28/10/20:

US, Washington DC: 2nd night of clashes after moped “accident”

27/10/20:

US, Philadelphia: fury after cops kill black guy armed with knife in the City of Brotherly Love… Video of cops on the run here…a lot more here

“ most of the injuries to officers that occurred overnight are reported to be the result of being struck by projectiles, such as bricks and rocks. One officer, however, a 56-year-old Philadelphia Police Sergeant, was struck by a pickup truck in the area of 52nd and Walnut streets around 12:45 a.m. Tuesday. Officials said she sustained a broken leg and various other injuries. She has been admitted to the hospital in stable condition.…The 29 other officers have reportedly been treated and released from area hospitals. Looting was captured on on video Tuesday morning. Chopper 6 was overhead as people could be seen running from a Foot Locker store…Hours after the shooting, a group broke windows and vandalized vehicles along 52nd and Pine streets in West Philadelphia. The group is also believed to be responsible for broken windows at a number of buildings in University City, including a police station and a Starbucks. In West Philadelphia, dumpsters were set on fire as police struggled to contain the crowds late Monday night. More than a dozen officers, many with batons in hand, formed a line as they ran down 52nd Street chasing protesters away from the main thoroughfare…At least 10 ATM machines were damaged late Monday and early Tuesday in Philadelphia, police said.” 

…Washington DC: clashes with cops after young man dies in moped “accident”

…Brief Crimethinc election text “Everybody Out!”

25/10/20:

US, New York: clashes during election rally; protestors throw eggs at Giuliani’s car More here

You can’t make a troublesomelette without breaking eggs. “Videos showed the activists ripping flags off of cars in the convoy led by Giuliani, and throwing red paint and punches as they faced off with President Donald Trump’s supporters”.

US: the idiocy of liberal gun control advocates

X writes:

Interesting how these avant garde of domestication types always remind us of the right-wingers who have guns, and only mention, without drawing the obvious implications, that the fascist sheriffs, cops, ICE, Bureau of Prisons’ Special Forces, etc. – all in Trump’s camp, all supporters of the right wing white’s/macho guy’s rugged individualism, are all heavily armed, and all protected by the state.

The only counter-balance to this is an armed citizenry, as was evident in Louisville – this was the only thing that kept the right-wing would-be murderers at bay. And that’s where things stand now.

The interviewee never mentions the times when armed workers fought to defend themselves against both government and mercenary gunmen, as they did again and again during the 19th and 20th centuries, at Homestead Steel in 1892 and Ludlow in 1913, and elsewhere. Without an armed population supporting the strikes and occupations back then, the toll of working people would have been far higher, and the hired gunmen of the companies and their friends in government would have been far freer in their brutal repressions. We should not for a minute forget that at the same time the militias of Max Holz and Karl Plattner were bravely fighting their rearguard actions against the rising tide of Social-Democratic sponsored proto-nazism, and the last protagonists of the Russian revolution were fighting their unequal struggles at Kronstadt and in the Ukraine, the redneck miners were marching on the mine owners and their backers at Blair Mountain in this country – and were being attacked, like their class siblings in Germany and Russia, with all the weapons of modern warfare.

The interviewee in this article, whether he says so or not, wants to see us disarmed, helpless and dependent on the slender reed of politicians like Biden, who make their livings lying to us, imprisoning us, and to overseeing our subjection and impoverishment.

This one-sidedness in the service of social pacification is service for the cause of slavery.

***

This, from Black Flag 1997, about the Albanian uprising seems relevant in this context (thanks to SK for pointing this out):

17/10/20:

US, Portland: cops use CS gas against protesters at ICE building on 126th night of protests

CS gas has particularly long-lasting effects. In 1977 I  went out with a woman who’d been CS gassed in Paris in 1968, and over 9 years later she still had eye problems that affected her focus in a way that glasses couldn’t rectify. However, an American friend has said he was subjected to CS gas recently and the effects were only immediate. So either they’re diluting it or using a different type of CS gas or the woman I knew was particularly sensitive to it or attributed eye problems following her being gassed in ’68 to CS gas when the problem merely coincided with the teargassing.

…San Francisco: fascists get thumped

“At about 1 p.m., Anderson took the stage. He was quickly greeted by a barrage of plastic water bottles and glass bottles thrown over the barricade. “You knocked my tooth out, but you’re saying Black lives matter,” said Anderson, who is Black. “I love America and I love this country, but I want free speech.” At least one Trump supporter was taken from the rally in an ambulance after being attacked by a counterprotester. His condition was not immediately known. The speech ended after about 15 minutes, and counterprotesters were left confronting a line of riot-gear-clad police…“… It’s not our job to be peaceful. You don’t get justice, you take justice.”

15/10/20:

Trump boasts of summary execution of antifascist

“Trump bragged about Reinoehl’s killing at a rally in North Carolina on Thursday, getting cheers for a description that sounded like a summary execution by the state.“We sent in the U.S. marshals, took 15 minutes and it was over,” Trump said. “They knew who he was, they didn’t want to arrest him, and 15 minutes, that ended.””

12/10/20:

US, California: statue of instigator of brutality against indigenous Americans who refused to convert to the usual brutality of monotheistic religion torn down on Columbus Day

On 17th October there was this report about the Archbishop of San Francisco performing an exorcism to cleanse the site of the protest.

X writes:

This is quite funny: an exorcism to drive evil spirits away, supposedly to protect the memory of a monster who set up a system of prison camps running the length of central and southern California in which to practice the doctrines of the Spanish Inquisition. No accident that the Native Americans burned the biggest one down. The richest line comes at the end of the article where the priest tells the reporter that “the experts in the field tell me that Latin is more effective against the devil because he doesn’t like the language of the church.” The Devil doesn’t like the language of an institution that murdered and tortured and burned books all the way across Europe and around the world? The language of Cato the Elder and Julius Caesar, of Caligula and Nero? The Devil doesn’t like it? A language steeped in the deaths and enslavements of millions before the barbarian Christians with their burning hatred of any knowledge that they couldn’t control or use to manipulate those whom they had subjugated, had even got their hands on it?

On July 16th the city had apparently decided to take down the statue but we can assume a Higher Being (Mel Gibson? Bono? Lady Gaga?…anyway, some Catholic or other) intervened.

11/10/20:

US, Portland: Oregon falsification of history society building smashed a bit, Lincoln and Theodor Roosevelt knocked off their pedestals by demonstrators celebrating Indigenous People’s Day

The eve of Columbus Day – Portland, Oregon – Lincoln loses his base:

Lincoln’s final resting place for those who here risked  their freedom that humanity might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that they should have done this. It is for us those struggling to live, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced (a reference to  this).

Under Lincoln’s presidency, soldiers captured hundreds of Dakota men and interned their families. The men had been driven to war by US treaty violations causing  increasing hunger and hardship among the Dakota. The largest mass execution in United States history   was the hanging of 38 of these captured Dakota men,  December 26, 1862, in Mankato, Minnesota. The “Dakota 38” tag on the base of the statue refers to this state murder.

“When it was proposed to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia, which did not have the rights of a state that was directly under the jurisdiction of Congress, Lincoln said this would be Constitutional, but it should not be done unless the people in the District wanted it. Since most there were white, this killed the idea. As Hofstadter said of Lincoln’s statement, it “breathes the fire of an uncompromising insistence on moderation.” Lincoln refused to denounce the Fugitive Slave Law publicly. He wrote to a friend: “I confess I hate to see the poor creatures hunted down . .. but I bite my lips and keep quiet.” And when he did propose, in 1849, as a Congressman, a resolution to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia, he accompanied this with a section requiring local authorities to arrest and return fugitive slaves coming into Washington. (This led Wendell Phillips, the Boston abolitionist, to refer to him years later as “that slavehound from Illinois.”) He opposed slavery, but could not see blacks as equals, so a constant theme in his approach was to free the slaves and to send them back to Africa. ..in Charleston, in southern Illinois, Lincoln told his audience: “I will say, then, that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races (applause); that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people.. . .And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.” – Howard Zinn, here.  Whereas Lincoln’s Gettysburg address contains this  well-known quote: “…a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal…”

 Below:

Also 11th October 2020 – Portland, Oregon – Theodor Roosevelt  gets a rough ride

The odor Roosevelt –  always near the top of the tiresome lists of “America’s Greatest Presidents.” On Mount Rushmore he functions as a permanent reminder of America’s historical amnesia—forgetting his racism, his militarism, his love of war. He wrote, in 1893, “No triumph of peace is quite so great as the supreme triumph of war” and in 1897, “In strict confidence . . . I should welcome almost any war, for I think this country needs one”. When a mob in New Orleans lynched a number of Italian immigrants, Roosevelt privately wrote to his sister that he thought the lynching was “rather a good thing”. Roosevelt even congratulated an American general who, in 1906, ordered the massacre of 600 men, women and children on a Philippine island. But he is seen as a “progressive” because as well as establishing the National Park system,  he implemented certain regulations on unfettered capitalism, such as controls on trusts, on  drugs and  on food ingredients.

More here (explanation of what happened, why and how by a participant – well worth a read!)

“…The crowd then moved their sights on the Portland State University campus police station. This is the home base for the PSU campus police station, a campus police force that has killed two men, Jason Washington and Richard Barry, while ironically calling themselves “security forces”. For years activists and friends of Washington had tried to get the college to abolish its police force. I’m confident that there was a widespread feeling of justice and satisfaction when the police building’s windows were smashed out. A US military themed and police supporting restaurant also had its windows smashed. Any liberals/peace police had long gone home by then. Since the police were preoccupied with a shooting, there was still no presence of them. The crowd then took the opportunity they saw and began marching through downtown, smashing up the banks and corporate storefronts which had recently removed the boards from the windows after thinking the riots in May had long settled. Eventually, after the window smashing failed to cease, the police sent their riot cops after the march. The crowd, feeling accomplished, saw no reason to continue the march and dispersed almost immediately instead of trying to foolishly stay in an attempt to fight off the militarized overfunded police forces…”

…Los Angeles: forbidden street celebration of basketball team win turns into riot; bottles, stones thrown at cops, businesses vandalised

This was forbidden by City Hall for the standard reason nowadays – Covid1984.

4/10/20:

US: very interesting article from Gelderloos on the various strategies round the election

“…The military brass generally dislike Trump and they roundly oppose an interventionist domestic politics. Historically, military coups are rarely airtight secrets in their preparatory phase, and over the last four years the military has shown itself willing to leak information that is harmful to Trump. In this case, we can read the lack of evidence of coup preparations as evidence that no such preparations are taking place. On its face, this means that a coup is not in the cards, if we are going to use that word with any precision. Without the military, and with existing paramilitary organizations lacking anything near the level of strength and coordination they would need pull something like that off, we have to turn our attention to other kinds of power plays that can be equally dangerous but that function in completely different ways. The neutrality of the military, however, bears examining, as many in the center Left have already misinterpreted it. Many Democrats have predicted that the military will frog march Trump out of office if he tries to seize another term, but this is a grave misunderstanding, both of how the military view their neutrality and of exactly what kind of power grab Trump is planning. The brass have openly stated that they will make no interventions into the electoral process, and in this case I think we can believe them. And as we shall see shortly, it is actually the Democrats’ strategy, and not Trump’s, that relies more on a military intervention…

… though Democrats are indeed stupid, not everything they do is an effect of their stupidity. If we take a calm view of the situation, they actually constitute one of the most dangerous sectors in the upcoming electoral unrest, and they are probably the group that most anti-fascists have thought about least. This is another chief disadvantage of prioritizing the framework of anti-fascism: it often means privileging the left and obscuring its true historical role. Actively or reluctantly, Democrats will encourage a peaceful, symbolic protest movement in response to Republican machinations to steal the election. Such a movement will represent an explicit break with the tactical intelligence and collective self-defense that has repeatedly overcome the police and the far right over the past few months. That experience of revolt—that know-how, determination, and solidarity—is one of the only things that can keep people safe through the coming turmoil. It’s also one of the only things that can change the outcome of the crisis. In specific cities, people can kick out the far right—and just as the George Floyd rebellion forced the state to begin dismissing and even arresting police officers, similar actions might stop courts and legislatures from throwing out uncounted votes. Generalized unrest might compel large segments of the government to conclude that Trump and his Party are just not worth so much destabilization….The historic role of the left is to institutionalize and thus strangle emancipatory movements. This only works because so many people in the rank and file of the left are sincere in their desire for change—but all the same, they are roped into a chain of co-optation that stretches from the center to the margins. The movement will be strongest if it understands itself as a continuation of the Black-led, anti-police rebellion that broke out once more after the murder of George Floyd. “

This text, by the way, links to an article that says Christine Lagarde declared, about 18 months ago, that, because of the dangers posed by climate change, right-wing populism, and trade wars, capitalism might not exist in 20 years’ time. Since it might take about 10  minutes to scroll down to the relevant bit, I’m putting it here: “…On capitalism, a key theme of the event, Lagarde had a more ominous prognosis. The system as we know will be threatened if rising inequality isn’t curbed, she said. And for the planet, things are even worse. “We will not be talking about [capitalism] in 20 years time when the planet is completely gone,” she said.”.  For more on Lagarde, see this.

28/9/20:

US, Portland: further clashes

“An armed police officer in Portland has said the violent protests could stop immediately if ‘people liked our Trump government a lot more’. ..BLM protesters marched on a police union office as clashes continued on the 124th night of demonstrations, leaving one sergeant hospitalised after being punched in the face and five cops sprayed with a chemical irritant. In footage taken during the latest night of protesting a woman confronted armed officers and asked how the unrest can come to an end…A number of armed officers changed tactics and descended on a group of protesters before they had even started to march. Police confiscated shields, used pepper spray and controversially tried to take a picket sign which read ‘Vote’. “

…Philadelphia: Amazon van torched

26/9/20:

US: Clashes in Portland, Seattle and New York

23/9/20:

US, Kentucky: 2 cops shot but sadly survived after Grand Jury refuses to charge cop killers of Breonna Taylor 

In the US whether a Grand Jury goes ahead and decides to prosecute cops is dependent on the case presented by the local DA or local Attorney General, who almost invariably has links to the cops.

…Portland: clashes over cop murder of Breonna Taylor…Seattle: cop intentionally rides bike over peaceful protester’s neck and head…

The fact that this cop got suspended is to show how balanced the authorities are, so fair that they can even think of prosecuting a cop who was nasty even though they do far far worse stuff, usually without cameras being pointed at them. Anarchist  report here. “Most of us are well aware that capital is complicit in Breonna’s murder, that it was in fact developers trying to gentrify the area who pushed for the police operation that ultimately resulted in the end of her life. There’s some tension about the attacks on property, but nothing like the peace policing we’d seen in the past…A few arrests are made throughout the night. Several de-arrests happen. Regret fills the hearts of those who wished they’d acted differently and pulled there comrades from the pigs. There are many more of us than them…Security cameras wires cut. Fireworks, rocks, and bottles chucked at officers. As the bike squad runs into some debris an officer falls and gets separated. He falls and takes a cone. He maces the crowd, then is hit in the head with a bat so hard his helmet cracks. Middle fingers and insults curse him as he flees…We saw people out in the streets who had previously chastised the bloc as “ANTIFA” and not being about “BLM” in full bloc cheer as police were injured or bank windows went out. We saw methods proliferate and lessons learned after these 100+ days implemented. By the end of the night the police had intentionally attacked legal observers and intentionally run over the neck and head of a prone injured person (the officer has since been given paid leave, basically a paid vacation, as footage of the incident makes the rounds the cops wait for the heat to die down)…”

18/9/20:

US, Portland: clashes resume after “truce” forced by forest fires; ICE offices targeted …Is ICE removing migrant women’s uteruses? and other tales of growing fascism

“A privately run Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) detention center in Georgia has been accused of coercing migrant women to have hysterectomies without their informed consent. The Department of Homeland Security is now investigating the allegations, some of which were submitted as a whistle-blower complaint by a nurse at the facility. It’s hard to wrap your head around how something this horrific could be happening but, as Moira Donegan explains, “the allegations of forced sterilizations would make the Irwin county detention center only the latest in America’s long history of eugenics, which has disproportionately targeted women of color”.

X writes:

In this country, the failure to assess the Trump regime and the kind of social changes that Trump and his allies are putting into place – to say nothing of the overt courting (if not outright assumption of command in the case of the Proud Boys) of overt fascists – is simply not mentioned in the mainstream, or if it is, it is only as “white supremacists.” 99% of the Democratic Party is afraid to use the “f-word” because their own political careers are based on a cultivation of the same kind of people that Trump successfully ushered into his camp last election. Look at the way Biden shits on his own left wing and, at the same time uses Rick fucking Snyder Governor of Michigan responsible for the deeply racist policies that produced the catastrophe of Flint Michigan’s water supply – something that he should face the death penalty for – as a talking head to support his campaign. Biden would rather be burnt alive than use the word “fascist” to describe Trump because he shares too much of the same territory. Biden would rather see his precious family burnt alive in front of him than use the word “fascist” and raise by doing so the question of the general direction in which this country has been headed for so many years.

16/9/20:

US: “Extremist watch” group says “Anarcho-Socialists” are  responsible for riots, partly by preaching hate crimes against whole groups (ie cops etc.)

Original report here

X writes:

This, linked through a Voice of America “extremist watch” segment, notes that the people who put this together, “affiliated with Rutgers University” ultimately are to be considered part of the “Contagion Network research Institute, an independent non-profit that tracks hate on social media. The group lists the United Nations, the Anti-Defamation League and the liberal billionaire George Soros’ Open Society foundation as its affiliated patrons.

Effectively then, this amounts to liberal counter-insurgency’s attempt to understand (their characterization, “anarcho-socialist” suggests they have a rather long way to go) the anti-authoritarian anti-capitalist movement and its allies, something it clearly sees as a threat. One notable feature evident from a superficial glance: the report considers that it is dehumanizing “hate” if one sees individual members of a group of people who are part of an organization whose actions are structually determined to undertake repression of spontaneous social movements (against captalism, the state and the reactionary constellation of beliefs – racism, sexism, patriarchy, authoritarianism, etc. – that reinforce them) and act uniformly as per their organizational discipline, such as the police, FBI, etc., as enemies to be uniformly detested and opposed. Would George Soros think it were “hate” to uniformly detest those in the SS? And if not what are the unspoken and underlying values that would account for this apparent inconsistency?

SF write: Surely this, by its own logic,  is a hate crime against “Anarcho-Socialists” (whatever that is) – dehumanising them by bunching them up all together.

T writes:

These type of articles or police reports reminded me of a part in W. Reich’s account of treating a schizophrenic patient, where he wrote:

“It was soon after the FBI had mistaken orgone research for German (or
Russian?) spy activity and had taken me into custody (as an ‘enemy
alien’) at the entry of the United States into World War II. The fact
that I was soon released unconditionally after a hearing did not matter
much to the patient. What mattered was the fact that I had been
suspected of subversive activity, and this, of course, was in harmony
with the general attitude of neurotics as well as psychotics to distrust
everything, especially their own inner feelings. Our patient wanted to
be able to trust me because, as she said plainly, she needed my help in
her fight against the ‘forces’. I assured her that I was not a German
or, for that matter, any other type of spy and never had been. Thereupon
she said that everybody thinks only in terms of his own nature or
character structure and that hence the FBI could not think of anything
but spy activity when they could not understand what I was doing. I had
to agree with this statement, and I found my liking of the schizoid mind
again justified. Schizophrenics are able in their lucid periods to see
through individual and social matters intelligently, as no other
character type can. Later we shall see that this lucidity of
intelligence in the schizophrenic is one of the major dangers which
threaten his existence in present-day society.”

15/9/20:

US, New York: teachers go on wildcat strike against unsafe schools

14/9/20:

“The top communications official at the powerful cabinet department in charge of combating the coronavirus made outlandish and false accusations on Sunday that career government scientists were engaging in “sedition” in their handling of the pandemic and that left-wing hit squads were preparing for armed insurrection after the election. Michael R. Caputo, the assistant secretary of public affairs at the Department of Health and Human Services, accused the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention of harboring a “resistance unit” determined to undermine President Trump, even if that opposition bolsters the Covid-19 death toll. Mr. Caputo, who has faced intense criticism for leading efforts to warp C.D.C. weekly bulletins to fit Mr. Trump’s pandemic narrative, suggested that he personally could be in danger from opponents of the administration. “If you carry guns, buy ammunition, ladies and gentlemen, because it’s going to be hard to get,” he urged his followers. He went further, saying his physical health was in question, and his “mental health has definitely failed.”

…as local states intensify surveillance technology budgets, but reduce budgets for other stuff (surprise surprise!)

