Tag: Law

Wall St. Occupations

September 26, 2011: J. Rosencrantz

Inspired in part by popular uprisings in North Africa, the Middle East and Europe, the “Occupy Wall St.” has managed to maintain a presence in NY’s financial district for 10 days. Meanwhile, corporatist/nationalist “mainstream” media ignores the movement as the police brutally crack down on the non-violent mostly young protesters.

Anthropologist and Activist David Graeber (whose books I highly recommend) has an essay in the Guardian suggesting that what we are watching are “the beginnings of the defiant self-assertion of a new generation of Americans” who are demanding “a conversation we were all supposed to have back in 2008″:

There was a moment, after the near-collapse of the world’s financial architecture, when anything seemed possible…

It seemed the time had come to rethink everything: the very nature of markets, money, debt; to ask what an “economy” is actually for. This lasted perhaps two weeks. Then, in one of the most colossal failures of nerve in history, we all collectively clapped our hands over our ears and tried to put things back as close as possible to the way they’d been before.

Meanwhile, members of the emerging defiant generation who take action against Wall St. crime are met, predictably, with the heavy cloven hoof of the pigs — witness this video of these peaceful young women getting corralled and pepper-spayed for daring to express their 1st Amendment Rights:

NYPD spokesliar Paul Browne asserted that this use of pepper spray was “appropriate“.

Various other coverage on the Web:

A solidarity movement is starting to manifest in Los Angeles (#OccupyLA), with a demonstration planned today (Monday) at 2Pm at Santa Monica and Crescent Heights to coincide with Obama’s fundraising visit.

Local Activists are also planning an occupation of Downtown beginning October 1.

Prison Hunger Strike

July 17, 2011: J. Rosencrantz

Pelican Bay SHU, a stripped and cuffed inmate, and the wide open space of the exercise yard.

Pelican Bay  “Security Housing Unit” inmates have been on hunger strike since July 1, in protest of the nightmarish conditions of their captivity.

They are kept in total isolation, under constant florescent lighting, in a 8′X10′ cell 22 1/2 hours a day.  If they are lucky they get an hour in a slightly larger concrete yard (pictured above right, from images taken from this photo essay).

Some of the hunger striking inmates have been held in the SHU for decades.

As Jeff Kaye stresses at FDL, one of the core demands of the hunger strikers is an end to the “debriefing” process, whereby prisoners are held in the SHU until they snitch or make up evidence against another inmate — an act which can put the prisoner and his family in danger.

The only other way out is to die or to complete your sentence in the SHU — what prisoners call “snitch, parole or die’.

The San Francisco Bay View has been all over this story, documenting the solidarity demonstrations in various cities and updates on negotiations between the prisoners and the Dept. of Corrections. Particularly interesting are the journal entries from hunger striking prisoners themselves — here is Richard Johnson on the “psychology of prisoners” as well as the challenges of “aging in prison”.

The Economist adds that inmates in “at least 11 of California’s 33 prisons” have joined the hunger strike in solidarity, and puts the current California prisons crisis in the broader context of the last several decades of “tough on crime” legislation:

The tale of how California’s prison system deteriorated to this point spans decades. In 1977 Jerry Brown, governor then as now, signed a law introducing determinate sentencing, limiting the discretion of judges and parole boards. Politicians and voters then added hundreds of new laws, all claiming to be “tough on crime” by punishing ever more offences with prison, and making prison terms ever longer.

Most famous of these was the 1994 ballot measure called “three strikes and you’re out”. Sponsored by the prison-guards union, it requires criminals convicted a second time to get double the usual sentence, while those with a third “strike” must get 25 years to life. Other states copied California, but California’s version is still the harshest, allowing even a non-violent or trivial third strike to result in a life term. In another six ballot measures between 1978 and 2000, voters also reintroduced and expanded the death penalty.

Here is a brief video update from TheRealNews.com and FSRN:

(I used to file audio reports with FSRN, btw.  Here is one from 2004 about the 10th anniversary of the “three strikes” law.)

Barack and Bradley

May 1, 2011: J. Rosencrantz

The case of Bradley Manning  has exposed much about the hypocrisy and incoherence of the Obama White house.

After Manning had spent the better part of a year in 23-hour-a-day solitary confinement, much of which time stripped naked and constantly surveilled — all without trail — Obama, the former Constitutional Law professor, assured the press that he had checked with the Pentagon, which assured him that everything being done to Manning was “appropriate”.

Meanwhile, over 250 U.S. legal scholars, including Obama’s former Constitutional Law professor at Harvard, denounced Manning’s detention as torture.

