"A Pretty Good Day For The Revolution"

[Title taken from a comment posted at FDL yesterday].

Yes, it was a pretty good day for the revolution (small "r" so far this cycle) yesterday when a coordinated effort by numerous groups banding together with BlackOut Collective seized and shut down the Oakland (CA) police headquarters and held it for 4 hours and 28 minutes as a memorial to Mike Brown and in honor of so many of those killed by police in Oakland and around the country.

It was both a moving tribute and an expression of the full blown disgust and anger so many Americans share at the terror inflicted on fellow Americans by out of control and unaccountable police.

One action does not a Movement nor a Revolution make, to be sure. But the cumulative effect of all these actions all over the country, sustained by determined young people and their allies, is a wonder to behold, and that wonder can lead to revolutionary change in consciousness and behavior -- and that's the point of all these actions.

I saw an articulation yesterday regarding the underlying issues and objectives of the current actions, and I ransacked my own archives. So much of it seemed so familiar. So much of what we were going through just a few years ago with Occupy and police issues has been repeated in response to the outrage and protests over the incessant killings by police, so many of them unarmed black men. Similarity is not identity, but Occupy activists understood quite clearly that the police behavior toward them was merely mirroring what had been going on in communities of color for generations -- it was in no way comparable, but it was a reflection.

So much of what people have been yearning for -- which I have long characterized as "dignity, justice, community, and peace" -- has been cynically thwarted and subverted by a ruling elite which sees its own interests as the only interests that matter. Shooting people down in the streets, as the police so often are wont to do, is simply one of the tactics used by Our Rulers to keep the rest of us in line.

It doesn't matter who they shoot or why; it matters that they shoot, and shoot to kill, so as to serve as a warning to everyone else. It is no longer "Get outta line, the man come and take you away," it's "Bang, bang, you shot me down."

It's been happening in communities of color, especially in black communities, for as long as there has been a United States, and long before that. For as long as Europeans have colonized and conquered the Americas, the Other has been subjected to whatever torments their oppressors choose to indulge in. The original sins and some of the methods of genocide and chattel slavery live on in contemporary America, despite all the calls to "get over it" and "move on."

Shutting down freeways, shopping malls, bridges and intersections, walking out of work and school, all are effective tactics used during the current period of unrest following the repeated killings by police of unarmed and/or nonthreatening individuals by roided up rangers on a mission of murder. They are not engaged in shootouts with desperadoes. Far from it. They are hunters and killers, not protecting and serving, but seeking out "righteous battle," targeting and executing whoever gets in their sights.

Yesterday's tactic in Oakland was to shut down the police headquarters itself.

According to Bella Eiko who was livestreaming part of the action, previously it had been nigh unto impossible for protesters to get to the police headquarters in Oakland as it had been barricaded by police and traffic was diverted away from it. Yesterday morning, however, a dedicated cohort of black activists and white and Asian allies made their way to the building and chained themselves to the doors; one intrepid soul used climbing gear to successfully mount the flagpole in front of the building and unfurl a "Black Lives Matter" flag showing the images of some of those who have been killed by police in Oakland and elsewhere in the country.

So far as I could tell from the videos and tweets that I saw yesterday, the police were caught completely off guard. Their shields were down; their defenses were penetrated. And the action -- completely nonviolent -- put them in a very bad light indeed. For once, they could not even protect and serve themselves -- the only people who really matter in their universe.

Throughout the country, let it be noted, police and government offices in general have taken to barricading themselves against the public. Police stations are some of the most heavily guarded and barricaded locations, but all government offices sport layers of security and barricades to keep the public at bay. During protests, there will often be phalanxes of police surrounding their "forts" -- police stations and offices.

In Ferguson, I noted that the only places protected by police and National Guard when the Darren Wilson nonindictment was announced were the police and fire department buildings. Everything else was on its own, and where vandalism and arson were being committed, there was no police or fire department presence at all.

The police protect their "fort" and almost nothing else. It's happened again and again, in many other places besides Ferguson.

But yesterday, the Oakland main "fort" was compromised, and the police could do nothing but let it happen.

Well, they did nothing but let it happen.

Whether they could have done anything to prevent it or fight it, I don't know.

Ordinarily, under typical circumstances, they would have used gas and grenades and batons and rubber bullets, the full panoply of hardware and brutality, to break up and disperse the demonstrators and the throngs who gathered to watch.