“Awash in these federal funds, cities have doubled down on their surveillance investments, even as they face general budget shortfalls in the tens of millions. On August 4, two days before Operation Legend was formally announced in the city, Memphis signed a new contract with Cellebrite, an Israeli forensics manufacturer popular with law enforcement, whose products can hack and extract data from smartphones…Chicago, meanwhile, announced on August 14 that it would employ “enhanced” technology for “around-the-clock” monitoring of social media to identify looters. One hundred federal agents from the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives were sent to Chicago through Operation Legend in late July. Though Mayor Lori Lightfoot at first assumed a hostile attitude toward the initiative, in August she also announced a new task force on looting in partnership with the FBI…In Memphis, a unique consent decree from 1978 prohibits law enforcement from engaging in “political intelligence” — collecting information on individuals for political purposes. This decree was the backbone of the 2018 American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit, which held that Memphis had violated the law. City law enforcement has lobbied to amend and strike the decree, but so far, it has held. Yet the Memphis law does not apply to federal law enforcement. “That’s the harsh truth. The decree only covers the city,” explained Tom Castelli, legal director for the ACLU of Tennessee, though per the decree, the city cannot collaborate on unlawful surveillance with outside agencies. Still, Memphis Police Director Michael Rallings has alluded to partnering with the FBI to get around some of the decree’s restrictions, later confirming through a city spokesperson that he “told [federal officials] that we are restricted by the consent decree and depend on them to catch threats articulated on social media.”…”

13/9/20:

US, Pennsylvania: after apparently mentally unstable man with knife is killed by the filth,  cop station windows smashed, cop car attacked, etc… Democrats take up Trump’s ideology

X writes;

The analysis offered here is a joint project of IGD and Crimethinc. The critical points it makes about the Democrats adopting Trump’s talking points and making the demand that “anarchists are prosecuted” echoes the prescient comment of the comrade who said more than a fortnight ago that the election was going to be “the party of law and order vs. the party of law and order.”

The additional point that the Democrats, in their increasing anxiety that Trump may actually thumb his nose at them and stay in office if the outcome of the election doesn’t suit him, will  have to depend on the very forces of BLM and antifa they are presently using as their scapegoats, the only entity with the chance of effectively counteracting what will amount to a right-wing coup d’ etat, is well taken. What is missing from this, or insufficiently pursued it seems, is what the anti-authoritarians and and anti-racists are going to do right now to make themselves strong enough that the natural evolution after a coup is thwarted – namely the suppression of the ‘unruly elements’ that will have allowed the parliamentary pseudo-opposition to Trump to crawl back out of the ashcan of history – is thwarted as well. That is where the real discussion now must begin.

Trump endorses summary execution

““That’s the way it has to be,” Trump said after U.S. marshals killed a man suspected in a deadly shooting in Portland, Oregon, last month….Trump also appeared to suggest that law enforcement officers take similar action against demonstrators suspected of committing violent acts. He made his comments as protesters across the country demonstrate against racism and police brutality amid the police killings of Black Americans. “You can’t throw bricks at guys with shields on them,” he said. Reinoehl’s shooting death came the same day that Trump took to Twitter to call for Reinoehl’s arrest, calling him a “cold blooded killer.”…One witness told The Washington Post that he never saw Reinoehl pull out a gun. Nate Dinguss said he saw officers pull up to Reinoehl in two unmarked police vehicles, get out without identifying themselves and immediately start firing their weapons at him. But two other witnesses told The Olympian that they saw Reinoehl fire what they thought was an assault rifle at the unmarked SUVs after the vehicles pulled up to him…If Reinoehl threatened officers or posed a significant threat of death or serious physical injury to them, they would not need a reason to warn him before opening fire. The American criminal justice system presumes that a suspect is innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. Taking punitive action against a suspect before then would run counter to that system.”

X writes:

Keeping in mind the statement of Trump ally Stone that Trump impose martial law if he is not elected, we can see an increasingly clear profile of one section of the US ruling class that has left bourgeois legality completely behind, is not effectively challenged by the proponents of legality (principally because they must support a law enforcement that is already heavily disposed toward extra-judicial measures and composed largely of fascist sympathizers) in government or civil society, and is increasingly committed to an eventually unsustainable rule by means of state and vigilante/Freikorps terror. Trump’s speech here amounts to open advocacy of political murder of anyone who manifests a public physical opposition to the regime and who advocates self-defense against the state-sponsored domestic terrorism presently taking shape.

WWII 2.0 is looking like it’s going to be a planet-wide civil war, with the anti-fascists starting in a considerably more dire situation than they did in 1918-1937, when they were effectively defeated before the war moved on to become a conflict between imperialist powers. Those expecting the Democratic Party or the US military to provide a bulwark against this accelerating movement towards fascism are to be sorely disappointed.

Trump does not always endorse summary execution

Cops sadly not executed

A study in contrasts:

Heavily armed federally-deputized gunmen murder an antifascist whose only crime was to defend a friend of color against a fascist with a knife, and “that’s the way it has to be,” says Trump. “There has to be retribution” so that fascist trash can invade and terrorize communities with impunity and not have to worry that someone will get the idea to finally finish off all fascists, in and out of uniform. Meanwhile, the notion that we have a right to defend our communities against neo-nazi filth who invade them and inflict violence upon us is a topic on which Joe Biden, and the rest of the Democratic Party pseudo-opposition, remain silent. Now there’s a surprise!…But a single person (with perhaps a lookout) and a single pistol shoots two members of the notoriously brutal LA County Sheriff’s Department, and it’s a “cold-blooded shooting” which is “unconscionable,” and whose perpetrator must be brought to “justice.” (see this) Now there’s another surprise! Even at the scene of the shooting, LA law enforcement found themselves incapable of restraining their proclivity for unprovoked violence as they beat up and arrested a member of the press. About that attack Biden was silent again. A night of surprises! The Democratic Party’s attitude toward the struggle against the ultra-right in the US is at “best” one of passive obstruction. This is the “practical alternative” neo-liberalism presents as its tepid alternative to Trump’s aggressive and increasingly overt neo-fascism. On such a frail and rotting reed depends bourgeois democracy (the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie) in our time. But then the bourgeoisie and its allies have always played with  fascism &/or let it develop if they feel threatened – from the Freikorps of 1918 to the present day via Churchill’s admiration for Mussolini. The uprising  in the US following George Floyd’s murder threatened the multi-millionaire Biden as much as it did the more obvious advocates of dictatorship. The election poses a clear choice: the party of law and order versus the party of order and law. “Order” here  being a synonym for the chaos and constant disorder imposed on the majority of people’s lives by the constant  “anarchy of the market” system, which just as you think you’ve got some sense of stability pulls the rug from right under you.

12/9/20:

US, New York: further clashes with cops after protesters shut down bridge for about an hour

11/9/20:

US, Indiana: auto parts workers on wildcat strike

10/9/20:

Cop whistleblower reveals how Department of Homeland Security’s official policy involves  ordering its cops to minimise fascist terror threat and hype up antifa

Most voters don’t see Trump and Biden as mentally fit to be president

This is a bit of an “Emperor’s Clothes” moment for the American political system: The two parties – effectively the ONLY TWO PARTIES – are the two halves of a political system so senile it is incapable of putting forth “leaders” who are credible as anything but the props of the looters and morons who drive them.

9/9/20:

Portland: further clashes

8/9/20:

LA: 4th night of protests against cop killing of black cyclist at end of August

LA – city of angels

Further details on Michael Reinoehl murder by cops

7/9/20:

Report from Kenosha

6/9/20:

Portland, Oregon: cops let fascists beat up antifas and later intervene for the sake of appearances
X writes:

The new ultra-right tactical model is larger numbers of fighters and high mobility for rapid insertion of large columns into cities where the anti-fascists are smaller in number or unprepared. It is clear that the defenders of Salem were overwhelmed and outnumbered 5 to 1, according to the article. The pigs just watched until the anti-fascists were getting pulverized in an unseemly way and then gingerly intervened so as to avoid bad optics.

The neo-fascists are counting on the anti-fascists to have been cowed by the message that the assassination of Michael Reinoehl sent: Hurt their Nazi auxiliaries, and the FBI and local law enforcement will murder you…without photographic witness. Equally obvious is the fact that the state-sponsored murder of an antifa fighter has given new hope and impetus to the fascist organizations, increased their numbers and compelled them by circumstance to acquire a modicum of skill coordinating their activities. This is exceedingly ominous, as well as revealing of the actual relationship between the professional forces of repression and the barbarian auxiliaries they are increasingly open in mentoring and protecting. The state itself is becoming more overtly fascist itself in the process. We are moving toward a civil war in which only one side is allowed to do the fighting.

It is obvious innovative tactics must be developed that avoid casualties as much as possible while inflicting maximum harm against neo-nazi resources and resource bases, while mobilizing large segments of the urban population for a diversity of tactical approaches. The little militias of the John Brown Gun Clubs must be supplemented by a large proletarian citizens militia with an expanded range of capabilities while this is still legal. We need to learn from the experience of the Red Army of the Ruhr.

5/9/20:

US, Kentucky: clashes as both armed white racists and armed, mainly black, anti-racists have separate demos

“Armed police supporters and anti-racism demonstrators clashed in Louisville before the Kentucky Derby horse race, while Rochester police used tear gas to disperse protesters, as discord in cities across the US continues to simmer. Protesters in Portland, Oregon, threw fire bombs at police last Saturday night and at least one person was injured, police said, on the 100th day of demonstrations in the West Coast city over racial injustice and police brutality. In the afternoon, hundreds of protesters marched towards the Churchill Downs track in Louisville chanting, “No Justice, No Derby” – a nod to activists’ calls to cancel the annual race, which was being held without spectators because of the coronavirus. Separately, roughly 250 members of a black militia group named NFAC that has protested against the police killings of black people assembled outside Churchill Downs, all armed with long guns. NFAC leader John “Grandmaster Jay” Johnson taunted the officers standing guard in front of the race track, but the group later retreated without incident.”

…Portland, Oregon: links & videos of 2 days of demos and riots

…New York: 3rd night of riots and protests in reaction to cop murder of black guy back in March

…Florida: clashes after Grand Jury finds cops who murdered 3 blacks don’t have to stand trial

3/9/20:

US, Washington: cops assassinate man who killed fascist…Vice interview with antifa guy before he was murdered

A meeting of the combined law enforcement agencies of Washington

X writes:

This was very clearly a police assassination done in solidarity with the fascist Patriot Prayer organization; the antifa activist was subjected to a 40-50 round fussilade in the assassination. The filth – headed by federal filth – say they do not have any film and that there were no body cameras. In plain English this means THAT IT WAS AN OUTRIGHT ASSASSINATION, planned ahead,” with malice of forethought.” And nothing else could say how strongly connected the ultra-right scum of Patriot Prayer, with their on-the-bus slashers and attempt at building a multi-racial right-wing goon squad, are at the core of the plans of the official law enforcement apparatus for this country, as this. The message is: hands off American fascists. They have impunity. They are the allies of the state and the federal government will treat attacks on fascist murderers as attacks on official law enforcement. Which of course has the reciprocal effect of making federal law enforcement complicit, if not actors in conjunction, with the acts of fascist murderers. It means, in short, that we must regard the feds as fascist murderers as well, since they have made it so plain that they intend to cover for whatever the fascists do.

SF: It should be pointed out that not all revolutionary libertarian anti-racists in the US who are for the anger expressed against the cops agree with this – some think it’s just the cops doing what they’re trained to do as usual.

 

31/8/20:

US: comparative statistics of clashes and riots between May to August 2020 and the post Ferguson period 2014-2015

This is in French but easy to understand (affrontements=clashes; émeutes=riots; villes=towns). He refers to these confrontations as “Black Lives Matter” clashes, which is rather simplistic.

Of course, it’s not just white people who use him as an example of peaceful protesting, nor do all white anti-racists hold him up as a role model – many of them support violent tactics where necessary and possible.  But it makes a valid point…

Albuquerque: charming description of charming police in the most charming “reformed” police department in the US

“How could five years of intensive, court-supervised, federally mandated police reform make things worse? The Albuquerque Police Department is notoriously among the most lethal police departments in the United States. How could a department with so much heat on it, with so many critics breathing down its neck, and with so many years of reform imposed it, continue to stalk and harass people, stop and frisk people for no legal reason, routinely beat people, and get away with it? The Albuquerque Police Department has been forced to undergo every single reform measure that every police reform advocate has ever wanted to impose on a police department. If police reform doesn’t work in Albuquerque, arguably the most “reformed” police department in the United States, how could it work anywhere? “

30/8/20:

US, Washington DC: 2nd night of anti-racism clashes

29/8/20:

US: article on election

“Ice Cube remains little more impressed with the present Democratic offering of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris for the presidential race than he is with incumbent President Donald Trump and his running mate, Mike Pence. …”What I didn’t hear [at the DNC] is, what’s in it for us? What’s in it for the Black community besides the same old thing we been getting from these parties? […] They just pulled $3 trillion out of they ass and gave it to their friends […] Where’s our f******* bailout?” […] Democrats don’t seem like they got a plan. Republicans don’t seem like they got a plan for us. So how the hell you gonna vote for them?” …For progressive Democrats – particularly supporters of former presidential candidate Bernie Sanders – and those on the front lines of social and racial justice struggles, the Biden-Harris ticket cannot but be a great disappointment. On so many of the most important issues, from judicial and penal reform and Medicare for All to the Green New Deal and foreign policy, a large number of Democratic voters are far closer to the Sanders wing than to the party’s neoliberal leadership. From Bill Clinton to Barack Obama, we know how the story goes – great “hope” and promises of change lead to tepid policies that reinforce rather than reverse trends towards greater inequality and state violence. ….. Chomsky points out, that whatever their faults, the candidates and the Democratic platform, in fact, signal a progressive step forward beyond any tandem or policies that came before. But given how the last two Democratic administrations reinforced rather than transformed the very forces that have enabled the disasters of the Bush and now Trump presidencies, it is hard not to join Ice Cube’s sarcastic refrain and ask “What’s in it for the rest of us?” if the Democrats win, except a brief respite from more Republican Sturm und Drang? In a world and a country beset by multiple interlocked crises that seem beyond the possibility of a solution by ordinary politics – a sentiment which, after all, helped elect Trump in the first place – it is no wonder that young and disaffected voters are not lining up behind the latest avatars of “hope and change”….And while Trump offers racist and xenophobic bread and circuses to the Republican masses, the Democratic Party is too inept even to pretend to support core policies that the vast majority of its voters deeply desire….This election is not about voting for the president who will lead us out of the Trumpian darkness towards a more just, equitable and sustainable future. It is about choosing which enemy we would rather spend the next four years fighting to secure a future that neither the two parties, nor the system that ensconces them, have the interest or ability to create…. being told you have the chance to choose between two radically different enemies to fight for your survival makes the choice and the motivation to vote far clearer. On the one side, we have a ruthless narcissistic authoritarian with no checks on his executive power and a Supreme Court almost entirely his who is permanently enshrining a feudal oligarchy that disenfranchises and disinherits the majority of Americans, and blowing past any survivable CO2 limit, thereby threatening the survival of humanity and a million more species within a few decades. Trump 2.0 will unleash the full weight of the federal government, including white nationalist-infiltrated federal security forces, and tens of millions of heavily armed, fanatical and increasingly apocalyptic followers onto the streets violently to crush any remaining opposition to the quest…On the other side, we have an enemy who is neither strong, cruel, authoritarian, sociopathic nor ultimately suicidal enough to rush headlong towards climate and environmental disaster or permanently entrench a neo-feudal order. Even more so, Biden does not have the stomach or the mandate to unleash a level of state and militia violence against protesters that will be impossible to counter short of civil war. And this enemy has already been infiltrated by upwards of 100 agents of change through the Congressional Progressive Caucus, at least half a dozen of whom are among the most well-known and powerful young politicians in America. While it will take at least a decade for the “Squad” and other young progressives to achieve institutional power, if their numbers grow by even a dozen members, the Democratic Party will have been conquered from within by progressives in the same way Republicans were conquered by the Tea Party. Put this way, voting in November is no longer about choosing an “ally” that will surely betray you or even choosing the lesser of two evils. Rather, it is about having the good fortune of choosing an adversary whom you just might be able to defeat and a strategic position that enables the continuation of the struggle for racial, economic, climate and other forms of social justice without the risk of mass repression and even civil war.”

Though I understand and recognise that a Biden presidency would be better than Trump insofar as the brutal fascists at street/local level and at cop level would be less encouraged than under Trump, this article seems to think that an eventual “progressive”  Sanders-type presidency will save the day and the planet. But capital doesn’t work like that. Even a Keynesian-type capitalism could only come about by a significant global social movement  (in the Covid-imposed confusion, fear and suffocating social control of current developments to many this seems  like more and more wishful-thinking fantasy).  Capitalism at a national level has to remain competitive with other nations.  Only a significant threat to its existence  in the economically &/or militarily stronger countries would force a Welfare-Statist and  “ecological” direction internationally that wouldn’t be undermined by the competitive advantage the less Keynesian-oriented nations would gain if others turned to a modern form of greenish social democracy. And a social movement capable of forcing capital into the type of Welfare State that followed WWII would be capable of abolishing capital altogether.  Besides, is an ecological capitalism possible or even desirable? As long as the need for money exists such a potential capitalism would have to be very heavily policed globally and as totalitarian as any of the current neoliberal forms of misery. Moreover, such a potential welfare state would be far more technologically equipped   to ensure that the margin of freedom that prevailed from the 50s to the 80s would not be repeated. This margin tended to allow a far wider critique of aspects of capital than are generally expressed nowadays, and allowed a far greater degree of experimentation in living and subversive adventure.  But with the use of mass surveillance, and other scientific developments, it would be even more reductive of life to mere survival, to “suicide on the installment plan, a renunciation of life every day ”   than any previous spans of Welfare Stateism  – starting with Bismarck, on to the Liberal Party reforms in the UK in the 9 years before WWI, the development of a kind of totalitarian “safety net” (for the utterly submissive &/or those cowed into submission) under Stalin, Hitler, and Roosevelt, then mostly post-war intensified Keynesianism in other countries (note that Keynes book “The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money” as well as Lenin’s “Ultra-Leftism: an infantile disorder” were amongst some of the books the Nazis did NOT burn after they came to power). One of the most vocal advocates of the welfare state amongst UK politicians in the late 20s, early 30s was the Tory-turned-Left-Labour-politician-turned-England’s-most-famous-fascist Sir Oswald Mosley (he advocated a corporate state which intended to combine businesses, workers and the Government into one body as a way to “Obliterate class conflict and make the British economy healthy again” ). There has never been such a thing as a welfare state determined by the mass of proletarian individuals any more than there’s been such a thing as a workers state. And there never could be. A new form of Welfare State, built on the disarming of proletarian subversion,   would be subject to being reversed even quicker than what unfolded during the post-1973 epoch (see also this).

It seems far more useful to consider the Democrats’ strategies for containing social “unrest” than merely to say “voting in November is no longer about choosing an “ally” that will surely betray you or even choosing the lesser of two evils. Rather, it is about having the good fortune of choosing an adversary whom you just might be able to defeat and a strategic position that enables the continuation of the struggle for racial, economic, climate and other forms of social justice without the risk of mass repression and even civil war.” And we’ve seen how they – using “they” loosely to mean the whole repressive reformist street-level professional activists/Leaders etc. – almost immediately moved in to hand over white “outsider” rioters to the cops, to unmask them, to call for “peace”, to snitch on looters, etc. Money might temporarily pour into various recuperative activities (maybe Ice Cube will provide his own forms of recuperation) – so it seems, particularly for those in the States who will be most immediately effected by these things, worth anticipating some of this by keeping an eye out for what the Dumbocrats are proposing. A different form of “mass repression” is certainly likely under Biden. Also, I wouldn’t be so sure that a simmering “civil war” – from Trumpish fascists on the right as well as armed struggle fetishists on the left (or amongst those without any leftist ideology) – would somehow be halted by a Biden presidency. The fascists (or whatever) might be a bit discouraged but I wouldn’t have thought much discouraged. Of course, not living in the States means I don’t have much of an inkling how these things might develop in greater detail than stating this general idea…

28/8/20:

US: Inside the emotional 48 hours that saved the NBA’s bubble

T writes:

This may seem trivial to some, but I think what happened in the NBA is kind of noteworthy, despite the spectacular context of commercialized sports in which it took place and the millionaire athletes who are involved. The Milwaukee Bucks refused to play their scheduled match after the filth shot Jacob Blake – the first time this has happened in NBA history. Since it put into question the rest of the Playoffs and the whole billion-dollar industry around it, it was necessary for this to be nipped in the bud. But as we all know, the dictates of the times are such that this had to be done cunningly and to make it appear as the opposite of what it is: that the players’ strike is the one hurting ‘black lives’ and that the business as usual and continuation of the Playoffs – painted with BLM themes and slogans as well as voting propaganda – benefits black people.

