NYC: RNC/LEGAL
Post-RNC Fallout
19 Apr 2005 00:13 GMTOver seven months after last summer's protest against the Republican National Convention in New York City, the truth is finally coming out about how the City treated protesters. The charges against Josh Banno, wrongly arrested in connection with the "green dragon fire", were dropped on Friday, April 15. As well, The National Lawyers Guild announced on Friday that the city is to pay 230, 000 dollars in contempt of court charges for their slowness in releasing arrested protesters. Evidence provided by video activists has cleared over 400 of the 1806 arrestees, including some non-protesters caught up in police sweeps. And a front page story in the New York Times largely confirmed 4 months of postings to NYC IMC documenting police perjury and the doctoring of evidence.
However, the Times has yet to investigate the questions raised on NYC IMC about Pier 57, or "Guantanamo on the Hudson", primary city detention center during the RNC. Documents obtained by imcistas show both the City's use of Pier 57 violated its written lease agreement and that the Hudson River Park Trust, controlling authority for the Pier, was aware that the pier contained asbestos, lead and fire hazards. Arrestees posting to the NYC IMC newswire have claimed to be suffering from chemical burns and other ailments as a result of their detention at Pier 57.
More about the RNC at:: Indymedia.us | Portland IMC
What front page story?
freeyourmind 20.Apr.2005 15:48
I can't find this front page NY Times story. I've followed the link, and I've searched nytimes.com. Was it only in the print version?
Denial and Pretend Conscious Fool No One
z bemused 20.Apr.2005 23:23
These Middle Class Pretend Protests against Pretend Problems in a Pretend World - Where the Activists pretend to understand - The USA is so weird and no where weirder than in activist circles...
North American Activist Denial and Dishonesty Lead to Demobilization and Genocide:
By Everything is a Weapon/Total Resistance is the Road to Sanity
The numbers of anti-Imperialist resisters in North America have gotten smaller, yet the global resistance grows larger. The situation is more stark globally speaking, but more of the half-hearted US activists stay home. We should be supporting the Iraqi resistance, why? Because the US is never going to leave the region until the oil is gone and all the people in the greater region are subdued or dead. This fate is as true for Palestine and Lebanon as it is for Iran and Pakistan. The only moral position for the Resistance anywhere is the removsal of all US troops and influence from the greater region.
This is not only a struggle against cultural annihilation, but to elevate the needs of nations and the environment above that of the needs of oil (the lifeblood of imperialism). It is not only anti-war, it is inherently anti-capitalist. The reality of capitalism is that it aims for limitless production in a limited environment. Oil production, currently at an all-time high of 84 million barrels per day, cannot be pushed much higher and neither can it be sustained indefinitely. Declining US production means a more savage neo-liberal ravaging of the third world for energy resources.
The relationship between industrialized and developing or indigenous nations has always been that of predator and prey. The first world nations have cannibalized their own endowment of resources and are now dependent upon external sources to fuel their economies. Through debt, coup, and outright invasion, the interwoven military-industrial-finance complex has deliberately held developing and indigenous populations in check, so that they might not apply their resources to their own development.
This "final-solution" stage of capitalism is a self-perpetuating process in which growth equals survival for the capitalist paradigm. Every imperialist conflict the West has engaged in has this terrible need at the root of it - culminating in the current war in Central Asia (Afghanistan, Iraq, soon to be Iran) Oil is transportation, industrial agriculture, plastics, medicines, asphalt, cosmetics... everything we produce, consume, buy, and throw away - everything that differentiates the first world from it's victims. If we oppose the war, we cannot ignore that our lifestyle demands a constant flow of wealth from the impoverished to the wealthy nations, and war is the means to achieve this.
The level of material wealth that America expropriates from the rest of the planet cannot feasibly be shared by other developing powers. American oil consumption stands at fully a quarter of world use, though it has only 5% of the world's population. Emerging industrial nations seeking to attain the per-capita oil use of the US will inevitably create conflict over diminishing resources. The fastest growing economy on the planet is China, whose oil consumption is growing at a similar rate. For China's one billion people to enjoy the same per-capita oil use would require a doubling of world oil production. That is physically impossible, equivalent to eight additional Saudi Arabias pumping oil at maximum capacity. The capitalist dream of unlimited growth is on a collision course with the ecological limitations of the planet, and competition for those diminishing resources is the catalyst for a new World War.
The current conflict is being waged with a morbid indifference to public opinion and fiscal sanity. The oil reserves that will sustain American consumption in the coming decades are being contested in nationalist struggles of every character. Resistance to imperialism is flourishing in every corner of the world. However, it is not the resolution of individual injustices but the entire economic order of things that is at stake as sovereign peoples rise up and assert that their land and its wealth exist for their benefit, not their exploitation.
Venezuela has begun to take the notion of a revolution seriously. The measures being taken are among the most inspiring yet performed anywhere in history. The barrios are alight with massive literacy campaigns, health clinics sprouting up everywhere, new universities built for the entire region. The military has started to carry out an actual land reform process, albeit slowly. How to defend all of this? Venezuela has begun training citizens basic military self-defence maneuvers, as the American hostility to the revolution grows deeper every day. Venezuela is more dangerous to the Empire than any other country in the world: democratic, successful, advancing the conditions of the people, this process is providing "the threat of a good example"-and Venezuela is not naïve about the need to defend itself.
