Antifa -- Is the Vanguard Ready?

The Incident at Berkeley has caused much hand wringing and hair pulling, "pearl clutching" in a word, throughout the law'n'order/"non-violence" -- except by the state -- crowd.

Ohnoes!!! Broken windows! "Molotov cocktails!" Disruption! Black clad anarchist!!!

This attitude toward disruption, inconvenience and broken glass (black clothing too) is one of the reason why we're in the pickle we're in. The fear of actually doing something that might-could get someone in trouble, change the narrative, prove disruptive, inconvenient, or break a window  has been so ingrained in the American subconscious that when it happens -- as at Berkeley, but many times before -- there is a reflexive recoil. "Ohnoes!"

Well, stop.

While I don't find the Black Bloc to be a particularly effective tactic -- never was -- it exists, it happens, it's going to continue, get over it.

Yes, really. Get the fuck over it. I think I said much the same during Occupy, whenever the Pearl Clutchers went into their periodic -- and idiotic -- hysterics over someone breaking something somewhere or burning trash in the street. Come on, it's a tiny thing when compared to the outrages of the ruling class. If it gets attention paid to some of those outrages, great. If not, it's not the end of the world.

Welp, here we are now, and Antifa is a rising thing as people start to recognize that Fascism has evolved and the Trump regime is its New Model avatar. If we really don't want fascists to rule us, we'll have to accept a bit of vanguardism from the Antifa.

Don't worry about it so much.

If you don't want to participate, don't. Is that so hard?

Of course I've heard plenty of reports that there are provocateurs sent by the state in every Black Bloc action we know of. Could be. I did encounter provocateurs during Occupy, but to my knowledge they were not included in any Black Bloc action I had personal knowledge of -- which wasn't all of them, by any means.

Any movement is going to be infiltrated. That's just the way it is, and it's another thing to get over and get used to. Infiltration will happen and authorities will attempt to decapitate any nascent movement -- at least any nascent movement on the Left -- before resorting to naked force. It's Iron Law.

We've seen, however, up at Standing Rock in particular, a remarkable level of resilience and continued resistance, despite the efforts of the authorities not just to decapitate but to violently confront and kneecap defiance.

Defiance, in fact, seems to be what puts the militarized police into an absolute frenzy. Hello. Clue stick. This is how you bring the system of rule to a halt and eventually bring it down.

Surprise: it's not a straight path to victory, and the Resistance makes many strange bedfellows along the way.

A key understanding is so far missing from the Resistance: this is Class War, and it is necessary to place Trump in the Ruling Class category and let it be known that the class he represents is in most ways just like he is.

In order to reach victory the entire 1% must feel the effects the defiance of the masses.

Their rule can be brought to a halt by making it impossible for them to govern.

The Antifa vanguard is already taking the risks, though it doesn't look coordinated -- yet. Interestingly, the RevCom agitators are right out front. Communists and Anarchists ordinarily don't get along -- and I'll leave to another time speculation on just who and what RevCom is -- but perhaps the danger is so great now that tired old animosities must be set to the side.

The Antifa vanguard is active but so far it is uncoordinated. Perhaps that will change with  the next ukase from the Winter Palace. We'll see.

But for now, I am surprised -- and impressed -- at the number of Antifa activists at the Disrupt J20 inauguration events.

 

Meanwhile in Berkeley:


And then there's this from WSWS:

Why is the New York Times promoting the “black bloc”?

By Bill Van Auken 
4 February 2017

The New York Times, the semi-official voice of the Democratic Party establishment, published an extraordinary article in its Friday edition headlined “Anarchists Vow to Halt Far Right’s Rise, With Violence if Needed.”

The piece, which ran across four columns of the newspaper’s front page under a huge photo of a black-masked individual preparing to break an office building window with an iron bar during Wednesday night’s protests at the University of California, Berkeley, amounted to free publicity and promotion of the violent protests organized by elements identifying themselves as the “black bloc,” anti-fascists and anarchists.

So there ya go. Chaos ensues...

Sow the wind, reap the whirlwind...

(Note: the Trotsky-ites at WSWS are great at analysis, but they tend not to get involved in anyone else's uprising. They field political candidates though, so there is that...)

Comrades!

Until today, I hadn't watched any video of the takeover of Wheeler Hall at UC Berkeley when Peter Thiel, noted billionaire reactionary founder of PayPal, was pontificating on stage before a rapt audience of devotees.

Reminds me just a little of this:


And this is how the cowards of the Berkeley PD respond to nonviolent protest:



Fear-driven, roid-raging, violent cowards.

The Altar Boy is Radicalized at Berkeley -- Mario Savio and More About "Subversives"

Mario Savio, Free Speech Movement, UC Berkeley, 1965

Now that I've gotten to the chapters about the student rebellion at UC Berkeley and more particularly about Mario Savio, I'm learning plenty of stuff I didn't know or didn't think about if I did know.

Images of the early Free Speech Movement protests at Berkeley and of those involved (particularly Mario, but not just of him) are burned into my brain. They form a huge part of what I considered positive in my adolescence. "Who" these people were and the underlying motivations for "why" they were doing what they were doing hardly mattered. What mattered was that they were doing it, fearlessly, determinedly, and at considerable risk to themselves and and their futures. Bravery was only the most obvious of their attributes.

While I was riveted by Mario Savio's eloquence and charisma -- and oh, yes, I had a sheepskin lined suede jacket like his, and I think in other ways I strongly identified with him -- I knew nothing, really, about him, except that he was considered "working class" among the students and administrators who came from money (I knew too many of those people), and thus he was subject to relentless denunciation and ridicule by those opposed to the FSM protests.

After the glare of the media spotlight faded from him and the student movement went on to other issues and other campuses, I didn't try to follow Mario's further adventures. I knew that he was a reluctant hero, if you will, and was deviled by doubt during the Free Speech Movement years, but beyond that, not much. It wasn't until much later that I learned he'd gone on to become part of the initial faculty at Sonoma State University in the 1980s, and died of heart failure in 1996. Resquiat in Pacem.

Until I got into the biographical chapters about him in "Subversives," I didn't know that he had been an altar boy in Queens, or that he was considered a "troubled genius" in school and had a terrible stammer when speaking -- unless he was on stage or in front of a crowd, at which time he could become extraordinarily eloquent and persuasive. I didn't know that his mother wanted him to become a priest -- and he seriously considered it -- but he chose physics and the sciences in his initial college days in New York, only to switch to philosophy studies when he transferred to UC Berkeley in 1963.

I didn't know that he was initially enthusiastic about the Kennedy presidency, but he became disillusioned as Kennedy seemed incapable of following through on his campaign rhetoric and promises. Where have we heard that before?

I didn't even know that he had gone South for the Freedom Summer, and that his experiences with the Freedom Riders and with CORE and SNCC at Berkeley had profoundly shaped his perspective about the absurd and arbitrary restrictions placed on student political advocacy and activity on the University campus.

While Mario's iconic speech about "the gears of the machine" he gave on the steps of Sproul Hall on December 2, 1964, will likely resonate forever, the issues he was speaking about are not really well known at all, and they're not particularly easy to explain or examine from the distance of almost 50 years.

I remember what I was feeling about it back then, but the issue of the prohibition of on-campus political activity -- which is what the Free Speech Movement was opposing -- seems somewhat arcane and even petty from a distance.

It was actually a pretty much universal rule to prohibit on-campus political activity throughout California's public education system at the time, especially so at the University. The premise was that California's students would receive a mandatory and "free" public education through high school, and qualified students would be eligible for tuition free higher education at any public institution of higher learning in the state -- any that they could get into, as access was highly competitive and restricted. But part of the bargain that made this possible was that the public education system, particularly the University, had to stay out of politics... thus the prohibition on political advocacy on the Berkeley campus that became the fuse that lit the fire of the Free Speech Movement.

Up to a point, this prohibition was tolerated because the University didn't interfere with tabling and political speechifying "outside the gate," Sather Gate. Well, that is they didn't until they discovered that the sidewalk outside the gate actually belonged to the University, not the City of Berkeley as they had assumed. The campus administration and police started enforcing the rule on the sidewalk as well on the campus proper, and this seemingly arbitrary act triggered the protest. Students moved their tables onto the campus in front of Sproul Hall, the administration building, and defied the administration and police orders to desist.

And when Jack Weinberg, a graduate student, refused to desist or identify himself to police, he was taken into custody and hustled into a waiting police car on Sproul Plaza. This arrest by campus police precipitated a sit-down action by hundreds and then thousands of students, and the Free Speech Movement was launched. Nothing would ever be the same again.