26/8/20:

US, Minneapolis: looting after arrested murder suspect commits suicide

25/8/20:

US, Wisconsin: cops let vigilante go into riot to kill 2 protesters

“A man — who witnesses described as being part of a vigilante militia group — with a long gun brazenly walked down a street in Kenosha, Wisconsin Tuesday night and began firing his weapon at people protesting the police shooting of Jacob Blake, killing 2, and incredibly walking right past a swarm of cops who let him go into the night. The protest centered around the courthouse and got out of hand, with water bottles, rocks and fireworks aimed at police. The police then fired rubber bullets and tear gas into the crowd, which then dispersed and moved several blocks. That’s when the white vigilante appears on video with his gun. He reportedly had already shot someone in the stomach several blocks away, and he was being chased by protesters who were trying to subdue him. The vigilante falls to the ground as he’s being chased and then begins unloading his weapon, striking and killing 2 people. And, then the unthinkable happens. As police swarm the area in patrol cars and fortified vehicles, the vigilante — gun clearly visible around his chest — put his hands up in the air. The police vehicles all pass him, as the crowd screams he’s the shooter.  It’s a stunning contrast … the white vigilante posed a clear and present danger, even if cops didn’t know he was the shooter, yet Jacob Blake, an unarmed black man, was shot in the back 7 times as he tried to get in his car. Jacob is now paralyzed from the waist down.”

17-year-old arrested

Earlier in Kenosha, Wisconsin: protests continue

“Protests continue in Kenosha, Wisconsin, on Tuesday, August 25, after police shot a Black man identified as Jacob Blake the previous day. Video footage showed Blake being shot multiple times as he tried to enter his SUV during a police inspection. Blake has been hospitalised in serious condition. According to his attorney, the man’s three children (3, 5 and 8) were in the car. The city of 100,000 inhabitants has seen tensions rise as protesters broke windows and sprayed graffiti at a Kenosha County administrative building following the shooting. According to reports, vehicles at a nearby auto dealership were torched, a fire was started at a county courthouse. Kenosha has since declared an overnight curfew.”

More here

Extracts from a white union militant posted in the  Ironworkers Union Local Facebook page (obviously his uncritical attitude towards unions and BLM are not things I agree with, but it’s still interesting):

“Allow me to make a confession. I’m a 52 year old fat bastard, white and proud Union member of Ironworkers Local 396 and I fully support Black Lives Matter…Fully and utterly support! “Why?” Many of my brothers and sisters ask. As if the idea of standing for justice for all no longer affects us. Is the concept of fairness and decency is not our concern? Have we forgotten where we have come from?

What so many of my brothers and sisters don’t understand is that the fight for justice that Black Lives Matter represents is exactly where the fight for worker’s rights was 100 years ago. It is no slight to say they are not on new ground at all, but rather are standing precisely where unions stood a century ago. We are them. They are us. Young! Angry! Thirsty for justice! And like us in 1920’s, they need to be heard. Let me state this as bluntly as possible. There is no activity that Black Lives Matter does that we did not perfect a century ago. In no way am I disparaging this. They are borrowing time-honored techniques from a previous century’s movement just as that movement borrowed them from those who came before. Anything that people complain about BLM doing, the Labor Movement did. We did those things to get us the privileges we have today. In fact, those things are the reason we have the rights we currently enjoy.

Did we block streets in the course of our strikes and protests for better wages and treatment? Hell yes! All the time! There were strikes and marches that shut down entire cities and even states for days at a time. In the fight for just the eight hour day, hundreds of thousands marched across the nation month after month and year after year. They shut everything down. They needed to! Were we violent? Oh my god! Our Grandparents were tough as nails. Does anyone think that they just asked nicely to be given living wages and be treated like human beings? Our great grandparents fought like hell itself for the rights that so many of us now take for granted. And we fought violently against authorities who beat or shot workers in these actions. Many of these periods of civil unrest led to the destruction of rail yards, factories and entire city blocks. Cities shuddered to a halt with the rage in the face of the injustices that occurred when companies had the police departments and the courts firmly in their pocket or could hire mercenary armies to maim or kill workers. Year after year, our predecessors rioted and burned shit down.

But we didn’t loot, right? Do you really believe that? There have always been looters and there always will be. In every period of labor unrest, looting was widespread. The shopkeepers, clerks and capitalists were always against us. They hated what unions stood for and many had little problem with looting and burning shops to the ground. But a month ago the rioters looted Target!!! Get real. With the anti-worker attitude that Target and so many other mega-companies have, our great great grandparents would have had little issue burning Target after Target to the ground.

Did we kill people? Yes. The usual scenario was as follows. The police or mercenaries would shoot a few workers, and the workers would shoot several of them in return. Police firing into crowds or ambushing workers would often lead to full scale violence often devolving into all-out war where dozens or even hundreds died.

Let me give you some events to look up. The Battle of Blair Mountain, The Ludlow Massacre and aftermath, The Great Railway Strike of 1877, The Memorial Day massacre of 1937 to name just a few off the top of my head. Oh, and for all our sakes look up the Minneapolis Teamster Strike of 1934. Look them up and learn.

When workers grew so desperate, they did terrible things. And rest assured, when their brothers and sisters or sons and daughters were shot before their eyes, they often rioted with frightening force. These were not isolated incidences. This violence happened repeatedly decade upon decade. So much so that most American cities built armories downtown to help put your grandparents down if they ever had the temerity to rise against the powers that be. Understand that these armories were not built against foreign invasion, but rather against our union brothers and sisters.

This is our history! Learn this so you not only can protect the rights you have, but so you can recognize what is happening now?

What does all that violence and destruction produce? In our case? Everything! There is not a right we possess today that did not in part arise from violence or the threat of violence by our great grandparents. You may as well ask what good violence did in the Revolutionary War? Our opponents have never given us rights until they are exhausted, until we have risked our lives time and time again standing up to them. In so many cases, we had to demonstrate that every victory they had was a pyrrhic victory. That is where it didn’t matter if the authorities won every battle, the victories would be so expensive that they were never worth winning.

Understand that I am in no way justifying killing and violence. I grieve for those hurt on the sidelines. I sorrow for those who lost business and livelihoods, and I weep for the officers injured and killed. In addition, I also know that often violence becomes the enemy of any movement and often wrecks what has been achieved. Yet most riots, contrary to current conspiracy theory are not planned. They are the inevitable rage created by a system that crushes people in its gears. Violence stems from desperation which stems from injustice. Rioting and other violence is inescapable in a system where for many, justice cannot be found.

The long term solution to rioting is not more police. The solution to rioting is setting up a system where injustice is dealt with. Worker violence raged across this nation for 50 years until Unions were legalized and workers had another outlet for their grievances.

And yet many of the same people who have benefited all their lives from the same tactics that Black Lives Matter is using are now whining about inconveniences in their lives? How have we forgotten so much? Do we think we are shopkeepers and clerks now? Have we moved out of the working class? Do we believe that if we pretend we are on the billionaires’ side that they’ll continue to feed us with tidbits dropping from their table? Do we think that they won’t eventually drop us to the floor to be ground under their heels? And if when that happens and we have stood for no one else, who will stand for us?

But above all justice is still the centerpiece here and as a matter of justice, the facts are brutal. Black people are 2.5 times as likely to be killed by police. How is this not a tragedy worth any inconvenience? Unarmed black men are being killed because they don’t obey the police fast enough, because they don’t bow low enough, because even handcuffed and lying on the ground they are presumed to be such a threat that four officers can slowly suffocating a helpless and pleading man to death. Can you imagine seeing a video of your son or daughter slowly strangled to death? Can you envision how you’d feel watching their gasps for air? How would you feel if your son’s murder was just another in a long line of murders where justice was virtually unknown? Where the perpetrators would get off either utterly free or with a mere slap on the wrist? Imagine the rage you’d feel?

I fully support Black Lives Matter I don’t have a child but I have been a parent to the children of the women I have loved. I can imagine my kid being slowly suffocated under the weight of a human knee. In the last week, I have imagined it time and time again…I admit that I do not know and I fervently hope to never know how that feels, but I can imagine… and that’s enough for me.

For two centuries, the Labor Movement has been a push for justice and is not complete. BLM is a push for justice right now and is just beginning. No matter how I look at it, BLM is a sister organization to my own.

As Unions, we should remember enough of our history to understand what the desperation and suffering of our grandparents when they were on the bottom of society. And we should remember that it has always been our goal to lift everyone up to our level rather than tear anyone down. Therefore I, a white, 52-year-old, fat-bastard am a proud union member of Ironworker’s Local 396. I stand in solid support of Black Lives Matter. A fight for justice has always been at Union’s core, and I’m not about to give that up now.”

 

Pennsylvania : BLM protester shot in face by  man during march from Milwaukee to D.C.

X writes:

This is an interesting article for five reasons:

1) it is an event that has somehow gotten buried as the killing in Louisiana has to a degree as well; both overshadowed by the shootings in Kenosha.

2) it shows what a detestable reactionary Carly Fiorina still is, as if one did not need to be reminded.

3) the reader’s comment by “enemy of the people” consists of the exceptionally revealing quote by Luftwaffe Chief and war-criminal Hermann Goering that I wish everyone knew by heart.

4) there is another comment further below by a man whose father was in the Merchant Marines during the second world war and disposed of an arrogant nazi (“political” – I’m not sure how he knew) officer in a perfectly appropriate fashion.

5) there is at least one other statement by someone who understands that fascist ‘states of exception’ are things that can come around as well as go around – a thing we should all start practicing, whenever we get the chance.

More detailed report of misery inflicted on this march.

“Beyond the physical strain of marching dozens of miles a day, he said, several counties in their path had documented histories of being Ku Klux Klan strongholds. The group is composed of about 50 people who joined at various stops along the way. It’s a diverse group, with people of various races and members of the LGBTQ community. Some brought their children. A dog named Juice and a cat named Sparrow are on the journey….In Indiana, state police officers arrested three members of the group for blocking traffic in Kosciusko County. They were handcuffed and held for hours in the county jail. Indiana State Police wrote in a news release that the group was “intentionally obstructing vehicular traffic” on a four-lane highway with a speed limit of 60 miles per hour…Chandi LeSure, 36, a hospitality worker from Milwaukee who has marched with the group since the beginning, said she was accused of shoplifting at an Indiana Walmart after spending $300 on supplies for the group. On long, winding highways and rolling county roads, they say drivers have tried to run the caravan off the road. One car, LeSure said, sped toward a member of their group, who jumped out of the way. In Ohio, store owners locked their doors during business hours or refused to let the activists use gas pumps and restrooms, they said. In one instance, strangers pulled their cars into the gas station ahead of them to block the entrance. “I couldn’t believe that — we’ve got kids, we’ve got pregnant women with us who need to use the bathroom,” said Tameka Burks, 43, who joined the group two weeks ago and brought four of her children — ages 2, 3, 7 and 14 — along on the march…In Pennsylvania, a marcher was shot by a homeowner in Bedford County who fired several rounds at the group as they sat while pulled over along a two-lane road…In the videos, a man with a long gun can be seen advancing toward the group, sending people running, shouting, ducking behind cars. Between shots, a protester can be heard shouting, “We’re leaving! You don’t have to be violent!”…In the chaos, a police report notes, one member of the group was shot. Pennsylvania State Trooper Joseph Dunsmore said the agency has “strong evidence to suggest there was gunfire exchanged between the two parties,” although he declined to release other details. No arrests have been made. …The injured protester was hospitalized. The next day, demonstrators checked into a hotel. On Tuesday evening, a group of White men pulled up to the hotel brandishing weapons and shooting guns into the air, protesters said. The hotel staff locked the doors as protesters took shelter in their rooms…A 43-year-old man was charged with reckless endangerment, disorderly conduct and a firearms violation, according to Pennsylvania State Police records. By Wednesday, the group was back on the road. The injured protester had checked himself out of the hospital and rejoined the group. He’s not marching on foot anymore, Lowe said, but is determined to make it to D.C.” These are MLK-type pacifists to be addressed by the charlatan demagogue Al Sharpton. So much for non-violence!

24/8/20:

US, Wisconsin: probation office torched  during riots after cops severely injure a guy who posed no threat to them in Kenosha (between Milwaukee and Chicago)…New Orleans: sit-in of City Hall as protests continue against cop killing of black guy carrying knife…Portland, Oregon: police union building torched …Seattle: 2 police precincts attacked

Possibly over-optimistic report from ItsGoingDown  and another report

“The people of Kenosha responded in-kind, attacking the courthouse, burning cars and dump trucks, breaking police cars, hurling bricks and molotovs at pigs. They succeeded in knocking at least one pig unconscious, protecting others from his attacks. The courthouse was set on fire.”

22/8/20:

US, Oregon: clashes between nazi-types and anti-nazis…100s of Portlanders push out far-right…Colorado: windows smashed in cop HQ

See also this funny riot porn taken from May and June.

21/8/20:

US, Oregon: more confrontations outside ICE building…Virginia: more heavy policing…North Carolina: clashes at Republican Convention

20/8/20:

Fuckerberg bans various anarchist sites from Farcebook/Fakebook/Facecrook/Facespook/_______ (fill the gap)

18/8/20:

US, Oregon: yet more clashes (videos and links)

How to (apparently) make the filth less filthy

“Repeated exposure to high-stress calls for service and ongoing exposure to stress without relief were two of the contributing factors that could lead law enforcement officers to become susceptible to adverse events while performing their duties…”If we can develop innovative interventions for law enforcement officers that address their unique occupational demands, we can help mitigate compounding stress factors that affect their overall mental health,” …The research team collected data from three law enforcement agencies in the Dallas-Ft. Worth metroplex: a large urban department, a suburban department, and a rural department. The researchers met with officers in focus group settings to identify stressors and to gain insight on how to prevent future adverse effects such as use of force, officer or civilian injury, civilian complaints, or discharge of a weapon…behaviors such as taking a break between calls, practicing breathing exercises, and addressing one’s mental health over time can help lower levels of chronic stress….Previous studies have shown that for other occupations, reduced levels of stress increase productivity and job satisfaction.”

If only Derek Chauvin, the murderer of George Floyd, had had daily meditation excercises…

16/8/20:

US, Oregon: on 80th consecutive night of protests cops declare riot, firing  endless amounts of teargas…Seattle: another battle

15/8/20:

US, Chicago: protesters pepper-spray cops who’d pepper-sprayed them…Georgia: clashes between left and right…Similar clashes elsewhere

13/8/20:

US, Oregon: clashes continue (videos and links)

10/8/20:

US, Chicago: mass looting

“Chicago police exchanged gunfire with looters and arrested more than 100 people after crowds swarmed Chicago’s luxury commercial district early Monday, looting stores, smashing windows and clashing with officers for hours, police said. Police Superintendent David Brown called the outbreak “pure criminality,” and Mayor Lori Lightfoot sought to distance the incident from the “righteous uprising” in response to the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police on May 25. “This was not an organized protest. Rather this was an incident of pure criminality,” Brown told a news conference. At least 13 officers were injured, and a security guard and a civilian were struck by gunfire, Brown said. Social media images showed storefronts bashed in and people fleeing stores with arms full of goods, with much of the action taking place along Michigan Avenue, the upscale commercial district known as the Magnificent Mile. People were drawn by a number of social media posts encouraging looting in central Chicago after tensions flared following the police shooting of a man with a gun, Brown said. As police questioned a 20-year-old suspect, he fled, firing at the pursuing officers, Brown said. Police returned fire and shot the man, who was hospitalized and expected to survive. “After the shooting, a crowd gathered. … Tempers flared, fueled by misinformation as the afternoon turned into evening,” Brown said. In response to the social media posts, police sent 400 officers into the area, where they were met by caravans of people arriving in cars, Brown said. As officers arrested one man carrying a cash register, shots were fired at them from a passing vehicle, and police fired back, Brown said. Brown pledged a police crackdown in central Chicago, assigning officers to 12-hour shifts and canceling days off.”

“You’ll lose the blues in Chicago…They have the time, the time of their life”

More here and here and here

“The Chicago Transit Authority shut down all train and bus service downtown “at the request of public safety officials,” the [Chicago Transit Authority] said. Buses will not run in the area bounded by Fullerton, Cermak and Ashland Avenue until further notice, the CTA said, with all train service temporarily suspended as well. The bridges over the Chicago River were lifted at around 4:30 a.m., preventing further entry into and exit from the downtown area…Social media exploded with videos showing hundreds of people looting stores such as Apple, Macy’s, Nordstrom, Best Buy, Coach, Gucci and Louis Vuitton…Looters broke into a bank and ripped out the atm. They are trying to break into it. ..The looting began shortly after midnight as people darted through broken store windows and doors along Michigan Avenue carrying shopping bags full of merchandise. Cars dropped off more people as the crowd grew. At least one U-Haul van was seen pulling up…People were seen running out of a PNC Bank, its windows smashed, at Huron and State streets. Down the block, other stores, including a Sally Beauty Supply, had been cleaned out by vandals. Other parts of downtown, including around Grand and Wabash avenues, were littered with trash.Crowds repeatedly tried to bash in the windows of the Omega watch store at Delaware Place and Michigan Avenue.”

C writes:

“These very recent developments are interesting. For one the re-emergence of a conflictual response to police killings is reassuring and, for me at least, points to the actual weakness of recuperative forces when faced with “the real.” Not that they have no detrimental effect whatsoever, but that the tidal forces expressed periodically here cannot be fully contained by anything that currently exists. Maybe this is an overly optimistic reading.

Two, the looting seems to be, in part, the product of rumor milling on social media. That rioting can break out over untrue details which express a broader truth about contemporary life in this place is equal parts concerning and not. On the one hand, untruths spread on the internet could be highly destructive to any form of social movement and the lack of rigor or concern for this is a potential Achille’s heel. On the other hand, that rioters seem less concerned with the details of the shooting (it would seem the victim had a gun and might have shot at the cops first) than the simple fact of an extra-judicial killing suggests an implicit critique of state power as such that escapes the reformist’s plans for a less lethal police. Of course, this scenario is not really new as it played out in various ways during the rebellions which followed in the wake of Mike Brown’s death. Just because people responded this way to this particular instance does not mean they will continue to respond in this manner or to incidents of this kind in the future.”

9/8/20:

US: 6th anniversary of Mike Brown’s murder by the filth – clashes in Ferguson, Missouri and Phoenix Arizona  See also this…Portland, Oregon: protesters set police building on fire 

2/8/20:

US, Utah: clashes as demonstrators march against 2018 off-duty cop murder of allegedly armed thief

Re. the situation in the US: “Prelude to a Hot American Summer” is a mostly excellent appraisal of the movement there. One dubious aspect worth critiquing: “When you burn down a (non-carceral) piece of infrastructure, you foreclose its reappropriation for prosocial uses.” So workers shouldn’t burn down their factories (like in Bangladesh, 2005)? People shouldn’t smash up cars because they could be used to distribute stuff we all need? Shouldn’t they burn town halls, etc? Even carceral pieces of infrastructure could be reappropriated  for prosocial uses – eg for keeping politicians, cops and screws under surveillance, just as buildings used by  politicians to spout lies and ideology can, as William Morris suggested, be used  for storing manure.  But when the dispossessed get angry they attack the infrastructure of this society, which is all they can do until the moment where there’s a mass expropriation of the expropriators. And comments like this, from an assistant professor of criminal justice and a professor of sociology, miss the point, these blatantly obvious points.

30/7/20:

US, Oregon (Springfield): clashes on BLM march…The rise of black counter-insurgency

“…A counter-insurgency campaign has fundamentally altered the course of the movement. While the retreat and defeat of the movement that it induced may turn out to be temporary, such campaigns present significant obstacles to further radicalization, and therefore must be addressed. This counter-insurgency campaign on the ground was spearheaded by the Black middle class, Black politicians, Black radical academics, and Black NGOs. …”

Comment from a friend:

“The failure of this ill-will piece is the failure of nearly everything that talks about the social movement in the US these days. It’s framed merely in terms of race. All the motivations and the betrayals of everyone is through the lens of race.
They get the timeline right in terms of things significantly changing after week one, and then all the snakes moving in. But there’s an a idolization of the “black proletariat” as the pure ones/ the vanguard. Describing that first week’s participants as “revolutionary abolitionists”- what kind of activist babble is that? The first week as a “black-led rebellion”- nobody was leading anyone in that explosion! (Black and white activists and ministers and shop-owners were leading the charge to snuff it out that first week, but they were the only leaders around.) They’re mostly right in describing what killed everything (though conveniently leaving out their own activist rhetoric among the perpetrators), but sloppily wrong when describing what that everything was. It was rage, and boredom, and the mental derangement that the pandemic reaped on all of us, and uncertainty about the economic future, and a generation that grew up with American riots on the news, and it was the desire to be happy, and vengeful, and to not feel little for once in our lives. People were possessed, and to just say it was the black proletariat leading the charge against “racial capitalism” is a disgusting over-simplification of things, and honestly only serves the same people they are outraged at for co-opting things.

The recuperation of recuperation.”