It is hard not to concur with IOZ’s assessment, who characterizes Obama’s response to Manning’s pre-trial torture as “the blithe indifference of a busy manager signing off on some subordinate’s expense report”, and as Obama himself as “an asshole of the worst order” who, though he doesn’t “delight in cruelty like his predecessor”, is nevertheless “grossly indifferent to it”.

Since then, the U.S. King Commander of Chief has publicly judged Manning to be guilty without trial, in the same breath as he maintained that the U.S. is a nation of laws. This is especially disturbing because even if Manning ever gets to have a trial, he will be judged by Obama’s subordinates. Greenwald asks: “How can Manning possibly expect to receive a fair hearing from military officers when their Commander-in-Chief has already decreed his guilt?”

Something about this situation reminds me of Prince Buster’s Judge Dread (as well as Megacity One’s Judge Dredd):

It is important to remember that, according to the chat logs obtained by Wired, Manning was motivated by a concern for transparency and the “public good”:

i want people to see the truth . . . regardless of who they are . . . because without information, you cannot make informed decisions as a public.

This weekend, Democratic partisans have been beaming that Obama was able to best birthers in a war of wits at the White House Correspondents’ dinner.  But after his war on whistle-blowers, and especially the pre-trial detention, torture and judgment of Manning, the funniest line might have been when the President praised the “daring men and women” who “risk their lives for the simple idea that no one should be silenced and everyone deserves to know the truth.”

Other notes:

Although Manning is now being transferred to medium security prison in Kansas, the Pentagon is planning on holding Manning in “pre-trial confinement” for the indefinite future.

The Obama White house has tried  to banish reporters from official print pools for merely reporting on a protest in support of Bradley Manning.

Here is the Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg discussing Obama and Manning.

Left Vs. Left on Libyan Intervention

April 4, 2011: J. Rosencrantz

The U.S./NATO intervention, command of which is gradually being shared with other European and North American allies (as well as token contributions from a small number of Arab states), has divided opinion on the left, with one side arguing that the humanitarian crisis posed by Gaddafi’s threat to wipe out his domestic enemies justified military intervention by Western powers, and the other side remaining distrustful of the motives, legality, and putative beneficial consequences of Western military interventions into resource-rich African and Middle Eastern lands.

Exemplifying this division is the debate between Juan Cole and critics of his “Open Letter to the Left on Libya“, which argued the justice of the (UNSC sanctioned / NATO executed) intervention follows from its humanitarian aim, its Libyan support, its international legality, and its limited scope. In short:

… in Libya intervention was demanded by the people being massacred as well as by the regional powers, was authorized by the UNSC, and could practically attain its humanitarian aim of forestalling a massacre through aerial bombardment of murderous armored brigades. And, the intervention could be a limited one and still accomplish its goal.

Left critics of the intervention have questioned all of these premises, including Gaddafi’s power to successfully carry out his threats to annihilate his opposition. (See for example this overview of Socialist literature on the subject.)

In my last post, I argued that the selective application of humanitarian intervention exposes it as whitewash.

The touted degree of international support can also be doubted.  As Philip Hiro discusses, the foreign intervention in Libya has exposed divisions within and among international security institutions — the Arab League, EU, NATO, UN Security Council — and has served as an occasion for the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China) to “adopt a unified stance on a matter of war and peace.”

The BRIC countries, representing 40% of the worlds population abstained from the Security Council vote, while the Asia Times clarifies that Arab League support for the intervention was really a “House of Saud led operation” — “only nine out of 22 members of the Arab League voted for the no-fly zone.”  (Nevertheless, as Siddharth Varadarajan points out, this fact alone does not “absolve them of their failure to mount an effective political challenge to the drive for war.” Thanks to MTK, SF mayoral candidate and friend of the blog, for pointing to these discussions in comments).

The pro-intervention forces may have taken the steps to secure international legality for the operation, but its legality has been questioned on domestic legal grounds, since according to the U.S. Constitution the President lacks the authority to make war without Congressional approval. Ohio Rep. Kucinich is the leading the charge on this point, insisting that the rule of law should also apply to the President.

But Cole’s most contentious premise is his faith that the intervention can be limited in scope.  That is why the implausibility of a humanitarian motive is important to consider, for once its talons puncture flesh, the imperial eagle is unlikely to release until it is time to feed.

T. Miles exposes Cole’s false dilemma succinctly:

…as past history going back to the 1880s shows, that inviting the global imperial power to save them will enslave the Libyan people to a more subtle yoke in the coming years. This may be better than Gadaffi’s death squads, but that accepts the fallacy which goes completely unnoticed by Professor Cole that there are not simply two choices: domestic tyrant or Pax Imperia.

Along these lines, another of Cole’s reasons to support intervention — that the leaders of the uprising in Bengazi are “simply the notables of the city”  — has been rendered untrue by the logic of intervention itself: it is now Canadians and expatriate residents of Langley, VA that are filling leadership roles.