Ordinarily they would have arrested all the demonstrators -- violently in some cases -- and they would have hauled them all off to Santa Rita where they would have been processed as slowly as possible, and more of them would be assaulted and injured by police and guards.

Though there were preparations and expectations that the police would respond to this action with their typical violence and brutality, they did not. They appeared to be slow to respond at all. Did they not notice what was going on, or were they told to stand down?

As I watched some of the action unfold, I became suspicious that something was going on behind the scenes that curbed the OPD's general penchant for violence in the face of protests. Someone was telling them to cool their jets, put away their weapons, and let this thing play out.

I assume it was the chief. But perhaps someone was telling him to cool it. Perhaps it was the City Manager/Administrator (currently Henry Garner, who I know nothing of) -- who is in charge of the police in Oakland, not the Mayor or City Council.

And perhaps someone in authority over the chief and the city administrator (who could that be?) was telling both of them to stand down.

If that's the case, then I'd say something has finally penetrated the thick skulls of the Highest of the Local Mighty and they got the message: "Back the fuck off or...?" Or what? Revolution? This time they may feel it's real or has the potential to become real if they push against the protests too much.

The point has been made, too, that this action in Oakland was planned and executed by BlackOut Collective together with white and Asian allied affinity groups who consciously used their privilege as a shield for everyone against police violence and brutality. They knew the risks of what they were doing, but they also understood that because they weren't black they would have a certain level of protection from police violence.

And so it was. Not only were they protected from police violence, most of them weren't even arrested, and those that were arrested were released apparently within minutes.

It was as stark a demonstration of the nature of privilege in this society as I've ever seen. Except for a strong presence at the beginning of the demonstration, black folk were kept in a kind of kettle or cage across the street and were allowed to watch while white and Asian allies conducted their action with little or no interference or presence by police. Only the ones who blocked the doors and the street were taken away, but it's not entirely clear that more than a few of them were arrested (25 are said to have been arrested). According to reports, all of  those who were arrested were subsequently released. The ones around the flagpole and the "Flagpole Homie" who climbed the pole and stayed there for 4 hours unfurling the "Black Lives Matter" flag were allowed to leave with neither citation nor arrest, though arrests of all and charges to be filed had been previously announced by the Oakland PD PIO.

Meanwhile, in Washington DC, some of the activists from Ferguson who initially were not allowed to address the crowd assembled for the "Justice For All" rally organized by The Reverend Al Sharpton on Saturday spoke at what looked like a hotel conference room about why they shut shit down, including the rally until they were allowed to speak. They spoke about why and about how important the tactics of inconvenience and discomforting the comfortable are in this struggle.

I think they're brilliant:

 

Broadcast live streaming video on Ustream

This is Bella Eiko's video of the last hour and a half of yesterday's action in Oakland.



Broadcast live streaming video on Ustream

And a link to earlier in the day:

http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/56508513

This is a copy of a statement by those who organized the action yesterday:

For those of yall that have seen the action today that shut down the Oakland Police Department for 4 hours and 28 minutes, that was why this was posted this early in the AM, to give context to how this came about. Local black organizers, connected to The BlackOut Collective, Black Lives Matter, and #BlackBrunch, held down the very center of the action, with their message #BlackAndBreathing. Members of their groups were giving overall political direction. Multiple Affinity Groups (teams) of about 200 non-black folks, under the name Bay Area Solidarity Action Team, locked down to doors all around the building, scaled the flag poles and dropped a #BlacklivesMatter banner with the faces of Oscar Grant, Mike Brown, Alan Blueford, and Renisha Mcbride, and Tamir Rice. Blockade team with lock boxes at the base. Other allied POC, including an Asian affinity group #Asians4BlackLives locked to the front doors. Two intersections were blockaded as well, including folks in wheelchairs using them as blockade devices. The logic was allies leveraging their privilege to support the black reclamation of space, especially in front of the #OPD, an institution known for its violence on black lives. By the end, many more people in the streets supporting. Everyone safe, everyone who was arrested is out. Action demands lifted up national demands from #FergusonAction. Lots of lessons and mistakes along the way, looking forward to debriefing and learning more from this experience to keep it moving in a good way.

(h/t hotflashcarol at FDL who was in the thick of Occupy Oakland back in the day and has many stories to tell.)

The key here is that this aspect of the revolution is being led by the young. Those of us of a certain age and background are thrilled to see it. We can't tell them what to do -- and most of us won't try. The young are the ones who will find their way through this period of cruelty. And they're doing it.

They have shown a resolute intent to build a better world for themselves and for the future, and I for one cannot but be filled with respect and admiration.


Their voices have been heard, but we're not to the point of resolution. Not yet.

"And the Rockets Red Glare..."

Fort McHenry, Baltimore, MD flies a replica of the Star Spangled Banner

We went out to Ft McHenry -- about ten years ago -- on what may have been our last visit to Baltimore, in fact on what was probably our last day there on our last visit.

What I remember was how damned hot it was, blazing hot, and the humidity was high as well. It was in September, too. Despite spending several Septembers in Florida -- where the weather seems to be pretty damned hot and wet pretty much all the time -- I had never experienced heat and humidity like that at Ft. McHenry before and I'd really rather not do so again. This from someone who lived in California's Central Valley for decades. Summertime temperatures in the Valley are often over 100 and can on occasion be over 110 -- up to, say, 115 or so. Not pleasant, to be sure, but survivable because "it's a dry heat." Well, usually. Sometimes it's not...

I understand that at the "Restore the 4th" gathering at the State Capitol in Sacramento yesterday, the temperature was 109. Hot, hot, hot. Those kinds of summer temperatures are normal in Sacramento; it's not due to global warming. The irony is that the lingering rains and actually cooler temperatures in the Valley are more symptomatic of global warming there, whereas here in the East Mountains of New Mexico, it's the heat and drought.

But we've had rain here every day since June 30, apparently the Monsoon is coming in right on schedule. Actually, the weather people say this daily rainfall is not the Monsoon, because the storms are mostly coming from the north and east, and the Monsoon comes up from the west and south and the Gulf of Mexico. So the rains we've been having on a Monsoon schedule are considered anomalous because there is so little moisture coming up from the south or crossing over from the west. Bad as the drought has been here, I understand it has been worse in Mexico proper. I can only imagine.

What I saw of the "Restore the 4th" rallies showed somewhat muted and sparse crowds that weren't really crowds at all. They were hand fulls. A dozen or so in Albuquerque, a few hundred max in some other places, a few scattered 4th Amendment Supporters here and there; that leads me to believe there may have been no more than a few thousand demonstrators in all the land yesterday. How disappointing.

Well, what can I say. We ourselves went out to the Route 66 Casino and had us some fun. We came back through Albuquerque as the multiple fireworks displays were under way -- which made for quite a spectacle given the lightning that was flashing over the mountains. It was really quite a show, and as we crossed over the mountains ourselves, the rain came down in buckets. Day before, there had been much hail, so much that it looked like a heavy snowfall in places like Santa Rosa, and Meadowlake out in Valencia County was mostly flooded. The folks there raised quite a stink when the county told them they'd get no help till after the holiday. Priorities!

The 4th Amendment has never been all that operative when you think about it. If one is a member of a targeted Out Group, the 4th barely applies, and then only under certain tightly confined circumstances. No knock and blanket warrants are common, no warrants in emergencies (ever more broadly defined) is not unusual, and warrantless digital searches have always been part of -- indeed, features of -- the intertubes. Given the way the 4th has been ignored or sidestepped routinely over the past few centuries, and especially how it was all but voided during the conquest of the continent, the various labor uprisings and Red Scares, and more recently the Existential Terror Threats, it seems to me that getting all worked up over it now is a day late and a dollar short.

What is anyone going to do about it?

This is where the hysteria over NSA spying is strikingly dissonant, at least in my view. There have long been big problems with it in part because it is mostly being done by corporate partners like Booz Allen Hamilton, for which Young Snowden worked at the last. (I'd be careful making too much of that, though, because it looks like much of the documentation he collected and gave to the Guardian and possibly others was acquired in 2009 and 2010 rather than recently, which leads to a whole other set of questions about it -- and him.)  But ultimately the NSA portion of the Domestic Surveillance Apparat is that of the aggregator, not so much the instigator, and because it is "above the fray" if you will, the attacks on the NSA for violating the 4th Amendment strike me as jejune. Yes, they are violating it, but so what? What are they doing with their accumulated data? Nobody really knows, do they? Has any of it been used to persecute Americans or "US persons"? Again, nobody knows. Has the NSA been engaging in this persecution -- if it has happened at all -- on its own account? If anybody can testify, please, come forth.