28/7/20:

US, Portland: “WTF is Going on in Portland Right Now?”: A Report

27/7/20:

US, Arizona: clashes with cops (videos and links)

26/7/20:

US: Minority Report – 100s of mathematicians boycott predictive policing

“Several prominent academic mathematicians want to sever ties with police departments across the U.S., according to a letter submitted to Notices of the American Mathematical Society on June 15. The letter arrived weeks after widespread protests against police brutality, and has inspired over 1,500 other researchers to join the boycott. These mathematicians are urging fellow researchers to stop all work related to predictive policing software, which broadly includes any data analytics tools that use historical data to help forecast future crime, potential offenders, and victims. The technology is supposed to use probability to help police departments tailor their neighborhood coverage so it puts officers in the right place at the right time.”

25/7/20:

US: Thousands Take to Streets in Solidarity With Portland; Youth Jail Set on Fire in Seattle…

Other links –

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZNJ50ug5K3M

https://thepostmillennial.com/antifa-mobilizes-agitators-nationwide-riots-saturday

Portland riotersused metal spikes to target federal vehicles …

Trump sent the feds to quash Portland’s protests: What we …

VIDEO: Feds launch offensive after Portland rioters attack …

Trump’s Power and Limits in Policing US Cities

Cops declare Seattle protest a riot as youth detention center …

Federal law enforcement clash with riotersin Portland

Portland clashesreflect a leftist history, but also a racist past

US Protests: Clashes with police in Portland continue

Feds deploy tear gas in Portland as clasheswith protesters …

Federal agents clashwith Portland protesters, use tear gas

Portland protesters continue clashes with armed federal agents

Portland protesters counter teargas with leaf blowers in …

Seattle: various links:

• Seattle police declare riotat renewed Black Lives Matter protests
• 16 arrested after protesters throw explosives and rocks at …
• Seattle bans police from using less lethal crowd control tactics …
• Seattle Police Declare RiotsAfter Protesters Set Fire To …
• Police declare riot at Seattle protests; more than two dozen …
• Seattle protests declared a riotafter mob sets fire to Starbucks …

North Carolina:

• Anti-Racists in Gastonia Clash With Counterprotesters After …
• Protest going on today

Gelderloos critique of witless white “ally” snitches in need of stitches

24/7/20:

US, Missouri: report on murder of unarmed white woman by cop in June

“According to a database of police shootings in the United States since 2015, half of those shot dead by police—and four of every ten who were unarmed—have been white. People in poor neighborhoods are a lot more likely to be killed by police than people in rich neighborhoods. Living for the most part in poor or working-class neighborhoods as well as subject to a racist double-standard, black people suffer disproportionately from police violence. But white skin does not provide immunity.“

23/7/20:

US, Portland: and so it goes on (videos and links)

Received: “The_Working_Class_Pandemic_Wildcat_Strikes and Working Class Self-Organising in the US” (informative, but somewhat academic in the autonomist tradition and probably over-optimistic)

Sample quote:

“Joanne Hardesty is Portland’s only Black city councilwoman. She has longstanding ties to local organizing against police brutality and has not shied from principled but politically precarious stances against both the police bureau and the police union. After the first night of demonstrations in Portland set the City ‘Justice Center’ on fire, she willingly took the hit for Portland’s white liberal Mayor and declared a curfew against the demonstrations. Since the beginning of the rebellion, her decisions and positions have been at times surprisingly uncharacteristic. She and the City Council continued to hesitantly stand beside the Mayor after almost two months of nightly police attacks on increasingly bold and militant demonstrations. As the Mayor issued mealy-mouthed statements denouncing “the violence that has gripped our city,” (notably unclear as to whose violence he was referring), he pledged to rein in police and work with police leadership to enact reform. The Police Union contract was expiring, a moment in which Hardesty and the local leadership promising reforms had a rare opportunity which one might expect more astute political leaders would utilize as a chance to offer significant concessions to the streets. In a surprising move (given the political climate, the popularity of demands to move against the Police Union generally, and multiple City Council members who had campaigned against the Police Union for years), the Mayor and City Council united in granting a one-year extension of the contract without qualifications. At the State level, the Governor banned teargas except when life was under threat, and the legislature committed to enacting state wide policing reforms. The day after the tear gas ban, the police declared a riot and gassed demonstrators.”

22/7/20:

US, Portland: Oregone energy…and a liberal pro-Democrat report

20/7/20:

USA, Oregon: Portland cop clashes continue…anarchist report on Portland movement and the filth…and another anarcho-report

Trouble with repeated confrontations is that they tend to get stuck in a groove and what was subversive a month or more ago becomes ritualised and more and more get involved in dealing with arrests and other cop horrors but so far, as far as I can see through my star-gazing telescope, few seem to be trying out innovative tactics and even less some direct attempts to communicate theoretical reflections, particularly to other sections of the city.

The following scientific reduction of people to more easily  measurable forms of  physical, ideological, psychological, etc. social control should contribute to convincing those who hate capitalism to not fall into largely predictable, ritualised and over-repeated forms, strategies and ideas of social contestation, as suggested by what’s been happening in Portland (re. the above):

Scientists use epidemic-type models to assess rioters

“Episodes of social unrest rippled throughout Chile in 2019 and disrupted the daily routines of many citizens. Researchers specializing in economics, mathematics and physics in Chile and the U.K. banded together to explore the surprising social dynamics people were experiencing. To do this, they combined well-known epidemic models with tools from the physics of chaos and interpreted their findings through the lens of social science as economics. In the journal Chaos, from AIP Publishing, the team reports that social media is changing the rules of the game, and previously applied epidemic-like models, on their own, may no longer be enough to explain current rioting dynamics. Using epidemiological mathematical models to understand the spread of infectious diseases dates back more than 100 years. “In the 1970s, this type of methodology was used to understand the dynamics of riots that occurred in U.S. cities in the 1960s,” said Jocelyn Olivari Narea, co-author and an assistant professor at Adolfo Ibáñez University in Chile. “More recently, it was used to model French rioting events in 2005.” From a mathematical point of view, the team’s work is based on the SIR epidemiological model, known for modeling infectious disease spread. This technique separates the population into susceptible, infectious and recovered individuals. “Within a rioting context, someone ‘susceptible’ is a potential rioter, an ‘infected individual’ is an active rioter, and a ‘recovered person’ is one that stopped rioting,” explained co-author Katia Vogt-Geisse. “Rioting spreads when effective contact between an active rioter and a potential rioter occurs. They discovered that the SIR model uses Hamiltonian mechanics for mathematics, just like Newton’s laws for physics. “This allowed us to apply well-known tools of the physics of chaos to show that within the presence of an external force, the dynamics become very rich,” said co-author Sergio Rica Mery. “The external force that we included in the model represents the occasional trigger that increases rioting activity.” When including such triggers, the team found the way a sequence of events occurs varies greatly based on the initial number of potential rioters and active rioters. “Even the sequence of rioting events can be chaotic,” Rica Mery said. “Rich dynamics reveal the complexity involved in making predictions of rioting activity…it was surprising that the idea of disease spread can be well applied to rioting activity spread to obtain a good fit of rioting activity data. “While you might think that the study of disease transmission and problems of a social nature vary greatly, our work shows epidemiological models of the most simple SIR type, enriched by triggers and tools of the physics of chaos, can describe rioting activities well,” Vogt-Geisse said.“

17/7/20:

US, Oregon: report on clashes

““…by 930, most of the fencing has been knocked down and re appropriated as a barrier. 9:42 LRAD announces that the parks are closed and we need to evacuate the park or we are subject to arrest, citation, and use of force…11:58 Pepper balls and a tear gas canister is fired out of the federal courthouse “murder holes” because protestors started converging near the steps. 12:12 The response to the pepper balls and tear gas by the crowd was to block the entrance to the Federal Courthouse with fencing. 12:39 LRAD announces that we are subject to arrest and use of force, asking crowd not to block the doorways to the JC and Fed Courthouse. 1:32 The crowd had lit fireworks in the direction of the JC and blocked off one of the doorways. PPB has declared an unlawful assembly, telling the crowd they have 4 minutes to clear out all of the barricades. They also announced downtown is closed. They changed their verbiage tonight by saying that the crowd was “inhibiting local and county law enforcement….”

 

15/7/20:

US, Portland: report on 7 weeks of conflict

https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a33347230/portland-oregon-protesters-detained/

https://itsgoingdown.org/solidarity-with-the-people-in-the-streets-of-portland-against-the-federal-occupation/

X writes:

Portland this year has become like Italy in the “hot autumn” of 1969: a laboratory of counterinsurgency. The fascist future is now the present. Oh yes, and a new verb “to be Pinochet’d.”

Another friend in the US said the protests/riots in Portland have become repetitive and ritualised, with no innovation. The totalitarian future/present can only be combated with experimental practices that not only involve rioting, occupations,  intense discussion and targeted critique, graffiti, wildcat strikes, sabotage, etc.  but strive to go beyond their separations and limitations in ways that learn from the strengths and weaknesses of the past but go further into the partially unknown. As always, easier said than done.

4/7/20:

US, Baltimore: died on the 4th of July – city harbors war criminal…

 

…Oregon: Americans show their independence by protesting & rioting for 38th consecutive day…Seattle: car driver murders protester, maims another; court calls it “vehicular assault”…Pennsylvania: nazis manipulated into defending the indefensible with guns and cops

2/7/20:

US, Portland: fire in County Injustice Centre etc. on 2nd day of protests being declared “riot”  More here… report on workers’ strikes at 2 Chrysler plants over  management’s bad handling of coronavirus risks…Colorado (Denver): clashes over attempt to create autonomous zone

1/7/20:

US, Seattle:  state chops Capitol Hill “Autonomous Zone”

More here and here and here

…Iowa: minor clashes outside Capitol

30/6/20:

US, New York: minor clashes outside city hall after 6 days of occupation of City Hall park during demos demanding defunding of cops

Video here

28/6/20:

US, St.Louis: a calm stroll through a gated community

Eyewitness account says:

“The march proceeded to the Mayor’s house which was surrounded by metal barriers and these were promptly removed and used to block off the intersection. Some protesters lounged on the lawn and some relieved their bladders on the house. Others busied themselves by painting the street with calls for the mayor to resign. Some neighbors were sympathetic and confused while wanting to protect their property. Others were hostile and aggressive while wanting to protect their property. A few tried to drive their Lexuses and Mercedes Benzes through the repurposed metal barriers but were unsuccessful. One guy ventured into the crowd with his phone filming, was surrounded and then extracted by his family or neighbors. Another guy almost pulled a gun to prevent people from touching his luxury car and spent the rest of the night sitting on his steps protecting his property which is only a few doors away from the Mayor’s house. Later as everyone was leaving he apparently threw M-80’s at the dispersing crowd (1/4 sticks of dynamite that make a loud bang but not much else) though I didn’t see this myself. That prompted a standoff with the remainder of the crowd with some returning fire with fireworks of their own and others breaking up a huge landscaping stone to throw at his house. At which point he began waving his gun around. Luckily no one was shot. It is illustrative of the disconnect with poor and working class realities that people like this and the McCloskey’s think they can act that way in front of their own homes. Doing so in a poor neighborhood would undoubtedly have consequences. Time will tell if the upper crust gets a real education in what life is like for the rest of us.

Despite these components of visceral class antagonism, the movement still hasn’t escaped the limitations imposed by the “organizer” role and its attempt to provide exclusive “leadership.” Many of the faces controlling the crowd are the same faces that controlled crowds in 2014, 2015 and 2017. While the protest side of the movement is more multi-racial than it was in 2014, the division between protester and rioter is still just as real. This time around there is no united front among the mostly young, black protest organizers and they are openly airing their conflicts in the street. Some “veterans” of Ferguson who haven’t maintained their roles seem somewhat jaded and disillusioned with the power struggle and general approach to movement of the new groups while others have doubled down and are attempting to recreate what they, somewhat narrowly, see as the successes of the protest component of the previous rebellions.”

This – eu.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2020/…/ – claims “”When the victims observed multiple subjects who were armed, they then armed themselves”, but according to an eyewitness, “the claim that they armed themselves in response to anything but a mob of angry black and white working class people in their neighborhood is…. bullshit designed to deflect the hostility that is coming their way. There were armed protesters but they were asked to show up in response to the unhinged behavior of richie rich and his coked out wife and did not appear until much later.”

27/8/20:

US, Kentucky: man shot dead on protest demo against cop killing of woman at her home  back in March

26/6/20:

US, Oregon: police precinct torched, looting, etc.

“The north side of the North Precinct was set ablaze around 2:15 a.m. Police used CS gas, a type of tear gas, to try to disperse the crowd, but militants threw canisters back at the pigs. At one point in the early morning, militants and pigs physically clashed as police tried to move them from the area. Some militants shot paintballs at the pigs’ face shields, rendering them unable to see. Several businesses were looted overnight after windows were smashed and more fires were set. A nearby bank is believed to have been vandalized as well. Multiple pigs were injured in the uprising. For the first time since George Floyd was killed exactly one month ago, people in Portland demonstrated at two police precincts simultaneously overnight, and set up barricades outside the precinct in North Portland, which was set on fire …Revolutionaries vandalized the police building by spray-painting graffiti along the outer walls, blacking out security cameras and rolling dumpsters into the street to form a barricade as a line of uniformed pigs looked on from a distance. Some revolutionaries also attempted to barricade the North Precinct’s exit doors so that anyone inside the building could not get out. Across the Willamette River at the Justice Center, another group formed on Thursday evening for a vigil for George Floyd and others killed by police. Later, the group dismantled the fence near the building and vandalized the structure.”

16/6/20:

US, Missouri: 2 nights of clashes after arrest

“…the suspect fled and a police officer was shot in the hand when he was apprehended. The incident sparked false rumors of Black men being shot, which triggered that crowd to march to St. Cloud police headquarters, doing damage along the way and eventually at the police station early Monday morning. … numerous people started to congregate in the area, eventually taking over the roadway and blocking traffic. …Individuals in the crowd began to throw rocks at officers and passing vehicles before the liquor store was breached. Multiple people entered the store, stealing items and causing damage..At that point, officers moved in to stop the looting. “Chemical crowd control munitions were successfully utilized”…The use of teargas sparked outrage from some leaders of community groups who met with Alberts on Tuesday afternoon to talk about how to alleviate violence and damage over the upcoming nights. …Anderson…the police chief asked. “If I seem a little bit tense — one of my cops got shot…It’s not that I don’t respect the agreement. It’s because people were throwing rocks,” he said. “Last night was worse than the night before. And for what?”. When some of those who had gathered continued to question the use of force, Anderson raised his voice and said, “People were shooting at us last night. Bullets were flying all over the south side last night…We’re sitting on a powder keg.” Anderson also responded to comments that he and the police department should publicly show more empathy about Floyd’s death. Some suggested that would resonate with youth who are angry and trying to find ways to be heard. “

15/6/20:

US: Supreme Court declines to hear cases over legal doctrine qualified immunity, which shields police from lawsuits

See also the John Oliver show, “Last week tonight”,  from 7th June. It’s perspective is reformist – what would one expect from a guy who’s got his own show on US TV and wears a suit and tie to give him the image of reasonable respectability? But it’s genuinely passionate and outraged,  very informative, especially about “qualified immunity” (about 21 minutes 30 seconds in),  and the last few minutes – starting at about 30 minutes in – is excellent, and has some great footage of a furious black woman.

13/6/20:

US, Seattle: cops spray mace at 7-year-old, then arrest and imprison man who filmed it for 2 days

…Atlanta: videos and links to what’s been happening there…Protesters block motorway

12/6/20:

US, Washington: mayor’s house vandalised during anti-cop march

 

US, Virginia: another monument in celebration of slavery destroyed

10/6/20:

US, Seattle: more recent report

Whilst this is obviously an interesting & significant  development, substituting “police” with “people” is ambiguous; it could imply that “the people” act as cops within the logic of the commodity economy, and this is happening to a certain extent. Someone on a private forum wrote “… according to two friends in Seattle, developments at the CHAZ (Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone) are fluid but mostly upbeat. The armed checkpoints are apparently being staffed by a semi-famous local rapper and his crew. They already made some ugly decisions, like chasing and beating a guy who was spray painting. Some of the anarchists there condemned this establishment of policing (under the banner of “community”), while others are paralyzed by fear of being called racist because the armed folks are predominantly Black.” For a text on “the people” see “We should we belong to the people?”.

9/6/20:

US, Seattle:  Capitol Hill declared “Autonomous Zone”

“THE Seattle enclave that has been abandoned by cops has been dubbed as “part street festival, part commune” with armed checkpoints to keep police out. Demonstrators have declared the “Capital Hill Autonomous Zone,” or CHAZ, near the city’s central district, with a banner telling all that enter that “This space is now property of the Seattle people.”

 

…Anarchist report

…Seattle city hall briefly occupied by protesters

…Texas: release of police video and documents more than a year after the in-custody death of a black man

This happened when 4 cops  tasered him after a car chase when he failed to stop after he’d committed the horrendous crime of not dipping the headlights of his car.  It seems the fact that this was being  filmed by a TV crew for a  real-time police show might well have been part of the motivation for the cops taking pursuit for such a trivial ‘offence’. The cop taking chase, a black cop by the way, is a regular on this show, and was the first to taser him when, despite showing his hands,  he failed to get down on his knees or spread out on the ground. Then a white cop arrived with the “Live PD” crew and shoved his Taser into the guy’s back. Despite telling the 4 cops four more times that he can’t breathe and pleading “save me….I have congestive heart failure.  I am not resisting.” the 4th cop tasered him for the final time and he was  later pronounced dead. Failure to dip your headlights  or passing a fake $20 bill (I once got a fake £20 bill  from a bank’s ATM machine) are now capital crimes in the States!

…Antifa eating babies for breakfast terror horror shock!!!

US: report on aspects of the 20th century history of US cops’  militarisation

 

X writes:

There has been a dialectic between imperial expansion and the necessity of crushing movements in those areas of expansion ranging from those for national independence to proletarian autonomy since the American invasion of the Philippines, as this article points out. The underlying reason behind counter-insurgency abroad, the necessity of creating a safe environment for capitalist exploitation, applies equally at home. Capital is an alien presence no matter where it goes and it invariably takes its colonial logic with it, whether it penetrates a new geophysical territory like it did in Vietnam, or a new territory in the social-imaginary or behavioral realms: in the commodification of lifestyles, or the pursuit of time-motion studies or today’s AI-conducted evaluations of “productivity” in individual workers.

What this article leaves out is the depth to which the intelligence function plumbs the target societies in the new lands to be conquered. As Alred W. McCoy makes clear in his book on the American experience in the Philippines, Policing America’s Empire, this included developing files on all the important people in Philippine society, especially those connected with the independence and labor movements, not only using statistical methods and official records, but tapping telephones, reading private mail and recruiting large numbers of informers. This allowed the US military authorities a great deal of information suitable for sub rosa leverage (the conventional rendering of this concept is blackmail) against target individuals in order to compromise the movements to which they were connected.

McCoy goes on in the chapter “President Wilson’s Surveillance State” to detail the way the Military Information Division of Major Van Damen accummulated a database on hundreds of thousands of US citizens under categories determined by ethnicity such as German Americans, Irish Americans, “Negroes”, “Hindus” as well as those regarded as subversive, driven by the “fear that the people of the United States could not be trusted and therefore should be controlled”. Together with the American Protective League, a vigilante “citizen surveillance network,” regarded by the Bureau of Investigation (later to be known as the FBI) as a “most important auxiliary and reserve force”, millions of investigations were conducted and raids fomented by their “red squads” against such organizations as the Socialist Party, and especially the IWW, during the First World War. At the conclusion of the war, this machinery of repression went into overdrive with the Red Scare. The destruction of the most militant sections of the American labor movement can be directly attributed to the application of counter-insurgency methods developed as an integral component of the American imperial adventure abroad to the class war in the United States itself.

This dialectic of foreign and domestic counter-insurgency on behalf of the Empire and its beneficiaries continues to this day. It is, like the police itself, not an “excess,” exterior to the requirements of capitalism that some can claim can be made “humane,” it is a constituent part of an inhuman system inimical to human freedom and, as we can presently see, to the continuation of the biosphere as we know it.

New York, Long Island:  clashes between protesters and white counter-protesters

7/6/20:

US, Seattle: man drives into protesters and shoots one of them…More here

5/6/20:

France: Rouen and Lille – clashes following anti-racist demos inspired by the events in the USA

US, Oregon (Salem); cop helps white fascists avoid being teargassed &/or arrest for breaking curfew More here

4/6/20:

US, New York: Cuomo uses Covid testing as policing tactic against protesters…

“On Thursday, New York governor Andrew Cuomo… declared in his afternoon press briefing that the state’s coronavirus testing criteria would expand to ensure anyone who attended a protest in the past week would have access to COVID-19 testing. First of all, according to the official New York City COVID-19 information portal, “all New Yorkers should get tested now, whether or not you have symptoms or are at increased risk.” There aren’t even testing parameters to expand anymore. Everyone who wants to get tested for COVID-19 explicitly could already, at least in New York City. Residents in the rest of the state can get a test if they think they might have been exposed. At a time when distrust of law enforcement and city officials is at an understandable high, it’s easy to wonder whether going to get a COVID-19 test and telling your doctor you were protesting is the best idea”. Meanwhile the NY cops are bent – on giving arrested protesters the virus.  “Lawyers say the NYPD is also denying many of those arrested their right to a phone call, leaving their friends and families fearful for their lives. ..Despite the coronavirus pandemic, they said most police officers do not wear masks and in some cases confiscate those of protesters who are being “packed” into cells with no regard for social distancing… the conditions in the holding cells that they are held in, in many cases for 10-20 hours, are abysmal. Especially following some of the larger demonstrations and mass arrests, that there are extremely crowded conditions, that the cells are dirty and unsanitary and unsafe.”