Mario quickly emerged as the spokesman for the Movement, though it was obvious even then that he was uncomfortable in the role that had been thrust upon him. Nevertheless, he was a passionate and very articulate spokesman.

His passion derived from his experience, an experience I knew very little about until I started reading "Subversives." I have a much greater regard for him now than I did nearly 50 years ago, and I hardly thought that was possible. But learning about his past, and what he believed in, and what he had done prior to the Free Speech Movement only makes me admire him the more.

I'm no hero-worshiper, as anyone who knows me knows. There are many individuals, however, for whom I maintain great admiration and respect. Mario Savio has always been one of them, but now my admiration and respect for him has increased substantially.

The more I learn... I'm grateful I can still learn...

More Insight and Ironies From "Subversives"

For example, I knew that Clark Kerr (UC President during the Free Speech Movement demonstrations in 1964 and 65) was responsible for coming up with the California Higher Education Master Plan -- which is usually attributed to Governor "Pat" Brown -- but I didn't know that he was affiliated with the Quakers or that he had been elevated to the presidency of the University specifically because of his abilities and reputation as a negotiator.

My memories of Kerr are somewhat mixed but overall they are negative, largely because he was demonized during and after the FSM, by student protesters and later by Reagan and his ilk, as part of the ongoing problem at Berkeley and other campuses, not part of the solution. I recognized him as someone who was trying to maintain control and exercise authority in a situation in which control and authority were being exercised for their own sake, and under the circumstances, it was wrong. I see from Rosenfeld's examination of the documents, however, that Kerr was trying to do something else -- not necessarily what it looked like at all -- and that despite his somewhat ham-handedness and bumbling, he may have been doing more good than harm.

It would be some time before I more or less clearly understood the often tense relationship between the Regents of the University, the University administration, and the Legislature, as well as with the Governor's Office, alumni, donors, faculty, students, and the communities in which the University campuses were placed.

Rosenfeld is saying the situation was even more complex than I came to understand it to be, and the complexity of the relationships between all the moving parts of the University was part of what made it relatively easy for interests like the FBI or, as happened with the FSM, student "radicals" to exert so much control -- at least temporarily.

Rosenfeld has also laid bare J. Edgar Hoover's personal interest and the FBI's general interest in the University of California, dating back essentially prior to World War II. Hoover saw it as a hotbed of Communists and Communism from very early on, particularly the Berkeley campus, and he kept his personal eye on what was going on there, and ordered his agents to conduct covert and often lawless surveillance of faculty and administration, students and staff and provide the Director with reports of their findings as well as disrupting any sign of opposition to the Established Order.

I knew about the anti-Communists witch hunts and purges throughout California's public education system (my 5th grade teacher, for example, was accused) but I was not fully aware of how deeply the purges went nor how destructive they were in particular cases. This is something I probably should have been more aware of, but I wasn't.

After all, even though everyone knew that surveillance and anonymous accusation of "Commies" was routine, we weren't necessarily able to recognize the general effects: curbing or crushing dissent and enforcing conformity of thought and action. Conformity being the key -- I've written about it many times as the fundamental social/political factor of the era, far more enthusiastically embraced and enforced than any of the OUTRAGES!!!!!™ we are privy to and are expected to run around denouncing these days.

Given the technology of the era, Hoover and the FBI were as thoroughgoing in their surveillance and interference in the University as it was possible to be at the time, far more directly and disruptively than we realized, and some ways more so than the pervasive surveillance we are under today.

There's much more, of course, and I'm still in the early chapters, but the way the background of the story of the student uprising at Berkeley is being laid out and the underlying issues, personalities, and events are being detailed is actually quite revelatory  to me. I knew a lot of it, but not so many of the details. In many ways, it was worse than we thought.

Much worse. Which makes the story more depressing than I would have thought.

Subversives

I just received a copy of Seth Rosenfeld's "Subversives" -- a book about the early days of the student rebellion of the 60s. I've written about that era quite a few times, for the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley and the more or less general student rebellion it inspired were deeply influential to my own perspectives about American imperialism and authoritarianism. What I've written about it is almost all my personal perspective on events I witnessed (in person or on television) or was involved in (such as the Draft Moratorium protests in Oakland in 1967 -- I was there for my pre-induction physical.)

Rosenfeld got hundreds of thousands of documents that I understand revealed the deep, deep involvement of the then-existing Security State to infiltrate and disrupt the student rebellion, largely at the behest of J. Edgar Hoover, FBI Director since dirt was new. There was much more Security State involvement than we knew at the time, that's for sure. And yet the fall out from the events of those days -- including the apparent co-optation of such rebel lights as Todd Gitlin and Mark Rudd, both of whom I have had at least passing dealings with -- continues to resonate.

I'm sure I'll have more to write about those days once I've finished the book.

Change of Pace: Ms Katehi Sez

Herself, Linda Katehi, Chancellor of the University of California at Davis, under guard during the Student Assembly at UCD November 21, 2011.

I've been on a tangent lately, dealing with Other Things That Must Be Done. My blogging has been intermittent and I have not touched much on the various reports and issues surrounding the incidents of police brutality and administrative incompetence last fall, especially throughout the University of California system, particularly at UC Berkeley and UC Davis.

Teri49 in comments jogged me into thinking about these matters somewhat more than I have for a while, in part because of an incident in Santa Fe that wound up in Federal Court over the improper touching of Capital High School students by private security guards, and in part due to the fact that I'm surprised that the reports which have so far been released have been so highly critical of the University's administrators, essentially accusing them (accurately, I'd say) of pernicious ignorance of their student bodies and disinterest in their campus communities.

Indeed.

I really did not expect this.

And yesterday, Herself made an appearance at the California State Capitol wherein she averred she had personally erred last November in ways that led directly to the Pepper Spray Incident on the UC Davis quad.

Well. Who. Would. Have. Thunk?

Not I, that's for sure.

Look, the whole point of becoming an educational administrator is to avoid accepting responsibility for anything. Everybody knows that. The purpose of educational administration is to put the blame for everything on someone else, and preferably charge them for the privilege of being blamed.

In today's educational environment, it's about The Money, and that's just about all.

But there was Katehi over at the Capitol yesterday mea-ing and culpa-ing up a storm and a half.

What happened at Berkeley and Davis last fall (and other campuses, too) may have shocked the consciences of some members of civilized society, but it was no surprise to anyone who's been aware of or been around militant student protests for the last 30 years or so. It has been standard operating procedure for years for California university police to tase and beat the shit out of students who don't obey their commands promptly and with sufficient subservience. It has happened often enough -- and internationally notoriously, with numerous viral videos in the last few years -- for some people to recognize that this behavior on the part of campus police toward disobedient students is no anomaly, it is policy.

This is all tied in to the notion that obedience is the primary objective of public education, and has been for many a long year now, what with students at all levels of public (and some private) education being subjected to the arbitrary imposition of authority, often brutally, as a matter of course. As if they had no rights that anyone in a position of authority was bound to respect at all.

Public schools and colleges operate like -- and often resemble -- prisons, a factor that led to a spate of school shootings back in the '90's. Campuses are routinely put on "lockdown" -- just like prisons -- and students are routinely subjected to invasive and typically arbitrary search and seizure by campus police and administrators. This has been going on for decades.

"Disturbances" are routinely broken up with tasers, tear gas, batons and sometimes other weapons. Armed guards patrol not only the campuses but the nearby communities as well. There's a law school a few blocks from my house, for example, and the campus police routinely patrol and make arrests in the surrounding community. There is a school district police force -- actually in the school district that succeeded the one where I attended high school -- that is accused of using its powers of arrest to tail and arrest drivers in the area for various minor infractions as a money-making scheme for the district and the department. The level of administrative corruption in education has reached astronomical proportions. Michelle Rhee, for example?

This is the historic and backstory context of the Incidents at Berkeley and Davis last fall, something that so far as I am aware, none of the reports issued so far touch on, nor does the media seem able to pick up on the long-term pattern of brutal enforcement of Obedience in the American educational system.

But I have read the reports, and I am struck by how uniform they are in placing responsibility for what happened last fall on the administrations of the campuses involved, and the overall system administration, and for pointing out that these things have happened over and over again, reports have been issued over and over again, and for some reason, nothing changes...

Administrators are divorced from the student bodies and often from the faculty and staff as well; campus police forces are often left to do their own thing without guidance, or in the case of Davis, have been known to defy instructions (and did so on November 18); students and often the faculties and staffs of the university campuses have little or no trust in either the campus police or administrators.

This has been going on for decades.

This article from The Nation in March puts another angle on what is going on, the "Homeland Security Campus" angle, and I have to agree that the author has a point. There's a whole campus security back channel where the latest developments in repression are being discussed and means and methods tested. When Katehi and others of her ilk speak of the "health and safety" of the students, for example, and then in the next breath order the violent dispersal of a protest -- which has happened over and over again -- which often leads to broken bones and other serious health and safety consequences for the students, she's not speaking about the students' "health and safety" at all. She's concerned about her own health and safety -- ie: preserving her job and her $400,000 salary -- and about the financial health and the paramilitary "safety" squads who do the dirty work of stamping out unpermitted campus protest and enforcing Obedience.

I can recognize all this and more is going on, but I confess I don't know what to do about it apart from continuing and stepping up protests including occupations of campuses, and contrary-wise, refusing to utilize a University system that routinely brutalizes students and faculty.

One thing that's clear from the reports is that the administration of the University is very concerned with the reputation the system has gained for brutal and unnecessary police actions. The University has been heavily recruiting out of state and international students -- who pay even higher tuition and fees than in-state students do. They won't come if the campuses have a reputation for internal violence precipitated by the campus police.

So the adminstrators vow to clean it up by next year some time (ie: when the next cohort of high-value students is due to arrive.)

Meanwhile, the mess that public education has become in this country continues...

The following video is from last December in Sacramento:

And if you haven't already, read this article by Mark Ames to get a better picture of just who Ms Katehi is... layers and layers, wheels within wheels...

This Is What A Police State Looks Like (Redux)

By now, it should be clear that the Authorities have been busy during the Occupy semi-hiatus over the winter. Oh yes. Oh. My. Yes.

The other day, the Oakland City Attorney sued one of the local Occupy activists for vandalism for acts he is alleged to have committed in Oakland on the night of General Strike Day, November 2. Cesar is one of the gentlest and most generous people I know. He says that on that night, he was not committing vandalism in Oakland at all. He was trying to protect himself from police munitions fire by "liberating" a piece of plywood covering a window to use as a shield. Cesar was arrested that night for vandalism and failure to disperse, but he has not been charged criminally. The video evidence the city says they will produce more than likely is ambiguous about what actually happened, but it's obvious the City of Oakland is using this case as a weapon to keep "outside agitators" out of Oakland. Message: if people from elsewhere show up in Oakland and something happens, the outsiders will be charged for damages. Sort of like the Hotel Tax, I guess.

Not content with merely charging outsiders for damages, the Alameda County District Attorney has filed criminal charges against a number of UC Berkeley students and one professor for their participation in the iconic protest demonstrations at Sproul Hall on November 9, 2011. It's worse than the Daily Cal reported above. Nancy O'Malley -- the now notorious Alameda County DA -- has charged a total of ten students who participated in the protest at Sproul Hall, some of them charged after the UCPD gained access to their records at the University medical center where they went for treatment of the injuries sustained when they were beaten by police. Only two or three of those charged by the DA were arrested that day. One of them was Celeste Langan who is seen dressed in purple, at the extreme left of the video at the beginning, "resisting" arrest.



http://youtu.be/kNHXuf6qJas

Cute. Her arraignment is scheduled for tomorrow, I believe. Should be quite a show.

These are links to raw footage of some of what was going on that day at UC Berkeley.

http://youtu.be/NSat-nRefXY (Langan is seen in this video, the second person thrown to the ground and trussed up by police at about 3:40; at the end of this video, she is shown being hoisted up and starts to be led away)

http://youtu.be/cEcqsLyX-vI (In this video, which shows nonsequential events, Langan appears at about 2:17 being led away. The determination of the students in the face of what was seen at that time to be outrageous police violence is impressive.)

http://youtu.be/SN7WOsvepUg (This video is sort of the Highlight Reel; early on a female likely Cal student is heard repeating "You're hurting him!" while a protester is being beaten nearby. She is then heard saying to someone "That's how we train them to fucking stop us. We pay for them to fucking hurt us." Which is absolutely true. The UC police and the Alameda County Deputies were actually training not far from this very site a month or so before -- I've read it was with Israeli trainers -- to conduct this kind of action. Celeste Langan is shown in complete shock being led away in flexicuffs at about 3:20.)

The picture used in the article about Israelification of Occupy suppression is of course of the UC Davis pepper spray incident that happened a week after the Cal police riot. After numerous delays, an official report on the incident was supposed to be released on March 6, but the UC Davis police officers union sued to prevent it and got a TRO which is currently in effect. They claim that release of the report will compromise the rights of officers who might be named therein. This matter is also supposed to be heard in court tomorrow.

The NYPD is notorious for spying on various suspect groups including Muslims and Occupy Wall Street, but now, according to In These Times, they've gone further than usual by arresting people for "thought crimes" or "pre-crimes." This practice was more-or-less institutionalized during the RNC convention in St. Paul in 2008 prior to which and during which dozens of arrests were made and property was seized of people who were suspected of making preparations to protest. There is apparently a grand jury empaneled in Chicago that has been trying to develop terrorism charges against some of those who were arrested in Minneapolis and St. Paul four years ago, but many of those subpoenaed have refused to cooperate.

This is a compilation video of some of what was going on in Minneapolis/St. Paul prior to and during the Republican convention.



Notice anything? The exact tactics have been used and are being used against Occupy. At the time, in 2008, what was going on in Minneapolis/St. Paul was seen as way over the top. The rallies and marches and protests during the convention were peaceful, even routine in the context, yet the police were on some kind of hair-trigger/steroid alert against the protesters constantly -- even before the convention, and they have stayed that way afterwards -- and they behaved with what was at that time shocking brutality and over kill. People were being kettled and arrested en masse -- whether or not they had anything to do with protesting -- hundreds were held for days, they were not allowed any sort of contact with the outside, nor did were they allowed medical attention for injuries or other conditions; people were arrested for doing nothing at all, but merely because they had been identified as "potential" protesters. Flash bangs and tear gas were liberally employed against nonviolent protests. Police brutality was commonplace. It was a war zone in which only one side -- the police -- was fighting. The protests were nonviolent. The police, however, employed what were at that time considered extreme levels of violence against them.

And it's going on in much the same way against Occupy.

What gives?

The political conventions are what's called National Special Security Events, during which, essentially, the Constitution is suspended. During National Special Security Events, a form of martial law can be and often is imposed; violent and otherwise unethical or illegal means are typically used to suppress protest. While I've written about National Special Security Events and the nature of policing during them, I'm not at all sure that many Americans actually understand what is going on.

More likely, they see the suppression and assume it is due to something the protesters have done, which is simply not the case. The suppression tactics and the "threat display" aspects of officials are policy during these events. The policy doesn't change based on what the protesters do or don't do. The policy is to suppress, to prevent, and to tightly control the public -- no matter what they do.

Since the October 25 assault on Occupy Oakland, it's looked more and more like the Occupy Movement has been categorized as something that requires NSSE-type suppression. The clue came much earlier, however, when fully armored up riot squads were deployed night after night against a handful of local protesters who were peacefully engaged in civil disobedience. Night after night after night, dozens of riot cops (sometimes up to 70 or 80), squad cars, paddy wagons and so forth were dispatched to round up ten or two or, on one occasion, one protester sitting on the sidewalk refusing to "disperse" at plaza "closing time." It was an absurd goon show that became a joke. But not a funny one. Eventually, even the police recognized how foolish they looked in their little riot get-ups and their ridiculously over produced arrest-theater, and scaled back their overkill, and when the hundreds of thousands of dollars it was costing was released, they stopped doing it altogether. The DA refused to prosecute, and in the end, all the charges against demonstrators were dropped, although there has been an attempt to assess "fees" against those who were arrested multiple times (typically around $300).

As someone pointed out, had the police used their discretion and not engaged in this nonsense to begin with, there wouldn't have been any costs to the city at all. Duh. But no. Civil disobedience must be suppressed. Violently in too many cases.

But even when there isn't police violence during Occupy suppression actions, the official intent is to intimidate and disable. For example:

Occupy Miami raided by SWAT teams (VIDEO) (h/t teri49 in comments)

Objectively, this is just insane. The official fear level about the Occupy movement -- and apparently any other civil disobedience -- has reached a fever pitch. The fact that people are so pissed off and no longer fear saying so seems to have hit a raw nerve among the ruling classes and their enforcers.

Bones are thrown to the masses from time to time, but it doesn't stop the protest and actions. Suppression doesn't stop it; in fact, action seems to be on an increasing curve as more and more activists pick up on the Occupy movement's strategies.

This is not going away, despite the institutionalization of the Police State -- which looks to be full-time and permanent now. The ruling class and its bought and paid for government and enforcers are in a pre-panic state. They do not know how to suppress it, and they don't know how to fully control it. But they don't want to actually listen the voices of the People and do the right thing, either. They still don't think they have to. After all, they have NDAA and HR 347.

We got nothin', right?

We'll see about that.

Mario Savio Explains It All For You

Thanks to Michael Cavlan RN over at FDL for posting this full version of Mario Savio's December 2, 1964 "Gears of the Machine" speech that he gave on the steps of Sproul Hall just before several thousand hundred students occupied the building thus catalyzing the student (and counterculture) rebellions of the 1960's.

I've posted many times that this was a radicalizing event in my life -- I was 16 at the time and in high school. Three years later, I would be involved in this:



Here's Todd Gitlin's narrative of those events:

Here, protestors wait to close down the Oakland Induction Center where young draftees arrive for their physicals and are taken into the Army. They hold wooden shields and wear helmets. It is an October Friday in 1967 and no one anticipates a peaceful outcome.

At some point in that year anti-war activists across the country agreed to turn protest into resistance. Fred Halstead says in Out Now!, his detailed history of the anti-war movement, “it was a time to move opposition to the war and the draft from moral protest to a show of power.” The draft of young men into the armed forces was a particularly odious feature of the Vietnam conflict. Beginning with the war’s expansion in 1965, President Johnson doubled the number of young men to be drafted each month from 17,000 to 35,000. Because college students still held draft deferments, the vast majority of hapless draftees were lower class males and much more likely to be black, Mexican-American or Puerto Rican. In 1965 there were 25,000 soldiers in Vietnam. By the end of 1967 there were more than 480,000 soldiers in Vietnam. And 15,000 of them had been killed.

In May of 1965 some 40 Berkeley students staged the first public burning of draft cards in front of the local draft board, at the time a handy half-block from the UC campus. A “liberal” Democratic Congress responded to the burning of draft cards by making the act a felony punishable by five years in prison. Draft card burnings continued, though, and by 1967 a group called The Resistance was organizing ever-larger protests against the draft. Leaders decided to mount a weeklong protest October 16-21 that would end with a march on the Pentagon. Ground zero for draft resistance was the Oakland Armed Forces Examining Station, aka, the Oakland Induction Center.

[snip]

What followed on Bloody Tuesday was a riot. Direct action collided with police brutality and the result was an hour of mayhem as members of the Resistance, who had expected to block Center entrances and be arrested, were instead beaten bloody. Organizers held a rally Thursday on the Berkeley campus and vowed to return to Oakland on Friday. “We’re going to give the cops one hell of a run for their money,” shouted Stop the Draft Week organizer Morgan Spector. And they did. More than 10,000 protestors showed up early Friday morning, prepared with shields and helmets to engage the police. As cops poured out again into the streets, activists ran a virtual Chinese fire drill around the city’s central core, occupying intersections until police arrived, then vanishing down alleys to return to the Center where they blocked entrances until police returned. Battles ensued as police officers fought hand-to-hand to arrest protestors who, aided by comrades that attacked police from behind, would break free and run. Barricades were built from parked cars, rolled into intersections and tipped over. A bus was seized, emptied of cheering passengers, and rolled into the street to block access by police.

Protest had become insurrection.

Yes, well. The rest, as they say, is history. And to clarify, this insurrection in Oakland lasted all week, and there were Stop the Draft events held all over the nation that week as well, culminating in the Levitation of the Pentagon on October 21, 1967.

In Oakland, the history of insurrection has a long and noble lineage, so every time I run into someone who wants to mindlessly denounce the current insurrection in Oakland -- which continues apace, despite all the hoo-and-haw over various tactical and strategic errors (to put it gently) -- even if it is Todd Gitlin -- my generally tolerant demeanor tends to get bent out of shape and I tend to respond with a bit of bite.

The point is not that I favor violent insurrection and resistance because I don't. The only ones who would actually engage in such a thing in this country are the rightists and fascists in any case. They've been doing so on a limited scale for decades. For some odd reason, though, the "anarchists" and what's pitifully left of the Left are blamed for whatever insurrectionist tendencies there are and are strictly advised by their Elders (of which I am now one, thankyouverymuch) to declare adherence and strictly follow passive nonviolence principles as outlined by "Gahndi" and King. Now isn't that interesting? It should be. It should be interesting and instructive about the true nature of Power and Control in this country.

What I find interesting is that the nonviolence advocate who had the greatest influence on me is never mentioned: Cesar Chavez. It's the strangest thing. It's as if he and the United Farm Workers he led never existed, and their struggle never happened at all. He and his work have been all but erased from the historical record, and I truly wonder why.

Every now and again, I get together with some of the abuelos from the farmworker huelga days, and they shake their heads sadly at how far we have come yet how very far there still is to go. The struggle continues, yet it has become so highly ritualized and enervated that measurable progress is almost impossible to find, while there is plenty of backsliding to be found in the fields everywhere throughout The Other California, where those many farm fields still are (well, at least the ones that haven't been buried under suburban sprawl.)

One of the ways the Overclass got a handle on the farmworkers' movement and made it much less effective was to essentially buy off some of its leaders and younger workers by providing them with a way out of the fields and a comfortable living if they wanted it. Many farm labor activists wound up teaching on college campuses, others became civil servants, ironically in some cases charged with enforcing farm labor law but without the tools to do so. The less they felt trapped in the fields, the less the farmworkers felt they had little hope for improvement besides the UFW. The Overclass used many other tactics, including murder, to get their way, but from the public's perception, the farmworkers were the ones who got their way, not the growers. Little do they know.

Similar tactics were used to disarm and ultimately disable the anti-war movements of my day. As with the farmworkers, Power did concede the minimum it had to -- such as, for example, instituting a draft lottery, then ending the draft, then removing troops from the ground in Vietnam, and finally withdrawing from Indochina altogether. Many of those firebrands and movement leaders -- those who weren't murdered -- wound up teaching on college campuses where some of them still are. Others found civil servant positions which by now they have retired comfortably from, and we all know what happened with Jerry Rubin: he became a capitalist pig.

Mario Savio himself taught physics and philosophy at Sonoma State until his untimely death in 1996.

Who am I to talk, I went into The Theater and ultimately into government service myself.

What I began to understand about all this is that what appears to be radical and insurrectionary at any given time probably isn't. Mario's speech on the steps of Sproul Hall still resonates -- at least it does to me, but then I can (vaguely!) remember what he's going on about. Yes, the issues were critically important in those days, and yes, the insurrection at UC Berkeley in the fall and winter of 1964-65 made a huge difference and catalyzed movements and rebellions all over the country and parts of the world some of which were brutally and bloodily suppressed.

But underlying it all was a demand for dignity and respect, justice and community. And most of all for Peace.

While the issues Occupy is wrestling with are different, and the Occupy rebellion/revolution itself is very different -- the underlying demands aren't. We once again have an out of touch and wildly out of control power structure that ignores or dismisses the Public Interest in pursuit of private interest goals. Mario is complaining because the University is being run like a corporation and to serve corporate needs, not the Public Interest at all, and in his view and that of many students at Cal and elsewhere, that was simply wrong on principle. That was not what the University was for and that was not the purpose of higher education in California, but there it was: Cal served its government and corporate "sponsors" not the People.

And so it is today, even worse than it was in 1964. And now it is wildly more expensive for students at Cal and in the rest of the public higher education system in California than it was almost 50 years ago.

The abuses are far greater and the costs are far heavier. And sometimes the solutions seem farther away than ever.

"These People Don't Know How Power Works!!"

The title of this post is based on a quote said to me during the disastrous visitation of Occupy Sacramento by the city's mayor a number of weeks ago.




I had to be away from the computer during the opening of the festivities of the Town Hall at UC Davis last night, so I was only treated to the question and answer session with the students. I'm not even sure who exactly was on the stage apart from Katehi. I will have to watch the recording when I get a chance and see if I can winkle out names and titles. I will say, however, that the Vice Chancellor sitting next to Katehi [The Provost & Executive Vice Chancellor of UC Davis Ralph J. Hexter] was one of the well-dressed people I was walking among on my way to the campus rally. I distinctly recall him speaking to his colleagues in defense of Katehi and the police and denouncing one of the unions on campus -- and being remonstrated with by someone defending the union. Hm. Interesting. (Of course, there is a caveat. I do not know these people personally. I recognized the Vice Chancellor as the man I heard while walking to the rally, but the mind and memory do curious things with external stimuli. I realize it may not have been him, but instead was someone of similar appearance and demeanor, and my "recognition" of him may be the recognition of similarity rather than the recognition of actuality.)

[Others on stage included: Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs, Fred Wood at the far left; Lt. Matt Carmichael, Interim Police Chief; Ralph J. Hexter; Linda Katehi; and eventually Vice Chancellor for Administrative and Resource Management John Meyer, who has actual authority over the UCD Police Department.]

It was clear from the get-go that most of these students "don't know how power works" either.

Not. A. Clue.

Some do, it's true. But under these circumstances, they had little opportunity to make a case. The game was rigged from the outset.

The situation was somewhat analogous to the Town Hall Seattle panel discussion of "Occupy Seattle" referenced in an earlier post. But no one Mic Checked the Davis Town Hall the way some folks did in Seattle, so the actuality of what was going on may not have been recognized by the participants.

By assembling administrators on a higher level, giving them microphones all the time, having them make unchallenged statements (that part is left out of the video above, I am scouting for more), and allowing ASUCD proctors to "moderate" challenges as strictly as they do (I assume they are ASUCD, but again, I'm scouting for more info), the power dynamic is this: "We are in charge here. You may or may not be recognized for a moment or two, but we will always be recognized because the Power is Ours, not yours. Got that? Good."

The other side, the students, quite simply have no power in this dynamic -- unless they seize it -- at all. That's the point of the lesson here. "We control you and everything here. You control nothing."

This is the problem with the power dynamics in the whole country, the whole wide world in fact, and this is why there is -- by necessity -- a global revolution under way.

There is no other way for the People to be heard at all; on the other hand, exposing the actual power dynamic in play -- such as the one at UC Davis last night or in the disruption of it in Seattle a few days ago -- doesn't necessarily register on the first go-round.

People are conditioned to accept this power dynamic as "natural." Challenges to it are deeply discomforting. Most of the time, most people will abide by the rules and the structure of the power dynamic on display last night at Davis and will not challenge it. To do so is not just threatening to Power, it is a threat to ones own comfort and safety. Challenges to this power dynamic will be met with brutality and worse.

Never mind that that was the topic of discussion last night.

Discussing it in the way it was discussed last night does nothing about it. Promises were made by the panel nonetheless on behalf of "changing policies." Yes, well. That's nice and all, but it is also deliberately meaningless. The students couldn't even get the panelists to describe what the current policy is.

Indeed, they were shocked to learn that no one on the stage was responsible for the actions of the UC Police in last Friday's Incident, and that the police do not report to the Chancellor, and that she has no direct control over them at all. "Then who does?" the multitude demanded to know. She couldn't quite say, she didn't really know the title of the person who did have responsibility, some Vice Chancellor of Something Or Other, he was in the room, over there somewhere....

It was a remarkable moment. But typical. Typical. Typical.

"Never reveal your actual lines of Authority, or if you must reveal them, do so in a manner that confuses the masses; be prepared to change those lines of Authority suddenly."

So the Vice Chancellor of Something or Other was found and brought to the stage and spoke briefly from the podium, complaining that his "portfolio" had been expanded a couple of years ago when the number of Vice Chancellors was reduced, and supervision of the UC Police on campus was dropped in his lap, oh poor pitiful me.

Oh, and he'd come to the University from the Bay Area, where he had served as Assistant City Manager (OMG!) somewhere (it's in the video, I'll try to review it later today and clarify) Yes, better to clarify. Having reviewed the video, I'm kind of gobsmacked. This man was City Manager of Davis before taking up his role at UC, and I think there may be an unpleasant connection between him and a relative. I'm not sure, however, so I will say no more about it. His thinking was... or "the University's thinking" was... that they were looking at Oakland, and what happened there, and to a lesser extent at UC Berkeley, and they didn't want that to happen at UC Davis, so some of the decisions that were made about policing the Occupy demonstrations at Davis were based on what had happened in Oakland -- he said "Oakland!" many times. "Maybe it wasn't the right decision."

Ya think?

And?

"Well, it didn't go the way we'd hoped last Friday."

YA THINK??!

It was a revelatory moment but not particularly instructive. Well, it was instructive if you knew how to process it. The UC Police, effectively, are run out of an obscure office, by someone no one knows, on behalf of relatively shadowy interests, essentially independently of the rest of the University's operations, and their actions are based on "fears" of what might-could happen, because something happened somewhere else that they didn't want to repeat.

In other words, it's a DHS-type operation.

If you parse his commentary sufficiently, you see that the police were sent in as a riot squad because that's how the police are "supposed to" address this kind of encampment defiance by students. Policy, in other words. But what happened at Berkeley when the UC Police went berserk backfired, and they didn't want a repeat of that. It looked bad for one thing. Brought discredit to the University. Yadda yadda. So. The decision of how to break up the demonstration was left to the field commander of the operation -- Lt. Pike -- with the understanding that batons were not to be used except defensively, and only if absolutely necessary if the officers were attacked by the demonstrators.

If the demonstration had to be broken up, some other tactic had to be used. Pepper spray? Well, that's always good! Yes! Let's do pepper spray! Yay!

(It has been pointed out that the spray that was actually used was most likely bear repellant -- though some have denied it -- but that in any case it may have been far stronger than "normal" pepper spray.)

Of course the operational details would be left to the field commanders.

The fact that this Vice Chancellor came to the University from the city manager realm rather than the academic realm is vitally important. In California, police forces are mostly under the authority of the appointed City Managers, not the mayors or elected city councils.

This was something Occupy Sacramento learned very late in the game it seemed to me; though I and others had pointed it out numerous times, the notion did not actually click until the Mayor Himself said so at the disastrous GA he attended.

What this Vice Chancellor was afraid of what that the Occupy demonstration would "get out of hand" -- the same fear at UC Berkeley, BTW -- and "become like Oakland."

There's a whole world view involved in the idea of "becoming like Oakland." Ultimately, a statement like that has nothing to do with the Occupy Movement; it has to do with deep and abiding prejudice against the People of Oakland, many of whom aren't exactly white.

Many of those who are white in Oakland are social/political radicals.

Visit almost any UC campus today and you perhaps will notice that a large proportion of the student body... isn't... white.

You will note, too, that most of the administrators... are.

In other words, many UC campuses may look more "like Oakland" than many of the administrators are comfortable with.

And that discomfort with the People is a consistent issue within the City Manager realm. By and large they are not at all comfortable with the demographic changes going on in California.

Enough said about that.

Katehi was challenged on her experience as a student in Athens when the University she was attending was attacked by the fascist military junta -- and on her recent advisory role on behalf of the Greek government's revision of the University's asylum policy. She got very heated. This was one of the only times she became animated. Most of the time, she was just "tired."

She said that the students who rebelled in 1973 were "mainstream" not radicals at all. On the other hand, the University has been burnt to the ground "twice" she said, by "anarchists" since then. All the Universities in Greece have been "taken over" by "anarchists," she said, and the policies she advised the Greek government on recently had to do with restoring control of the Universities to the People and restoring a "safe" academic environment for the students. She did not advise the (Socialist! she pointed out) Greek government to put police forces back on the campuses the way they had been during the dictatorship.

[Note: from what I have been able to find out, her story is... not entirely true. This is a story of what happened in 1973. I won't get into the details here, but you can read some of eyewitness accounts of what was happening in Athens in December, 2008 -- which is when the anarchists took over the Polytechnic briefly -- here, here, here, here, and here.]

Yes. Well.

A whole other realm of interests and ideas opened up with this sequence.

This fear of "anarchists taking over" is perhaps the key to understanding why so much brutality has been unleashed on Occupy demonstrations so consistently in so many places all over the country and all over the world, and why it was so casually unleashed at UC Berkeley and then at UC Davis. (Not to mention all the other campuses that have experienced police assaults lately -- and there have been many.)

"Anarchists" are the New Terrorists.

Make no mistake.

That's the God-forsaken Truth.

We are all so far over the cliff and down the rabbit hole now that it sometimes seems there is no way back to sanity.

Yet the Revolution abides.

It's going to take me much longer than I have this morning to process all of this into any sort of coherent form. But the Bigger Picture of what is going on is becoming clearer.