Record global oil prices continue to buoy the programs of social housing, hyper-democracy and land redistribution. These prices will never drop again, thus meaning the outright destruction of the revolution will only grow on the priority list for the Pentagon-all the more now that the revolution has declared itself socialist, placing the Bolivarians and Hugo Chavez at the front of global alternatives.
Meanwhile, "our" anti-war movement continues to play body count: We count the American GI's in the morgue, and count the civilians who are in the streets. While the rest of the world, through resistance and revolutionary upsurge, are able to demonstrate an alternative vision, we can't even articulate one. We don't speak here of a need for rigid blueprints, but rather to think about the state of global energy resources so as to allow us to think realistically about a new alternative. If we are in denial about what the conditions are that we organize in, then we are organizing a giant lie. There is no way out for an imperialism fully dependent on oil reserves. Yet our slogans are things like "No blood for oil" and "money for housing, not war". It's as if we want to believe that housing money isn't a direct result of war!
When oil pipelines are attacked in Iraq by resistance fighters, when the Niger Delta-located Ijaw people declare all Shell refinery employees military targets, these people show an understanding of two things: one that they understand what drives the assault on all people throughout the world, from the Arctic to the Equator. Two: that they see no real ally in the first world, what with our entire program a giant basic lie.
There is no return to the life of mass consumption of the American Dream. This war is a Wolfowitzian stalling tactic, and it's working. What's our alternative? When our mass movement declares "money for homes not bombs", the population of both the US and the rest of the world can safely ignore us, knowing as they do we are locked in a massive time warp. Further, this more than anything else is why the numbers of the demonstrators in the streets dwindled to embarrassingly low levels in many cities this "second anniversary". We should not celebrate these dates as if we were engaged to the war!
A few months ago, on the day that George W Bush entered Canadian soil on Nov 30, ironically five years to the day after the Battle of Seattle, a small, shadowy group attempted to blow up Hydro Quebec power lines that supplied energy to New York state, from dams that were built on Indian land in James Bay. The Initiative de Resistance Internationaliste (IRI) declared they did not want the weight of the resistance to imperialism to fall on the shoulders of the "noble Iraqi people, the Colombians and the Palestinians". The action was a failure, garnering little to no attention except from the same people who want to impose smart card national ID's on us all.
Neither did the act inspire anything because the North American anti-war movement is frightfully passive and cowed. So long as our movement continues to leave the struggle to the shoulders of all the rest of the world and the colonies within, this is inevitable. We need to stop lying, start strategizing about what ways might bring down imperialism on a global level-before imperialism brings down us all. And to do that, we must state we don't know what to do, because this situation has never been seen before.
We need to wrap our collective heads around exactly why it is impossible, completely unthinkable and a total non-starter to imagine street protests "forcing" a dwindling energy imperialist monster into a retreat. You can't simply talk a tiger into vegetarianism; you have to cage it or kill it. And we are doing so basically without arms. Therefore we must be good at learning. Let's be as serious and as humble as we can: We know nothing, that's the first piece of profound knowledge of our movement on our path to freedom.
When we have a strategy that really speaks to the systemic, terminal crisis that late exterminist imperialism is taking us all into, when we articulate this in a way that invites the people of both North America and the rest of the enslaved planet to fight this petroleum hydra and all the heads, by instead going after the heart of the beast, then more than a mere few windows at a Starbucks will quake and shatter; when the people who own this world as a part of it see a way out that actually relates to what they know in their very soul, the piddly explosions of a few hydro towers will be mere amusement.
The explosions you hear will be not of towers, but of a new dawn awakening. In other words, it will not be "money for schools, not bombs!" but an education itself that explodes through our continuing hypocrisy. We need to, in a word, trust; Trust the population to handle the truth. If we can't, then all we have done is for naught.
...threats have forced Shell to close one of its plants. Some weeks it must reduce output by millions of barrels and evacuated its workers. Other oil companies are keeping a careful eye on developments and preparing to do the same as Shell if necessary. In reality what is happening is that the Nigerian army is stepping up its operations and the oil companies have strengthened their armed guards to make sure production continues as much as possible. The response of the regime has always been absolutely ruthless. It would send in the troops and butcher hundreds in response to one kidnapping.
Post Script:
After you finish debating impossibles, consider the weaknesses of the Empire and what strategies could exploit and unbalance some of these.
Look for places that energy will leverage and tip the balance. Latin America is a milk cow of the empire and the US Hispanic vote could determine how severe the American right wing dares. Combining these two struggles with a new morality that combines social and personal responsibilities is the course.
Finding reputable new leaders to develop a new strategies and carry it forward is challenging. As you say, telling the truth is the first step along with admitting that our past actions and present direction are failures leading us to nowhere.
The pro-technology liberals who think of themselves as "progressives" are one of the most effective allies of George Bush. They steer the debate away from structural changes and over to flawed fantasies of global scientific applied industrialization for a globalized new world order. One that the rich will still dominate and bide their time in.
amen!
booger 26.Apr.2005 21:43
bmused is absolutely correct. Lets take example from Ecuador. Bring the war (against global capitalism) home.