California: cops murder another guy

There has clearly been a shift as the middle class take over and start kneeling everywhere. The dominant media obviously emphasise the spectacle  of opposition which makes it all seem  very co-opted already – safe symbolic stuff like kneeling. Maybe white middle class people feel safe breaking curfews, while poor black Americans just know how it ends for them – jail time or worse….the rush of white lefties to show their colours and be seen to be kneeling. It’s the usual cathartic response. Obviously the black American footballers was a powerful moment (in media terms) – not cathartic but an act of defiance where they risked their jobs and the wrath of their supporters, but the white signalling here is truly painful to see.

But in fact, there are, apparently, more or less two worlds developing in the USA: the world by day is controlled by the professional activist-politicos condemning the violence, condemning, like Trump himself, “white outsiders”. See for instance, this sad display of “moral highground” taking: “On a bullhorn, an organizer has the crowd say in unison: “I will not provoke (or) lash out at police, at property, or at each other. If I see somebody breaking that rule, I will do everything in my power to make it stop, by any means necessary.”

“By any means necessary” used to be a slogan of the 60s movement, with all its strengths and weaknesses,  But what does this “by any means necessary” mean? “By any means necessary” to stop any independent form of revolt and replace it with the professional activist politicos control of revolt and its transformation in reforms that’ll end up as largely cosmetic (particularly given the massive limits on capital and the states’ margin of manouevre compared with the 50 years ago).

A friend in the States told me that a friend of his, whom I know a little bit,  almost got strangled  by some activist trying to “control” her by choking her during a demo-turned-riot.  She couldn’t breathe for a few seconds. How’s that for irony? Though ideology can’t entirely explain this psychotic behaviour, it certainly plays a part. Apparently  there are a lot of conspiracy theories going around that white outsiders  are being paid to bring the movement into disrepute by pretending to be as angry as the blacks. This from the Right to  the liberal Left, from Trump to professional activists. The crude ideological attack on “outside agitators” spewed out by black and white politicos means they can’t , don’t want to  and have an interest in refusing to understand that millions of whites are almost as agitated as most blacks and are left permanently outside, even if a bit less so than most blacks. Because their  place in present and future class society,  their fairly well-paid role,  is above all  making sure that  when black and white fight together they should do so in a  way that poses no  threat to  the professional’s place in present and future class society, their fairly well-paid role,  and above all no threat to the social relations they maintain. And they’ll defend this “by any means necessary”.

A recent leaflet:

” ‘We make the path by walking’

A slogan from another place, another time, another struggle. But also words that can help us here, and now, in this fight.

Let’s keep walking together: let’s keep marching, blockading and disrupting. But let’s also think about how to take other steps together. At the end of the day, a protest is primarily a demonstration of collective willpower and strength. This is vital, but sadly, it has proven to be simply not enough. Our struggle to address the intimately linked problems of racism, policing, and poverty has to enter into our daily lives and the multitude of our relationships in order to create an enduring change, a tidal shift in what it means to be black, brown, white, American . . . In that spirit, there are an infinite number of methods that people all across the country are thinking about and experimenting with. From the center of it all, Minneapolis, emerge three particularly promising avenues that deserve to be explored in greater depth.

O N E

Occupation of unused space: There this idea took the form of homeless advocates occupying an empty hotel and turning it into a self-organized shelter: an oasis from police violence and the violence of not having what you need. Our city is full of empty buildings that could be used as movement centers, clinics, shelters, kitchens and anything else we can imagine. There are countless empty lots that could be used to create a new and beautiful vision of agriculture and food supply. Imagination, determination, and the power of the people around us are all that we need to begin.

T W O

Neighborhood organization: On the night that the national guard was deployed in force, neighbors in Minneapolis met with each other. Strangers were introduced, phone numbers shared, fears and contingencies calmly discussed. Some patrolled their streets, not as reactionary vigilantes, but as supportive neighbors looking out for each other. Others created bucket brigades to put out any fires that might accidentally spread to residential areas. Many streets saw the construction of symbolic barriers: a message to the police that they were not wanted or needed. A few went further to create actual barricades, preventing the movement of the State’s paramilitary forces. Here in ___, we may not need to lock down our blocks, but we certainly could do with more socially connected neighbors. Not only did some people directly attack the police in Minneapolis, but others simply made them irrelevant. If the abolition of police departments is a goal worth taking seriously, then organizing with our neighbors to make sure all our needs are being met, to address problems locally, to find safety in ourselves rather than an outside force that knows only one solution for every problem; then this is something to take seriously as well.

T H R E E

Mutual-Aid: The networks that were created to address needs brought on by the pandemic blossomed in the aftermath of the rioting. Major streets in Minneapolis were crowded with people handing out free food and water. Those with cars organized themselves via secure text threads into a rapid response ambulance and taxi service, taking the wounded to hospitals and the stranded to their homes. Even looters sometimes pooled their recently acquired resources to share for anyone who wanted or needed them. Here in ___, these networks of material support already exist. Some have suggested defending those facing eviction in the coming months with our bodies and our collective strength. Others are working to crowdsource funds, food and supplies for anyone who needs it. Now is the time to reinforce these efforts with our own resources and create new initiatives as well.

From the forest fires of the past week, let the flowers of a new meadow bloom!”

An angry reflection on the official Black Lives Matter in Minneapolis (it’s important to note that BLM is not a unified organization with a program; various local chapters have more antagonistic relationships with politicians and law enforcement)

I keep seeing people declare that BLM didn’t start the riots, that BLM had no part in the vandalism and looting in Minn. Allow me to go ahead and confirm that. Those declarations are absolutely correct. BLM insisted on people remaining peaceful. And insisted to the point of getting in the faces of black and brown angry youth and attempting to control their actions. And I can confirm with my own first hand experience, that BLM defended the 3rd Precinct with their own bodies. They sided with the police. The Minn BLM played absolutely no role in the attack against the State because they are fucking cowards. Their liberal pacifism failed to stop the inevitable explosion of rage against the police, their precinct and subsequently their control and domination of that area. If it was up to Minneapolis BLM, we’d all still be marching in circles for hours chanting about being angry without having the courage to materialize that anger into rebellion.

You want to donate to the “movement”? Donate to your local anti-authoritarians, the black and brown youth and all those who had the guts to make history by showing the world the police – the State – can be defeated on their own fucking ground. The police can be overwhelmed and sent running. The people across all gendered and racial lines can strike back, can weaponize that anger and fight back.

The Minneapolis BLM doesn’t know shit about that. They were the bootlickers shaming black and brown youth from the beginning, and now many of them are the ones claiming the uprising was started by “outside agitators” and “white supremacists”. So when people say BLM was peaceful, that is correct. Peaceful with the police. Peaceful with colonial order. Peaceful with full obedience to the law. Peaceful with the fact that George Floyd is dead.

The Great Escape:

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3/6/20:

California, Long Beach: Interesting video of a National Guard genuinely fraternising with protester:

 

2/6/20:

US, Washington DC: pacifist scum hand over pavement-breaker to brutal cops

If the social movement erupting in the States doesn’t furiously tackle hypocritical “pacifists” like this, then it’ll end up in the arms of the reformist filth, cop collaborators who want to present an acceptable face so as to climb the reformist rat-race career hierarchy in a fundamentally violent system.

“The Only Race Is The Rat Race” – graffiti Notting Hill Gate, London, 1968

A friend in the States told me that a friend of his, whom I know a little bit,  almost got strangled  by some activist trying to “control” her by choking her during a demo-turned-riot.  She couldn’t breathe for a few seconds. How’s that for irony? Though ideology can’t entirely explain this psychotic behaviour, it certainly plays a part. Apparently  there are a lot of conspiracy theories going around that white outsiders  are being paid to bring the movement into disrepute by pretending to be as angry as the blacks. This from the Right to  the liberal Left, from Trump to professional activists. The crude ideological attack on “outside agitators” spewed out by black and white politicos means they can’t and don’t want to  understand that millions of whites are almost as agitated as most blacks and are left permanently outside, even if a bit less so than most blacks. Because their  place in present and future class society,  their fairly well-paid role,  is above all  making sure that  when black and white fight together they should do so in a  way that poses no  threat to  the professional’s place in present and future class society, their fairly well-paid role,  above all no threat to the social relations they maintain.

1/6/20:

US: curfew defied; clashes in at least 10  cities… List of George Floyd protests, state by state …Kentucky: man killed by cops/National Guard (official state version of events)…window shopping in New York

“Shopping should be an emotional experience. People should want to drop in.” –
Mr.Quayle, director at Woolworths’ “21st Century Shopping Ltd.”, new name for Woolies in Bristol (The Times, 14/2/82).

“Just doing a bit of window shopping” –
Wood Green rioter, 1981 (LBC, July ).

There are certain situations when dropping into a shop is a truly emotional experience. That’s when people start to smash that blatantly seductive parader of the beauty of possessions, the shop window which reflects back to you the ugliness of your fundamental dispossession. Don’t the vast majority dream of wrecking that fragile separation? At the same time as it titillates us with things we’ve been told we want, it prevents us from grasping them. When we smash a shop window, it’s not only the miraculous display of things (with their artistic image association and their ideological free gifts) that gets shattered, but also the ‘reasonable’ cops in our head. The objects become what they always were – just objects, whilst the bourgeois rationale that hypocritically distinguishes between theft and property also appears for what it is: bullshit to keep us impotently yearning. How can those who resign themselves to a world which is meant to be expectantly gazed at know the simple beauty of the delightful anger hurling the brick shattering the repressive splits of this fragmented vicarious life? Perhaps they mutter “Greed…Resentment” as they greedily clutch onto their narrow resentment of those who are having a smashing time….

– from here: https://dialectical-delinquents.com/daily-life/shopping-who-gives-a-toss/

31/5/20:

US, Washington DC: HQ of AFL-CIO torched

“Union bus drivers in Minneapolis and New York City have refused to transport police officers or take arrested protesters to jail. But certain unions play an important role in perpetuating police brutality and can be directly linked to the killing of Floyd. The AFL-CIO, for one, is affiliated with the International Union of Police Associations (IUAP), which represents and protects more than 100,000 law enforcement officers in the United States.”

… riots in at least 40 cities (Minneapolis, Alamo, Albany, Atlanta, Chicago, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbia, Columbus, Dallas, Denver, Emeryville, Fargo, Grand Rapids, Harrisburg, Indianapolis, Jacksonville, La Mesa, Lincoln, Los Angeles, Madison, Miami, Nashville, New York, Oakland, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Pittsburgh, Portland, Richmond, Rockford, Sacramento, Salt Lake, San Antonio, San Francisco, Scottsdale, Seattle, Toledo, Tucson, Washington) Videos and links…a colonial sense of impunity: report on more mad cop/National Guard behaviour during curfew etc.

“The National Guard and local police are marching through a leafy neighborhood in Minneapolis. Then the shooting starts. Tanya Kerssen was standing on her front porch filming the procession of armored vehicles and riot gear–clad troops rolling through Whittier, a neighborhood a few blocks north of where protests over the killing of George Floyd, an unarmed black man, had recently turned into riots. The National Guard had been called in to help restore order and enforce an 8 p.m. curfew set by Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. Kerssen was complying with that order—the curfew applies only to public spaces, not private ones like residences, porches, or front yards—but she became a target anyway. Light ’em up!” someone can be heard shouting in the video. Then bean bag rounds and paint canisters are fired at Kerssen and others, who quickly flee inside.…On LIVE TV the APD [ Atlanta Police Department] just broke car windows, slashed tires, tazed both passengers and arrested both passengers for NOTHING. RIPPED THEM OUT OF THER CAR….in New York City, cops literally drove into a crowd of protesters. ”

Louisville, Kentucky

So wonderful for journalists to tell us stuff we’ve  known all our adult life

Report on Arab-Black relations and how the current situation highlights ties and tensions between the “races”

““We stand for Black Lives Matter,” Cup Foods owner Mahmoud Abumayyaleh told local publication Sahan Journal. “We are against abuse of power and racial injustice. We have a system that is broken, and it must be fixed.” On Thursday, Abumayyaleh told CNN that the employee who called the police was simply practicing “protocol” after discovering the suspicious $20 note. Officers arrived while Floyd was still outside the building and the killing was captured by the store’s security footage….Some social media users were quick to condemn the business. But Dawud Walid, the Michigan executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), said store owners acting in good faith face a “dilemma” when dealing with crime at their establishments. “It is unreasonable to say to the store owners just take one for the team or look the other way when someone is allegedly committing a crime, and that’s irrespective of their skin colour,” Walid said. “On the other hand, if it’s something minor or insignificant or perhaps even a misunderstanding, then the store owner should also be aware that calling the police for a small matter could actually lead to the beating or the death of a human being.” …He also urged challenging racist incidents and language within Arab communities, including the use of the word abeed (slaves) to describe African Americans. On the business end, he said store owners should put money back into the communities from which they profit. “There are horror stories about how people in the Black community are treated by our business owners and by the security they hire,” he said. “But then there are some positive developments that are good examples for everybody to use – which is hiring people from the community, hiring security, if you need it, from the community, investing in the local baseball team.” More here on this subject.

And there’s this:

“...Whereas the protesters have been described as “looters” and “violent” by some sections of the media, one restaurant that incurred major damage on Thursday night has decided to approach the damage to its property differently. On Friday, owners of the Gandhi Mahal Restaurant, about a block away from the Minneapolis Third Police Precinct that was taken over by some protesters, announced that despite the attempts by neighbours to protect it, the restaurant had been significantly damaged. “Youre [sic] efforts won’t go unrecognised. Don’t worry about us, we will rebuild and we will recover,” the Facebook post read. “This is Hafsa, Ruhel’s daughter writing, as I am sitting next to my dad watching the news, I hear him say on the phone: ‘Let my building burn, Justice needs to be served, put those officers in jail’. Gandhi Mahal May have felt the flames last night, but our fiery drive to help protect and stand with our community will never die! Peace be with everyone.” The Bangladeshi-owned restaurant’s position has drawn widespread support and praise at a time when questions are being asked about the role of communities of colour and the perpetuation of police brutality.“

30/5/20:

USA,Utah: woman covers the stench of the filth with a sweeter scent 

 

“a very bizarre form of protest has emerged, where a woman was seen defecating on a police vehicle”

Atlanta: CNN windows smashed…as protests spread to at least 30 cities

A couple of comments sent 27th – 30th May from 2 friends in the USA via email (the first is a reference to my recent 70th birthday) –

Y :

The city of Minneapolis is your birthday cake. Try blowing out those 70 candles.

It’s unreal what’s going on. It’s on par with LA ’92 and the urban
riots of the ’60s. Much more diverse and seems deeper than Ferguson.
No idea where it’s headed. Each night they could overrun and burn a
precinct. Why they don’t just arrest the dude is beyond me. Some
friends from here are going there. I imagine that’s true all over the
country. One looter was already killed last night. I think more death
is imminent with how bold everyone is. If national guard or cops kill
someone, it’ll definitely spread here and throughout the country.

My response:

No desire to blow them out – those candles can burn, baby, burn.

But why do you think it’s deeper than Ferguson?

Y:

I don’t know if it’s deeper yet. More widespread and prolonged and intense, but aside from a few bus drivers refusing to transport cops or arrested in different states, it’s not spread across other sectors of society. Z went up to Minneapolis yesterday. Said there is a strategy among some to try and overtake a new precinct once one has fallen. I think there are 5 in total. 1 down. Everything for the authorities seems delicate. Things spread to all sorts of cities last night. Small and big. Reminds me of Rodney king stuff. Clashes in the usual places- Oakland, NYC, etc., but also places like Las Vegas, Tallahassee, Dallas, Eugene, etc. went to the thing downtown here last night. Post-Ferguson activists still are able to exert some control, and last night it was barely enough to keep things civil, despite loads of young kids just waiting for someone to break that first window. Some fireworks and graffiti, and a stupid highway blockade. After we left, a terrible thing happened as some people on the fringes tried to loot an Amazon prime and Fedex semi-truck (a lorry;)). The driver of the Fedex truck panicked and ran over and killed someone looting in the back of the truck. A protestor was also shot and killed in Detroit – unclear by whom. Things are getting messy. Afraid things will turn into a deadly culture/political war, but hasn’t slipped totally into that yet. Racial unity and class consciousness seem strong enough for now, and politics hasn’t usurped all this yet. Almost feels like even if things chilled out tomorrow in Minneapolis, the rest of the country would keep going. But don’t know if the genie is out of the bottle quite yet. Here’s an article about last night in St. Louis:
https://www.kmov.com/news/man-killed-after-being-dragged-by-fedex-truck-following-night-of-protests-in-downtown-st/article_f8a89482-a259-11ea-84b8-a374c58a7d47.html

***

X:

On the tube (ABC, Channel 7) I saw the aftermath of the San Jose incident in which three pigs and the “civilian (undercover cop?)” removed the cop who had been struck and was still in a state of shock, described at the bottom of the article. I also saw a lot of the events in Oakland later in the evening, as well as a further incident in San Jose in which an SUV, blocked by demonstrators, backed up and ran down a guy – definitely the hairiest of all the action that happened. The guy got up right afterward although I swear the car passed over his arm.

The next most intense action was the blocking for a short while of Hwy 880 (the “Nimitz Freeway”) by exceedingly brave demonstrators who stopped a large stream of traffic until the arrival of CHP (California Highway Patrol) forced them to quit the scene. Large numbers briefly surged across the road and some people climbed a big-rig truck and hung there a short while.

In terms of the actual fighting, the sharpest action occurred during a standoff at an intersection in downtown Oakland where the cops held the intersection, but were pressed in on two sides by the demonstrators. Things remained static for a while until demonstrators on a second story overhang threw homemade explosives, one of which was powerful enough to disable the TV cameras filming the scene for a few moments, went off with a great blast and shower of sparks. Apparently a couple of cops at least were injured and had to be carried off. With that the remainder of the cops, who had been densely packed at the crosswalks, although their lines on one side of the intersection had bowed inwardly, cleared the area and forced a rapid retreat by the demonstrators.

X:

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/protests-ramped-up-police-attacks_n_5ed316e9c5b640cb8341c6bb

Attacks against the press – and who are obviously identified as such – are clearly multiplying, an actuality which can be directly attributed to the orange clown in the White House and his own campaign against anything (facts, for instance) which show him in a bad light.

Of greater interest in this article linked, perhaps, is the language of what the protests are about: “police killings and inequality”. It is the latter, and the implication of the near-universal, systemic nature of this condition, that tells us why so many people (including many who are not black, but who identify with the plight of people who are impoverished, insecure, always vulnerable to attack by employers, landlords, pigs, and any authority who happens to come along or is in the mood, because that conditions & defines them as well, if not to the same degree) are taking to the street.

This has the possiblity of becoming a generalized revolt against class society now.

It is about time.

US, Seattle: video of riot including looting where looters throw out stuff for those outside to take what they want &/or need

29/5/20:

US: protests spread nationwide… protesters force brief lockdown of White House …workers refuse to transport cops in solidarity with protests

“Metro Transit officials suspended most of the region’s mass transit starting at 4 p.m. Thursday “out of concern for the safety of our customers and employees.” The suspension was later extended through Sunday. A spokesperson would not say if the suspension was solely due to the protests, the Minneapolis Star Tribune reported. It’s also unclear if the decision was directly related to the transit workers’ solidarity action.”

…workers refuse to transport arrested protesters to jail

… riots spread to Memphis & L.A…with protests in  Phoenix, Denver,  Louisville, &  Columbus

 

Riot in Brooklyn, New York:

“New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said the coronavirus crisis, which exposed inequalities in health care, and the protests surrounding the death of George Floyd, are connected. “One looks like a public health system issue, Covid, but it’s getting at the inequality in health care also on a deeper level. And then the George Floyd situation, which gets at the inequality and discrimination in the criminal justice system. They are connected,” he said at his daily news briefing on Saturday.”