Cole’s narrow focus also misses how the attack sends a clear message to other outlier regimes: “no matter what, no matter the inducements or pressure, never ever give up chemical weapons or a nuclear weapons program. Doing so will not ensure that the U.S. does not attack you—on the contrary, it will make it much more likely.”

8th Anniversary of Supreme International Crime

March 21, 2011: J. Rosencrantz

Nothing symbolizes more acutely the dark matrix of corporate hegemony, war, lies, unaccountability, torture and secrecy than the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq 8 years ago.

This weekend, as the U.S. Executive Branch (without Congressional approval) began bombarding yet another oil rich predominantly Muslim country, Los Angeles joined other cities in protest to mark the anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, a “supreme international crime” according to principles laid out by the International Tribunal at Nuremberg after World War II.

As I did last year, I documented the event in video.  This year the most compelling speaker was Mike Prysner, an Iraq War Vet and co-founder of March Forward!, a anti-war veterans group.  Here is a recording I made of his speech at the rally, edited with time lapse video of the protest march:

The AP reported that “hundreds” of people marched, but the time lapse sequences seem to indicate more. Looks like at least a few thousand to me.

Meanwhile, in D.C., Daniel Ellsberg and about 100 others were arrested in protests outside the White House.

Instruments of U.S. Foreign Policy

December 16, 2010: J. Rosencrantz

In the wake of the release of a small fraction of the diplomatic cables it has attained, Wikileaks has faced a barrage of challenges. In addition to threats and denunciations, as well as incoherent accusations of treason and even calls for the extrajudicial execution of Assange,  Amazon booted Wikileaks from it’s servers,  PayPal “permanently restricted” its account,  EveryDNS terminated its DNS services, and MasterCard and Visa stopped processing donations — all in the absence of official charges, let alone a trial or conviction for any wrongdoing.

In British custody for questioning about a (very convenient) Swedish sexual assault investigation, Julian Assange delivered the following message via his mother:

“We now know that Visa, MasterCard and PayPal are instruments of US foreign policy. It’s not something we knew before.”

At CounterPunch, Alexander Cockburn points out that this episode is a “wake-up call on the enormous vulnerability of our prime means of communication to swift government-instigated, summary shutdown”:

So here we have a public “commons”—the Internet—subject to arbitrary onslaught by the state and powerful commercial interests, and not even the shadow of constitutional protections.

Effectively defy the Imperial Will, and the global corporate institutions which sustain your activities — your communications and financial transactions — will evaporate.

Here is a discussion on Al-Jazeera questioning the right of companies like MasterCard and PayPal to deny service to Wikileaks.

Swedish Documentary about Wikileaks

December 15, 2010: J. Rosencrantz

Here is an informative Swedish documentary on Wikileaks:

View from Outside II

December 10, 2010: J. Rosencrantz

This vid from Taiwan summarizes recent wikileaks-related events quite nicely:

Illegal Plants (But not for long?)

November 1, 2010: J. Rosencrantz

I never thought that I would see the day when Peter Tosh’s anthem would become a reality, but it looks like it might happen if enough people go to the polls tomorrow.

If anybody knows of any compelling reasons why marijauna should not be legalized, please let me know – I can’t find any.

By increasing the legality of this particular plant, CA Prop 19 would eliminate a disproportionately applied (i.e. racist) law that puts people in cages for the possession of a plant that grows from the earth. (Last year, CA police made 60,000 marijuana possession arrests, mostly of “young men of color”, even though “white” people use it more. )

Other benefits: It will increases tax revenue for a cash strapped state, and (possibly, hopefully) reduce the violence of the drug wars in Mexico, which has already claimed tens of thousands of lives.

But if all of this isn’t enough, just listen to Snoop:

No surprise, but Peter Tosh’s son Dave is also down. He makes his plea here.

CA Prop 23 (2010)

October 20, 2010: J. Rosencrantz

Prop 23, initially and primarily funded by two Texas oil corporations (Valero and Tesoro), would suspend the Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006 (AB32) until unemployment drops to 5.5% for four quarters.

If it passes, Prop 23 will require that the State of California abandon the implementation of comprehensive greenhouse-gas-reduction program, and drop the effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020.

Proponents argue that the measure will help preserve jobs, and that preserving jobs should take precedence over addressing the climate crisis. Opponents say that overturning AB32 will result in more air pollution, undermine the burgeoning clean clean energy sector, and reduce incentives to find alternatives to oil.  Also, there is mistrust of the motives of the measure’s sponsors, who happen to be among California’s worst polluters.

Here is an argument against Prop 23 in action-movie format, written and directed by respected acquaintance M. Cooke: