Archive for category General

By Guest Contributor Madhuri, originally published at Restore Fairness

“Police officers giving drivers $204 tickets for not speaking English? It sounds like a rejected Monty Python sketch. Except the grim reality is that it has happened at least 39 times in Dallas since January 2007….All but one of the drivers were Hispanic.”

Reporting on the issue, a New York Times editorial asks the question – is racism alive and kicking in America? If this were a one off incident, it could be an aberration. But 39 times makes it a growing pattern of injustice.

So how does one question who or who is not an American? Does it have to do with language, race, ethnicity, how long one has been in the United States – or is it about the more legal aspect of possessing citizenship.

Recently, an incredible achievement by Meb Keflezighi’s, winner of Men’s NYC Marathon, kicked off a number of doubts about whether this is truly an “American” achievement, or one imported in from outside.

“Meb Keflezighi, who won yesterday in New York, is technically American by virtue of him becoming a citizen in 1998, but the fact that he’s not American-born takes away from the magnitude of the achievement the headline implies.”

Comments from a CNBC Sports Business Reporter who half apologized in a post the next morning.

“Frankly I didn’t account for the fact that virtually all of Keflezighi’s running experience came as a U.S. citizen. I never said he didn’t deserve to be called American.”

Keflezighi came to the United States when he was 12 from war torn Eritrea. Is that enough time for him to be an American? Ironically the last American to win the marathon was also born in another country – Cuba. Alberto Salazar’s comments from a New York Times article are insightful.

“What if Meb’s parents had moved to this country a year before he was born? At what point is someone truly American? Only if your family traces itself back to 1800, will it count?“

The same article talks about the racial stereotypes that seem to be emerging to the surface.

“The debate reveals what some academics say are common assumptions and stereotypes about race and sports and athletic achievement in the United States. “Race is still extremely important when you think about athletics,” said David Wiggins, a professor at George Mason University who studies African-Americans and sports. “There is this notion about innate physiological gifts that certain races presumably possess. Quite frankly, I think it feeds into deep-seated stereotypes.”

So are we heading for a “clash of cultures” figuring out where the identity of America lies. This Huffington Post article has a few answers.

What’s been missing from our national discourse on “is it race or isn’t it?” is the distinction psychologists and neuroscientists have made for over two decades between conscious and unconscious (often called “explicit vs. implicit”) prejudice

Asking what the difference may have been if over the last 25 years, a half million Englishmen a year had entered the U.S., it wonders if

“what turns up the volume on Americans’ feelings about immigration is that immigrants are not white, English-speakers from London but brown-skinned Mexicans who may not speak our language well and don’t share our Anglo-American culture.”

Demographers now place it around 2040 when whites may be in the minority in the U.S. And so it seems, the best way to deal with this reality may be -

“There’s nothing shameful about admitting that you’re among the majority of Americans – of every color – who has sometimes judged another person on the color his skin instead of the content of his character – and then realized it wasn’t fair. The best antidote to unconscious bias is self-reflection. And the best way to foster that self-reflection is through telling the truth in a way that doesn’t make people defensive or point fingers – except at those who wear their prejudice proudly and deserve our scorn.”

(Photo courtesy of the New York Times.)

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The update below was just released today by MOVE:

ONA MOVE, everbody! I want to update you on the parole status of The MOVE 9. At this point everybody but Chuck Africa has seen the parole board. Chuck should see the board sometime this month or early next month. Everybody has been denied parole except Phil Africa who hasn’t received his formal response as of yet. Everybody so far has gotten a 1 year setback except Eddie who got a 2 year setback for some unexplainable reason. Everybody that has been interviewed by the parole board was denied with the same excuse that they won’t say they’re guilty (because they’re not) and we expect nothing different with Phil and Chuck. As we explained before, what they’re doing is clearly illegal and cannot be explained. This, alone, should tell people that the government has no valid reason to deny MOVE people parole or they would cite that reason instead of some illegal unreasonable nonsense about them not saying they’re guilty. These parole boards across the country cannot be allowed to continue to trample on peoples lives and freedom like this. It has to stop and we can make it stop thru pressure, thru the power of the people, if we take a serious unrelenting stand. MOVE is in the process of contacting as many media contacts as possible (local, national and international) to urge them to request interviews with the chairwoman of the Pennsylvania board and question her about the board denying people parole because they won’t say they’re guilty. Having the media from all over calling her and questioning this procedure will put pressure on the parole board. If you know of any media people with a backbone that would be interested in getting involved in this activity, let us know so we can follow up on it. In the meantime, keep the letters and phone calls going the parole board. Thanks for all of your support and remember, this issue affects inmates all over the USA, not just MOVE.

LONG LIVE REVOLUTION!!!!

THE MOVE ORGANIZATION

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By Ellen Papazian

Feminist Review recently interviewed writer and activist Victoria Law on her book Resistance Behind Bars: The Struggles of Incarcerated Women. Here Law shares her thoughts on making her book an activist tool, the culture’s blind spot about the prison industry, social justice movements’ responsibility to incarcerated women’s issues, and how motherhood radically altered her own work and informed her upcoming anthology, Don’t Leave Your Friends Behind.

Who did you write Resistance Behind Bars for?

I originally wrote the book, or the college paper that was the start of it, with no audience in mind. I had spent a semester researching post-Attica prisoner organizing and resistance in college. At the end of the semester, I looked back at what I had and realized that every instance, except for one, was about male prisoners. So the first paper was written to explore what women were doing and why their actions weren’t as well-documented, or remembered, as their male counterparts.

When I first had the idea to turn my paper into a book, I had a few audiences in mind: people who were already interested in prison and prisoner issues; those interested in women’s issues; people who aren’t particularly interested in prisons or prisoners’ issues, but are interested in tales of resistance, and incarcerated women themselves. In corresponding with over a dozen women incarcerated around the country, I also wanted to make sure that the book was accessible to them. None of the women I’d reached out to had any idea of organizing being done in other prisons or of the previous organizing, resistance, and riots that had happened in women’s prisons in the 1970s and 1980s. I kept in mind that I wanted my book—and the information in it—to be accessible to someone with an eighth-grade education. The book doesn’t work as a potential organizing tool if those most affected by these issues aren’t able to read and comprehend it.

What’s the response to Resistance Behind Bars been like—and how has it affected you personally and your work as an activist?

I think that because Resistance Behind Bars is a book specifically about incarcerated women—and even more specifically about their acts of resistance—it’s attracted attention and interest from people who normally think of prison issues as male issues and are excited and intrigued by incarcerated women’s resistance. Such an enthusiastic response means that I’ve been kept busy planning and doing events, not only the typical bookstore readings, but also workshops at various social justice conferences and at schools.

My daughter, who was a newborn when I first started researching incarcerated women’s resistance, is now eight years old and knows a lot about prisons, prison and gender, and abolition, probably more than most other eight-year-olds (except, perhaps, for any children whose parents are Critical Resistance organizers). She’s asked me very pointed questions about both realities inside prisons and ideas about abolition, which means that I had to clearly articulate my arguments, thoughts, and ideas.

What was the writing process like for this book?

When I first started researching, I did two things: I set aside all preconceived notions of what prisoner organizing might look like and started reading specifically about women in prison. I found a lot of material covered issues like motherhood and pregnancy. Issues of parenting—and, of course, pregnancy—do not come up in documentation about male prisoner organizing, and so people who are looking at instances of prisoner resistance aren’t going to necessarily look at how they organize around and challenge the realities of parents in prison. Battering and past abuse is another issue that comes up in a lot of the studies around incarcerated women, but again, that’s not an issue that we see impacting men going to prison and thus isn’t looked at as a “prison issue.”

I also scoured the news—and alternative media, mostly prison-related zines—for mentions of actions by incarcerated women. Once I found that someone had done something—filed a lawsuit, complained to the press, launched a hunger strike, etc.—I used the websites of either that state prison system or the Federal Bureau of Prisons to find the woman’s contact information and sent her a letter explaining who I was and what I was researching. I asked if she would be willing to share her stories and experiences with me.

Not wanting to take without giving back, I offered what I could: I offered to look up lawsuits for them and send them copies of court decisions; I offered to look up other resources for them; I offered to send them books via the Books Through Bars program that I helped start here in NYC; I sent stamps so that they could not only respond to me, but also write letters to other groups or people; in some cases, I offered to call their children if they were unable to get through themselves.

What were some of the most surprising realities about women in prison that you discovered in researching your book?

I remember receiving a letter from the Clear Creek County Jail in Colorado about the re-institution of the chain gang for the women held there. That wasn’t the huge surprise; the surprise was that the woman who wrote me was actually happy to be on the chain gang! She had recently given her newborn son up for adoption, and so I can’t help but wonder if keeping occupied, even if it’s on a chain gang, helps her process losing him. She’s not the only one: women at Clear Creek want to be on the chain gang. It’s tiring, backbreaking work in the hot sun, but it’s also the first chance they’ve been given to get out of their cells, be outdoors, and accrue “good time,” or time off their sentences. Keep in mind that the jail’s male inmates have had the chain gang for a while. They also have other chances to earn “good time.”

What are the most common misconceptions and assumptions circulating right now about women in prison that keep people from understanding what’s really going on inside prisons for women?

In May, I was invited to speak at a New York City high school about women and prison. Having done so many of these talks to people who are interested in prison issues and have some framework about the issue, I forget what the majority of people think or don’t know. I came in ready to talk about historical contexts and what is going on now and started with the question: “What do you think about when you think about prison? Who goes to prison and why?”

One girl raised her hand and said, “Criminals. People who do bad things.”

“Drug dealers.”

“Men.”

I realized that most of the students had no framework about incarceration other than what they had been fed by the mass media, so I had to mentally throw out my outline and start from scratch. I talked about poverty and racial profiling, the history of the prison as a means of social control, how Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard Nixon equated the civil rights movements and liberation movements with street crime and started their war(s) on crime to lock up poor people of color before they could mobilize to demand their rights. None of the students had ever heard of the Rockefeller Drug Laws or mandatory minimum sentencing. I hadn’t either when I was their age, and I grew up in New York City too!

I also talked about some of the conditions inside—the lack of health care treatment, the fact that staff members often encouraged prisoner-on-prisoner violence, because it’s easier for them if the prisoners aren’t uniting and fighting for basic human rights, lack of educational programs inside the prison. At the end of the hour, when we talked about what they, as high school students, could do about this issue, one boy raised his hand and suggested that we should lobby for medical treatment for people inside prison. “If I broke my leg in prison—or anywhere—I would want people to help me get it treated.”

Later one of the coordinators of that high school’s community day told me, “Students in your session were really struck by the experiences you shared with them, and there has been a lot of conversation in among students about issues concerning prison.” Some of the students were talking about forming a student club to do work around some of these issues, like the Rockefeller Drug Laws.

You write in the book that calls for reform have failed to adequately address the factors leading to women’s incarceration. How so?

Prisons fail to address the societal conditions that lead to incarceration, such as poverty and the increasing feminization of poverty, misogyny, violence, racism, and the issues that accompany women to prison. How does locking someone in a cage address any of these factors?

You have to remember that people have gone to prison face numerous obstacles in successfully reintegrating into the community when they are released from prison. Oftentimes, they are not only released with the same lack of resources and opportunities than they had before being arrested and incarcerated, but now have a criminal record which prevents them from getting certain jobs, qualifying for certain housing, or social safety nets. The 1996 welfare “reform” banned people with drug felonies for life. Similar legislation banned them from receiving governmental financial aid for college, etc.

We also need to keep in mind that prison issues affect all sorts of issues on the outside, shifting money and resources away from other public entities, such as education, housing, health care, drug treatment, and other societal supports that are needed.

Did motherhood change your own activism?

Before motherhood, I was super-involved in all sorts of political projects and organizing. New motherhood definitely made me sit still! Once my daughter was born, I realized that I had to pick a few issues and focus on them. I also couldn’t risk arrest or bringing my daughter to something where the police might attack the crowd.

I started researching resistance and organizing among incarcerated women shortly after my daughter was born. Being stuck inside during the winter with a newborn gave me a lot of time to read, respond to letters, contemplate ideas and issues—this, by the way, is something I did a lot while nursing—and work on draft after draft of this paper. I don’t know if I would have had this same opportunity if I had tried to do this as a childfree person rushing off from one political [event] to another at various hours of the day and night, or if my daughter had been older, more mobile, and needing more direct attention.

I want to stress that what’s made my continued involvement and even writing my book possible is the huge amount of support I get from my friends and the people with whom I organize. I realize that not all mothers get this type of support, although they should, and that I’m extremely fortunate to have such a wonderful support system.

What are you working on now?

My next book, Don’t Leave Your Friends Behind, will be an anthology co-edited with China Martens, a mother, writer, and publisher of the longest running subculture parenting zine, The Future Generation. Originally, China and I wanted to share our experiences as radical mothers and advocate for community support of all families. We were meeting parents and their allies and hearing their stories and experiences. A few years ago, we realized that we wanted to extend the reach of our message of community support and decided to compile a handbook specifically geared towards allies, or potential allies, of radical parents.

With Don’t Leave Your Friends Behind, we’re addressing the need to support—and build support systems for—families in our own social justice movements. In so many of our so-called radical movements, we’re not providing support for people who decide to have children so that they can continue participating in political work. There’s an individualistic attitude that says, “Well, I didn’t choose to have kids. You did, so you deal with them.”

Even when there’s not an overt resistance to having children in our movements, we need to look at how ways that we organize and socialize exclude parents and caretakers. We lose valuable organizers—and organizing experience—when we don’t take these factors into consideration.

Unlike Resistance Behind Bars, this book will be an anthology of both caregivers and their allies of ways that their movements support children and their caretakers in your collectives, organizations, or communities. We are especially seeking experiences that take into account factors such as race, class, gender, single parenthood, and/or mental health issues, since these issues often aren’t talked about when we talk about building communities and support systems here on the outside. We’re still reaching out, meeting people and collecting submissions, so if anyone out there has stories and experiences to share, they should definitely get in touch!

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By Deputy Editor Thea Lim

**TRIGGER WARNING**: The following post is about physical and sexual abuse in detention, and focuses on a trans woman who has chosen to speak out about the abuse she endured. Her choice is incredibly brave and her story is deeply distressing.

Restore Fairness has a post about Esmeralda, a trans woman from Mexico who came to the US to seek asylum, only to endure sexual abuse in an American immigration detention centre.  Her story, like many others, speaks to the way that the immigration system intersects with other forms of oppression, often in an unspeakably cruel and dehumanising way.

Esmeralda: A Transgender Detainee Speaks Out from Breakthrough on Vimeo.

The Restore Fairness article states:

Transferred far away from their homes and families, stories are rife of how detainees are denied visitation, access to lawyers, medical care, and are subject to physical and verbal abuse. Many vulnerable people, including asylum seekers, pregnant women, children, lawful permanent residents and even U.S. citizens are among those detained.

Listen to Esmeralda’s voice of courage and take action now to fix a broken detention system.

The article also links to the website of Just Detention International, an organisation that works to end the sexual abuse of detainees in the US and internationally.  Esmeralda’s story is in included among their Portraits of Courage, a section of their website where people who have survived sexual and physical abuse in detention, are speaking out – often in spite of the threat of severe retalitation – to try and put a stop to the horrific abuses that go on in detention.  Not surprisingly, many of the people who took part in Portraits of Courage are queer people of colour.

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by Latoya Peterson

It was a peaceful Sunday morning. Sunlight streamed in through the windows, the sheets were clean, the pillows were fluffy. I settled into bed and got nice and comfortable – that is, until my boyfriend decided it was time for the Sunday talk show circuit.

“[Hasan] was a radical jihadist!” blared out of the television. There went my quiet morning. Atlasien has a piece in the works about Fort Hood and some of the other major headlines. Until then, here’s a relatively sane round-up of what’s been going on:

Fort Hood and the invisibility of Arab Americans – Washington Post Short Stack Blog

Arab-American history is long and deep in the United States but Arab and Muslim Americans are not part of how we imagine who we are as Americans or how we perceive what makes up the American experience. Now, in the national discussion among commentators, politicians, and others in the aftermath of Ft. Hood, we can see the dangerous effects of Arab-American invisibility; in that vacuum, acts of a single individual, Major Hasan, cast a shadow of collective guilt on millions of Americans.

Timothy McVeigh warped the interpretations of the Constitution but we easily dismissed that without pondering whether there was inherent evil in the Constitution. The same cannot be said of how we view the relationship between the Koran and violent behavior – we unfairly blame individuals’ horrific acts on the teachings of the Koran. We ignore needed discussion of evident mental health issues, which were the focus when other service people have cracked and murdered their colleagues, and instead engage in lazy analysis about ethnic predilection of violence.

How can we move the conversation forward? If we knew more about the soldiers mentioned above and other Arab Americans, if their stories were familiar to us, if the origins of their names recognizable to us, how would the conversation be different?

Fort Hood Rampage: Don’t Let Tragedy Bring More Tragedy – Racewire

As we respond, we must categorically resist voices of suspicion and reaction so that this tragedy does not bring more tragedy. That the shooter’s name sounds Muslim will offer those who thrive on fear an opportunity to pounce. We reject the impulse to assume that the shooter’s name means anything about his motivations, that being Muslim or being perceived as such makes someone dangerous. A hideous crime was committed. Let’s make the attacks end there.

What Does Fort Hood Mean for American Muslims? - Wiretap

Writing shortly after the incident, the perceptive young American Muslim writer Wajahat Ali understandably cautioned against leaping to conclusions, writing:

“A cousin of Hasan, interviewed by reporters, has suggested an alternative motivation, not necessarily influenced by religious conviction. ‘He was mortified by the idea of having to deploy,’ said Nader Hasan. ‘He had people telling him on a daily basis the horrors they saw over there [in Iraq and Afghanistan].’”But in the face of additional evidence that emerged today, it is not reasonable or logical to pretend that some great wall separated Hasan’s own sense of Muslim identity from his motive. Witnesses report that he shouted “God is great!” ahead of his rampage; family indicated that he was deeply upset over discrimination he said was visited upon him for being Muslim; and he openly expressed his hostility to the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan by describing it as a “war against Islam.”

Of course, we do not yet know precisely what combination of factors led to the attack, and with more than 20,000 Muslims actively serving in the U.S. military, it would be absurd to mistake one man’s warped and skewed understanding of Islam and graft it onto every other Muslim.

But the scale and nature of this incident raises a number of uncomfortable questions about what usually goes unseen and remains unsaid outside of military circles.

A psychiatrist, Hasan heard the stories of soldiers returning from combat: did these accounts of killing, abuse and other horrors fuel his anger at American policy as the date of his own deployment to Afghanistan neared? What kind of harassment was Hasan subjected to on base for his Muslim identity? How widespread is enmity toward Muslims and Islam among the very soldiers who Gen. McChrystal is sending to fight alongside Muslims against Islamist extremists?

There are also other, equally pressing questions that directly affect young Muslims, such as me, who call this country our own. People will invariably ask why and whether Muslims are in the military — or perhaps even in the country at all — and what sort of measures will be taken to “monitor” this minority.

Tunku Varadarajan: Off the Deep End - Sepia Mutiny

By now, many readers may have seen Tunku Varadarajan’s controversial column for Forbes from last week, “Going Muslim.” In it, Varadarajan coins a new term to describe Major Nidal Hasan’s rampage at Fort Hood two weeks ago. “Going Muslim” is Varadarajan’s variation of “going postal,” a phrase coined a few years ago, after a string of (non-Muslim) U.S. postal workers went on killing sprees. Here is how Varadarajan defines the term:

This phrase would describe the turn of events where a seemingly integrated Muslim-American—a friendly donut vendor in New York, say, or an officer in the U.S. Army at Fort Hood—discards his apparent integration into American society and elects to vindicate his religion in an act of messianic violence against his fellow Americans.

The most irksome part of Varadarajan’s column for me was the following paragraph:

The difference between “going postal,” in the conventional sense, and “going Muslim,” in the sense that I suggest, is that there would not necessarily be a psychological “snapping” point in the case of the imminently violent Muslim; instead, there could be a calculated discarding of camouflage—the camouflage of integration—in an act of revelatory catharsis. In spite of suggestions by some who know him that he had a history of “harassment” as a Muslim in the army, Maj. Hasan did not “snap” in the “postal” manner. He gave away his possessions on the morning of his day of murder. He even gave away—to a neighbor—a packet of frozen broccoli that he did not wish to see go to waste, even as he mapped in his mind the laying waste of lives at Fort Hood. His was a meticulous, even punctilious “departure.”

In fact, reports from Hasan’s colleagues strongly suggest a profile of a person who was borderline psychotic for several years, but who finally snapped around 2007. Yes, he gave away his broccoli on the day he went on a shooting spree. But that is in fact entirely in keeping with how psychotics behave.

What Varadarajan doesn’t realize is that the kind of paranoid argument he is making about immigrants in “camouflage” could very easily be used against any other immigrant group, including Hindus, as a pretext for mistrust or active discrimination.

Varadarajan also make a claim about “integration” into American society that is simply not supported by any facts. The diverse groups of immigrants who are Muslim have done just fine in terms of their economic performance, civil participation, etc. By coining this pernicious phrase, and by promoting an argument based self-evidently on bigotry, Varadarajan has shown us why we no longer need to take anything he says seriously.

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November 11, 2009 – 03:35 — no2010

Vancouver Police have acquired a Long-Range Acoustic Device (MRAD) for use in crowd control during the 2010 Olympics. The LRAD emits a high frequency noise that can disorient & injure people caught within its range. A LRAD was recently used during the G20 protests in Pittsgurgh. Vancouver cops claim the device is only to be used as a public address system… and any water cannons they purchase will only be used for watering lawns…

BCCLA uncovers VPD purchase of untested crowd control weapon for Olympics
British Columbia Civil Liberties Association
November 10, 2009 – For immediate release

Vancouver, B.C. – A senior member of the Vancouver Police Department confirmed to the BCCLA late last week that the VPD has acquired an LRAD (Long Range Acoustical Device) crowd control weapon for the 2010 Olympics. He advised that the VPD would be using the device to ensure that police instructions were clearly heard. The LRAD sonic gun fires a concentrated beam of sound at its targets that can cause hearing damage and temporarily disrupt vision.

BCCLA President Robert Holmes pointed out that even as the Taser inquiry has not yet reported back, police are acquiring another high tech device that could be used to cause grievous pain. “This crowd control weapon was obtained without any public discussion and without any defined policy for its safe and proper use being set in advance. Tasers were also brought in through such an ill-considered and backwards approach.”

To the knowledge of the BCCLA, there have been no public discussions around the purchase and use of an LRAD in Vancouver or British Columbia, no Canadian safety testing of the device, no Canadian approval of the device’s use by any agency independent of Canada’s police services or the weapon manufacturer, and the device has never before been used in a protest scenario by police in Canada.

“On October 22, Vancouver Police Chief Jim Chu said that ‘No extraordinary effort will be made to restrict protest because of the Olympics,’ but his force is buying new and untested weapons,” said Holmes. “A City Councillor said that we were out of line for noting the parallels with Beijing, but Vancouver joins China in embracing these devices. The secret purchase and implementation of the LRAD, in conjunction with Vancouver passing a bylaw that suppresses free expression, reduces the credibility of blandishments from city officials about not interfering with lawful and peaceful demonstrations.”

MEDIA CONTACTS:

Robert Holmes, President, BCCLA (604) 681-1310 or (604) 838-6856
David Eby, Executive Director, BCCLA (778) 865-7997

TECHNICAL INFO & COUNTERING THE LRAD

What is the Long Range Acoustic Device?
http://www.tech-faq.com/long-range-acoustic-device.shtml

The LRAD or the long range acoustic device that has been developed by American Technology Corporation is capable of emitting a maximum of 151Db sound within 30 degrees of where the device is pointing. This device can be used as a combatant deterrent weapon or crowd-control device by emitting sounds that are painful to the ears.

The LRAD weighs about 210 kilograms and is capable of emitting sound within a 15 to 30 degree beam. The range of the LRAD is 300 to 500 meters and, at maximum volume, it can emit sound 50 times greater than the human threshold for pain so it can cause permanent damage.

Sound Propagation Principles used by LRAD

Sound waves spread out in all directions as they travel through a medium and lose strength proportional to the distance from the source. High-frequency sound waves, however, spread out less than low-frequency sound waves. Moreover, sound waves with longer wavelengths travel a lot farther than those with short wavelengths. Sound waves can also either cancel each other out or merge together into a sound wave with higher amplitude depending on whether they are out of phase or not.

LRAD applies all the above mentioned properties of sound to make the device work.

The Technology behind the LRAD

Instead of the usual diaphragm that normal speakers use to make sound, the long range acoustic device uses a set of piezoelectric transducers which are capable of converting electrical energy into sound. These piezoelectric transducers are permanently polarized, so any distortion of the shape of such transducers creates an electrical impulse and vice-versa. By using a power source to supply this electrical impulse, piezoelectric transducers can rapidly change their shape, therefore, creating sound waves in the process. The transducers are also arranged so that they are in phase with each other so that the resulting sounds they emit can combine to make the projected sounds louder.

The sound that the LRAD produces can be directed so there’s less-than-normal dispersion. This results in a 20-dB drop in the volume of sound 15 degrees outside the beam. This directional sound propagation stems from the fact that the LRAD employs outer and inner transducers in creating sound waves that are not completely in phase with each other. This enables other sound waves to cancel out those that are in the outermost portion of the beam. The resulting wave front of the sound is also flatter than usual, preventing the sound from being dispersed as it propagates. Moreover, as the LRAD-produced sound waves interact with the air, they create additional frequencies within the wave and thus amplify the sound and pitch.
Advantages and Disadvantages of LRAD

The primary advantage in military and law enforcement circles is that the LRAD is a less than lethal solution that has the potential to prevent antagonists from continuing their unwanted activities, without endangering the friendly personnel.

The major disadvantages of the LRAD system are:

The loud sounds the LRAD emits may cause permanent hearing damage to those within its range. The LRAD sound wave can be cancelled altogether through the use of common earplugs. The better the earplugs are at blocking sound waves, the less effective the LRAD is. Sounds emitted from the LRAD can be reflected back to the source by using a flat solid object.

Vancouver police to use noise device for crowd control
http://www.theprovince.com/Vancouver+police+noise+device+crowd+control/2…
VPD insists the long-range acoustic device is not a ’sonic gun’

By Lora Grindlay, The Province, November 10, 2009

The Vancouver Police Department has purchased a sonic gun for crowd control in time for the 2010 Olympics, claims the B.C. Civil Liberties Association.

But police took exception Tuesday to using the term “gun” to describe the department’s recently purchased Long-Range Acoustic Device (LRAD).

Vancouver Police Const. Lindsey Houghton said the acoustic device will assist police in communicating to large groups. Its range is up to over 300 metres on land.

He called it “a more effective public-address system” than handheld, battery-operated megaphones, which are rendered useless when there is a lot of crowd noise.

Houghton said the $17,000 unit, bought used in October, will be primarily used in the event of an emergency situation like a natural disaster or an earthquake. Vancouver police used a demonstration model to communicate instructions to hundreds of boaters in English Bay during the Celebration of Lights fireworks display this summer.

“Any suggestions that this device will be used as a weapon or characterizations of it as a ’sonic gun’ are ridiculous. As you can see it looks nothing like a gun,” said Houghton as he held the machine at a press conference Tuesday.

“We are using it as a speaker.”

In a comment that appeared to be aimed at the civil liberties group, Houghton said: “Those who wish to cause fear or to rally others to their cause — it’s unfortunate that they are using the purchase of this public-address system to do so.”

Houghton admitted the machine has the capacity of sending out a “pulse-like noise” at adjustable volumes of up to 150 decibels, and he couldn’t rule out police using it as a crowd-control measure — which is how the LRAD is marketed by the manufacturer.

“The function is available if the situation arose,” he said. “It’s like anything. We carry firearms, we can’t rule out the use of those firearms to stop a threat. We possess tear gas. We could use that in a situation where there is a riot and we have the grounds and the backing of law to use that. This is no different.”

According to the American Technology Corporation website — the company that produces the LRAD — the device is “a high-intensity directional acoustic array designed for long-range communication and unmistakable warning.”

The LRAD can project a voice more than one kilometre and follow up with a piercing noise or “warning tone” of 151 decibels at one metre away and 90 dB at 300 metres.

“This crowd control weapon was obtained without any public discussion and without any defined policy for its safe and proper use being set in advance,” claimed BCCLA president Robert Holmes in a release.

“Tasers were also brought in through such an ill-considered and backwards approach.”

The LRAD has been used by the U.S. military and navy and to control birds.

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November 12, 2009 – 11:36 — no2010

Power failure in Brazil leaves millions in the dark

World’s second-biggest electricity generator fails, affecting Sao Paulo and Rio De Janeiro, the city that will host the World Cup and Olympics

Bradley Brooks
Rio de Janeiro — The Associated Press, Nov. 10, 2009

A massive power failure blacked out Brazil’s two largest cities and other parts of Latin America’s biggest nation for more than two hours late Tuesday, leaving millions of people in the dark after a huge hydroelectric dam suddenly went offline.

Paraguay was also affected when the Itaipu dam straddling the two nations’ border stopped producing 17,000 megawatts of power, resulting in outages in Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo and at least several other big Brazilian cities, Brazilian Mines and Energy Minister Edison Lobao said. He said outages hit nine of the 27 states in a country of more than 190 million people.

The cause of the failure had not been determined, but Mr. Lobao said strong storms uprooted trees near the Itaipu dam just before it went offline and could be to blame. Rio was the hardest hit city, he said.

At 12:37 a.m. local time Wednesday, the lights in Rio’s Copacabana neighbourhood roared back to life, prompting cheers and thunderous car honking.

“It’s sad to see such a beautiful city with such a precarious infrastructure,” said Igor Fernandes, a shirtless 22-year-old law student peddling his bike down a dark Copacabana beach. “This shouldn’t happen in a city that is going to host the Olympic Games.”

Mr. Lobao said the hydro plant at the dam itself was working, but there were problems with the power lines that carry electricity across Brazil. Brazil uses almost all of the energy produced by the dam, and Paraguay consumes the rest.

In Paraguay, the national energy agency blamed the blackout on a short-circuit at an electrical station near Sao Paulo, saying that failure shut down the entire power grid supplied by Itaipu. All of Paraguay went dark for about 20 minutes, the country’s leading newspaper, ABC Color, reported.

The company in charge of the dam, Itaipu Binacional, said the blackout did not start at the hyrdoelectric complex. It said the most likely cause was a failure at one or more points in the transmission system.

The blackouts came three days after CBS’s 60 Minutes news program reported that several past Brazilian power outages were caused by hackers. Brazilian officials had played down the report before the latest outages, and Mr. Lobao did not mention it.

Brazil’s official Agencia Brasil news agency said Tuesday’s outage started about 10:20 p.m., snarling streets in Rio, where normally chaotic traffic turned riotous. Cars, taxis and buses zoomed through dark intersections, honking to let their presence known as they zoomed through. Pedestrians scampered across avenues, and tourists scurried back to a handful of luxury beach hotels, the only buildings with light.

Flavia Alvin, 37, a shopkeeper in Copacabana, waited with her co-workrs for the blackout to end before making the long bus ride home to western Rio. Asked if she was worried about violence or looting, she shook her head and pulled her young daughter closer.

“I’ve heard of problems like rioting in other places with blackouts, but Brazilians are more relaxed,” she said. “All I can do is wait here and drink a beer.”

That was what a crowd was doing at the Eclipse restaurant, a block from Copacabana beach. Drinking quickly warming beer beat sitting in a sweltering apartment, said Paulo Viera, 35, a graphic designer. But he worried about how the outage might look for a city that last month was picked to host the 2016 Olympics and will be the showcase city for soccer’s World Cup in 2014.

“The image of Brazil, of Rio, is bad enough with all the violence,” he said. “We don’t need this to happen. I don’t know how it could get worse.”

Subway service was knocked out in both Rio and Sao Paulo, and G1 said Sao Paulo subway users were forced to abandon train cars.

In the city of Taguatinga near the national capital of Brasilia, a second division Brazilian league soccer game was halted after lights illuminating the field went dark. No power outages happened in Brasilia.

Utility companies that provide electricity for Rio and Sao Paulo did not immediately offer explanations for why the power went off or when it would be restored, Agencia Brasil said.

Sao Paulo is South America’s largest city, with 12 million residents. Rio has 6 million citizens. But the metropolitan areas of both cities are much larger. Also affected was Belo Horizonte in central Brazil and the northeastern city of Recife.

The Itaipu dam is the world’s second biggest hydroelectric producer, supplying 20 per cent of Brazil’s electricity. China’s Three Gorges dam is the largest.

Al-Jazeera blog on Brazil blackouts, mentions protests against large-scale dam expansion in the region which government & corporations will use as leverage to push through construction of hydro-electric project… also mentions potential of hackers being possible cause of blackout…

Brazil Blackout
By Gabriel Elizondo, November 11, 2009 [Al-Jazeera blog]

http://http://blogs.aljazeera.net/americas/2009/11/11/brazil-blackout

For those of you who have never been to Sao Paulo, and can’t imagine what the city would be like in total darkness, just imagine New Delhi totally without power. Or Los Angeles, Mexico City, or Bangkok.

Blackout. Simple as that.

By now, you probably heard the news that Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and cities in 18 different Brazilian states were plunged into darkness last night with a massive power outage.

I am in Sao Paulo now, but when I heard the news last night, I was in the Houston, Texas airport waiting to board a flight back home. But from those I have spoken to since returning to Brazil this morning, it was a scary night that caused panic on the streets but no major public security incidents.

For those of you who have never been to Sao Paulo, and can’t imagine what the city would be like in total darkness, just imagine New Delhi totally without power. Or Los Angeles, Mexico City, or Bangkok.

Sao Paulo is South America’s largest city and the financial capital of the region. Fortunately, all power is restored and besides shaken nerves, no damage was done from the outage. But that hasn’t stopped intense media coverage and President Lula asking tough questions of his ministers.

There are two take-aways form last night’s events:

Number One: In a previous blog post I commented how Brazil will be under incredible international scrutiny now that the country will host the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Summer Olympics.

You get awarded those events; you also get the scrutiny of your country that comes along with them. Brazil has figured this out real quick over the past month.

Take for example the Daily Mail’s headline “Eerie evening for Brazil as power outage plunges future home of Olympics into late-night blackout.” I imagine the words “home of the Olympics” will be in just about every headline about Rio in the coming years.

Obviously, the questions being asked today are: Is Brazil ready? And doomsday insinuations such as, “What happens if there is a major outage during the opening ceremony?”

All these questions are legitimate, but let’s not forget these international events are years down the road. Brazil has time to fix its problems.

But make no mistake; no longer will problems in Brazil be overlooked on the international stage. They will be front page. A recent report by CBS’s “60 Minutes” on cyber terrorism even mentioned Brazil’s hydroelectric grid being vulnerable to cyber attack.

There is no indications the recent outage was cyber attack related, but it was certainly noted in many quarters that the outage was less than 3 days after the CBS report aired.

Number Two: In another previous blog post, I wrote about how there are groups in Brazil pushing back against the government’s plans to build massive new hydroelectric dams in the Amazon. (The cause of Tuesday night’s outage was a problem with transmission lines from the massive Itaipu dam, the second largest in the world.)

I promised to expand on the why the government would push for more dams and risk permanently altering the natural environment. Last night said it all. Brazilian energy officials say they need more dams to power growth to meet energy needs and avoid blackouts.

Critics have long said that simply is not true. I am not sure who is right, but I am positive the recent outage will be used as leverage for those people who support the building of more dams. They will say, “See, we need more dams to fix this problem.”

For now, all is back to normal in Brazil. We have electricity. But nightfall is coming soon, and I plan to keep a flashlight handy tonight.

Just in case.

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I want to start with the present, go back to the past for a few moments, then return to the present and examine it again in the light of that past.

Today, neozapatismo must be a central focus of any attempt to evaluate the question of possible autonomy. Not only has the Zapatista movement survived despite two serious military efforts to wipe it out (January 1994, February 1995) and years of state counterinsurgency operations (including murderous paramilitary violence) but it has also successfully carried out a whole series of innovative restructurings in its own communities. Elsewhere in the world, and not just in Oaxaca or the rest of Mexico, many other autonomous movements and projects – some newly launched, some thriving, some faltering, some threatened with annihilation – have been inspired by what the Zapatistas have accomplished.

For all of these movements and projects – including those of the Zapatistas – one of their most common and serious weaknesses has been their isolation from each other and from other struggles. Breaking out of that isolation requires making connections with other efforts in other places and creating networks of solidarity and mutual aid. When the EZLN first came out of forests and invaded cities in January 1994 they were few and they were isolated. The heavy military counterattack (some 15,000 troops, armored vehicles and bombers) threatened to wipe them out. Only the mobilization of hundreds of thousands demanding a political rather than a military solution from the government made their survival possible. As time revealed that the government’s pretense at political negotiation was only a public relations ploy masking a counterinsurgency strategy of repression, again and again it was the mobilization of people throughout Mexico and around the world that supported both their continued survival and their ability to discuss and implement reforms within their communities. That mobilization was not sufficient – it complemented but did not replace the Zapatistas’ own efforts – but it does seem to have been necessary, to prevent even more brutal and bloodier repression. How the Zapatistas were able to break out of their isolation, build networks and retain them, therefore, has to be a key issue in any attempt to draw lessons from their experience.

Yesterday, Guiomar Rovira analyzed how the rapid dissemination of information by journalists and others, through a variety of media, including the Internet, played a central role in the mobilization of the solidarity and support for the Zapatistas that helped them survive and continue to elaborate autonomous approaches to self-organization. We also know that not only the dissemination of information but also the spread of discussion about tactics and strategy in those same networks circulated the efforts at solidarity and the mobilization of support: from demonstrations against the Mexican government around the world to the arrival of international observers and material aid to the rebellious communities. Moreover, we also know that those networks not only facilitated the organization of the Continental and Intercontinental Encounters against Neoliberalism and for Humanity in the spring and summer of 1996 and the Second Intercontinental Encounter in Spain in 1997 but led to the formation of Peoples’ Global Action and the first Global Action Days against the World Trade Organization (WTO) in Geneva in 1998. Those beginnings led, in turn, to the subsequent Battle of Seattle and the emergence of Indymedia in 1999 and the many demonstrations against the WTO, the IMF, the World Bank, and the G8 that followed in places such as Davos, Prague and Genoa, i.e., a global movement contesting the capitalist neoliberal reorganization of the world.

The importance of these developments cannot be overestimated. Never before in history have we seen anything like them. Never before has there been such intense and interconnected opposition to capitalism. Capitalism has always been resisted and opposed but never before have so many moments of resistance and opposition been linked in the ways achieved during the last ten years.

What has been the role of neozapatismo – born in the fires of indigenous struggle in one small area of Mexico - in these developments? It wasn’t just the justice or valor of the Zapatistas’ struggles, there have been many others as just and as valiant, including some far larger, e.g., across the border from Chiapas in Guatemala. It wasn’t just the circulation of information, or even of discussion, those things happened in opposition to NAFTA and on a world scale in opposition to the First Gulf War. Clearly one thing that was new, one thing that had been missing from previous situations was the way the Zapatista message reverberated and resonated around the world, provoking action where previous knowledge of other cases of injustice and valiant rebellion had only provoked sympathy.

But why did their message resonate? It was not just their spokesperson Subcomandante Marcos’ intellectual, literary and rhetorical gifts – though they certainly helped. The real reason for the resonance, it seems to me, was because the message spoke to common concrete concerns in ways previous messages had not. Whereas cries for help from many earlier struggles had often provoked little action, this time the story being told sounded all too familiar to be ignored. The Zapatistas may have been one more in a long history of indigenous struggles, but what they were struggling against was no longer just local repression but policies that had become general and all too familiar around the world. No longer did capitalist policy makers employ one kind of strategy here, and another there, so that those in struggle here had difficulty identifying with those in struggle there. As the 20^th Century drew to a close similar strategies were being wielded against people everywhere and the Zapatistas recognized this emerging homogeneity and spoke of it in ways that others could understand.

From Imperialist & Colonial Hierarchy to the post-WWII Era

Before, for a very long time, there was no such homogeneity. This was obvious in the days of imperial empires where the people in colonies were treated quite differently than the people in the colonizing countries. Most, in both places, were exploited, of course, but the modes of exploitation, levels of productivity, wage and income hierarchies were quite different. Imperial hierarchies tended to concentrate more highly productive manufacturing industry and higher wages at home and lower productivity agriculture and mining and lower wages in the colonies. Racism, patriarchy and ethnic discrimination often rationalized the brutality needed to impose the hierarchy and keep colonial majorities abroad on the bottom. The overall higher level of productivity achieved through colonization also made it possible to pay the higher wages in the “home” country and construct an imperial wage and income hierarchy as a whole. The theorists of “dependency” tended to dichotomize this structure in terms of a rich “center” that exploited a poor “periphery” but in reality people were being exploited at every level, only some won higher wages and standards of living and others saw theirs reduced.

Even after end of most colonialism, however, when national liberation struggles bore fruit and formal colonial Powers were expelled in the years following World War II, both the existing international hierarchy and the radical difference between policies implemented by capital in the “First” or industrialized world, and those judged appropriate for the new “Third” or “underdeveloped” ex-colonial world continued.

On the one hand, the Keynesian solution to the Great Depression adapted to the new wave of industrial worker struggles that exploded in the 1920s and 1930s, reworked capitalist development in the First World around collective bargaining, rising wages, welfare and state support for technological change (to increase productivity to pay for the higher wages). In those areas, rising wages for some and welfare expenditures for others were seen through the optic of “macroeconomics” as central positive elements in “aggregate demand” that would induce capitalist investment and spur growth.

There were, of course, local hierarchies, with waged income generally exceeding unwaged welfare payments and wage growth limited by frequent capitalist recourse to new sources of labor, , e.g., recent rural-urban black immigrants or Mexican labor in the United States, West Indian or South Asian immigrants in Britain, North or West African immigrants in France.

On the other hand, in the “Third World” policy makers still reasoned, more often than not, in terms of zero-sum games, “development economics” and “growth models” – and sought to minimize wages and maximize exploitation, savings and profits to generate investment through repressive labor practices, the absence of welfare and such mechanisms as intentional inflation to redistribute value from fixed-wage workers to the business owners of the commodities whose prices were rising. Such economic policies were complemented by the “modernization” theories of political science and widespread institution, elite and nation building designed to replace the old colonial structures of command with new “modern”, i.e., neocolonial, ones.  Something similar was taking place within the “Second World” of Soviet-dominated countries where continuing industrialization in Russia was facilitated by more intense exploitation of workers in other “socialist” republics and in China where peasants were being squeezed to generate the surplus necessary to finance the build-up of manufacturing industry.

The reorganization of the international capitalist hierarchy from the colonial to the ex-colonial period was both a response to struggles against the old organization and an effort to cope with new ones. Britain may have pulled out of places like the South Asian subcontinent or Nigeria, just as France pulled out (well, was thrown out) of places like Vietnam and Algeria, but struggles in those places continued (sometimes quite obviously as in Korea where US government forces replaced the Japanese, or Vietnam where they replaced the French). As a plethora of “post-colonial” studies have amply demonstrated, the end of formal colonialism by no means meant the end of colonial-type social relations or the struggles that had grown up against them.

As a result, struggles against exploitation, alienation and repression multiplied and to some extent circulated, both within the First, Second and Third Worlds and among them – through awareness and empathy but also through multinational investment and trade. Capitalists always tend to invest in areas of high profitability and to abandon those of lower profitability. That is to say: they flee from stronger workers to exploit weaker ones, or to exploit weaker ones in order to make it possible to make concessions to stronger ones. The resulting changes in patterns of investment produce changing patterns of production and trade and thus changing patterns of struggle as well, e.g., Western investment in South Africa led to an internationalization of the struggle against apartheid in that country. Foreign aid, on the other hand, whether deployed by Western Powers or Eastern ones, tended to rush to areas of intense conflict, either to counter or support local struggles but creating another link between struggles at home and those abroad, e.g., US aid – military and economic – to the government of South Vietnam led to an intensified anti-war movement all across North America and beyond. Conflict also circulated through the movement of those in struggle, whether from countryside to city or from one country to another (and often back again). So while American, British, French (or even Soviet) planners often imported cheaper foreign labor (to limit the growth of local wages), the multinational workers who came (often autonomously in violation of capital’s rules) not only brought their experience of struggle with them – creating ethnic communities of mutual aid – but in interaction with local labor and new production relationships learned new forms of struggle (which they often took back home).

The Crisis of the post-WWII Global Capitalist Hierarchy

For some years – almost a quarter of a century – these conflicts, for the most part, proved manageable, but in the end they tore the post-WWII order apart. In theFirst World struggles of the unwaged buttressed those of the waged and severed the connection between wage and productivity growth upon which the upper end of the international income hierarchy had been based. In the Third World, struggles by both unwaged peasants and waged industrial workers disrupted the ability of multinational corporations to pit them against better paid workers in the First World. In the Second World of the Sino-Soviet axis, the power of covert resistance against police-state repression undermined the state planning of exploitation. The withdrawal of imagination and creativity from the state sabotaged its ability to elaborate technological solutions to its political problems via Keynesian-style concessions in both countryside and cities. In the late 1960s and early 1970s struggle-induced crisis spread like wildfire across the capitalist world, West and East.

Counterattack and the Rise of Neoliberalism

The capitalist response was a halting and often ad-hoc series of moves: abandoning Bretton Woods and fixed exchange rates, using food and energy inflation against real wages, fear of limited nuclear war (presaging current efforts to use fear of terrorism), a crackdown on immigrant workers, dramatic hikes in interest rates and debt service demands, and finally global depression with falling trade and rising unemployment in the early 1980s. In the First World, Keynesian macroeconomics was replaced first by monetarism (the tight money attack on inflation and behind inflation, wages) and then supply-side economics (the direct attack on labor unions, high wages, welfare payments of all kinds, and entitlements such as social security coupled with deregulation and privatization). These shifts were all designed to shift income flows from wages to profits, from consumption to investment – in other words, to shift the balance of power back toward capital. At the same time, a conservative “social agenda” was pursued to restore patriarchal authority and discipline women and children by wiping out abortion rights, imposing standardize testing in schools and shifting student financial aid from grants to loans.

In the Third World, and then in the old Second World after the Fall of the Wall, the dismemberment of the Soviet Empire, and the crushing of the pro-democracy movement in China, capitalist initiatives took the form of massive debt crisis, the implementation of austerity and wide-spread privatization of state firms – sold off to private business to slash wages and benefits and increase profits – and the opening of both trade and capital flows to unregulated multinational corporate decisions, e.g., “free trade” rules, institutionalized in regional arrangements like the European Union or the North American Free Trade Agreement or globally in the WTO. All this was rationalized with a refurbished 19^th Century ideology of market worship. In Latin America this combination of policies and ideology was soon given a proper title: Neoliberalism.

As these policies were increasingly implemented, North and South, East and West, the differences between the theories and policies applied in industrialized countries and those applied in so-called underdeveloped or developing countries disappeared. First brazenly implemented in Latin America during the debt crisis of the 1980s, then even more viciously applied in Eastern Europe, Russia and the various ex-socialist republics in the 1990s, and finally piece-meal and to varying degrees within the industrialized countries themselves in the same period, a new capitalist world order was crafted – still with a nasty hierarchy of waged and unwaged, rich and poor, less polluted and more polluted, etc., but being shaped with a much more homogenized set of theories, strategies and policies.

Zapatismo versus Neoliberalism

Both the existence of those more homogenized theories and policies and the clear Zapatista grasp of them made their discourse against neoliberalism in Mexicoresonate with others involved in struggle against similar policies elsewhere in the world. Discussion at the Continental Encounters against Neoliberalism and for Humanity in the spring of 1996 quickly made it clear that in England neoliberalism had the face of Thatcherism, in the United States the guise of Reaganomics and so on. The capitalists themselves, in the generalization of their theories and policies, created the possibility that the Zapatista “One No!” would echo around the world and galvanize people with many different “Yes’s!!” Global capital launched the Fourth World War to crush or subordinate our struggles; it is up to us to win that war and free ourselves once and for all.

Some are confronting this new situation with familiar, but stale and unappealing – because of past failures – theoretical and political paradigms. Orthodox Marxists with their “working class party” to synthesize diverse oppositional currents make up one example. Anarchists who only repeat their mantra of “smashing the state” – presumably at both national and supranational levels constitute another.

One new theorization of this new capitalist homogeneity which has sought to ground a more innovative approach to organization has been Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s concept of post-imperialist “Empire” – a shift in sovereignty that corresponds to the multinational corporate subordination of the nation state to the maintenance of a world in which capital can move freely to reorganize itself to counter changing patterns and intensities of many different kinds of struggle. They, and others, have sought to grasp that diversity of opposition and affirmation, that combination of “One No!, Many Yes’s!!” in terms of Spinoza’s constitutive, world-reordering “multitude”.  Unfortunately, the leap to organizational proposals has been hesitant and vague at best.

But whatever theoretical approach you decide to use, the basic point is to recognize two things as the basis for organizing: first, the existence of, and therefore the ability to point to, a common enemy and second, the possibility of diverse autonomous projects being complementary in their struggles against that common enemy at the same time that they construct the future along diverse paths. In earlier times, the commonality of the enemy was not so apparent, given the diversity of its means and methods. Today the unique, neoliberal face of capitalism is recognizable to more and more people. Political organizing must, of course, continue to sketch its features so that it will, eventually, be recognizable to all. But, thanks to capital itself, and the vivid prose of the Zapatistas, that’s the easy part.

The Sixth, the Other Campaign and the Search for a New Politics

The hard part remains: imagining and constructing ways to achieve complementarity among diverse autonomous struggles, i.e., the politics of our own movement of movements. Our struggles for autonomous forms of life are always elaborated in particular places, among particular sets of relationships and at particular points in the international hierarchy of income and power that capital has imposed on our world. Our struggles are not automatically complementary, indeed they are often contradictory, or indifferent, and therefore isolated from one another.

One very partial solution has been joint action against the common enemy by representatives of many, many different struggles. This has the approach of international mobilizations that have brought tens of thousands of protestors into the streets against the WTO, the IMF and World Bank and the G8. Representatives of diverse struggles have stood shoulder to shoulder, quite literally, against these institutions of neoliberal capitalism. Success in such endeavors has been found partly in whatever degree of disruption has been achieved and partly in the inevitable, informal networking that has taken place prior to and during such protests. These gatherings have overcome isolation, at least momentarily, and not only given participants an acute sense of connectedness with others in struggle but laid the groundwork, through networking, for future common actions. For these reasons alone, such mobilizations have been fruitful.

On the other hand, participation in such mobilizations is both irregular and expensive (in both monetary and human terms) and despite communication ahead of time for organizing, and discussion afterwards for evaluation, actual gains in terms of disrupting capitalist planning or thwarting neoliberal strategies have been minimal. At the moment, such forms of joint struggle seem to have peaked in the summer of 2001 in Genoa, Italy when over 300,000 people protested the G8 and their neoliberal policies. Despite widespread continued resistance, and multiplying autonomous initiatives, there have been no such massive gatherings in the last five years.

We have been going through a very necessary period of reassessment and exploration of alternative ways to proceed. Now what? Or in Chernechevsky and Lenin’s classic formulation “What is to be Done?” next. This is the question that was posed by the Zapatistas’ Sixth Declaration of the Lacandona in the summer of 2005 and this is the question to which we must all seek answers. As is typical of their ways, “asking as they walk”, the Zapatistas did not offer a final answer to this question, only a proposal for one step in searching for an answer (or for a collection of complementary answers). They proposed changing the terrain of discussion (away from the formal electoral spectacle) and then set about organizing that change, first through a series of meetings with diverse people in struggle in Mexico and then through their “Other Campaign”.

The Other Campaign, as it wound its way through Mexico from Chiapas to the northern border where it met with those from “the other side”, effectively created, as it went, new terrains of discussion, of listening and of speaking, of the exchange of experience and of reflection on the past, present and possible futures. As has been typical of Zapatista encounters, no unified program was proposed by the organizers or adopted by the many, many discussants in those dozens and dozens of meetings. But the whole process constituted a dramatic political act, far more dramatic although less spectacular than the formal presidential elections with all their fraud and ex-post contestation by AMLO and the PRD. Not only do I know of no other example of such a nation-wide campaign of grassroots discussion and sharing of experience and ideas, but I do not know, unfortunately, any other group besides the Zapatistas with both the power of convocation to carry out such a campaign and the interest in doing so.

The Other Campaign’s criticism of and refusal to be drawn into the electoral arena, either in supporting the PRD before the elections, or in protesting against PANista-PRIista fraud afterwards, was highly controversial and infuriated a great many who have dedicated themselves to struggle on that terrain. Yet, as events have unfolded since the elections, from the vicious state violence in Atenco, through the popular uprising in Oaxaca, to repression in that state, the bankruptcy of the professional political parties, including the PRD, continues to be demonstrated as they either lag far behind, or participate in the repression of those in struggle at the grassroots.

Phase One of the Other Campaign is now over, another phase is beginning. That phase will include a new Intercontinental Encounter in Chiapas in the summer of 2007 – one in which, I suspect, the Zapatistas will share with comrades from around the world their experience and the lessons they have drawn from their many discussions in Mexico. What the Zapatistas have organized needs to be replicated, in one form or another, around the world. We need to be engaging – locally and globally – in the same kinds of discussion, sharing experience, evaluating the successes and limitations of past efforts and ideas about what to do next.

And to the question of “what to do next?” there is no simple answer. For if we are really proposing to build new worlds we are not just talking about finding other ways of doing politics, we are talking about the reorganization of all of society. While the possibility of global discussion and the search for complementary strategies may be a function of capitalist globalization, it also means the possibility of discussing, comparing and learning from alternative autonomous projects of reorganization of every aspect of life, e.g., ways of growing and consuming food, making textiles and clothing, how we house ourselves, manufacture items we want, the way we take care of our health, our bodies and their interrelationships, the way we build and use computers, the ways we play, the relationships in our families, the ways we learn, the ways we repair the damage done to the land, the oceans, the atmosphere and ourselves. There is already a multiplicity of interesting, alternative approaches to all these things. There are already coordinated efforts to change many of these things simultaneously, as in Zapatista and other indigenous communities. Innovations such as the Good Government Councils or APPO’s are not models to mimic but small scale examples of the concrete reconstruction of social, economic and political relationships.

Local situations are already materially interlocked, both by the circuits of capital and by our efforts. Some interlockages can, and should be broken, e.g., Mexicodoes not need US government subsidized corn grown in Iowa for its tortillas. Some should be reconfigured, .e.g., shifts from “free” trade to fair trade that excludes exploitative middlemen and is geared to meeting the needs of communities rather than profit. To achieve the power to force such reconfigurations we need to find ways to reorganize our own regional and international linkages and for that we need exactly the kind of discussions organized by the Other Campaign, but at a global level. We need, in short, a Global Other Campaign. Instead of plowing our political energies into formal electoral politics – as many in Mexico did in 2006 and as many people in the United States did in the mid-term elections of 2006 and have been urged to do by professional politicians during the long run-up to the 2008 presidential elections – we need to be creating, as the Zapatistas have been doing, new terrains of very different kinds of discussion in order to find ways to fight outside, and against, the electoral straightjacket in which capital seeks to keep us bound.

For those of us in the United States, the parallels of the current situation with those of the recent Mexican past are disturbingly close. Existing repressive regimes – in Mexico first those of the PRI and then that of the PAN and in the US the administration of George W. Bush – provide oppositional politicians (the PRD in Mexico and the Democrats in the US) leverage to frighten us into backing them in the hopes that if elected they won’t be as repressive and might even, if we’re lucky and if circumstances permit, marginally reduce the repression and improve the services available to us. But even if they win, past experience demonstrates that the odds of improvement are themselves marginal and along the way they succeed in draining whatever energy and hope we have right back into the pseudo-democratic political structures which have distracted us for so long from imagining what real democracy could be like and from constructing new approaches to autonomous control over our own lives. Somehow, thousands of people in Zapatista communities have been able to free themselves of these distractions and illusions and employ their energy and hopes in more fruitful ways; we need to learn from what they have achieved and figure out how to accomplish something similar ourselves.

Harry Cleaver

Austin, Texas

October 2006

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Friday, Nov. 13 in MKE… Come for the show & stay for thesummit.

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APOCistas of the Midwest (and beyond) COME AND REPRESENT!

It’s going down in the Mil NOVEMBER 14^TH AND 15^TH 2009!

APOC MKE  is happy to host its first summit on the lovely Northside of Milwaukee. There are some things ya’ll should know about Mil-Town.

45% of the African-American population lives at or below the national poverty line – most of these homes are spearheaded by single mothers.

57% of African American males are unemployed/undereducated.

Every 1 in 3 Black males under the age of 25 is incarcerated.

MILWAUKEE IS ONE OF THE TOP SEGREGATED CITIES IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERIKKKA!

We may be a small city, but we got a lot of problems to solve. It’s about time we organize and let our black and brown siblings know that there is a possibility of REAL CHANGE.

FUCK THE FONZ! IT’S ALL ABOUT THE BLACK, BROWN AND BRONZE!

Here’s a taste of what will be going down:

Skill Shares (tentative)

Using Hip-Hop to inspire Community Activism

Mini zines and DIY Publications

Organizing a Neighborhood Cop Watch

Sign Language Skill share

Fundraising Skill Share

Building the Midwest APOC Network

–

Workshops

Auxiliaries (tentative)

Cisgender Auxiliary

Male Privilege Auxiliary

Able-Bodied Auxiliary

Light –skinned/Passing Auxiliary

Heterosexual Privilege Auxiliary

–

Caucuses (tentative)

Youth Caucus

Womyn’s Caucus

Gender Queer/Trans Caucus

Sex worker’s Caucus

Poor Folks Caucus

Interested? Shoot us an e-mail at novapocsummitmke@yahoo.com for more details, reservations, and summit site info.

Housing and (vegan) food will be provided.

Hope to see ya’ll soon.

-APOC MKE

All attendees of the summit held in Milwaukee, WI must adhere to and respect the Revolutionary Principles of Unity.

*Revolutionary Principles of Unity*

1. We call for a social revolution to erect an entire new society.

2. We want decent housing, food, clothing and other essentials for all, not

just the rich.

3. We oppose all forms of colonialism and imperialism in the Third and

Fourth Worlds and support the struggles of all oppressed peoples in the

West.

4. We oppose nation-state wars and the building of a fascist police state

based on hysteria over “terrorism.”

5. We oppose any form of white supremacy, white cultural chauvinism,

whiteness or internalized racism in the Anarchist movement, and call for

unity and recognition of our right to autonomy.

6. We strive and fight to dismantle, deconstruct and unlearn (in no

particular order but all at once) white supremacy, patriarchy, ableism,

heterosexism, speciesism, transphobia, queerphobia, environmental racism,

ageism, classism, authoritarianism, the State and all forms of oppression.

7. We oppose the oppression of wimmin/women, queers, transfolk, two spirit

people, youth, genderqueers, differently able-bodied people, people with

mental health complexities, animals and all that are oppressed.

8. We oppose any forms of capitalism and class oppression and support the

liberation of the poor and the workers.

9. We call for an immediate moratorium of the death penalty and the

dismantling of the prison industrial complex.

10. We demand an immediate end to all violence against all wimmin/women

(sexual, domestic or otherwise). We fully support survivors’ (of sexual

assault and rape) autonomy. We demand all perpetrators adhere and cooperate

to the fullest extent the procedures and demands of the survivors and the

communities.

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