…San Jose and Oakland

“Hundreds gathered in Oakland and San Jose gathered in solidarity with protesters in Minneapolis denouncing the May 25 police killing of George Floyd on Friday night. Starting around 3 p.m. in downtown San Jose, protesters chanting Black Lives Matter marched to Highway 101, where they temporarily blocked traffic and smashed car windows in an otherwise peaceful demonstration. Two hours later, officers declared the protest an unlawful assembly and clashed with activists. While several protesters were detained, at least one officer was also injured before police fired off gas canisters at crowds near city hall as the demonstrators threw bottles and other items at them. According to a law enforcement source, at least one officer was struck by a glass bottle hurled by a protester, who lifted a cell phone near an officer’s face before the officer grabbed the phone, tossed it and was punched in the face. The officer was carried away from the area and later helped to his feet by three other police officials and a civilian. Meanwhile in Oakland, protesters marching down Broadway in the first of three consecutive protests planned this weekend, which are being branded the Minneapolis Solidarity Demonstration, around 7:45 p.m. About an hour later, tensions escalated again in San Jose. Some protesters began damaging storefronts again and police used tear gas and flash bangs.”

….Texas: Dallas…Houston & Forth Worth

…Portland, Oregon

…Minneapolis: streaming of events with a mix of comments, some valid, some not, fairly regularly updated…“Now This Fight Has Two Sides. What the Riots Mean for the COVID-19 Era”(Crimethinc article)

This last is  also a mix of comments, some valid, some not. What’s annoying is that it’s full of “We should do this, we should do that”s – for example “Every time people stand up for themselves against the police state, we should show up in solidarity, prepared to run the same risks that those we support face every day.”  Whilst running “the same risks that those we support face every day” is good advice (depending on your circumstances at least) sometimes showing up in solidarity may not be the best thing to do at all – it may be better to start something in your own area . Amongst a group of friends &/or comrades that people know “we should” could well be valid, at least following the logic of a discussion, general perspective or previous history (ie “considering we think this, and have done that, we should do XYZ”). But as a general approach in written form to anonymous readers, it tends to take away from the reader the independence of decision about what could be done, to work out from the examples given, what may be pertinent.  Plus with this “we” there’s an assumption of an agreed line on a situation which may or may not be the case.    It comes over as playing the Leader, an anarchist version of Lenin’s “What is to be done?”. Though  obviously far better than this crappy vanguardist  text by Lenin, what it has in common with him is that it still tends to encourage a  blind follower attitude on the part of the readers, spoonfed with suggestions that haven’t developed from their own efforts, their struggle to work things out for themselves from their understanding of the situation. This personal and social struggle is far more essential for the development of  autonomy than making a list of “we should”s.

Fast food restaurant burning – licensed to grill

Report on police militarisation

28/5/20:

US, Minneapolis: cop station torched…during 3rd night of fun, fire  & fury as National Guard are called out…Eyewitness account of the burning of the 3rd precinct … Crimethinc article  Pretty interesting, especially tactics-wise. There are also some wonderful and heartwarming looting anecdotes etc. at the end.

 

Anarchist report here

the world turned right way up

27/5/20:

US, Minneapolis: shopkeeper murders possible looter during 2nd night of riots bigger than first, despite cops being fired; journocops too scared  This is full of empty pacifist platitudes, but then what can one expect from a site that calls itself “Hot Air”?  More here and here

 

On Target:

1) Washington Post article from 2006 highlighting the Target corporation’s efforts to increase survelliance and policing of black and other workers of color across US cities:

“In the past few years, the retailer has taken a lead role in teaching government agencies how to fight crime by applying state-of-the-art technology used in its 1,400 stores. Target’s effort has touched local, state, federal and international agencies. Besides running its forensics lab in Minneapolis, Target has helped coordinate national undercover investigations and worked with customs agencies on ways to make sure imported cargo is coming from reputable sources or hasn’t been tampered with. It has contributed money for prosecutor positions to combat repeat criminals, provided local police with remote-controlled video surveillance systems, and linked police and business radio systems to beef up neighborhood foot patrols in parts of several major cities. It has given management training to FBI and police leaders, and linked city, county and state databases to keep track of repeat offenders. …  “In many ways, Target is actually a high-tech company masquerading as a retailer,” said Nathan K. Garvis, Target’s vice president of government affairs.”

2) Locals’ issues with Target and the “communities” it “serves” go way back

26/5/20:

US, Minneapolis: riot in response to cop murder of black guy

With a name like Chauvin, what should we expect? See also this on the original Chauvin. “Nicolas Chauvin …is a legendary, possibly apocryphal French soldier and patriot who is supposed to have served in the First Army of the French Republic and subsequently in La Grande Armée of Napoleon. His name is the eponym of chauvinism, originally a term for excessive nationalistic fervor, but later used to refer to any form of bigotry or bias…”

8/5/20:

USA, Ohio: excellent sabotage by hacker of attempt by state to prevent workers claiming unemployment insurance…a sabotage with successful consequences

“The state of Ohio won’t deny unemployment benefits to people who refuse to work during the COVID-19 pandemic after people targeted the website it was using to track these workers, according to officials at the state’s Department of Job and Family Services (ODJFS). The state previously set up a “fraud” website encouraging employers to report those who refused to go back on the job, angering workers and labor rights advocates. State officials say they are now reconsidering the policy after Motherboard reported that a hacker created a script to flood the “COVID-19 Fraud” website with junk data, with the goal of making it impossible to process these claims….The anonymous hacker previously told Motherboard they created the script as a form of direct action in support of working people. Ohio is among several states that have prematurely reopened against the advice of health experts, forcing many workers to return to their jobs and put themselves at risk of contracting the deadly virus. Over 33 million Americans have filed for unemployment since March, and unemployment benefits are quickly becoming many peoples’ sole source of income. Meanwhile, many retail and service workers deemed “essential” have said they are being forced to continue working in crowded stores and warehouses without personal protective equipment such as masks. While the hacker’s script has since stopped working after changes to Ohio’s website, another hacker has taken up the project and plans to release an updated version, the anonymous hacker told Motherboard.”

1/5/20:

 

US, St.Louis: director of operations for city hall is unmasked trying to impose the current dominant “logic” of  stay-at-home rules on the homeless by making them doubly homeless

Since this site is not accessible in Europe, it’s impossible  to know what this link  says. However, Our Diplomatic Correspondent in the US has just sent this report by supersonic drone:

There’s been a growing homeless encampment across from city hall, in the heart of downtown since corona… Between 80-100 tents it seems. The mayor’s office window overlooks it. The city has had its hands tied legally because of emergency corona guidelines. They tried to coerce them out after the first week, but it’s grown since then and residents have been defiant. [May 1st] they tried to evict them a little more coercively, but the 20 or so cops didn’t know what to do and stood down while city health and sanitation workers tried to evict them …residents and supporters shamed garbage workers into not doing their job of seizing the tents. People stood on the tents it seemed like. Some post-Ferguson civil rights lawyer group defending the camp is now dragging the city through courts right now so the city has been forced to back off.

…unfortunately the drone got attacked by eagles and so, sadly,  we shall forever be forced to wrack our brains desperately trying to guess what the mayor said. Best guess wins a week’s holiday in Salt Lake City. 2nd best guess wins 2 weeks holiday in Salt Lake City.

28/4/20:

US: Report on riots and escapes from juvenile detention centres in Louisiana and New York

14/4/20:

US: sabotage of Billboard/ Hollywood Reporter website by IT workers laid off under pretext of virus

10/4/20:

US, Kansas: prison riot

“The prisoners ransacked offices, broke windows and set small fires for several hours before the facility was secured [sic/k]”

 

8/4/20:

US, Washington state: over 100 prisoners riot

US Prisoner uses his banned mobile phone to beg for help amid coronavirus pandemic

 

4/4/20:

US, New Jersey: beds burnt in prison riot…See also this personal account of total medical neglect towards him having what could be the virus by US anarchist prisoner Sean Swain

 

3/4/20:

US: Growing hopes for rent strikes in various parts of country…More hereSt.Louis graffiti

It should be pointed out that, even some time before this crisis, 40% of Americans,  on receipt of an unexpected $400 bill, go into terrible financial difficulties.

This, taken from a report on a forum, was  a discussion-cum-interview on the news today (**** is used to make names of areas anonymous):

“**** Rent Strike is a growing movement that is urging tenants to use money on the essentials [this is not entirely accurate, by the way]. Organizers urge families to pursue any strategy they feel is best, but the point of the strike is to put a wall around those whose (pay)checks have disappeared. So, what about the real estate companies or landlords? They’re real people too. Here’s **** Rent Strike’s response: ‘We have little to no sympathy for people who make their living off our broken backs, our polluted neighborhoods, and our drafty houses. If they lose their profits and have to adjust their retirement plans, we will not be crying for them. Or, was that supposed to be a joke?’”

They then go on to quote a manager of over 1000 properties. Objectivity at its best.

Quoted from this exchange:

“-Why are you pushing for a rent/mortgage strike?

The reality is that many people will not be able to afford rent this month, next month and for several months following. Many people have permanently lost their jobs and the economy is not going to recover from “the worst economic crisis since the great depression” overnight. The more people that refuse to pay rent, the more potential there is for amnesty for those who simply cannot afford it. Others are already facing the choice of buying groceries and medicine or paying rent. They shouldn’t have to make this choice, ever, but especially right now.

Put another way, if a tick is on you, you pull it off yeah?

-How hard has the shutdown of businesses hurt residents of ****?

Some of us are OK financially but others are not. Many ****ans live pay check to pay check. Layoffs, reduced hours, reduced wages and salaries make it impossible for people to pay their bills. Are we supposed to starve and get sick so that landlords can keep on being business owners? Are we supposed to subsidize their lifestyles with our misery?

-How many participating in strike?

We don’t know. There are likely many people throughout the city who will not be paying rent by default. We are trying to build networks in our neighborhoods so that the evictions that will come in May or June or July can be minimized. This will take some time, but we are not waiting.

Ultimately, the final number depends on whether or not you join us.

-How long will the strike last?

Hopefully forever.

Realistically, the strike will last at least as long as the orders restricting employers are in place. We are not a union and are not in control of individual strikers. We can’t start it by decree and we certainly can’t stop it. We will be working with our neighbors and others throughout the city to look out for each other and respond to developments that hurt our interests as tenants and workers.

-How much will using the rent money on other essentials help?

Having $500 to $700 or more for groceries and other supplies when you are out of a job is a big deal. For comparison, SNAP offers under $200 a month for an individual. Something like 20% of city residents live below the poverty line. That means some of them will likely not even receive a stimulus check because they are not required to file a tax return. As of April 1, the IRS has not provided clear instructions for filing a return in order to receive the economic impact payment for those who have not already and are not required to.

-I read on a post your organization mentioned Wall Street getting a big bailout as well. Is this more about individual struggle or a feeling of lack of caring from the government?

For us, this is about neither individual struggle nor feeling abandoned by the government. It is about collective struggle against a system which doesn’t care if we live or die, have homes or live on the street, eat dinner or go to bed hungry.

-Concerned about legal pushback?

Yes we are very concerned about what will happen when landlords initiate eviction proceedings against those who cannot or will not pay rent during this crisis. The more of us there are, and the more connected we are to each other, the better our chances come summer. In the coming months we will be working to create a dense network of support.

-Why not push an alternative method (negotiating reduced rent, delayed payment, etc.) before an all our strike?

Individual tenants have and are welcome to pursue whichever strategy they feel is best. We are trying to build a wall of protection and support around those who cannot pay rent.

-What about the landlords/real estate managers? Any concern about how they will make ends meet?

Frankly, no. We have little to no sympathy for people who make their living off our broken backs, our polluted neighborhoods, and our drafty houses. If they lose their profits and have to adjust their retirement plans, we will not be crying for them. Or, was that supposed to be a joke?”

More here on this mainstream Bernie Sanders-supporting site

…and not just rent strikes:

Work is shit … Work is bloody …Work is sick…Amazon makes you sick…Interactive map of wildcat strikes

A friend writes:

1/4/20:

US, Chicago: occupation of bank-owned building for mutual aid projects and rent strike support

“In cities with eviction moratoriums, the closing of civil courts and the halting of business as usual makes squatting easier than ever before. Just as there is strength in defying the authority of landlords en masse there is transformative power in reclaiming shuttered buildings, clogging eviction bureaucracies, and moving evicted tenants back into their apartments. One is the natural outgrowth of the other. As rent strikes unmask the fundamental violence of rent, building occupations become acts of self-determination that shatter the illusion of private property. While state responses to COVID-19 continue to center on social distancing, quarantine and public health, we accept these frameworks as cynical half-truths. Although we recognize the dangers posed by the virus itself, we are also keenly aware of the catastrophic effects of viewing ourselves as a ‘population in need of state intervention.’”

30/3/20:

US: report on Amazon strikes

“‘Dildos are not essential items’…An Amazon worker has gone viral for speaking out against the e-commerce giant in a press conference after employees across the country walked out on the job in protest of work conditions amid the COVID-19 crisis….”

More here

27/3/20:

US, Memphis: wildcat strike of warehouse workers

“Despite being the largest grocery chain in the U.S., Kroger has yet to give its workers’ hazard pay, unlike other chains like Safeway, H-E-B, and Giant Eagle. Workers complain that the company has not taken adequate steps to protect themselves against COVID-19. The Memphis workers join a growing wave of wildcat strikes of workers being forced to work through COVID-19 pandemic in what many see as the beginning wave of strike action that the United States has not seen since the great General Strikes of the 1930s. “Half the workers have gone home. They scared for their safety. The ones that is here, they so tense they scared to touch the equipment,” said Wiggins, who had worked 97 hours on a mandatory seven-day-a-week shift. After the company was slow in letting the union know about the positive COVID-19 test results, most workers chose to walk off the job.”

…Missouri: 100 protesters sit-in outside governors home demanding release of prisoners

25/3/20:

US: Workers Launch Wave of Wildcat Strikes in USA as Trump Pushes for ‘Return to Work’

24/3/20:

US, Georgia: prisoners in ICE detention centres on hunger strike

23/3/20:

US, Washington state: 14 escape jail during crisis

21/3/20:

USA/Canada: report on rent strikes in several cities See video here

20/3/20:

US: report on development of mutual aid groups…report on hunger strikes in migrant detention camps…California: MacDonalds on strike

18/3/20:

US: report on wildcat strikes and shutdowns in car industry…Detroit: bus drivers win all demands after 24-hour strike: fares will not be collected for duration of  coronavirus crisis

“The riders are going in and out the back doors…There is very little interacting with the drivers.”

17/3/20:

US: wildcat strikes in several auto factories

8/12/19:

Brief look at history of non-violent direct action in the US 1976 – 2012

15/9/19:

Flint: union scabs on itself

7/9/19:

Sharpiegate: Reality denial hits new level of insanity (re. Hurricane Dorian hitting, but in fact not hitting, Alabama) …More here “It’s unheard of that [Noaa- National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, a government department] would – with no scientific basis whatsoever – undermine their own employees for political reasons. That’s never happened before under any administration … This doesn’t happen. This is a scientific agency. People gather data and they make the best decisions they can make form that data.”…“The NWS’s job is to save people’s lives, and if you undermine that authority, you’re going to cost people’s lives,” he said. “If they don’t believe hurricane warnings or tornado warnings, it will cost lives. That’s what Noaa’s doing. It’s irresponsible, managerial malpractice, and frankly someone should look into them. They have no right to be running an organization if that’s what they’re going to do.”

X writes: “…definitely a star for the contrafactuality file.  Now we have begun to enter an epoch of true barbarism, where factuality is openly contested by Power, and no longer simply on issues that could be regarded as “important”. The child pointing out the “emperor’s clothes” is to be shouted down without delay. Now the bodyguard of lies, as overworked as the armed forces of the Amercian Empire, must defend every point that might be contested, like the Wehrmacht after Hitler’s “no retreat” order. This is a land in which even the civil service bureaucrat finds him/herself no longer insulated but under duress. This is the very frictive point at which the tires of authoritarianism begin to shed their tread and legitimacy, considered on the old terms, and is now something the strongmen glance over their shoulders to see fall astern. A greater and greater measure of pure power will have to be deployed to keep this level of lunacy in power from crashing.  Eventually like the “explosion point of ideology in China”, this moment will demand so much complicity from all the institutions of the state and will have crossed itself up in so many insoluable contradictions that it will no longer be able to sustain itself as it was. A crisis of the mythology of power will follow and without a common social narrative (impossible in this increasingly divided world), the society/civilization will further unravel. So put this in with Erdogan’s burning of the books, the firing of Bolsonaro’s NASA-equivalent chief, the size of the crowd at Trump’s inauguration and an accumulating heap of other examples where the contraction of ruler by fact is always now resolved in the ruler’s favor and the civilization built on lies expands to the point where the branch on which it is sitting cracks.”.

SF replied: “This about the hurricane and Alabama is truly insane. But denial of reality at such a degree of submission to the Emperor, merely to satisfy his narrow narcissistic ego, seems to have nothing to do with social control or economic development as far as I can see, and is very unlikely to be the main trajectory of this society – because it weakens the effect of every important lie the state needs to maintain its power. People just won’t believe ANYthing if they continue like that.” 

X responded: “I would dispute your minimization of the importance of the (now burgeoning) scandal of the NOAA “correction”. Rather than having nothing to do with social control, I think it has a great deal, because the technique is not going to be limited to the emperor. The essence of the thing is the ‘gilding of the lily’ when writing reports for superiors, in order t get ahead. We saw a mass-murderously wonderful example of that in the ever-higher grain yields that preceded the wave of starvation that came with the Great Leap Forward. It is the same way police suspects die in custody and not a single piggy is found guilty of murdering them. Reality is bent to reflect, first and formost, the greater glory and pmniscience of the authority or authorities. It is true that this goes on many places all the time, but having such a thing so blatantly done, means that this is no longer something that ‘doesn’t happen’, this is something that does happen is called soemthing else that does not embarass the Leader and fuck you if you can’t take the joke or do the 1984-style dance pretending that things have always been so. It shows that now very high up the ascending order of important factualities necessary to the smooth functioning of a military-merchantile empire, things can be arbitrarily falsified and the merchants artisans and peasants are all going to have to pretend to go along with the new dispensation and at the same time pay greater attention to carry on business without fucking-up. the burden of everyone having to factor-in this deliberately imposed irreality when they do all their routine tasks is going to wear. It gives the plebs something else to preoccupy them, more uncertainty and possible danger, hence an enhanced element of social control. It must be noted that this, for the very reason you expressed, is not an approach that can be sustained indefinitely.  This may not be part of a conscious plan, but it does look like a part of a historical pattern. This same kind of fatigue produced by constantly changing political campaigns once wore down the ‘enthusiasm of the masses’ until the “explosion point of ideology in China” was reached. One can only hope.” Developments (10/9/19) here.

4/9/19:

FBI  Tracking Border Protest Groups As Extremist Organizations
FBI doing what it was created to do, act as a clearing house to the right-wing and as enforcers of repression. Check the specie memo included in this article. Appparently, the idea of questioning borders is a threat the FBI must take seriously now.

3/8/19:

Hardship during the Great Recession linked with lasting mental health declines

 8/8/18:

Future news? The wooden slogans give them away, as does the contrived style, which it must be said is a little less so than before; the robots of the RCP have spent many years imitating real human beings and have made great strides in the direction of developing convincing simulacra.

22/6/19:

Trump’s 1000-year Reich

1/6/19:

New US Order

1/5/19:

Report on new evidence showing how cop deliberately murdered Oscar Grant in Oakland January 1st 2009  X writes: “Now, ten years after the killing of Oscar Grant, it comes out that the main defense of Mehserle, the cop who shot him to death, was a blatant lie, which was somehow given legitimacy in the proceedings that occurred after the incident. The video of the event shows Mehserle looking back at his hand the last time he tries to draw his weapon, to check he shoots Grant, who had been trying to comply with the order to put his hands behind his back for cuffing. The filth and their handlers sat on this shit for a decade in order to protect their precious order built on oppression, sadism, aggression and fear, from being assaulted by thousands of angry East Bay residents, had they known the truth.”

25/4/19:

Concrete evidence of how close the Republican “mainstream (Cloaca Maxima)” has merged with overtly white supremacist outfits as to be indistinguishable

11/4/19:

Immigration enforcement to be lead by man who imitates China’s categorisation of its Uighur concentration camps as “vocational training centres”, the man who described immigration centres as “summer camps”

22/3/19:

The Great Bureaucrat-In-The-Sky sends his only begotten bastard son to save one monstrosity from another  God has intervened and Trump is his vessel, his chamber pot, his bedpan. The idea that the most  heavily armed country on the planet is led in foreign policy by a fruitcake who believes the creator of the universe makes periodic interventions in the petty territorial disputes of barbarian trash on some no-count little planet should give pause to any unreasonably optimistic notions of a long wait until character armourgeddon.

13/3/19:

Report on the lie of the meritocracy X writes: “A consequence not without importance. The collapse of middle class values is now on display for all to see, like the emperor’s new clothes. The myth of upper-class meritocracy is seriously damaged – there are no gracious people up there, only the same Hobbesian brutishness as everywhere else in this society. These were supposed to be the ‘goldilocks class’ everyone aspired to join, that embodied all those values we were seeking to export under the name “democracy” – which turned out just to be the name of the storefront behind which it was sold.”

6/3/19:

Whole Foods cuts workers’ hours after introducing  minimum wage

A friend of a contact sent the following email:

“The Whole Foods calendar is set not only to seasons, but also to what Frank Zappa referred to as “contrived national, commercial artifices”. He was, of course, referring to Mothers Day ( and all that quaint, unique Americana – the Xerox-copied “family newsletter” – receiving one every Xmas was a real howl!). Anyway, to set my caboose back on the tracks: WFM always cut back on labor during the interim. I think the Guardian is correct as regards small cities, but maybe not as regards sections of huge hipster-infested metropolitan areas. Temporarily laid-off tech workers get a job at WFM and then quit after a few hours. Granted, that’s an extreme example, but so are the working conditions – the one thing that the Guardian really nailed: customers – or as one says in Spanish ” pinches clientes” [“fucking customers”] – don’t get served promptly; it takes hours to complete the most mundane of tasks…and, in a complete reversal of Whole Foods protocol, everyone in management fakes the log books. Workers certainty don’t have time to update them, especially when they’re short-staffed.

There are a few remaining OGs who really try to make an effort to follow the rules to the letter. If we’re caught doing this, we may, however, be interrupted by a supervisor or team educator – inverted commas – who’ll tell us to put an extra updated sticker on a product whose WFM internal compliance date has expired. That doesn’t mean it’s expired by the manufacturer’s standards. It just means that it’s a bottom seller, and WFM doesn’t want to spoil it out until they’ve derived the most profit from it.”

Oakland: report on sell-out of teachers’ strike
Interesting report, although through a dubious source. We don’t need to agree with Trots to know that the teachers got  ripped for this one, along with the students.

4/3/19:

An event that features a veritable who’s who of ultra-right filth and gives something of their backgrounds for (US) anti-fascist data bases

2/3/19:

The beginning of the civil war on campus

21/2/19:

Oakland: official teachers strike “…the latest in a series of increasingly militant work stoppages by educators across the country.  In January, teachers in Los Angeles, California, won a historic strike, securing smaller class sizes, a nurse in every school, a reduction in standardized testing, a 6 percent pay raise for teachers and a plan for the School Board to vote to call on the state to cap charter school growth. The teachers union in Denver, Colorado, won its first strike in 25 years last week, while educators in West Virginia walked out earlier this week, halting proposed legislation that would have allowed tax dollars to pay for private-school tuition. Today, the 3,000-member Oakland Education Association (OEA) is on strike after 95 percent of its members voted on February 4 to authorize the work stoppage. The union says it has picket lines up at all 86 educational campuses in Oakland. The Oakland teachers strike is as much about defending public education as it is about teacher pay. United under the slogan, “Fighting for the schools our students deserve,” the union is calling for smaller class sizes, more support services for students (nurses, counselors and librarians), and an end to neighborhood school closures. “

3/2/19:

US, New York: clashes outside jail as prisoners suffer heat & electricity cuts

1/2/19:

US, West Virginia: cops fire pepper-spray pellets at partying students

31/1/19:

Report on nasty state tactic for trapping immigrants

18/1/19:

US, Oakland: teachers go on wildcat strike

5/1/19: Arkansas: pig shoots dog X writes: “Our filth in action. Most impressive to note that, according to the article, this act of sadistic, gratuitous cruelty wasn’t even against the law. However much we despise the pigs, the article makes clear that it was only possible through the laws and the lawmakers that this happened.  Not really something big to report, but indicative of the kind of place we live in and the terrorism of daily life that gives it its underlying character.”

31/12/18:

US, Arizona: report on attacks on self-driving cars

26/12/18:

Article on how native American continued slavery of blacks in 19th century A good antidote to the usual anti-imperialist rhetoric of “500 years of struggle against imperialism…”

24/12/18:

Did Erdogan blackmail Trump?

5/12/18:

On the link between repression of immigrants and repression of labour activists

14/11/18:

US, California: riots at 2 prisons  No details given here, so it’s not clear whether these were riots between prisoners or an attack on the screws and prison infrastructure or a mixture of the two.

8/11/18:

From Cautiously Pessimistic :

1/11/18:

US, New York: huge payout for Google executive accused of sexual harassment provokes spontaneous walkout

28/10/18:

US, Florida: whilst empty of people, Republican Party offices receive hail of gunfire

24/10/18:

Trump and his nationalism X writes: Now the regime has run up its true colors: “nationalist” – the universally recognized euphemism for fascist is now unapologetically adopted by the ruling party. This should be a shot across the bows of anyone who is paying attention – and in this country, what percentage of the population raised from birth to be obedient cattle does this really include?

22/10/18:

You scratch my back, I’ll scratch….the record of complaints against you Judges judging judges ensures the consolidation of authoritarian rule…will we one day be able to definitively judge them?

19/10/18:

Judge tries to overule jury A perfectly transparent example of what US “rule of law” is all about: rule of the elite. Those defenders of this society’s true values, people who don’t want a triviality like the cancers of potentially millions or the destruction of this planet stand in the way of some very important people who want to make obscene amounts of money. An exhibit in the indictment of the civilization that produced it.[X]

18/10/18:

Right Wing Death Squad: The Ticking-Time Bomb of Trumpism  A fairly convincing scary analysis, though dependent on a number of things that may not happen.

17/10/18:

The New York Times soft sell fascist creep whilst the useful idiots at the Huff give a little push for  RCP Maoists, who’ve discovered colors and upgraded their No! posters

13/10/18:

New York: proud boys against gay pride That the Proud Boys, to celebrate their victory, shouted “I like beer” in reference to Kavanaugh’s successful coup, shows an increasingly open unity between the blatantly fascist street-fighters and the ascendant authoritarian (Trumpist) wing of the Republican Party. A common culture and system of referents is being forged through this alliance of the legal with the illegal, the violent with the respectable. ..so will Gavin McInnes learn from history or will he end up like Ernst Roehm? Or has Trump collapsed the distinctions between crass noveau riche like himself and the old plutocracy, between the Evangelical patriarchs who are afraid of women governing their own bodies and the Proud Boys, sufficiently to create a new ‘big tent’ of reactionary consensus? [X]

12/10/18:

Trump to make demonstrations only affordable to the rich…?

10/10/18:

Ohio: cop killer of 12-year-old Tamir Rice given another licence to kill 

8/10/18:

Keeping Gruesome Bureaucrats in bed together as  Kremlin bacKs Kavanaugh

6/10/18:

US, Washington DC: protesters against Kavanaugh ‘occupy’ Supreme Court steps “Women, survivors, and allies walked straight past the police, climbed over barricades, and sat down on the Capitol steps.”

4/10/18:

US, Washington DC: 100s arrested during sit-in at Capitol Senate office building Few seem to have noticed the irony of the fact that this included a celebrity representative of an industry that especially exploits women-as-image/object,  the “well-known” model Emily Ratajkowski.  But this is an epoch where we should suppress all critique because “hey, don’t be so negative”.

29/9/18:

US, California: Amazon chicken-supplying farm occupied by animal rights activists  As I said in relation to an animal rights action in Australia on 212/9/18: “Whilst the intensified commodification of animals by big business is undoubtedly horrible (and produces increasingly tasteless hormone-filled nutritionally valueless food), so is it for human beings (see, for instance, this – official  work death statistics for the country, “official” meaning “understated”), something animal rights activists usually ignore in their role of charitable vanguard of those who cannot fight for themselves“. The link above is for work-related deaths in Australia; the latest statistics for the US are for 2016, when there was a 7% increase in work-related deaths compared with  2015 – “…the first time more than 5,000 fatalities have been recorded since 2008.”

24/9/18:

US, NY state: 35 school buses vandalised…Berkeley: legal challenge to cops’ obvious provocation to violence against antifas arrested but not even charged by publicising their faces, names and towns of residence

21/9/18:

3 articles on Trump’s nomination for the Supreme Court:

https://crimethinc.com/2018/10/01/kavanaugh-shouldnt-be-on-the-supreme-court-neither-should-anyone-else

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/sep/20/brett-kavanaugh-supreme-court-yale-amy-chua

A contact [X] writes:

Amy Chua, the author of the Battlehymn of the Tiger Mother a paean to the virtues of raising hyper-competetive children in a highly pressurized “success-oriented” environment, is one of a couple who are close to Kavanaugh and share in his forms of cultural value creation. The article does an excellent job of showing the surreptitious vileness and overt sliminess of the legal arm of the political class.

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/brett-kavanaugh-american-aristocracy_us_5ba2cc8de4b0375f8f99c5d2

X writes: A sketch – in some cases illuminating –  of the plutocratic elite in the USA. However, it’s worth questioning, after reading this from the pro-Democrat Huffington Post,  how it eluded the writer that ever since the drafting of the Articles of Confederation, the “American aristocracy” has been a bi-partisan project, whichever subsequent era we refer to.

17/9/18:

Report on how cops are using self-deleting messaging app to avoid disclosing incriminating evidence

15/9/18:

Unsurprising report of mass  surveillance of leftist or fat leftist groups

8/9/18:

US, North Carolina: further clashes over pro-slavery statue

4/9/18:

Report on the new developments in the supreme court X writes: A fairly insightful analysis of the Supreme Court in its present direction, as well as some of its reasons for being as it is, and of the Democratic Party’s capacity for opposition. Its notion of what the public should do, on the other hand, is constrained by a completely conventional unrealistic civics textbook attitude of what is political necessary or possible.

3/9/18:

US: prison strike – prisoners speak out, mainstream media remains mute

28/8/18:

Arizona: yet another carte blanche given by the filth to the filth

25/8/18:

US, N.Carolina: clashes between those wishing to maintain pro-slavery statues and those against them …Philadelphia: clashes between antifas and filth

24/8/18:

US, Texas: small victory of prison strike…?

22/8/18:

US: day 2 of prison strike

21/8/18:

US: prison strike in lots of prisons throughout country For updates, see this. More here… Statement from Nova Scotia prisoners.

20/8/18:

US, N. Carolina: confederate statue pulled down. Eyewitness accounts here

12/8/18:

US, Virginia: report on Charlottesville protests  And another…Washington DC: a couple of dozen fascists, 1000s of counter-protesters & the cops More here

10/8/18:

Arizona: example of growing authoritarianism…and similarly in Georgia

Report on alt-right

5/8/18:

US, California (Berkeley): antifas arrested in limited ‘clash’ with fascists Report from X, a contact: “It was PATHETIC. This article is from Fox News (so you already know it’s hyperbolic hogwash), and, as may be seen, they have tried to do the alt. right’s work for it by publicizing the identities of the people who got arrested (you see their pics; they look a miserable lot, as though central casting had gotten them from the same pool that once held Steve Bannon).
When I got there, things had already arrived at a kind of stalemate: there were no more than a couple of dozen fascists in the middle of the park, which was surrounded with concrete roadblocks arranged to stop pedestrian traffic as well, save by single -file entry. They were surrounded by a somewhat greater number of demonstrators who were yelling at them. Each side had a person shouting into a loudspeaker, each with their separate incantations, each of less than ten syllables. The nazi clown – who was definitely the same one who was at Portland the day before – was chanting something about Marxism and paedophilia, and the Maoist (the article references the knocking of books off a book table that Revolution Books had set up in the park, remarkably near by) was shouting the usual “No Trump, No KKK, No [non-red] fascist USA”. There were quite a few cops around, and a certain type of seemingly contrived high tension was in the air…but it was nothing like what was happening at the same time in Portland yesterday. And yet one had the feeling that one side, the leftist side, was trying rather desperately to engineer some kind of cathartic moment. Although I did not see it directly, I believe it was probably the reason for what looked otherwise like extremely bad generalship.
As I exited the blocked off space in the park and proceeded down the block I found, at a 90 degree angle, a double line of tac squad cops facing off to what looked like only slightly more than a hundred demonstrators to the right on Milivia St. It looked like neither side wanted to butt heads at that point, there were, after all, squads of cops all around the park in little knots – defense in depth, as it were – and even if the whole lot of demonstrators had broken through, all they could have done was rough up the couple of dozen nazis for a short while until the cavalry came…and so what?
I continued the rest of the block to University, made a right turn toward the main street of Shattuck, and no long afterward the entirety of the marchers followed me up that block to stop at the intersection. There I was able to see in the vanguard, about fifty or so people in black-bloc attire, but not a single flag or evidence that these were anarchists (despite what you see in the Fox article; of course “anarchist” is a favorite demonizing word for both types of fascists present, and that may explain why Fox wanted it so, lack of evidence notwithstanding). The props indicating actual political positions consisted largely of the Bay Area Resist’s little printed poster (whose diminutive size I suspect was a consequence of a recent Berkeley ordinance), the RCP’s “No!…” poster and the occasional demonstrator adorned with a DSA T-shirt. The rest of the crowd was fairly typical Berkeley motley, mostly of people in their twenties and thirties with a sprinkling of older movement veteran-looking grey-hairs.
At least as striking though was the zombie-like shuffling gait, obedient stop at the march leader’s instructions, obligatory sloganeering for a few moments before they began marching again, up the block and to the right on the next street, where I knew from the street I had moments ago traversed, that they would find another police blockade/check point. This seemed remarkably dense from a tactical point of view: why tire your troops by marching them three times the distance that your opponent will have to march to cut them off and impose the same tactical stalemate again on you? I saw one of the marchers tarrying along the sidewalk as the rest of them got going. He seemed a little uncertain himself and so I asked “What is the point of this exercise? They should already know that the street they’re going toward is blocked as well; it’s warm and they’ll get tired”. The person I asked had no idea and seemed perplexed as to why this was happening himself.
Nevertheless, he and all the others dutifully followed the instructions of the march leader and shuffled off…I keep going straight, up to Shattuck, not wishing to wait around in the sun for some female leftist iteration of Colonel Blimp to march her charges into a cul-de-sac from which they might be hard-pressed to extricate themselves, especially as they had conspicuously less mobility than the cops, whose main body of heavy infantry may have been no faster, but who had numerous small groups of tactical reserves loosely surrounding the demonstrators already.
It was at that point, where I could see no successful outcome, that I packed it in. Getting bottled up along with a large (it was really no more than 120 people…maybe Fox has taken up the old ancient Greco-Roman style, accounting the opposing Persian armies at preposterously large numbers to make their own victories more impressive, unaware that centuries later Hans Delbrueck would ambush them) group of cattle-like PBI (Poor Bloody Infantry)s whose tactical imaginations must have completely failed them to allow themselves to be led into such a trap…or perhaps there is a special leftist obedience school they attend…was definitely not the way I wanted to spend the rest of my afternoon and evening. So I drifted up to Shattuck St., past Eastwind Books – a pitiable shadow of its former self when it came for a while into its own under a more independent management after the death of Mao and began to stock a wide range of books that weren’t just propaganda – and turned right. I drifted past the seedy comic book store and Half Price Books where I briefly read of Peter Padfield’s biography of Karl Doenitz (the period right after the mutinies of the High Seas Fleet) and picked up a copy of Anarchism and the City [Barcelona 1898-1937], with one ear cocked to the sounds of the street coming from around the corner. Then, giving up entirely on the demonstrators ability to give their fatalistic turn of march the slip, I descended into the underworld of BART.
I was on the point of calling, and coming, home when I heard two loud explosions I took to be flashbangs and heard the loudspeaker sloganeering get momentarily closer and louder. Although I expected some of the demonstrators to take refuge in the BART, it didn’t happen. I later heard when I got home (per this article) that 12 people had been arrested, some of them probably tying to force a passage through to the park. If so, and there is little reason to doubt it, the tactical leadership of the march was definitely at the level of the British offensive at the Somme (or, given the persistent impression that the march leader was making stabs in the dark for a tactical solution – like Scheer going into the attack against Jellicoe for the second, catastrophically disastrous time): just bludgeoning a body of troops against impenetrable defenses until they break or, as happened, until the offensive runs out of cannon fodder. The terrible irony was, as I discovered making my way through the park when I first arrived, that the later WW I tactic of infiltration of individuals or small groups, would have likely insinuated enough people in to make a sudden push, routing the ultra-rightists, without the police being able to respond in time. This is a terribly old tactical trick. Perhaps the ulterior motive was to get people popped to “radicalize” the crowd – I’ve seen the RCP do this a number of times in the past; it’s completely cynical and it probably doesn’t work so well, but it provides the bureaucrats with a feeling of Stalinoid pseudo-Machiavellian omnipotence (although to read the descriptions of the charges against some of those arrested, they may well have been detained away from the main body of demonstrators). Perhaps I am being too harsh on the planners of this demonstration – I would like for the sake of the poor walk-ons taking (no decision-making) part in the demo, but by the look of things when I left, that would give more credit than I would justifiably extend.
A world of difference form what was observed to have happened in Portland.“

Additional comment: “I omitted to mention two bits of observation that have a bearing on how yesterday’s events came out and their significance.

The first was seeing the poster of the group of people immediately behind me as I walked through the crowd breifly immobilized on the sidewalk on University Avenue. “Capitalism+Racism=Fascism” Such a poster really makes one ask how much beforehand thinking went into whatever gestalt produced this thoroughly mindless slogan. Just examining the elements that make it up – did capitalism not contain a rather virulent strain of racism from the very beginning to justify the slaughter, the destruction of civilizations, the reduction of multiple populations to slavery, from the very beginning? And if so, why is it necessary to add “racism”? And if racism was there from the very beginning, were not according to this formula, capitalism and fascism one in the same thing? What then, of the historical specificity of fascism? What indeed of the historical consciousness of the demonstrators who hold this ridiculous slogan high?

The second occurred not long afterward, while listening to the march leader talk to the crowd before the next spasm of chanting began. I wasn’t able to catch all of it, but there was concern expressed at the threat made by the leader of the Patior Prayer march the day before in Portland – which, by the way seemed unrealized – that the alt right would put some of its Sturmabteilungen into “black bloc” outfits and disrupt the counter-protestors’ actions. Perhaps there is some of this concern in the the concentration of all the black bloc attired demonstrators at the front of the crowd together, so they could engage in mutual supervision of each other. This is testimony to a rather low degree of command and control management (perhaps Warsaw Pact style command and control to go with Cold War style politics), if true. Again, it would be well within the compass of the groups(s) involved for there to have been other actions and groupings in the wings or even off-stage that I did not see that would contradict what I have just now posited.”

4/8/18:

US, Oregon: cops wade into antifas as armed fascists march More here“Numerous times today cops claimed to be trying to disperse the anti-fascist crowd because “we saw some weapons” but the whole time they knew the other side actually had weapons and even “cut a deal with them” so they wouldn’t be searched (as promised).https://t.co/2jN0OHuuON” A contact writes: “…it was clear that the main object of the pigs was both the monitoring and attacking of the much larger counter protestor groups. The cops fired chemical weapons at the crowd – utterly unprovoked, although the pigs claim projectiles were thrown – something Unicorn Riot’s reporter on the scene refuted – and caused the counter-demonstrators to disperse. In retaliation for the chemical/explosive attack, a small number of counter demonstrators then threw projectiles and this then gave the pigs the “excuse” for a general assault on the the anti-fascists, violent beatings and (I don’t know for sure, but in all likelihood) the majority of arrests. I’ll bet that all or at least the majority of arrests were of the counter-demonstrators. Interestingly, the collection of confiscated weapons seized by the police, were of items heavily marked with confederate battle-flag emblems…”

31/7/18:

US, Indiana: wildcat strike over racist coordinator “On Tuesday, during a safety meeting, the coordinator asked one of the Mexican men to translate what he was saying to his fellow Spanish-speaking workers. When he refused, the coordinator “got mad, real red-faced,” Dangerfield said. So he called off the meeting and sent “five or six” people home, “trying to fire them.”…That’s when “they all packed their s**t up and shut this motherf**ker down!” Dangerfield explained with jubilance in the video, which has been viewed millions of times on Facebook and other platforms. “They are not bulls**tting,” he said. “They thought they was gonna play with these amigos and they say, ‘Aww yeah, we rise together, homie, and they leaving; they not bulls**tting.” “There wasn’t one [worker] left in the building…This is what black people need to be on, I swear to God, I love this sh*t,” Dangerfield, who is black, said in the video…”… we can all come together. There’s power in numbers….They were walking out with their heads up, strong. It touched me. That’s why I was like, wow, this is beautiful. We’re the ones, the workers — we make the heads get rich…Treating us lesser than isn’t even cool. We’re the reason the hub was getting built. Ain’t no owners out there in their hard hats. We’re the ones putting our life on the line. So you gotta respect us.” When Dangerfield went back to pick up his paycheck, he was offered $250 to take down his video, but it was just too powerful, he said, and he was fired. He added that the man who refused to translate was also sacked. Even still, Dangerfield doesn’t regret posting the 26/7/18:footage, “because it’s 5 million people who saw that. And it might change their view on things. Empowering people. Me losing a job is nothing compared to the big picture”

27/7/18:

US, Philadelphia: Occupy ICE win some kind of victory

26/7/18:

US, Kentucky: anti-ICE protesters block elevator in immigration court building

23/7/18:

US, Oakland: angry demo following racist stabbing to death of black woman on BART metro system“…a crowd of about 1,000 marched from the MacArthur BART Station to downtown Oakland. The march took a violent turn when demonstrators — seen in a video making the rounds on social media — began beating a man some believed to be a member of the Proud Boys. An Oakland Police Department spokeswoman said two people were detained after the incident and later released. While removing them from the area, police said a portion of the crowd became disruptive and began throwing M-80 and M-1000 firecrackers at officers, injuring six of them.

