Hundreds Protest Against NYPD Killing In Brooklyn Despite Heavy Police Presence
200+ came out today to protest the NYPD killing of Kimani Gray.
Police outnumbered the protest 3 to 1 with officers on foot with riot gear (6th photo), on rooftops (2nd photo), on ‘interceptors’ (last photo) and on horses (7th photo) and at least two officers were stationed on each corner in a 10 block radius.
Officers from the “Disorder Control Unit” was deployed to suppress the march which was heading towards the 67th precinct to demand justice. The Disorder Control Unit are meant to police riots and civil unrest in the NYC area.
In 2011, a document was posted online by Occupiers detailing the purpose of the DCU. The first point on the document says officers must “Always have disorder control equipment, including helmet and baton, ready for immediate use.” and “A strong military appearance,”
At approx. 5:30, police made their first arrest. Officers violently charged into the crowd who were on the sidewalk and arrested a random person (5th photo).
About 20 minutes later, an officer on a scooter targeted a live streamer by driving into him and ripping his charger off of his equipment, killing the stream. The battery fell behind police line and officers did not allow him to retrieve it for about 10 minutes.
The NYPD were seen carrying a LRAD-X (3rd photo), a ‘non-lethal’ weapon which can by used to emit harmful and painful sounds. It is used as a crowd control weapon but has proven to cause permanent ear damage and even deafness.
#Kimani Gray #Brooklyn Protest #NYPD #police murderers #ACAB #police state #disorder control unit #racism #police brutality
10,000 Quebec students clash with police after rejecting tuition increase
February 28, 2013A tuition-fee compromise by Quebec’s premier couldn’t prevent a violent protest that rekindled memories of last year’s Quebec Spring.
The window-smashing rally of 10,000 people took place despite Pauline Marois’s efforts to appease student hardliners with a bilateral meeting.
The hardliners instead boycotted Marois’s summit and organized a massive demonstration after the premier refused to abolish tuition fees.
As the meeting drew to a close south of downtown, Montreal riot police charged crowds of mask-wearing protesters north of the summit site.
Suspects pelted officers and their horses with rocks, eggs and red paint. Windows were smashed and vehicles were damaged along the rally route and police tackled at least one masked man and led him away in handcuffs.
It was the second straight day of vandalism related to the student movement. Suspects splattered red paint at the offices of several provincial politicians hours before the meeting got underway on Monday morning.
The premier concluded her two-day summit by holding firm on a $70 annual tuition increase and $250 million in cuts to university budgets over two years.
Marois marched with the students when she was opposition leader but has since drawn their ire despite cancelling the previous Liberal government’s seven-year, $1,800 tuition hike.
Before the violent outbreak Tuesday, she suggested the summit that brought together unions, university rectors and moderate students was a success.
“We have done a tremendous job,” she told reporters. “We managed to put the fighting behind us and return to dialogue.”
Even moderate student groups opposed to Tuesday’s protest gave Marois the thumbs down.
They said they were “extremely disappointed” Marois didn’t maintain a tuition freeze first implemented in 1993.
University principals and rectors are also upset at the budget cuts, warning that student services will suffer.
Quebec students have been willing to create social unrest to make their point.
The previous Liberal government’s decision to hike tuition led to months of protests last year that taxed police services, disrupted Quebec’s economy and made international headlines.
We desperately need this kind of organization in the US. My alma mater is raising tuition & living costs yet again this year & barely any students even know about it.
Julian Assange has not given much detail on what the nature of the documents will be, except to say that they will “affect every country in the world.”
If these documents are standard Wikileaks fare, they will probably include embarrassing and/or scandalous matter about large powerful institutions—world governments in particular. Moreover, the diffusion of these documents will no doubt leave some grumbling about the risks attendant to their disclosure.
