Two articles from Raw Story today paint the picture. A picture of justice not determined by facts, but by political orientation, class, and influence.
Let us compare and contrast.
Criminalizing dissent? RNC protesters face felony terrorism charges is a short blurb mainly pointing to an interview between Amy Goodman and ….
Luce Guillen-Givins who is one of the first people ever to be charged under the 2002 Minnesota version of the federal PATRIOT Act. Guillen-Givins and 7 other members of the group RNC Welcoming Committee – also known as the “RNC 8” – were formally charged with conspiracy to riot in furtherance of terrorism.However, criminal complaints filed reportedly do not allege that members of the RNC 8 personally engaged in any act of violence or damage to property.
From the interview…
AMY GOODMAN: And what are you exactly charged with?
LUCE GUILLEN-GIVINS: I have four felony counts that I’m facing: conspiracy to commit a riot in furtherance of terrorism, conspiracy to commit riot, conspiracy to commit criminal damage to property in furtherance of terrorism, and conspiracy to commit criminal damage to property.
AMY GOODMAN: Luce, what were you doing at the Republican convention?
LUCE GUILLEN-GIVINS: Well, at the convention, I was in jail. I had been in jail since the Saturday before.
Just to state it plainly, he is facing charges of being a terrorist….for a political protest, in the United States of America. I think it is safe to say that Luce Guillen-Givins is not a Republican.
But from the IOKIYAR side of the two tiered justice system….
Former RNC director convicted in phone jamming case gets off without penalty
The Republican National Committee employee convicted of a plot to jam the phone banks of Democratic get-out-the-vote efforts in New Hampshire in 2002 has escaped penalty in his case, after a federal judge ruled that new charges against him could not be brought.The latest charges against James Tobin, whose at least $722,000 dollars in legal fees were paid for by the Republican National Committee, were nixed by a federal judge on Thursday.
Tobin was convicted in December 2005 by a New Hampshire jury of being part of a conspiracy to jam Democratic phone banks led by Democrats and a nonpartisan firefighters union on Election Day 2002.
A paid political operative of the Republican National Committee, whose dirty tricks (ratfucking to use Segretti’s term) almost undoubtedly affected the Senatorial election in which John Sununu narrowly defeated Democratic Gov. Jeann Sheehean.
Terrorism charges for organizing a political protest.
No legal penalty for being convicted of rigging an Senatorial election. And the Republican National Committee even paid this ratfuckers legal fees. Paid to defend a person who was part of a conspiracy to fix elections in their favor.
We don’t have a justice system, we have a patronage and persecution system.
And just for good measure, the terrorism charges are the result of an FBI mole….and perhaps agent provocateur…who is facing his own criminal charges!
AMY GOODMAN: And, Jordan Kushner, the latest information about an FBI informant within the RNC Welcoming Committee that has just come out?
JORDAN KUSHNER: That’s right. He was an FBI informant and actually was an FBI informant in that Molotov cocktail case, too, although he wasn’t called because of the criminal charges of his own that he’s facing. He was arrested for some violent burglary charges in January, where he broke into someone’s house, assaulted two people. And so, he’s facing felony charges right now in Hennepin County over that. He was the most-he’s the principal informant in the RNC 8 case, the main person they’re relying on to accuse them of planning the destruction of property.
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If you’re one of the ‘elite’, then you are not the enemy. If you aren’t, you are one of the enemy. Virtually all of us (even the petty bourgeois) are not part of the ‘elite’. Most of our politicians are, or aspire to be (including the current President) to be part of the ‘elite.’
You should post this over at orange, too.
This is disgusting. I can’t believe the Repub operative got off scott-free. And terrorism charges? Meh.
I asked before and now ask again what do we do if our guys win and nothing changes……
what if nothing can change in any substantive way until the human species changes…..
after the heat……
after the fires……
after the water……
during the ice…..
after the loss of 60-70% of the biotic capital of the earth…..
we will change a tiny tiny amount……
and we will forget……
and it will begin again…….
perhaps it will unfold a tiny amount differently……
in the mean time midnight is promised to no one…….
life is precious and ephemeral…..
