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Video with 56 notes
Police Violence at UC-Riverside, Regents Meeting, January 19, 2012
“Shame on you! Shame on you! Shame on you!”
IN this video, you can plainly see the police initiating contact with protesters who are not advancing in any way, who are struck with police violence, and who then bring in a barricade to put between themselves and the police aggressors. The protesters also sit down to show they are peaceful and are not advancing or threatening the University police force - who is bolstered by the Sheriffs. Obviously, the Sheriffs thought the Unipolice were overmatched and stepped up, but were repelled by the arrogant uni cops - who then showed how they had control… with indiscriminate violence…
The amateur, unprofessional, aggressive, violent University police unleashed a hail of rubber bullets into the crowd, hitting students and inciting panic and outrage which only escalated the confrontation and served no tactical purpose… students weren’t advance and so weren’t rebuffed, there was no dispersal order, and the police acted unilaterally with violence against the students of UC-Riverside…
This is a fucking shame…
Post with 18 notes
We’re All Radicals Now
It has become fashionable in some quarters within the Occupy movement, particularly in Los Angeles, to deride others as “radicals,” to decry them - quite publicly - as something “other” and outside of “us,” as it were. Sometimes, this nefarious practice even goes so far as to suggest that radicals are more than that - they are police infiltrators or “provocateurs.”
It has become commonplace within OLA to toss this word - radical - around as if applying that label to someone, in and of itself, may serve to mitigate their influence or even to dismiss their suggestions altogether. In light of this, it has become imperative that we come to an understanding of what, precisely, it means to be a radical in the United States in 2012.
rad·i·cal
adj \ˈra-di-kəl\1
: of, relating to, or proceeding from a root
The word radical made its way into the English language, as so many words did, by way of Latin. In fact, to further demonstrate that point - consider the radish. The radish is an edible, root vegetable. It shares the common, Latin “root” of radical - “radix.” Radicals, then, almost by very definition - are inclined to focus on the primary causes of social and economic injustice - the roots. Not content to dither with half-measures and other reformist pablum - for instance, merely restoring Glass-Steagall or overturning the ruling in Citizens United via Constitutional Amendment - radicals seek a comprehensive approach to establishing equanimity in our global community.
In much the same way that so-called “radical surgery” or “radical medicine” addresses the root cause of disease or illness, radicals in our contemporary United States and throughout the world seek to address the root causes of our current maladies. While radicals may differ in what they define those roots to be or what particular arrows from a broad quiver of diversified tactics they choose to employ to address them, what they share in common is a desire to alter or effect the root itself.
It is only after we reach the third definition in Merriam-Webster that we find even a hint of radical as “other” or epithet.This usage seems to be the province of the establishment, the corporatist so-called “reformists” of both American “left” and “right.” To wit:
3 a : very different from the usual or traditional
But what does it mean to be “different from the usual or traditional?” It could be argued that the usual American participates in their democracy in the prescribed way - namely, by diligently doing their duty only insofar as voting when required. But even that is a tenuous argument, considering that in 2010, participation of eligible voters was a mere 38% of the voting-aged population. And this is not an aberration, as many Democrats claim. Contrary to the Democratic Party forced meme - so-called “progressives” didn’t abandon the political process - in fact - mid-term election turnout in the United States has consistently been in the 37-39% range.
Even in 2008, an election many proclaimed to be a watershed moment in American, electoral politics and generally regarded as a fundamentally important “election” for this nation (ed. the are never “important”), voter turnout was a mere 56.8% of eligible voters. While that was the greatest turnout since 1968 - it still represents little more than simple majority of eligible voters.
Something happened to many of us when we saw a small, radical band of people Occupying Wall Street. We felt it. We heard the code words, “horizontal,” “transparent,” “participatory,” and so on. We were given the courage to embrace our own radicalism. We were inspired to participate in ways that the vast majority of people don’t consider. In short, we were radicalized.
Some of us already were self-described radicals, while many of us seem to be having trouble coming to grips with that appellation. But the truth is - much like the writers of the Port Huron statement were keenly aware:
“We are a minority — the vast majority of our people regard the temporary equilibriums of our society and world as eternally-functional parts. In this is perhaps the outstanding paradox: we ourselves are imbued with urgency, yet the message of our society is that there is no viable alternative to the present. Beneath the reassuring tones of the politicians, beneath the common opinion that America will “muddle through”, beneath the stagnation of those who have closed their minds to the future, is the pervading feeling that there simply are no alternatives, that our times have witnessed the exhaustion not only of Utopias, but of any new departures as well. Feeling the press of complexity upon the emptiness of life, people are fearful of the thought that at any moment things might thrust out of control. They fear change itself, since change might smash whatever invisible framework seems to hold back chaos for them now.”
The truth is: we’re all radicals now. We were radicals the second we closed our laptops and participated in something other than writing a blog. Even if we write reformist piffle when we log back on, we’re radicals because we don’t just write. We occupy. We engage. We resist. We strike. So embrace it. Love it. We’ll all be in the same jail cells and courtrooms (self-described “liberals” and “radicals” alike) - we might as well get to know each other better and understand that - relatively speaking -
OccupyLA is radical. To occupy is fucking radical.
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He Who Shall Not Be Named
“He Who Shall Not Be Named” or “The Real Reason the Liberal Reformists Don’t, Won’t, Can’t and Never Will Support Any Proposal to Delegitimize the Already Illegitimate System of Voter Fraud in the Imperialist United States of America and Can’t Articulate Why Without Resorting to Tired Patriotisms”
Well comrades, I can answer this question, I will tell you what they never could and I can do it with one single word: OBAMA! The treachery in their outright refusal to name he-who-shall-not-be-named, resorting to shaming the memory of the armies of the poor who made the ultimate sacrifice all to protect your one and only voice, the voice of your unborn children’s children, stinks like the bodies left in the wake of Neo-liberal policies meant only to perpetuate the global domination of Capitalism by force of terror. Dance puppets, the Neo-lib puppet masters are pulling your strings, but WE WON’T GET FOOLED AGAIN!
Fuck voting, fuck Patriotism, fuck Nationalism, fuck Xenophobia, fuck war, fuck terror, fuck Capitalism, fuck Old Glory and FUCK OBAMA!
Peace.
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