There are understandable arguments in favor of such a position. Critics of Wikileaks appear to favor government secrecy on certain topics because they believe it to be a necessary predicate to good governance (e.g. keeping information about matters of national security matters classified). Thomas Jefferson, during his time as President, noted that:
[T]he Executive ought to communicate such papers as the public good would permit, and ought to refuse those, the disclosure of which would injure the public …
The fundamental flaw of this apparently reasonable position, however, is that there is no way to determine when the government is keeping information out of public hands for legitimate purposes. This is undoubtedly why many of Jefferson’s contemporaries took hardline stances in the other direction. Here is John Adams:
[The People] have a right, an indisputable, unalienable, indefeasible, divine right to that most dreaded and envied kind of knowledge, I mean, of the characters and conduct of their rulers. Rulers are no more than attorneys, agents, and trustees for the people; and if the cause, the interest and trust, is insidiously betrayed, or wantonly trifled away, the people have a right to revoke the authority that they themselves have deputed, and to constitute abler and better agents, attorneys, and trustees. And the preservation of the means of knowledge among the lowest ranks, is of more importance to the public than all the property of all the rich men in the country.
A popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy; or, perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance: And a people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.
I was struck dumb with astonishment at the sentiments … [t]hat the executive alone shall have the right of judging what shall be kept secret, and what shall be made public, and that the representatives of a free people, are incompetent to determine on the interests of those who delegated them … .The legitimacy of Democratic governance depends on consent of the governed. It is impossible for people to consent to acts of which they had no knowledge. And if history is any guide on the matter, government secrecy is invoked at least as often to ensure that the public remains uninformed of acts of official wretchedness carried out in their name, as it is to secure the blessings of confidentiality to sensitive information.
Such a state of affairs is intolerable in a free society. As Thomas Paine noted in the Dissertations, “In republics, such as those established in America, the sovereign power, or the power over which there is no control, and which controls all others, remains where nature placed it—in the people[.]” Government secrecy, no matter how well intentioned, subverts that control by ensuring that people cast their votes ignorant to potentially embarrassing, disagreeable, or perhaps even shocking actions which the government carries out in their name. One cannot vote against something they have knowledge of. And being ignorant of the same, a person would have little reason to. And therein, as they say, lies the problem.
FBI documents just obtained by the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund (PCJF) pursuant to the PCJF’s Freedom of Information Act demands reveal that from its inception, the FBI treated the Occupy movement as a potential criminal and terrorist threat even though the agency acknowledges in documents that organizers explicitly called for peaceful protest and did “not condone the use of violence” at occupy protests.
The PCJF has obtained heavily redacted documents showing that FBI offices and agents around the country were in high gear conducting surveillance against the movement even as early as August 2011, a month prior to the establishment of the OWS encampment in Zuccotti Park and other Occupy actions around the country.
“This production, which we believe is just the tip of the iceberg, is a window into the nationwide scope of the FBI’s surveillance, monitoring, and reporting on peaceful protestors organizing with the Occupy movement,” stated Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, Executive Director of the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund (PCJF). “These documents show that the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security are treating protests against the corporate and banking structure of America as potential criminal and terrorist activity. These documents also show these federal agencies functioning as a de facto intelligence arm of Wall Street and Corporate America.”
“The documents are heavily redacted, and it is clear from the production that the FBI is withholding far more material. We are filing an appeal challenging this response and demanding full disclosure to the public of the records of this operation,” stated Heather Benno, staff attorney with the PCJF.
(Source: occupywallstreet)
Of the some 3000 persons killed by US drones, something like 600 have been innocent noncombatant bystanders, and of these 176 were children. In some instances the US drone operators have struck at a target, then waited for rescuers to come and struck again, which would be a war crime. Obviously, children may run in panic to the side of an injured parent, so they could get hit by the indiscriminate second strike. We don’t know the exact circumstances of the children’s deaths because the US government won’t talk about them, indeed, denies it all.