Yes, it’s definitively true but fascism does come of red and blue flavors. The higher meme is that elite scumbag parasites get to exploit and control large numbers of people. Things do “change” but they only “change” because the Illuminati choice was left leaning fascism. We shall see who if anybody gets held accountable. All of it hinges on the lamestream of 30 second attentions spans of the sheeple.
http://www.newsok.com/okc-offi…
we can’t blame all of this on “the elite.” I have a pretty front row seat to what’s happening as a result of the Republican Convention. And I can tell you that almost none of our progressives in this community (elected or otherwise) are upset about what happened. Just last week a friend of mine was opining on what a good job law enforcement did at the convention. It made me sick to my stomach!!!
selected the judges and made the rules…plus they have the media in their corner…so no reportage…we hafta play by their rules and those rules keep changing in favor of the Republicans. It is going to be a long, hard journey and I hope we’re up for it!
I spent five days in the Ramsey County jail, locked up in a cell, isolated, completely cut off from contact with the outside world. I was a political prisoner, one of hundreds arrested in the occupied Twin Cities, arrested and thrown in jail for telling the truth, persecuted for condemning the crimes and the criminals of the Republican Party. The days were long and the nights were longer, there was no relief from the agony of not knowing what had happened to Shannon, no respite from the fear of knowing I might never see her again, no escape from the shame of knowing that I hadn’t been able to help her.
The minutes dragged by in that cell, each one as barren and empty of justice as the one before it and the one that came next, each minute a glaring reminder that my freedom had been taken away, that the freedom of hundreds of Americans had been taken away by anonymous riot police who didn’t give a damn about us or what we believe in. We were not Americans to them, we were not people to them, we were the other, we had no identity, we had no names, we had no rights.
On that street, in that crucible of violence, we were humanity taking a stand against inhumanity, we were the light on a street of darkness, we were the love on a street filled with hate, we were the truth in a city of lies, we were the promise of healing in a world of pain.
But that light was extinguished, that truth was scorned, that love was ignored, that promise of healing was trampled under those black boots of madness leaving nothing behind but blood on the street. I saw why fascism has such primal power, I saw the vindictive resentment in the eyes of those riot police as they marched down that street, I saw the psychotic power of authoritarianism, I saw the absolute conviction in their eyes that they were righteous guardians of the law, I saw their cold assurance that we were just mindless troublemakers, that we deserved to be abused, shoved to the ground, maced, beaten and tasered, that we had it coming. They were going to show us who’s boss, teach us a lesson, punish us, silence us so they could go on dreaming the Dream of the Proud, so they could go on pretending it hadn’t become a nightmare.
…to a post I generally agree with, esp. in broad philosphical frame…
…but, eh, the general meme of putting the disenfrachised in jail is a fine, fine way to monetize the poor; and that seems to me the underlying dynamic, more than just the “prison for dissenters” idea (or even the “jail corporations” idea, pushed directly). It is a broad web of interest with enormous intertia. The bank can put those jail construction bonds on their books, the community gets jails and jail jobs, the contractors get work to build the jails, the prosecutor gets power and more people, and the cops get whatever they can seize plus the big budget to keep “them” under control. There’s no incentive, anywhere along the line, to sale back the criminal justice system or to stop counting more and more people as “them”.
In such circumstances, it seems inevitable that people of higher socioeconomic classes find ways to stay out of the intakes, and that distinctions between dissent and outright criminality become rather blurry when the poor are in the dock…
doesn’t this make you a terrorist too?
Everything’s rigged in favor of the Repugs! BushCo enablement — it all stems from there. And, so it goes — nothing was ever done to STOP BushCo and the sense of enablement continues. We never cut off the snake’s head!
We need to act and act quickly!
This IS VERY, VERY IMPORTANT! We cannot afford to allow statute of limitations to run on the illegal spying issue and/or any other statute of limitations on a national level! DO SOMETHING!
are still at it with their brand of justice.
Oh, but its all to protect the children…yaright!