Good Morning!! I’ve got some widely disparate reading material for you today. I’ll begin with some articles related to the growing Occupy movement.
The New York Review of Books has posted an depth piece (just about all their articles are long and in-depth) by Michael Greenberg about Occupy Wall Street. I won’t try to excerpt from it, but think the article is a useful summary of the history of the movement and the author’s conversations with the organizers and protesters.
Raw Story has an interview with Chris Hedges: ‘Corporations have carried out a coup d’état in my country.’ Here’s some of what Hedges had to say:
“I spent 20 years overseas, I’m a war correspondent,” he said. “I came back and realized that corporations have carried out a coup d’état in my country.”
“I covered the street demonstrations that brought down Milošević, I’ve covered both of the Palestinian intifadas, and once movements like this start and articulate a fundamental truth about the society that they live in, and expose the repression, the mendacity, the corruption and the decay of structures of power, then they have a kind of centrifugal force, you never know where they’re going.” ….
“What happens, and it’s true in all of these movements as well, is the foot soldiers of the elite, the blue uniform police, the mechanisms of control, finally don’t want to impede the movement. At that point, the power elite is left defenseless. So, where’s it going? No one knows. Even the people most intimately involved in the organization don’t know. All of these movements take on a kind of life and color that in some ways is finally mysterious. The only thing I can say, having been in the middle of similar movements, is that this one is real … And this one could take ‘em all down.”
That’s quite a recommendation from a genuine radical.
It appears that the administration is getting nervous about what kinds of protests they might see at the Democratic Convention next year. The Charlotte Police are currently being trained to handle riot control, and the equipment and training are being paid for by the Federal Government.
Almost every one of Charlotte-Mecklenburg’s 1,700 officers are going through three days of intensive riot training. Police allowed Channel 9 a behind-the-scenes look at how they’re doing it.
“It’s a very controlled, measured response with a lot of practice,” Deputy Chief Harold Medlock said….
It’s all very carefully choreographed. There’s a reason, for example, why they would move half a step at a time toward a group of protesters.
“The point of some of the tactics and the maneuvers that we use is to allow folks to have the time to do what we’re asking them to do,” Medlock said.
Chanting is part of the plan, too.
“We want them to hear us as we move and do the things that we need to do, so you’ll hear a lot of verbalization from our officers and one of the things you’ll hear is, ‘Move back!’” Medlock said.
Apparently the riot training will also prepare police to deal with Occupation Charlotte.
Just another day in Police State America….
I’ve been watching a lot of Criminal Minds reruns while I’ve been sick recently. Tonight after I watched a couple of episodes, I came across this story from Philadelphia that could have come from that show. It seems too horrible to be real, but it is. Over the weekend four disabled people were found confined in a “dungeon.” Police suspect that the perpetrators were kidnapping disabled children and adults and keeping them locked up in order to collect their disability checks.
Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey said that wounds found on Beatrice Weston — the 19-year-old niece of the alleged ringleader of the operation, Linda Ann Weston — were the worst he had ever seen on a person who was still alive.
“I’ve never seen anything like this in a living person,” Ramsey said. “It’s remarkable that she is still alive. There is no penalty that is too harsh for the people that did this.”
Beatrice Weston, who had been reported missing in 2009, suffered wounds that included healed-over fractures, pellet gun wounds, and burns from heated spoons. Beatrice was also malnourished.
“The word horrific is not sufficient,” Ramsey said.
Ten children and teens were taken into protective custody Tuesday night, ranging in age from 2 to 19, reportedly near the apartment building in Philadelphia’s Tacony neighborhood, where the four original victims were discovered Saturday morning.
Authorities say there may be 50 more victims in the case, based on documents taken from Linda Ann Weston when she was arrested.
Hispanic voters may be angry with President Obama for deporting so many people, but the Republican candidates aren’t exactly endearing themselves to immigrants either.
Today, Republican candidates are competing over who can talk the toughest about illegal immigration — who will erect the most impenetrable border defense; who will turn off “magnets” like college tuition benefits.
But after such pointed proposals heated up yet another Republican debate, on Tuesday night, some party officials see a yellow light signaling danger in battleground states with large Hispanic populations in November 2012. Will Hispanic voters remember and punish the eventual Republican nominee?
“The discussion of creating electrified fences from sea to sea is neither prudent nor helpful,” said Ryan Call, chairman of the Republican Party of Colorado, where Hispanics cast 13 percent of votes in 2008 and helped President Obama flip the state to blue. “They’re throwing red meat around in an attempt to mollify a particular aspect of the Republican base.”
You’d think with all the awful problems facing this country, the Republicans could find better issues to run on than picking on undocumented immigrants and pregnant women.
The NYT editorial board has this to say about the cruel new anti-immigrant law in Alabama that Minkoff Minx has written a great deal about.
Alabama’s new anti-immigrant law, the nation’s harshest, went into effect last month…., and it is already reaping a bitter harvest of dislocation and fear. Hispanic homes are emptying, businesses are closing, employers are wondering where their workers have gone. Parents who have not yet figured out where to go are lying low and keeping children home from school.
To the law’s architects and supporters, this is excellent news. “You’re encouraging people to comply with the law on their own,” said Kris Kobach, the Kansas secretary of state, who has a side career of drafting extremist immigration legislation for states and cities, notoriously in Arizona and now in Alabama.
Alabama’s law is the biggest test yet for “attrition through enforcement,” a strategy espoused by Mr. Kobach and others to drive away large numbers of illegal immigrants without the hassle and expense of a police-state roundup. All you have to do, they say, is make life hard enough and immigrants will leave on their own. In such a scheme, panic and fear are a plus; suffering is the point.
The pain isn’t felt just by the undocumented. Legal immigrants and native-born Alabamans who happen to be or look Hispanic are now far more vulnerable to officially sanctioned harassment. Many of those children being kept home from school by frightened parents are born and bred Americans.
More evidence that American is becoming a police state.
Here a little good news for a change: New Jersey Sen. Lautenberg says it’s time for a new WPA
Senator Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) isn’t taking last week’s failure to pass President Obama’s jobs package lying down. Instead, he’s got a bolder plan in mind: create a new Works Progress Administration.
“It’s apparent that there’s a lot of need out there, and it’s apparent that there’s a lot of works out there,” he told Raw Story in an exclusive interview. “We’ve got millions of people looking for work,” he added, and his plan has “the immediacy factor” that other plans — including the President’s — lacks….
Lautenberg’s legislation, called the 21st Century WPA Act, wouldn’t be exactly like the WPA that gave Lautenberg’s own father a job during the Great Depression. Rather, it would award funding to projects that would give jobs to people unemployed for more than 60 days; have a continued economic benefit after their completion; and would devote a “high” portion of each dollar spent to employee pay. The legislation suggests — but does not limit departments to — a variety of projects, including the construction of water treatment plants, schools and firehouses, highway repairs and maintenance, building weatherization and trail maintenance.
It probably won’t get past the Republican House, but good for Senator Lautenberg for trying.
I’m going to end this post with a unique depiction of the mind of a Wall Street titan.
That’s it for me. What are you reading and blogging about today?