Let’s also Remember the 176 children Killed by US Drones - Juan Cole. (via mehreenkasana)
Bless them all
(via thenoobyorker)
And in Pennsylvania, the governor is preparing to release the names of 40 Philadelphia public schools waiting for closure. At the same time, he is escalating prison construction to accommodate the expected inmate population from today’s children. His calculus is based on income and minority status — meaning that he’s closing schools for poor children but building them prisons.
11 Stunning Facts About America’s Prisons
- In 2009 there were 7.2 million people in prison and under official supervision like probation — a larger population than the state of Washington
- Between 1987 and 2007 the national prison population tripled.
- 4 in 10 prisoners return to state prisons within three years of release.
- One in 30 men between 20 and 34 is behind bars — and up to one in 13 in one state.
- One in nine black men between 20 and 34 are behind bars.
- 734 out of every 100,000 people are behind bars in the U.S. — far and away the highest number in the world.
- The United States is the world’s largest jailer. Russia and South Africa are the closest, but the rates drop dramatically after that.
- Part of the bizarre prison black market, a thimbleful of tobacco can fetch up to $50 at a maximum security prison.
- Typically parole programs cost taxpayers $7.47 per day per parolee, while prisons cost $78.95 per day per inmate nationwide.
- Some prisoners cost more. It costs New Jersey $253 million every year to house just its death row prisoners — $11 million apiece.
- Between 1987 and 2007 state prison costs rose by 315 percent to $44.06 billion a year.
Because our 24/7 news media can’t actually do journalism, CNN, MSNBC, FOX and others have all just helped ruin someone’s life because they posted headline pictures of the wrong fucking Ryan Lanza.
Facebook groups calling for his death have already been created. Apparently it’s now open season on anyone named Ryan Lanza. Share this so people stop having blood vengeance for whoever this guy is.
Update: apparently the shooter may not have been named Ryan Lanza at all. Great job media. Apparently it may have been his brother Adam instead. Great, so his mother and brother are now dead and the media ruined his life during it all.
The result of shitty American media.
Anarchists disrupt a neo-nazi gathering where David Irving, renowned Holocaust denier and Hitlerite disciple, attempted to hold an event on his speaking tour, “Hitler and I,” at the Graves 601 Hotel in downtown Minneapolis on November16th, 2012.
Having gotten past the lobby and up five floors of hotel elevators, they entered the room approximately 60 strong. The antifascists seized the opportunity to destroy his books and dvds.
The disruption came just two weeks after Portland antifacists shut down another one of David’s pro-Hitler events and less than one week after counter-protesters outnumbered a neo-nazi/KKK rally 5 to 1 in Charlotte, North Carolina.
Cooper Union Students, Teachers and Supporters Protest For A Free Education, Hope To Spark Larger Movement
When George Caffentzis was teaching philosophy in 1976 at the City University of New York system, none of his students had to pay tuition.
That changed within a matter of just two years after New York City went into a financial crisis and needed help from the federal government. Because the city was broke, Caffentzis said, so too was the CUNY system, and charging tuition quickly became a proposition.
“So in order to presumably beat the debt, tuition would have to be charged. So this was the logic that occurred in 1976 and led to a historic change,” Caffentzis said, “and eventually led to a decline in enrollments,” as well as mass layoffs of non-tenured faculty, including himself.
Caffentzis went on teach in other American colleges — and in Nigeria for a time — before landing where he is currently at the University of Southern Maine. But on Saturday afternoon, he was in lower Manhattan to take part in a demonstration against the possible implementation of tuition for the first time at Cooper Union, a small college in the city’s East Village with around 1,000 undergraduates.
Cooper Union is one of the last higher education institutions in the U.S. to not charge students tuition — they’re all covered by a full scholarship which is currently valued by the school at more than $38,000. The possibility that Cooper may soon charge tuition for the first time in its history has prompted a week of student protests.
