just don’t like her unabashed liberal slant on the news. But at least she admits it! But these arrests in St. Paul MN are outrageous, and should be topics on the national network news. They were not tonight.

Local news at 11 added to my distress. They reported on high school marching bands, and where to find good pizza in the Twin Cities.

The national media has been mum about any disturbances or protests outside the RNC convention center. I only wish Walter Cronkite were still in the game, because in his journalistic world, flying police batons and tear gas and pepper spray would warrant coverage on his Edward R. Murrow-founded broadcast. Sadly, Katie Couric just flashes big teeth and says nothing.

Surely the end of the world as we know it is not far off!!! (just kidding, but still….. can you believe it!)

- Paul Berg, Arlington, MA

“Our liberty cannot be guarded but by the freedom of the press, nor that be limited without danger of losing it.” - Thomas Jefferson to John Jay, 1786

Recommended read from Timothy Karr of Free Press on the simply unacceptable silence and acquiescence of so-called public officials in condoning and/or excusing through their silence the government repression of journalism in St. Paul.

Here we have every indication of an orchestrated assault by federal and local law enforcement agencies to stifle independent sources of information. As shocking as this conduct is, more disturbing is the fact that the mayor’s office and the local daily seem so unconcerned.

It’s not difficult to understand why. With local leaders making every effort to roll out the welcome mat for mainstream media and the GOP leadership during a nationally televised convention, they’d rather sweep beneath the carpet those pesky independents who are showing us a side of the event that is less scripted and unready for prime time.

As an elected representative, Mayor Coleman should take a stand on behalf of a free press, rein in aggressive and violent tactics by local law enforcement, stop the targeting of journalists and immediately drop all charges against them.

One telling quote included in this report is by police spokesman Don Walsh….

Police spokesman Don Walsh intervened only to say that “arrest have been made” and that all those arrested were involved in criminal activities and not “simply non-participants.”

By making such a statement he is implying that only the guilty are arrested, and the very fact that you have been arrested is evidence of your guilt. That’s a convenient little loop of logic in the service of unaccountable government power.

Read The Full Article

Here is an extremely insightful report by Glenn Greenwald detailing the federal government’s involvement in the ‘pre-emptive’ arrests in St. Paul and the detaining of hundreds of people, including journalists, without warrants and/or on the flimsiest and extreme of charges. One example of the absurd and capricious nature of these kinds of criminal charges include the ones being levied against two producers for “Democracy Now!” who were arrested on charges of “probable cause for riot”. Throw in the ‘pre-emptive’ detainment and confiscation of all the equipment from organizations such as I-Witness Video and you have the kind of absurd Orwellian thought-crime prosecution we are used to hearing about in China and Burma, not the United States. This is nothing short of the state being an instrument of political repression.

Deputies coordinated searches with the Minneapolis and St. Paul police departments and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”

Today’s Star Tribune added that the raids were specifically “aided by informants planted in protest groups.”

COINTELPRO here we come.

We love to proclaim how much we cherish our “freedoms” in the abstract, but we despise those who actually exercise them. The Constitution, right in the very First Amendment, protects free speech and free assembly precisely because those liberties are central to a healthy republic — but we’ve decided that anyone who would actually express truly dissident views or do anything other than sit meekly and quietly in their homes are dirty trouble-makers up to no good, and it’s therefore probably for the best if our Government keeps them in check, spies on them, even gets a little rough with them.

After all, if you don’t want the FBI spying on you, or the Police surrounding and then invading your home with rifles and seizing your computers, there’s a very simple solution: don’t protest the Government. Just sit quietly in your house and mind your own business. That way, the Government will have no reason to monitor what you say and feel the need to intimidate you by invading your home. Anyone who decides to protest — especially with something as unruly and disrespectful as an unauthorized street march — gets what they deserve.

———–

During the Olympics just weeks ago, there was endless hand-wringing over the efforts by the Chinese Government to squelch dissent and incarcerate protesters. On August 2, The Post gravely warned :

Behind the gray walls and barbed wire of the prison here, eight Chinese farmers with a grievance against the government have been consigned to Olympic limbo.

Their indefinite detainment, relatives and neighbors said, is the price they are paying for stirring up trouble as China prepares to host the Beijing Games. Trouble, the Communist Party has made clear, will not be permitted .

Would The Washington Post ever use such dark and accusatory tones to describe what the U.S. Government does? Of course it wouldn’t. Yet how is our own Government’s behavior in Minnesota any different than what the Chinese did to its protesters during the Olympics (other than the fact that we actually have a Constitution that prohibits such behavior)? And where are all the self-righteous Freedom Crusaders in our nation’s establishment organs who were so flamboyantly criticizing the actions of a Government on the other side of the globe as our own Government engages in the same tyrannical, protest-squelching conduct with exactly the same motives?

Good question.

Read The Full Report (Includes Video)

A colleague of mine from the Alliance For Community Media recently commented on these goings ons as well, and posted some good informational websites regarding the situation.

The civil rights violations taking place in St Paul over the last 24 hours are quite shocking. Residences housing activists and independent media folks are being raided by Marshals with warrants that pretty much allow them to take everything in the place. You can read one of the warrants at the IMC site below (it’s hard to imagine that a court of law actually issued this - that’s how far this country has degenerated).

Updates at:
http://twincities.indymedia.org/

Fun video at:
http://twincities.indymedia.org/videos/2008/aug/rnc-emergency-dispatch

We live in the United States of America, not the so-called People’s Republic of China. Let’s start acting like it.

From Tom J’s letter to his friend and colleague James Madison, September 6, 1789. He seems to have been reading from another friend of his, Thomas Paine, as this reflects some points made by good ol Mr. Paine. Jefferson made repeated references throughout his life to the need for each generation to change the law according to their needs. He stated on more than one occassion that each generation should have its own constitutional convention. By this benchmark we are indeed LONG overdue.

From his Letter To Madison…

On similar ground it may be proved that no society can make a perpetual constitution, or even a perpetual law. The earth belongs always to the living generation. They may manage it then, and what proceeds from it, as they please, during their usufruct. They are masters too of their own persons, and consequently may govern them as they please. But persons and property make the sum of the objects of government. The constitution and the laws of their predecessors extinguished them, in their natural course, with those whose will gave them being. This could preserve that being till it ceased to be itself, and no longer. Every constitution, then, and every law, naturally expires at the end of 19 years. If it be enforced longer, it is an act of force and not of right.

It may be said that the succeeding generation exercising in fact the power of repeal, this leaves them as free as if the constitution or law had been expressly limited to 19 years only. In the first place, this objection admits the right, in proposing an equivalent. But the power of repeal is not an equivalent. It might be indeed if every form of government were so perfectly contrived that the will of the majority could always be obtained fairly and without impediment. But this is true of no form. The people cannot assemble themselves; their representation is unequal and vicious. Various checks are opposed to every legislative proposition. Factions get possession of the public councils. Bribery corrupts them. Personal interests lead them astray from the general interests of their constituents; and other impediments arise so as to prove to every practical man that a law of limited duration is much more manageable than one which needs a repeal.

This principle that the earth belongs to the living and not to the dead is of very extensive application and consequences in every country, and most especially in France. It enters into the resolution of the questions Whether the nation may change the descent of lands holden in tail? Whether they may change the appropriation of lands given antiently to the church, to hospitals, colleges, orders of chivalry, and otherwise in perpetuity? whether they may abolish the charges and privileges attached on lands, including the whole catalogue ecclesiastical and feudal? it goes to hereditary offices, authorities and jurisdictions; to hereditary orders, distinctions and appellations; to perpetual monopolies in commerce, the arts or sciences; with a long train of et ceteras: and it renders the question of reimbursement a question of generosity and not of right. In all these cases the legislature of the day could authorize such appropriations and establishments for their own time, but no longer; and the present holders, even where they or their ancestors have purchased, are in the case of bona fide purchasers of what the seller had no right to convey.

Read a complete online copy of the note Here

An interesting review of a book about the founders of America. Lord knows there is a huge amount of attention given to these people, often through a mythological filter (thus the deification of the by referring to them in capitals like “Founding Fathers”) in order to serve modern manifestations of fundamentalist nationalism, rather than through a sober historical one (which would better serve as a beacon of guidance for transcending and continuing the work, rather than simply trying to replicate and live in the world like it was still 1787).

Joseph J. Ellis has penned this book, “American Creation”, which puts some healthy new perspective on what the real value of the American story is to our current and future generations. The key point is in the way the original creators of this nation saw their work as only a step in a process, not a definitive declaration of the end all and be all of political wisdom. It helps to belie the absurdity of those who claim to be ‘originalists’ and who worship the constitution like it was holy writ, unchangeable and untouchable, contradicting the very nature and purpose of the political society the Revolution meant to establish in this country.

If at this point I were to note the familiar contradictions of the birth of the nation — chiefly the triumph of liberty, but only for propertied white men — and say that Ellis has written an entertaining account of, as his subtitle has it, the “triumphs and tragedies” of the founding, there would not be much new for me to say, or for you to read, either in this review or in Ellis’s book. It is difficult to imagine an educated American who does not know that the Revolution was selective and that the Revolutionaries, many of them slaveholders who were complicit in the bloodthirsty treatment of Indians, were flawed and imperfect.

But Ellis rescues his enterprise by going beyond the familiar critique of the founding to explore a point that remains underappreciated: that America was constructed to foster arguments, not to settle them.

———–

For the new American Republic, Ellis writes, “government was not about providing answers, but rather about providing a framework in which the salient questions could continue to be debated.”

———–

In a way, the fragmentary nature of the book mirrors one of Ellis’s key points. The past itself is fragmentary, and the fundamental task for any generation at any given moment is to bring order to intrinsically chaotic forces and events. History is messy because life is messy, and politics is provisional because life is provisional. Ellis shares the founders’ tragic sensibility, finding redemption in seeking the good rather than in achieving the perfect. The wisdom of the American founding lies in the recognition that the former is possible, and the latter is not.

“Unlike mathematics, in politics there was no agreed-upon solution reached by sheer brainpower and logic,” Ellis writes, “but rather an ongoing and never-ending struggle between contested versions of the truth.” Making it up as one goes along, then, is in the best tradition of the American Revolution.

As the decades passed and the founders died off, John Adams grew amused — in a John Adams kind of way — by the deification of the Revolutionary generation. “I ought not to object to your reverence for your fathers” he wrote an admiring younger correspondent, “but to tell you a very great secret, as far as I am capable of comparing the merit of different periods, I have no reason to believe that we were better than you are.” Perhaps so, but what Adams’s generation did with its moment was to create the means by which subsequent generations, including our own, could argue about ends in a largely peaceable way. “It was patched and piebald then,” Adams said of the founding, “as it is now, ever was and ever will be, world without end.”

Read the complete text of this insightful review from The New York Times Here

This has been a pretty tough year for most people in every dimension. Notable tipping points are seeming to have been reached on just about every front. From the most personal of circumstances, as well as the professional, to the most global, with sweeping events overtaking international and economic affairs, including the very fate of continued life on this planet becoming a crisis issue no longer deniable or avoidable except by the most selfishly immature amongst us.

In the face of these tectonic shifts in our situations it can be easy to become overwhelmed, even distraught at the prospect of confronting these changes with the positive insight and energy necessary to overcome these challenges. In light of this, Rebecca Solnit offers this encouraging list of reading to help galvanize the spirit and renew one’s faith in our humanity with The Secret Library of Hope: 12 Books to Stiffen Your Resolve. It’s hard not to sense and have hope in our ability to overcome the challenges we all face, both personally and collectively, when one takes the time to learn and understand that though things are difficult and it seems like humanity hasn’t really gotten anywhere, we actually have and people have been challenging and overcoming entrenched power time and time again throughout human history.

It is time for us to shift away from operating out of defensive reaction, and instead act out of creative response to these sometimes seemingly insurmountable challenges. It is time to focus less on identifying what is wrong, since it has become abundantly clear to most that things are indeed not working the way they should for the benefit and best interests of all, and focus the majority of our energy and intention upon creating what is right for the world. This is a point reiterated by Solnit when she describes dissent in this country having “become largely a culture of diagnosis rather than prescription, of describing what is wrong with them, rather than what is possible for us.”

It will be encouraging to see if people in the world can make the effort in the coming new year similar to the kinds we have seen humanity exhibit in the past as described by Solnit’s review, which is a recommended read to all those questioning our ability to face what the future holds, and whether humanity has it in us to live with more honesty and compassion, helping to provide for our ability to live authentic, meaningful and fulfilling lives in it by making sure that we providing for others.

Happy No Fear to all for 2008.

- Andy Valeri, USTV Media

The specter of full fledged authoritarianism in this nation of ours isn’t so hypothetical.

The president of the United States just issued a public pronouncement declaring, as a matter of U.S. policy, that a single man has the authority to detain any person anyplace in the world and subject him or her to secret interrogation techniques that aren’t torture but that nonetheless can’t be revealed, as long as that person is thought to be a “supporter” of an organization “associated” in some unspecified way with the Taliban or Al Qaeda, and as long he thinks that person might know something that could “assist” us.

But “supporter” isn’t defined, nor is “associated organization.” That leaves the definition broad enough to permit the secret detention of, say, a man who sympathizes ideologically with the Taliban and might have overheard something useful in a neighborhood cafe, or of a 10-year-old girl whose older brother once trained with Al Qaeda.

This isn’t just hypothetical. The U.S. has already detained people based on little more.

Any wonder why we at USTV Media have so often referred to the Bush/Cheney gang as the Busheviks and this country as the USSA? It’s not so funny anymore.

Read the LA Times piece Here

It doesn’t get much more succinct than this. Laid out here in black and white, coming to the fore by the publisher of the Wall Street Journal. Often it seems like a struggle to understand how people can reconcile the disconnect between the stated American principles of governance with actions of the Bush administration.

Fact is, they don’t have to because they don’t believe in American principles of government. They don’t believe in the idea of America. They seem only to be interested in using its power for their reactionary and regressive beliefs. The Bush regime and their acolytes in America truly are ‘counter-revolutionaries’ to the notion and purpose of the American Revolution.

Read this fascinating and disturbingly revelatory post Here