I'd love to hear how others see the dynamics in the video above.

What We Got Here Is: Failure To Communicate

Those of us of a certain age will recall this scene in "Cool Hand Luke" with a kind of visceral body memory of what it was like for many people in those days. This was 1967, remember. (The year the picture was released, not the year depicted therein.)

The "normal world" had come apart at the seams, all hell had broken loose, and the response of Authority was increasingly arbitrary brutality. This was supposed to calm things down, and of course all it did was make things worse.

There was rebellion and revolution in the air, everywhere around the world, and it would only grow in the coming years. 1968, of course, was a Year of Revolution -- strangely, not all that different than 2011, except that this year's upheavals seem to be making some headway against the Overclass.

The dénouement remains to be seen.

I'm still puzzling over why the Incident at UC Davis has had such a profound effect on the decent respect for the opinion of mankind whereas the Incident at UC Berkeley did not. That's not to say the Berkeley Incident did not have an effect -- it did, absolutely, as do all these incidents of police brutality being recorded everywhere. But the Incident at UC Davis seems to have taken on a life of its own for reasons I'm not entirely sure of.

This is one of the longest videos of the Incident at UC Davis currently available:



It shows some aspects of what happened that aren't necessarily visible in the shorter video clips. For one thing the infamous Officer Lt. Pike who delivers the "red substance" blast (we assume it's pepper spray or something similar) rather cheerfully discusses what's going on with one of the student demonstrators -- the bearded fellow in the dark hoodie -- who is also quite jolly.

After consultations with another officer and some radio back-and-forth between Officer Lt. Pike and... someone... Officer Lt. Pike apparently announces to the bearded demonstrator what is about to happen: ie, the use of chemical agents to break the demonstrator chain, and the demonstrator says, "You're going to shoot us for sitting here?" The Officer's response isn't heard, but the demonstrator then says, "Yah, that's fine, that's fine." The crowd then chants "Don't shoot students! Don't shoot students!"

The crowd then advises those on the protest line to cover themselves, protect themselves. It's obvious everyone knows what is coming, but I'm not at all sure they are prepared for the injuries to come -- in fact, I don't think they have prepared for this aspect of the non-violent demonstration at all. This is one of the things that has bothered me about many of the protests and demonstration that have occurred over the last year in this country: many of the demonstrators barely have any knowledge of non-violent resistance tactics, and they rarely seem to be prepared for the violence and brutality that is unleashed on them by Authority. They often don't have medics, sometimes they don't even have milk on hand to wash off the sprayed chemicals used against them.

This isn't always the case, of course. In Seattle and Oakland, for example, where they are used to living under quasi-martial law, they are typically better prepared. But at Davis, they weren't.

Back in the Old Days, something called Non-Violent Resistance Training was routine in Civil Rights, End the War and other demonstrations. People who were not prepared for the violence of Authority were generally encouraged not to participate. It was never wise -- and I think it still isn't wise -- to enter into these things blindly.

In the video above, we see that Officer Lt. Pike, after apparently explaining to the demonstrator what is about to happen, then makes quite a show of his pepper spray canister by shaking it vigorously, holding it above his head and waving it around. This causes the demonstrator-witnesses to scream "Stop! Stop!"

Note: there is another officer behind Officer Lt. Pike who also is making a display of his own canister of pepper spray. This officer will later use his pepper spray on the demonstrators when Pike's canister runs out, and he may be the one who is actually forcing the pepper spray down people's throats. It's hard to see exactly what he is doing, but he appears to be using his spray canister selectively in short bursts rather than in wide general sweeps as Pike does.

The demonstrators start chanting "Don't shoot your children!" before Officer Lt. Pike commences to spray them, "like cockroaches" as some people say. The spraying itself is preceded by additional officers (they appear to be City of Davis officers) pushing back the crowd from in front of the sitting demonstrators (who have mostly covered themselves in preparation for being hit with pepper spray.) This had to be coordinated somehow. I would assume it was done through radio communications between the UC Police and Davis Police.

Officer Lt. Pike then makes quite a show of pushing out his chin, a la Mussolini, releasing the safety pin of his pepper spray canister and shaking it some more before he steps over the demonstrators and commences to spray. And spray. And spray. Until it is empty.

The demonstrators don't immediately react.

The police then manhandle the demonstrators, lifting them and pulling them apart until they have cleared a path through them.

(It is during this action that the Other Officer uses his pepper spray canister.)

It has been widely pointed out that because the officers still have to physically separate the demonstrators in order to make a path through them, the use of pepper spray was entirely egregious and superfluous. In other words, it was a useless and deliberately cruel action on the part of Officer Lt. Pike and the other officer who used pepper spray that day.

It has also been pointed out that the officers were always completely capable of stepping over the sitting demonstrators any time they wanted; they were never at any time under any threat from the demonstrators whatsoever. That seems to be clear in the video above.

The UC Police have claimed that they were "surrounded" by demonstrators and they "could not get out" without the use of pepper spray. True enough, they were surrounded by sitting, arm-linked demonstrators. The police have also said they were attempting to transport an arrested demonstrator (who cannot be seen in the video posted above but who is visible in another video posted below) when they were surrounded by sitting, arm-linked demonstrators.

The question is not whether they were surrounded -- they were. The question is whether they had options. And clearly they did.

Police in these -- and most -- circumstances have a great deal of discretion of action, and one of the most obvious things they could have done to de-escalate this particular incident was to release the demonstrator they were holding in the midst of their own circle. Yes, they can do that.

They could have quite easily stepped over the demonstrators -- as Officer Lt. Pike does in order to use his chemical agent canister against them.

They could have waited the demonstrators out.

They could have physically separated the demonstrators without the use of any other physical force at all.

So on and so on and so on.

In other words, there was no requirement that they injure the demonstrators.

Not at all.

But they chose to do that, just as the officers in New York and Oakland and Berkeley and Denver and many other cities and campuses have chosen to injure demonstrators rather than de-escalate the situation.

Which gets us back to the clip from "Cool Hand Luke." It is the self-same imposition of Authority going on in all these instances. It is surpassingly stupid.

Rather than de-escalate, nearly all the Authorities, when confronted with non-violent resistance, choose to escalate and brutalize demonstrators, causing injury at the least, and we can expect this commitment to escalation will cause death of demonstrators -- as it has already come close to doing.

This procedure of escalating violence against non-violent demonstrators is national, and some claim it is coordinated through various agencies of local, state and the federal government. Whether it is or not is an interesting detail, but the issue is that non-violence is met with official violence over and over again.

"Authority must be maintained."

Send out the Cossacks. Release the hounds. This rebellion is to be suppressed "by any means necessary."



Indeed.

--------------------------------

Ten Things You Should Know About Friday's UC Davis Police Violence

The Matter of Trust

Now hold on.

This is the Open Letter from Occupy Portland expressing dismay at their treatment by the police and the mayor:

15 November 2011

An Open Letter to Mayor Sam Adams:

We, as members of the Occupy Portland Liaison Team, are officially resigning from our roles as city and police liaisons for the Occupy Portland movement. This is in direct response to the deplorable police actions of this past weekend and your refusal to communicate clearly with us during that time.

We were specifically asked by City Hall to create this Liaison Team, for the purpose of facilitating clear communication between city government, police and the Occupy Portland movement. We worked hard to assemble a capable team of activists to act as a conduit of information as agreed upon by our General Assembly.

Initial meetings were amiable and seemingly productive, as your staff was able to express concerns, some of which we shared, about conditions within the encampment. We facilitated communication and followed up by working closely with city employees and our own volunteers to address issues relevant to camp safety.

Despite our efforts, over the weekend, you decided to cave to pressure from your friends at the Portland Business Alliance, the Police Association and other groups interested in maintaining the status quo of economic injustice and issued us an eviction notice. Instead of allowing us to address conditions within our encampment in a transparent and democratic way you chose to enlist the full apparatus of police repression to destroy our encampment.

There's more. A great deal more. But you get the idea.

I'm concerned that our friends in Portland don't have The Idea, and this may be a reason why there has been such despondence in Portland after The Raid, while there is such jubilation and even celebration elsewhere (New York and Oakland come to mind) after their camps were raided.

Our friends in Portland say they "trusted" the Mayor and the police.

My question is simply, "Why?"

Why does anyone involved with the Occupy Movement-Becoming-Revolution "trust" or "want to work with" or in any other way express unity or a desire for unity with the Powers That Be, whoever they may be?

Listen to Mario again:



That was the whole December 2, 1964, speech on the steps of Sproul Hall that led directly to the "Occupation" of Sproul Hall -- which in turn triggered all sorts of student rebellion and response through the remainder of the 1960's.

A couple of things must be noted: the protesters were IN active negotiations with the University administration when this Occupation took place. The Occupation of Sproul Hall was due to the betrayal by the administration and the University regents of the basic principles of fairness and good will with which the student protesters had approached the problem of Free Speech on and near the campus.

Note what Mario says about "liberals."

Today, we would refer to them as "progressives." '

In other words, in 1964, the progressive administration of the University was actively negotiating with and betraying the good will and trust of the students; this was quite a revelation at the time. People -- not just students -- who had been brought up in a "liberal" or what is now known as "progressive" environment all their lives were discovering a horrible truth: these people lie, they're violent, and they serve the interests of the corporatist war machine first and foremost. Their mission is to provide endless fodder for the machine they serve, forever, world without end, amen.

THIS WAS IN 1964.

It hasn't changed.

After numerous protests and sit-in/occupations and a good deal of violence by police toward the student protesters -- violence that would escalate, not just on campuses but in many cities and their segregated ghettos -- negotiations continued and a sort of ad hoc agreement was reached that more or less defused some of the immediate rationale for protest over "Free Speech" for a time.

In other words, Authority Pretended to Yield, students got some of what they wanted, things calmed down. Somewhat. For a while.

But we've seen -- haven't we? -- that the argument over Free Speech that began at Berkeley in September of 1964, when the University decided to enforce a prohibition on political action and speech on and near the campus (actually, there were precursors, but I won't get into those here, though I have posted on some of it previously), has by no means ended.

Nor did it end at Berkeley when the administration was forced to make some concessions back in 1964 and 1965.

"Power concedes nothing" and all of that, but there is more to it than that. "Power" can be "liberal" or "conservative" or something else, it doesn't matter. You cannot trust Power under any circumstances. Except to trust that Power will be abused and that abuse will be directed at you.

That's it. Period. The Ideology of Power is always the same. It is in favor of itself and opposed to you. It doesn't matter -- at all -- what the political party designation of Power is, and it doesn't matter at all what superficial "agreements" are made. It is always the same: if you insist on being in the way, you will be crushed. Your only options are to stifle yourself or become absorbed by the Borg.

When you take that insight to heart -- and I've never been sure Mario ever did, or if he did, then I guess he was comfortable being "absorbed" -- it doesn't matter what Power does; everything Power does merely reinforces the point of the protest.

Power does not negotiate in good faith.

Ever.

You cannot trust Power. Ever.

The point of a Revolution is to replace Power -- not to become part of it and not to negotiate with it.

And this is the tough part, the hardest part of all. It's been done many times in the past, but how to do it is never known in advance.

Whether to do it at all is still part of the internal struggle of the Movement.

David Graeber may have some useful insights.

But it's tough. Mario ultimately couldn't do what was really necessary, nor were most of the Revolutionary Upstarts of My Day really up to the challenge they set for themselves. Most were either absorbed -- or paid for their fervor with their lives.

I don't know how far the current Revolutionaries are prepared to go, and I don't think the answer will be found in this country. Americans are the followers in this Revolutionary Era not the leaders.

This Is Awful -- The Man Shot at UC Berkeley the Other Day Was a Student

There was no way to tell from the initial reports what happened -- except that a man had been shot at the Haas School of Business in the computer lab. He supposedly had a gun.

This is who it was:



He was a transfer student, 32 years old, from Ohlone College who had been working as a security guard and shift supervisor while attending UC Berkeley -- apparently with the intention of improving his prospects and career path.

According to reports, a woman spotted a gun in his backpack as she was riding the elevator with him. She reported it to her supervisor who called UC Police. He was located in the computer lab in the building -- where he was shot. At first, the report was that he was shot once and was wounded. Then reports came out that he was shot numerous times (9 or 10?) and had died at the hospital.

As for what really happened in that computer lab, there is supposedly at least one and possibly more video records of the incident. What they show, if anything, is unknown since as of last night, the video(s) hadn't been released.

But it is fair to be skeptical of anything anybody says about what happened, especially including what the UC Police are saying (and they have been the source of nearly all the information so far.)

To say they have a tendency to fudge the truth is to be charitable. I would remind the gentle reader of the statement of Sergeant Margo Bennett just the other day regarding "not non-violence."

"The individuals who linked arms and actively resisted, that in itself is an act of violence," UC police Capt. Margo Bennett said. "I understand that many students may not think that, but linking arms in a human chain when ordered to step aside is not a nonviolent protest."

Here's a somewhat more detailed discussion of that little Gem of Police Wisdom.

And at some point, this shit has got stop.

Dignity. Justice. Community. Peace.

Next Up: Berkeley

The cowards who pass for Regents of the University were supposed to hold their meeting in San Francisco tomorrow. They got a report from the UC Police that there might be some unpleasantness having to do with the recent tumult at the UC Berkeley campus -- and other things -- so they advised the Regents to postpone their meeting.

This they promptly voted to do. Can't have any unpleasantness. Ick.

This is the story in the Daily Californian.

This is the Press Release announcing their cowadice:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Monday, Nov. 14, 2011
UC Office of the President
(510) 987-9200

Announcement from UC Board of Regents leadership

The following announcement was released today (Monday, Nov. 14, 2011) by Sherry Lansing, chair of the University of California Board of Regents, Vice Chair Bruce Varner and President Mark G. Yudof:

Late last week University of California law enforcement officials came to us with concerns about credible intelligence they had collected in advance of the Board of Regents meeting, scheduled for Wednesday and Thursday (Nov. 16 and 17) at the UC San Francisco Mission Bay campus.

From various sources they had received information indicating that rogue elements intent on violence and confrontation with UC public safety officers were planning to attach themselves to peaceful demonstrations expected to occur at the meeting.

They believe that, as a result, there is a real danger of significant violence and vandalism. They have advised us further that this violence could place at risk members of the public, students lawfully gathered to voice concerns over tuition levels and any other issues, the UCSF community, including patients, and public safety officers, UC staff and neighbors of UCSF Mission Bay.

They recommended to us, in the strongest of terms, that we cancel or postpone the meeting as scheduled.

After further consultation with these law enforcement officers, we have decided that, in fact, the most prudent course for us would be to postpone this meeting and reschedule it for another time and, possibly, an alternate venue. Failure to do so might constitute a reckless disregard of credible law enforcement intelligence. Ensuring public safety must be a top priority.

By rescheduling, it is our intent to allow the business of the University of California to go forward, but in a manner that will allow the public, including students, to express their views on issues related to the university without putting their personal safety in peril.

We will be announcing a new schedule for this meeting as soon as possible. We will not elaborate further on the law enforcement intelligence that prompted us to postpone, and we have asked our police officials to do the same.

Finally, we want to point out that the agenda for this meeting included updates from UC staff members on several initiatives that have been launched in an effort to offset state disinvestment in the university, providing alternate revenue streams beyond tuition and taxpayer support. This work will continue to go forward. Contrary to some public misperceptions, a tuition increase was never a part of the agenda for this meeting.

The arrogance -- and cowardice -- of the UC Board of Regents was legendary back in the Olden Days, but this announcement makes me believe it is even worse now than it was then.

Student Regents had a different take:

An Open Letter to Students, Administrators, Faculty, and the Regents:

The leadership of the Board of Regents has chosen to cancel this week’s Regents meeting. This letter addresses that decision, the recent protests on UC campuses, the continued defunding of public higher education by the State of California, and recent police brutality at UC Berkeley.
The State of California’s unprecedented and short-sighted divestment from public higher education is a disastrous moral and economic choice. In the short term, it hurts students. In the long term, it will hurt all Californians.

The University of California is a nationwide leader in educating students who are the first in their families to go to college, students who come from underserved communities, and first-generation students who are the children of immigrants. Collectively and through sacrifice, the State of California has built an institution that excels at providing a world-class education to students who have faced the greatest challenges to access it.

And yet the State is choosing to tear that institution down. The State of California cut the UC by $650 million in the past year, with a $100 million trigger cut likely on the way. These latest cuts come on the heels of decades of declining funding. The cost is felt first and foremost by students, who face nothing but bad choices: work multiple jobs to make ends meet, take out enormous loans that will be paid back in a terrible job market, or drop out and pursue an education somewhere cheaper or not at all. Generations of Californians attended an excellent UC at low or no cost; today, those same Californians are forcing the next generation of students to attend a university under threat, and at a high and rising cost. It is privatization of our greatest public good, and a morally bankrupt choice on the part of our citizens and our state government.

It is also a short-sighted economic choice. For decades, the University of California has fueled this state’s economic success, by driving innovation and entrepreneurship and graduating thousands of highly skilled workers into the California economy. Defunding this institution may ease our budget problems today, but doing so will bear bitter fruit for decades to come, as we become a less attractive destination for businesses and entrepreneurs. Cutting the UC hurts every Californian’s opportunity to get a well-paying job, decreases our future tax revenues, and delays or prevents entirely the research breakthroughs that advance our society and our economy.

The Student Regent and Student Regent-Designate support the actions of students who call attention to the privatization of public education through courageous and peaceful protest. The police violence at UC Berkeley on November 9 was reprehensible and ought to be condemned, not defended, by campus and systemwide administration. We have additional concerns about freedom of speech – on the day of the protests, a Berkeley Law student was stopped by police officers while far from the events at Sproul Plaza simply for carrying a megaphone. When she was unable to produce a student ID, she was handcuffed, placed in a squad car, and cited for a misdemeanor. Free speech and providing equitable access to education have been hallmarks of the UC and particularly UC Berkeley — by suppressing speech that advocates for education access, we do violence to two of our most cherished principles.

The Student Regent and Student Regent-Designate oppose the decision to cancel this week’s Regents meeting. We understand that local law enforcement authorities recommended the meeting be postponed in the interest of public safety. However, students have a right to protest peacefully and make their voices heard forcefully; this action eliminates their opportunity to do that. We would support finding a way for student attendees to exercise their constitutional and moral right to protest while excluding non-student elements that raise the specter of violence and vandalism. We urge students who had made plans to travel to San Francisco for the Regents meeting to travel to Sacramento instead, and make student frustrations known to the state’s ultimate decision-makers.

To fund the University of California, the State needs revenues. The Student Regent and Student Regent-Designate support ending Proposition 13’s treatment of corporate property taxes and ending the two-thirds supermajority requirement for raising new revenues in the state legislature. The Student Regent and Student Regent-Designate also support increasing taxes on the wealthiest Californians. Those at the top of California society have benefited the most from the fact that California is a vibrant, innovative, and diverse place; in times of struggle, they should give back to make sure that other Californians have the same opportunities to succeed that they did.

We hope that our fellow Regents and the administration of the UC will be forceful advocates for new revenues for state government. To not do so leaves us with only a single, cynical choice every year: submit a funding request to the State and lobby for it despite knowing Sacramento is unlikely to meet it; search internally for savings after yet another budget cut that we knew was coming; and fill the balance of our budget deficit on the backs of students, pushing those in the middle class further to the margins.

We have a responsibility to fight for an alternative. Students are leading the way. We hope that the University of California and its leadership can join students in the fight to preserve truly public higher education for all our citizens. As the Student Regent and Student Regent-Designate, we have a responsibility to be the students who partner with the Regents and the University’s top decisions-makers. We will continue to advocate from within the system for the principles and beliefs driving student energy and passion.

Alfredo Mireles
Student Regent

Jonathan Stein
Student Regent-Designate

Meanwhile, his Excellency the Chancellor of the University, has had something of a change of heart -- after students and others filed lawsuits and denounced him and the UC Police for their appalling brutality against students:

Calling videos of the demonstrations “disturbing,” Birgeneau stated that all students arrested during the protest for blocking police officers will be granted amnesty and will not face charges under the student code of conduct.

“The events of last Wednesday are unworthy of us as a university community,” Birgeneau said in the message. “Sadly, they point to the dilemma that we face in trying to prevent encampments and thereby mitigate long-term risks to the health and safety of our entire community.”

Sure. Whatever.

Tomorrow is a Day of Action throughout the UC system; there are supposed to be strikes everywhere. What will actually transpire is anyone's guess. There are plenty of students in the UC system (and the related public university systems) who are delighted to see police brutality on campus or off. The tuition hikes don't phase them a bit.

We'll see...
-------------------------

As an addendum:

As of 8:00pm PST, over 1800 people had signed the Open Letter to Chancellor Birgeneau, the UC Berkeley administration, and the UC Regents, regarding the unpleasantness of November 9, 2011, when the UC Police went on a rampage.

The Open Letter reads as follows:

We, the undersigned faculty, lecturers, and graduate student assistants—all of whom teach at Berkeley and are invested in the educational mission of this university—are outraged by the unnecessary and excessive use of violence by the police and sheriff’s deputies against peaceful protesters at UC Berkeley beginning on Wednesday, November 9, 2011.

We will not tolerate this assault on the historic legacy of free speech on this campus.

The protests on Sproul Plaza on November 9 were organized by a coalition of undergraduates, graduates, faculty, union members, and staff to clearly articulate links between the privatization of the university, the global financial crisis, the burdens of student debt, and the composition and power of the UC Regents, whose actions demonstrate a lack of concern with sustaining the public character of the UC system. The principles of these protests reach well beyond the Berkeley campus.

After a large demonstration at Sproul and a march into the city of Berkeley, the protesters formed a General Assembly that called for a non-violent encampment under the name Occupy Cal. As the encampment was being established, protesters were immediately met with physical violence by the police, including the jabbing and striking of students and others with batons. This assault by UCPD and Alameda County riot police against those peacefully assembled led to the forcible arrests of 39 protesters and one faculty member. Associate Professor Celeste Langan offered her wrist to the police in surrender, saying “arrest me, arrest me,” but was nevertheless aggressively pulled by her hair to the ground and cuffed. This began a series of tense confrontations—punctuated by further police violence—that lasted throughout the night and has persisted on our campus. The spectacle of police brutalizing members of our community does inestimable damage to our integrity, our reputation, and our standing as a public university.

We are appalled by the Chancellor’s account, in his November 10 “Message to the Campus Community,” that the police were “forced to use their batons.” We strenuously object to the charge that protesters—by linking arms and refusing to disperse—engaged in a form of “violence” directed at law enforcement. The protests did not justify the overwhelming use of force and severe bodily assault by heavily armed officers and deputies. Widely-circulated documentation from videos, photographs, and TV news outlets make plainly evident the squad tactics and individual actions of members of the UCPD and Alameda County Sheriff’s Department. This sends a message to the world that UC Berkeley faculty, staff, and student protesters are regarded on their own campus with suspicion and hostility rather than treated as participants in civil society.

We call on the Berkeley administration to immediately put an end to these grotesquely out-scale police responses to peaceful protest. We insist that the administration abandon the premise that the rigid, armed enforcement of a campus regulation, in circumstances lacking any immediate threat to safety, justifies the precipitous use of force.

We call upon the Chancellor to comply fully and in a timely manner with the Public Record Act request made in writing by the ACLU on November 10. We also call upon the Chancellor to initiate an independent investigation, separate from that to be undertaken by the campus Police Review Board, to ensure a fair review of events and procedures to prevent such attacks on free speech from happening in the future.

We also express our concern with the repressive policing that has occurred around the wider Occupy Wall Street movement—including Occupy Oakland, where undue force has led to numerous injuries such as those sustained by Iraq veteran Scott Olsen. In solidarity with Occupy Cal and the Occupy movements around the country, we condemn these police acts unequivocally.

We call for greater attention to the substantive issues raised at the protests on November 9 regarding the privatization of education. With massive cuts in state funding and rising tuition costs across the community college system, the Cal State network, K-12, and the University of California, public education is undergoing a severe divestment. Student debt has reached unprecedented levels as bank profits swell. We decry the growing privatization and tuition increases that are currently heavily promoted by the corporate UC Board of Regents.

We express NO CONFIDENCE in the Regents, who have failed in their responsibility to fight for state funding for public education, and have placed the burden of the budget crisis on the backs of students.

We express NO CONFIDENCE in the willingness of the Chancellor, and other leaders of the UC Berkeley administration, to respond appropriately to student protests, to secure student welfare, and to respect freedom of speech and assembly on the Berkeley campus.


Signed,
Julia Bryan-Wilson, Associate Professor, History of Art
Peter Glazer, Associate Professor, Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies
Gregory Levine, Associate Professor, History of Art

[And here I thought I was verbose!]

Most of those who have signed, by the way, are current active UC faculty, grad students, and workers. And as many have pointed out, this is really an astonishing response given the real risks to their academic careers -- and even their department fortunes -- many of these people are taking. It was an astonishing response when there were only 600 signatories. Now, with over 3 times that many, it's stunning.