The student occupiers have received more than a dozen letters of support from student unions and professors, from around the U.S. and overseas, who have been involved in their own protests against tuition and privatization measures.
At Saturday’s demonstration, student protesters, alumni and faculty members from Cooper, CUNY, New York University and elsewhere, used several symbols of student activism from abroad. They wore a red felt square, which was popularized during the recent Quebec student movement against raising tuition. They also marched while banging pots and pans, a popular feature of the Montreal student protests in May. While pots-and-pans demonstrations have their roots in Chile, the tactic was used by Canadians in response to emergency law Bill 78, which lawmakers pushed to quell an uprising amongst college students upset over tuition increases.“It’s exciting to see students having a much wider scope in the struggle,” said Conor Tomas Reed, a CUNY student with his own student debt, “that it’s not just one flashpoint, that it’s not just a sprint — it’s a marathon.”
Around 200 people, mostly students, gathered at Washington Square Park in Manhattan on Saturday to participate in a citywide rally supporting the 11 Cooper Union undergrads who’ve been in the eighth floor of the school’s Foundation Building for the past five days. In the park, and after a march to the Foundation Building, speakers shared why they came: A World War II veteran said he met his wife when she was at Cooper, several students said they wouldn’t be able to go to college without Cooper’s scholarships, and CUNY students were hoping this may spark a citywide strike among college students.
Organize on the job where you are robbed!
Is this the beginning of a long, loving relationship? Officers with the New York Police Department are crediting members of Occupy Wall Street for helping curb crime in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Sandy.
thepeoplesrecord:anarcho-queer:
A US drone strike in Shin Warsak, South Waziristan on December 1 2012 marked the 300th drone strike in Pakistan of Barack Obama’s presidency, according to Bureau research.
The attack was the second since President Obama’s re-election on November 6. It reportedly killed Abdul Rehman al-Zaman Yemeni, described as an al Qaeda commander, along with up to three others.
Although the pace of strikes has slowed considerably this year, CIA attacks have struck Pakistan’s tribal areas on average once every five days during Obama’s first term – six times more than under George W Bush. Here, we look at the key moments of Obama’s drone campaign.
What a milestone.
While it may be a long-term project, not only do I think it is socially feasible, but I believe it is inevitable. The majority of human history has occurred throughout stateless societies, it is has only been a few thousand years in which humanity has had to live under the state. The development of the state happens to coincide with the development of social classes. And then the historical transformation occurs in which the slave becomes serf and then worker. Now we have global capitalism, a system of international exploitation and expropriation which is fragilely maintained by the states and same classes of people that would have our ancestors work as serfs and slaves. You will never have a democratic society in which the entity that maintains the cohesion of that society has a monopoly on the use of violence (as the state does.) All anarchism proposes is that there are alternative models of organization that do not require a monopoly on the use of violence, or any form of exploitation. There are a lot of ways in which this could be implemented, but the point is that anarchism allows for a variety of different societies and forms of organization to exist under the same roof. While liberal capitalism may be relatively free of coercion, it does little to equally promote development of one’s own potential. If worker’s are able to cut out the middle man, the false scarcity will disappear and resources will become seemingly abundant. Anarchism just says that worker’s have the right to do that, and that it will require the destruction of the state for it to work. There have been some relatively recent examples of anarchism, including the Ukrainian Free Territory, the CNT-FAI in the Spanish Civil War, and the Paris Commune, but it is difficult for workers to push back the political and economic boundaries of state capitalism. Sorry I feel like I am rambling, so I will leave you with some theorists to read. For starters read some William Godwin, Pierre Proudhon, Mikhail Bakunin, Emma Goldman, Peter Kropotkin, and David Graeber.
Last Saturday, a 40.000 strong demonstration took place to strenghten the occupation of the ZAD and DIY build some new collective spaces. Some photos of the constructions can be seen on https://zad.nadir.org/spip.php?article636 (they were targetted this morning during the police raid).
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