What about the daily violations of the 4th by the FBI, and local and state police forces? Do those suddenly not matter because the NSA has a vast data collection and storage capacity? Because the NSA is in violation of the 4th Amendment, we should forget about all the rest?

That's the message the hysteria communicates, whether or not that's the intent of those undertaking the revelations.

Didn't we fight a revolution in order to secure these rights? No, actually we didn't. The concept of the Bill of Rights comes from an earlier era, and from a prior "revolution" in Britain, the so-called Glorious Revolution that deposed the Stuart monarch James II, and put in on the English throne his daughter Mary and her Dutch husband, William of Orange. As part of the deal made with them by the insurgents, they were required to accede to the Declaration of Right of 1688 and English Bill of Rights of 1689, which they did. Bless their hearts. Most of the provisions of the English Bill of Rights were already a part of civil and criminal law in the English Colonies that revolted from the Crown c. 1776, and they continued to be part of the post-colonial legal framework of the now independent states. The United States Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments to the Constitution, became an issue rather later, when a national government under the Constitution was instituted c. 1789, due to the perceived necessity to control the power of the new government just as the power of the Crown had been partially controlled previously. The American Revolution was not fought to secure these rights, for they were already as secured to American subjects as to the British, though it was often in the breach rather than in practice -- due to exigent circumstances, dontchaknow.

"Exigent circumstances...." Well, here we are again, n'est pas? Come to think of it, have Our Rulers ever not been operating under "exigent circumstances?"

But, but, but, but, surely we don't want the NSA spying on us innocent Americans, just as we don't want the TSA fondling our junk as it were. We must put a stop to it!!!! Well, I won't fly any more if I can avoid it, partly because of the invasive and officious behavior of the TSA. I de-Facebooked and de-Twitted partly because of the utter lack of privacy they entail though it had more to do with their utter time-wasting and hyper-marketing, but that's another issue.

Of course I still use Blogger and Hotmail. And I've never been much for heavy-duty encryption, or any of the other means of dancing around and sidestepping the Surveillance State. For a time, I even had a Carbonite account! OMG! As I see it, you can't really live in the Modern World and avoid all forms of surveillance, given the multitude of ways the private sector tracks your every move and the myriad ways the private sector shares and sells that information to the Perfidious Government. Unless you choose to live as a hermit in the wilderness, you're not going to escape it -- and even then, you probably won't as there are many means most of us don't even think about to keep track of and surveille hermits in the wilderness.

The NSA hysteria is in my view a sideshow and distraction from the very real issues involving day-to-day surveillance by the private sector on behalf of government or on their own account,  and the increasing levels of economic injustice that pervade our Land of the Formerly Free and Home of the Constantly Fearful. In my view, those who are most vocal about the NSA and its data capture and storage don't care in the least about the kinds of invasive ground-level surveillance most of us are subjected to from the private sector and they tend to ignore or actually support the economic injustice that has been eviscerating the middle classes and crushing the poor in this country for years.

This story will be told one day. And when it is, may we come to realize just how badly we've been had...

1789, Folks. 1789.

More and more, it's looking like we're on the cusp of some kind of revolt or revolution. Whether it will be as thoroughgoing and overwhelming as the French and Russian Revolutions is impossible to say. But there is no doubt that an encompassing movement toward "reform" and "transformation" is taking hold.

The initial salvo was fired by the Gingrichites in their determination to undercut, hamstring and then impeach Bill Clinton from the Presidency while overturning whatever was left of the Progressive Revolution that had transformed government in this country decades previously. For those who lived through it, Gingrich-time is fairly recent history, and yet it was fifteen years ago now, and it's not as if there haven't been titanic developments since then, not as if -- to continue the metaphor -- the Titanic hasn't sunk, in fact, and some of us are in the lifeboats trying to survive with no rescue in sight.

What do you do then?

Populist outrage is normal under the circumstances, but the genius of the TeaBagger sponsors was to be able to channel ordinary populist outrage against the others who are suffering rather than toward those who are causing the suffering -- not just causing it but profiting from it.

When I saw the video of Obama being confronted by TeaBaggers in Iowa, I thought, "You know, this really is a pre-revolutionary act. I wonder if those who brought this 'movement' into being are prepared for where it could lead?" It can easily get out of their hands, after all.



Polemicists and propagandists are having a field day, of course. The point of their screeds seems to be to discredit the electoral process itself and to denounce all the candidates because, the best you can get through the system we have is the lesser of two evils. And who wants that? If your argument is that the system cannot produce anything better than the greater or lesser "evil," then your proposition is essentially that not only is the system "evil" but so is the government that results. This frame of reference all but requires the overthrow of the system and the government -- because they are both... "evil." Choosing the Lesser Evil doesn't end the evility of the whole.

By 1789, Le Royaume de France had reached its financial limits -- in no small measure due to its financial support of the American Revolution. More to the point, however, the Ancien Régime had reached its political limits. The King and his Court had nowhere to turn and nowhere to go to get out of their political and financial impasse -- except to call an extraordinary session of the Estates General, something that hadn't happened in 175 years, but which had to be done in 1789 because there was no other option but to have the representatives of the People decide among themselves (with the support of the Crown, of course) what to do about the crisis.

At the time, the Ancien Régime was roughly three hundred years old, having come into being through the consolidation of the territory and rule of France under the Bourbons beginning in the late 1400's. It was a drawn-out process, however. We could say it was something like the drawn out process of establishing and consolidating the United States, which came into existence in 1776, didn't achieve independence until 1783, didn't have a functional central government until 1788-89, and continued the expansion, consolidation, and integration of domestic territory until 1959.

And, like France under the Bourbons, the United States has sought to project its power and influence far and wide -- including through colonial and imperial wars of aggression.

France began hitting the financial wall during the reign of Louis XV whose incessant wars (and the upkeep of the Royal Court and His Majesty's Presence and Mistresses) essentially bankrupted the state. Louis tried to solve the financial problem by asking his nobles to pay taxes. They laughed to scorn; they told him to get any money he needed for wars and upkeep from the common people -- where all taxes are ultimately paid from anyway. The nobles' excuse for not paying taxes was that it cost so much for them to hie their households to Versailles (which is where they lived, not necessarily well, either) and to wait in attendance on the King that they had no other ready money with which to pay additional revenues to the Treasury. Let the peasants pay.

And so it would be.

Of course disaster could not be held at bay forever, and as the ruin of France's peasantry continued, hunger and disease and misery stalked the land. When the price of bread skyrocketed due to the unwise deregulation of grain and flour markets, the French people commenced to starve -- and to riot and to raise more and more tumult.

Calling the Estates General was seen as a way to manipulate the masses into quiescence while forcing ever more revenue out of them. "See, you are being listened to!"

Yes, of course.

Of course things went awry almost immediately. There was the Bastille Incident; the incident at Versailles when the fish-wives of Paris stormed the Palace, killed several of the guards, and paraded their heads around on pikes. This would become a theme. The nobles continued to refuse to pay any significant amount of tax. The King dithered. The representatives of the People became infuriated. And soon enough, there was a revolt: it was the revolt of the first two estates, the clergy and the nobility, against the representatives of the masses. Wouldn't you know.

And that's when the world turned upside down. The representatives of the People (actually, it was mostly the representatives of the tiny French middle-class, but who's counting, right?) formed themselves into the National Assembly and declared that they were in charge now and demanded the King's assent. Which they got. This was no small accomplishment and it put the nobles and the clergy on the spot.

Things had gotten out of hand, and there was no way back to what now looked like the stability of Royal Rule from the Throne.

The path forward was uncharted. The American example was not really applicable to France, and the philosophes of France were not exactly masters of political organization. All that was understood was that the Old Ways could not continue.

The working out of New Ways took a very long time, and there would be rivers of blood shed along the way.

Yet most of the New Ways developed by the French through trial and much error are still in place throughout Europe and a significant portion of the rest of the world. No matter how much we might deplore the violence of the French Revolution(s), the social and political structure that they eventually settled on has served them well.

I noted quite a while ago that we were entering a period that resembled the prelude to the collapse of the Ancien Régime in France, and now I've taken to seeing growing parallels with the Crisis of 1789. We're almost there.

I am still convinced that if there is a widespread revolt, the Revolution will be led from the Right. And what we will witness is factions of Rightists fighting among themselves for pre-eminence in a more or less Post-Modern variation on Fascism which will effectively be direct corporate rule over us all. We are getting there step-by-step. The only real question is whether the final steps to this end result will be accomplished through peaceful acquiescence or through command and violence.

I don't have an answer at this point.