19/7/18:

San Francisco: interesting report on tech workers meeting

11/7/18:

Report on proposed heavy criminalisation of masked anti-fascist action…Anarchist critique here

5/7/18:

US, Philadelphia: further clashes outside ICE HQ…critique of leftist suffocation of Philadelphia ICE protests

3/7/18:

US, Philadelphia: clashes & arrests as cops clamp down on ICE protest…report on various ICE protests

30/6/18:

US, Oregon: clashes between fascists and antifas

28/6/18:

US, Washington DC: 100s of women arrested following occupation of section of the Senate against ICE…Oregon: cops dismantle anti-ICE camp “Protest coordinator Lillith Sinclair told local news station KGW8 that Homeland Security officers “have been playing mind games” for several days – placing cardboard cutouts of officers in the ICE building to make it appear as though their presence was larger, blaring Metallica’s “Enter Sandman” to keep protesters awake, while one officer walked around the encampment with an eagle mask on his head.”…but this says the occupiers remain in place “DHS officers, adorned in full riot gear and brandishing automatic weapons and shields, announced a final warning to clear the entrance over a loudspeaker as they moved in, rousing sleeping occupiers and pulling down tents. By sunrise, a handful of protesters had been cuffed (seven got misdemeanor charges for failing to comply with federal officers’ orders) and the entrance to the ICE building, which had been closed since June 20 due to the protest, was protected by a line of federal officers. The office was opened and remains open, despite the contentious standoff between the feds and protesters—separated only by police tape—which was still ongoing as of Friday afternoon….”…Eyewitness accounts reveal certain miserable contradictions amongst the campers“At the Portland occupation, I saw some people aggressively shamed for tagging the Tesla showroom. They were screamed at and kicked out of the occupation at 3 am. I also saw those same people later being described as white, although half of them were people of color, because it didn’t fit into the leadership’s privilege politics narrative to admit that many people of color are invested in confrontational politics and escalation. As they were verbally assaulted and kicked out of camp, they were told that because they had tagged the Tesla showroom, it would be their fault if the police came to the blockade and took children away from their parents. At the Tacoma blockade, one afternoon, a nonviolent direct action training took place. It began with two white people and one person of color aggressively shaming everyone in the space for the actions of the police. According to them, it was our fault that the ICE agents were torturing and raping people inside because demonstrators had been standing in the street the night before. It was our fault the ICE agents were torturing and raping people inside because a couple demonstrators had been drinking beer.” X, a correspondent, writes re. the above: “As we address the spores of bureaucratic rot and the ideologies that justify it, these commentaries showing the swiftness with which things are bureaucratized and the widespread prevalence of identity politicians – who are never silenced and never physically suppressed. Their defeat should be benchmarks of political advance and of judging the coherence of the actions themselves, as much as their avowed aim of blockading ICE. If these identity politicians continue to stand in the way of a genuine proletarian internationalism, the movement will stall and be defeated.”

Portland: no ICE on the track

“…the Olympia blockade… barricaded an active railroad for 12 days. The entire neighborhood was covered in anti-police graffiti. Cement was poured on the tracks. Security cameras were taken down. Parking meters in the area were broken. At any given time, the greatest number of people you might find at the blockade would be ~50-100. At night, it was down to 5-20 people. By contrast, if we count from the first day of the overnight occupation in Portland to the day the ICE building was reopened, the Portland blockade lasted 10 days—and the number of people at that blockade was often 1000 or more.The graffiti—and the smashed parking meters, broken security cameras, and so forth—at the Olympia blockade did not cause the police to come sooner. It actually took them longer to come, despite the blockade being only a fraction of the size of the Portland blockade. At the Portland blockade, people were busy policing each other.” – here

Interesting take on Trump’s immigration policies and propaganda “…what we are living with is pre-fascism. It is easy to dismiss Donald Trump as an ignoramus, not least because he is. But he has an acute understanding of one thing: test marketing. He created himself in the gossip pages of the New York tabloids, where celebrity is manufactured by planting outrageous stories that you can later confirm or deny depending on how they go down. And he recreated himself in reality TV where the storylines can be adjusted according to the ratings. Put something out there, pull it back, adjust, go again. Fascism doesn’t arise suddenly in an existing democracy. It is not easy to get people to give up their ideas of freedom and civility. You have to do trial runs that, if they are done well, serve two purposes. They get people used to something they may initially recoil from; and they allow you to refine and calibrate….” This is very obviously limited – not just because it comes from a journalist who intrinsically is incapable of speaking outside the parameters of bourgeois democracy, but also because, even within these very confined parameters, he doesn’t develop his perspectives much at all. Still, a start.

25/6/18:

US, Michigan: another ICE office occupied…New York: ICE forced to postpone deportation hearings

23/6/18:

US, New York: loading dock of ICE HQ blocked as “Occupy ICE” spreads throughout country…More anti-ICE protests “At a facility in McAllen, Texas protesters briefly blocked a bus that was carrying immigrants. “Shame! Shame!” they shouted at border agents….protesters set up tents outside an ICE facility in Los Angeles.”

22/6/18:

USA, Virginia: homeland security minister’s home and land lacks security “The protest, organized by the progressive group CREDO Action, took place at 7:30 a.m. In the pouring rain, protesters shouted several chants over megaphones, held posters that read “Child Snatcher” and played the audio clip released by ProPublica over a speaker system.”

20/6/18:

US: report on man who refused to collaborate in the US state’s child abuse policies …as Homeland Security Secretary gets her Mexican meal ruined (video here)…and in Oregon ICE building is blockaded by activists…forcing offices to shut down temporarily

19/6/18:

US: head of Tesla complains about saboteur in its ranks (video)

15/6/18:

US, California: dangerous criminals attack everything that’s wunnerful about the US of A (stunningly insightful video!!!)

13/6/18:

Report on the possibility of building an an AI wall between Mexico and the US – totaltarianism in increments

11/6/18:

US, Pennsylvania: earth-digger immobilised in solidarity with ZAD struggle in France…Iowa: anti-drone/military graffiti

3/6/18:

US, Oregon: fireworks and bottles chucked at cops as antifas clash with nazis More here

22/5/18:

Orlando cops testing facial recognition CCTV system

12/5/18:

US, Missouri: prison uprising “Among other areas, the inmates destroyed the food area, kitchen, and a manufacturing facility after hot-wiring forklifts to break down the gates to get in….” More here “.. the inmates began to stage a sit-down protest…that protest quickly turned into a riot….inmates were unhappy with shrinking recreation and program time associated with staffing restrictions….78 inmates destroyed property throughout the facility including a Missouri Vocational Enterprises factory, dining halls and the kitchen. “Property damage was extensive and included destruction of food supplies, graffiti, damage to security cameras, and damage to equipment and machinery throughout the building,” …the CRCC riot destroyed the facility kitchen, inmate work program machines, and caused at least $100,000 in damages.”

9/5/18:

US, North Carolina (Charlotte): anti-frackers erect 20-foot tower in fracking company’s CEO’s home driveway…Oakland: racist yuppie filth try to transform town into their own shrivelled petty moronic image

8/5/18:

US, Louisiana: prisoners go on strike

7/5/18:

US, Seattle: environmentalists occupy & shut down JPMorgan bank “…since President Donald Trump took office, JPMorgan Chase has quadrupled its investments in tar sands and increased its financing of coal by 2,100%….Female environmentalists occupied one of JPMorgan Chase’s bank lobbies in Seattle to demand divestment from fossil fuels…At least five indigenous and 15 non-indigenous female protesters occupied the lobby of the Russell Investments Center in downtown Seattle—where Chase’s regional leaders are based—while others shut down the street outside by erecting “tarpees” and hoisting a sign that read, “Road closed due to Chase’s financing of climate disaster…. Destroying the world in search of profit…perfectly legal. Peacefully protesting such destruction…not so much, it seems.”

1/5/18:

US, Puerto Rico (San Juan): protesters clash with riot cops

30/4/18:

US, Arizona: report saying state-wide teachers’ strike may be illegal

More here “Republican governor, Doug Ducey, proposed to give teachers a 20% raise. The proposal, which would still have left the state’s educators among the worst paid in the US, was rejected by the teachers’ union and the Arizona Parent Teacher Association after it was revealed that the plan would be paid with cuts to other state programs.”

20/4/18:

US, Michigan: lecturers & students occupy building on university campus in support of wage rise

17/4/18:

US, Philadelphia: Starbucks occupied after arrest of black guys for “loitering” whilst waiting for friend (video) More detailed report here

8/4/18:

The return of the concentrated spectacle? X, a contact, writes:  “Does this bible study group not give the impression of being akin to the central most study group of the Cultural Revolution under Chairman Mao, and for the same purpose: a re-ideologization of society which will provide “ideological incentives” for its supporters under conditions of increasing real-world impoverishment and austerity, quite possibly reinforced by the threat or actuality of war, while the looting escalates and corruption flourishes, all behind a screen of arbitrariness and irrationality? When the spectacle/authoritarian social imaginary gets stronger, it always gets crazier, and material conditions always get correspondingly worse. One may also, suspecting the basiclly Dominionist outlook of Pence, see this “study group” as the general staff of a war on secular society, its values, and its institutions.…as though the whole vile concoction were born directly out of a Margaret Atwood nightmare.”

3/4/18:

US, Oklahoma: 1000s of striking teachers etc. occupy state capitol building See also this.

2/4/18:

US: strike report on Oklahoma & Kentucky … Washington: Howard university occupiers demand immediate disarming of campus police (video) More here

31/3/18:

US, Sacramento: sheriff’s car deliberately hits protester… Florida: how to spoil a good walk spoilt

30/3/18:

US, Kentucky: teachers go on wildcat strike over pensions law manipulation More here. Doubtless there’ll be loads of radicals of various stripes talking of how this could develop into something BIG like happened with West Virginia earlier this month or Wisconsin 7 years ago. Obviously it could, like so many struggles that have some element of independence. However, unless optimism of the will is tempered by pessimism of the intellect, and proletarianised teachers or whoever stop accepting the manipulations of union bureaucrats etc., and go beyond the hesitations that repeatedly make them stall before the immensity of their tasks, it could very well fizzle out. A million times workers have complained of being “sold out” by union bureaucrats and Democrat or other politicians, as if they hadn’t already sown the seeds of being sold out by tolerating – and looking for help from – these 2-faced creeps whose fundamental social function is always to keep their struggle under hierarchical control, and to sell a “sell-out’ as the most realistic option. Everyone fears the relatively unknown. But avoiding the relatively unknown, succumbing to the fear of fighting without and against external authority, is the enemy within each proletarian that s/he has to combat if s/he is not to fall into the sense of demoralisation that comes from a very predictable sell-out.

29/3/18:

US, California: protesters against cop murder of unarmed black guy block roads, but Black Lives Matter leaders, and their followers, preach against blocking of basketball game…Washington: university admin building occupied in protest against financial “scandal”

25/3/18:

US, California: prison riot

23/3/18:

US, California: traffic blocked as protests against cop killing of black guy continues

22/3/18:

US, California: 100s block freeways and 1000s from entering basketball game in anger at another cop killing of unarmed black guy

19/3/18:

US, Hollywood: a critique of celebrities? “The “You Are the Star” mural sits at Wilcox Avenue and Hollywood Boulevard. It features classic Hollywood legends like Charlie Chaplin, James Dean and Richard Pryor sitting in the audience at a theater looking at the viewer of the mural. Someone painted yellow bars over the faces of several stars, including Marilyn Monroe, Clark Gable and Shirley Temple, among others. Other walls and street objects in the area were also vandalized. The same yellow paint was also splashed on the Hollywood Walk of Fame near Art Linkletter’s star. A trail of yellow footprints leads away from the spill.” See also “blinded by stars” “The celebrity is the role model broadcast non-stop advertising the positive value of total identification with modern alienation….the carrot of “fame” … invariably makes even those who reach stardom at best comfortable and complacent towards their unhappiness.”

14/3/18:

US: brief school walkouts throughout country in protest against gun laws As I said back in February: It’s difficult to unweave the subtleties (or lack of them) of the NRA v. liberal gun control debate – but from the point of view of radical opposition neither side makes sense, surprise surprise. Trump, at the end of February, declared he would have law enforcement seize the arms of anyone who (through the eyes of whatever means the US government possesses) constitutes what the government deems to be a threat, without due process. All the focus on “gun control”, without looking at how the state will selectively enforce such control according to its own needs and criteria, merely reinforces the illusion of the state as protector. What convenient selection of gun control could this mean? At the moment one can only speculate. But it could well mean that antifa groups like the Redneck Rebels could be disarmed (perhaps using statutes originally created to attack “criminal gangs”) while ultra-right filth like the now legally bulletproof Bundys will get a green light or even be allowed in as part of the posse. And how will they enforce this “gun control”? Probably by the use of even more highly technified, intrusive and slimey means of collecting information, and even more aggressive physical invasions of property (infoshops, squats, homes). All this contributes to repressing a community of resistance the growth of which would be the main atmosphere which could help stop the increased atomisation of increasingly mad and even psychotic individuals submissive to the individualist tastes produced by this insane society. [my thanks to G. for most of this]

6/3/18:

US, W.Virginia: school teachers win wage rise for all state workers…paid for out of cuts to Medicaid (wonderful!) Report on end of strike here.…Illinois: part of university occupied in protest against underfunding

4/3/18:

US, W.Virginia: 2nd section of working class go on strike in this state

53/18:

US, Michigan: antifas clash with fascists…Wisconsin: street shut down by 100s demonstrating support for illegal immigrants outside House Speaker’s offices

2/3/18:

US, W.Virginia: teachers vote to occupy state capitol… as “wildcat” school strike continues In fact, according to this fairly detailed take on the strike, “Rather than a wildcat, this has been and remains an illegal strike with the full support and participation of the 3 trade unions involved.” However, as far as I can tell, this is “wildcat” in the sense that the main bureaucracy has not quite given it its blessing, but the local union has. In fact, the “leadership” at state level seems to be playing a confusing 2-faced, “wanting their cake and eating it”-type game – if this report is anything to go by: “…the wildcat strike has the support of the teacher unions’ leadership. “The union leadership is still negotiating with the state, the governor and with the strikers…When the continuation [of the strike] was announced, yes it was a wildcat. And yes, even though those extra days have not been authorized by the union, the union leadership is going to stand by its members”. More here “It gets emotional for us, because West Virginia is deep, history runs deep, and strikes are not unknown to our working people here…People died on the lines fighting for what they believe in.” It’s good to be reminded of the fact that when people start to move a bit, when they start to make history a bit, they also begin to rediscover the history of past movements. However, it’s also indicative of this thoroughly counter-revolutionary epoch that the hierarchical form and ruling ideological content of education is largely unquestioned, very rarely subject to critique even amongst “anarchists”, as it was so often during the late 60s – 80s: historical memory has yet to reach such depths.

1/3/18:

US, W.Virginia: teachers’/school employees’ strike becomes a wildcat as strikers reject union sell-out (see entry 2/3/18 above for modified take on this)

…Nevada: well-executed detournement of gun ad It’s difficult to unweave the subtleties (or lack of them) of the NRA v. liberal gun control debate – but from the point of view of radical opposition neither side makes sense, surprise surprise. Trump, at the end of February, declared he would have law enforcement seize the arms of anyone who (through the eyes of whatever means the US government possesses) constitutes what the government deems to be a threat, without due process. All the focus on “gun control”, without looking at how the state will selectively enforce such control according to its own needs and criteria, merely reinforces the illusion of the state as protector. What convenient selection of gun control could this mean? At the moment one can only speculate. But it could well mean that antifa groups like the Redneck Rebels could be disarmed (perhaps using statutes originally created to attack “criminal gangs”) while ultra-right filth like the now legally bulletproof Bundys will get a green light or even be allowed in as part of the posse. And how will they enforce this “gun control”? Probably by the use of even more highly technified, intrusive and slimey means of collecting information, and even more aggressive physical invasions of property (infoshops, squats, homes). All this contributes to repressing a community of resistance the growth of which would be the main atmosphere which could help stop the increased atomisation of increasingly mad and even psychotic individuals submissive to the individualist tastes produced by this insane society. [my thanks to G. for most of this]

…Arizona: massive prison riot; 1 dead “…hundreds of inmates attacked guards and set fires…Some threw rocks, lit mattresses and other property on fire and some broke into the prison’s health care unit. The damage included broken windows, sinks, toilets, fire alarms and flooding.”

27/2/18:

US, West Virginia: possible rebellion against union leadership in teachers’ strike So far, it seems that this has remained at the level of a poll vote – it remains to be seen if this is transformed into action on March 1st when the union wants teachers to return to work on the basis of the usual lousy deal. See entry for 22/2/18 below.

22/2/18:

US, West Virginia: all state schools close as teachers go on first strike for nearly 30 years “Teachers across the state staged a walkout in protest against one of the lowest salaries in the country and the rising cost of healthcare.” More here.

15/2/18:

US, Los Angeles:70 people block ICE (Immigration & Customs Enforcement) van

10/2/18:

US, Seattle: clashes with racists at university

9/2/18:

The stench of Weimar: California cops work with neo-nazis against anti-racists Worth recalling that back in August 2017, the California Democrats were calling for the prosecution of antifas.

6/2/18:

US: Attorney General brings in 16 new repressive measures…Tennessee: report of fascist sheriff ordering cop murder of guy for driving offence

4/2/18:

US, Philadelphia: predictable post Super Bowl victory riot, with some funny aspects“Police in Philadelphia had been preparing for the possibility of riots following the Super Bowl, including putting hydraulic fluid on light poles in an attempt to keep fans from scaling them. …Video from after the AFC Championship Game showed fans managing to scale the 25-foot poles despite police greasing them with Crisco. Ahead of the Super Bowl, police tried to use a more powerful lubricant in the hopes of keeping fans from scaling the structures. But reports from after the Super Bowl noted that the fans who streamed out onto Broad Street after the Super Bowl had started to cause property damage. The Philadelphia riot grew from there, with reports from police scanners that light poles had been taken down …As the celebrations spread, police reported that some were throwing bottles at police officers.” More here “…windows were smashed out of some buildings. Police received at least one report of looting at a gas station. Fans also took down several light poles around town, injuring a few people” And here “…fans tipped over a car outside of a hotel and …a group of looters had broken into a convenience store screaming, “Everything is free,” while grabbing merchandise.”…Pointing out the damage inflicted upon a local Macy’s, Benitez revealed that the department store’s doors had been “completely smashed” and that there was “glass everywhere” from broken windows.”

22/1/18:

US, California: Disneyland entrance blocked by protest against Trump’s blatantly repulsive policies

16/1/18:

US, California: Apple buses attacked with pellet gun “Corporate buses, which ferry workers from San Francisco to its Silicon Valley headquarters, have become symbols of gentrification”…Google bus also

15/1/18:

US, Florida: prison strike against slavery More here. See also this.

14/1/18:

US, Florida: several elementary conditioning schools vandalised

11/1/18:

US, California: tenant groups occupy Capitol hearing room after bill to expand rent control fails

8/1/18:

US, Ohio: small riot in juvenile detention centre

26/11/17:US, Washington state: as blockade of freight railway line hits 9th day, a list of demands is published: “1. make the port a beach again
2. blow up the sun
3. the complete destruction of time itself
4. a brick for every window
5. a wrecking ball
6. that, while science still exists, one of us be endowed with an Adamantium laced skeleton
7. a swift and brutal end to the exploitation commonly referred to as “science”
8. the destruction of all dams, and the return of the salmon
9. no motor boats ever again
10. that fascists and politicians spontaneously combust
11. compost the police
12. release of all prisoners and the Total Destruction of prison, in all of its forms
13. cessation of all space exploration
14. the return of the Tasmanian wolf, the aurochs, the dodo bird, the coral reefs, and all other creatures and habitats that have ceased to be
15. the wilderness
16. total freedom
17.
18. the liquidation of Pacific Union’s assets, to be equally distributed among all children
19. mandatory clown uniforms for all Olympia parking employees
20. that steve hall fight a bear”

US, Berkeley: “free” speech very expensive…as hell and high water comes to the town…Milo Minderbender forced to cancel “Free Spew Week” “Milo Minderbinder: We’re gonna come out of this war rich!
Yossarian: You’re gonna come out rich. We’re gonna come out dead.” – Catch 22.