Tag: repression

I’ve been reading around the Left web for the past couple of hours, and it is heartening to see the quick solidarity toward the Freedom Road Socialist Organization comrades being subjected to police raids and the confiscation of vast quantities of their personal papers, records, mementos, and even money.  

Left activists from across the spectrum are organizing a series of emergency protest rallies around the country over the next few days, using Facebook and other social media to spread the word.  A list of those rallies and various related items on the flip.

When a society becomes corrupt it becomes economically unhealthy. Although it may continue to accumulate wealth through global plundering, the depletion of trust resulting from corruption undermines domestic productivity, as increasing numbers of citizens lose the incentive to cooperate constructively. The wealthy and powerful respond to the economic deterioration in classic zero-sum fashion: to preserve and extend their advantages, they extract more resources from the poor and the weak.

This is the situation America faces at the end of the first decade of the 21st century. The rapacious rich, having consolidated their control over the government since the “Reagan Revolution,” have undermined the economic productivity of the United States to the point that their only remaining avenue for further enrichment is to extract wealth from the middle and lower classes. They will do this by causing the US Government to default on domestic obligations to the poor and middle class – specifically Social Security and Medicare.

The cutbacks will fall on the weakest members of society because the wealthy and powerful control the executive branch, the Congress, and the courts. Behind a huge propaganda blitz, and possibly a new war of choice, the middle class and poor will be told that “sacrifice” is every American’s patriotic duty. Meanwhile, CEO salaries will continue to rise and wealth will be further concentrated, as the oligarchy continues to feed on the decaying carcass of our former democracy.

When social conditions for the middle class reach a point of intolerable deterioration, a political backlash will develop, but this is likely to be brutally suppressed by “anti-terrorist” tactics similar to those utilized in third-world regimes. The people may ultimately prevail against the oligarchs, but the cost will be frightful.

Given the sociopathic character of the American economic elite and their highly perfected tools of political and media manipulation, this unhappy outcome is inevitable. The public Internet has arrived too late to halt America’s plunge into the abyss. The forces of greed have overwhelmed the nascent movements for justice and sustainable society. Something true, just, and decent may arise from the ruins of the American culture of predation, but it will not emerge from simple reason and honest communication; it will be the result of a colossal and costly failure, the global failure of selfishness and deceit in a world sustainable only through sharing and honesty.

Cross-posted at dkos  http://www.dailykos.com/story/…

Update:  Please see my update in comment #6 below.  This thing looks as if it is much less a concern for the ordinary essayist/diarist than I thought!

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THIS AFFECTS ALL BLOGGERS/CITIZEN JOURNALISTS

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Thanks to kos himself, and to kossack WilliamKWolfrom, and AMERICAblogger John Aravosis, I am now aware of Senators Durbin and Feinstein’s efforts to deny citizens who do citizen journalism the benefits of the same shield law which protects professional journalists.

cross posted from The Dream Antilles

Evidently, it’s not a really good idea to assert free speech rights in China or to protest the policies of the Chinese government.  If you’re Chinese, as I previously wrote, you can be sent to “re-education through labor” if you apply five times to get a permit to protest legally. And what if you’re a US Citizen and you protest?  You are summarily punished without trial.  Or deported.  After all, protests about freedom for Tibet, or anything else that might offend you about the Chinese Government’s policies, might tarnish the luster of the perfect, mechanistic Olympics.

The New York Times reports:

Six Americans who were taken into custody on Tuesday as they tried to protest against China’s rule in Tibet have been given 10-day detentions, the Chinese police said Friday.

But members of their organization, the New York-based Students for a Free Tibet, said that they had no information about four other protesters – two Americans, a German and a British citizen – who were detained early Thursday during a protest near the National Stadium. Extrajudicial detentions are a common form of punishment for Chinese dissidents, but are rarely handed out to foreigners, who are often deported almost immediately after being taken into custody. Members of Students for a Free Tibet have staged eight protests involving 55 people since the Olympics began on Aug. 8, and human rights advocates said the government might be seeking to deter those contemplating similar activities in the Games’ final days.

/snip

Reached by telephone, Public Security Bureau officials declined to comment, but faxed a two-sentence statement explaining that the six Americans had been “apprehended for upsetting public order.” The statement, which did not include the detainees’ names, said the men were being held at the Dongcheng police station.

You read that right.  Extrajudicial detentions means punishment without trial.  And the offense is “upsetting public order.”

What exactly did these protesters do that so grievously “upset public order”?

Most of the organization’s demonstrations have involved unfurling “Free Tibet” banners or displaying Tibetan flags, which are illegal in China. In the latest action, four protesters raised their fists and shouted slogans while waving a Tibetan flag near the National Stadium. As at the other protests, the participants were quickly bundled off by plainclothes police officers.

So. The protesters are summarily detained and punished without trial.  But it gets more interesting:

Two photographers for The Associated Press were also roughed and taken into custody, according to news agency reports and press freedom advocates. The police questioned them for 30 to 40 minutes and took the memory cards from their cameras.

The Foreign Correspondents Club of China has received dozens of complaints from foreign journalists who have been detained, trailed or had equipment damaged by the police.

How dare anyone so grievously upset public order during the Olympics!  How dare newspeople and photographers actually do their jobs and record the protests!  Didn’t Chairman Mao write, “Let a hundred flowers bloom; let a hundred schools of thought contend?”  Well maybe.  But he must not have meant during the Olympics.

cross posted from The Dream Antilles



The Chinese Government is very afraid of these two women.

Seventy-nine-year-old Wu Dianyuan, on the right, and her neighbor Wang Xiuying, 77, followed the law.  They applied for a protest permit.  They wanted to protest inadequate compensation for the taking of their homes in preparation of the Olympics.  They asked for the permit five times.  They didn’t get it.  They ended up instead being sentenced to a year of “re-education through labor.”

According to NY Times:

Two elderly Chinese women have been sentenced to a year of “re-education through labor” after they repeatedly sought a permit to demonstrate in one of the official Olympic protest areas, according to family members and human rights advocates.

The women, Wu Dianyuan, 79, and Wang Xiuying, 77, had made five visits to the police this month in an effort to get permission to protest what they contended was inadequate compensation for the demolition of their homes in Beijing.

During their final visit on Monday, public security officials informed them that they had been given administrative sentences for “disturbing the public order,” according to Li Xuehui, Ms. Wu’s son.

Mr. Li said his mother and Ms. Wang, who used to be neighbors before their homes were demolished to make way for a redevelopment project, were allowed to return home but were told they could be sent to a detention center at any moment. “Can you imagine two old ladies in their 70s being re-educated through labor?” he asked. He said Ms. Wang was nearly blind.

Join me in Beijing.

I often find discussions about Cuba frustratingly polemic. On one side are the demonizers, who see everything the Cuban government does as evil, even if it’s providing free healthcare, education, or inculcating equality as a value in Cuban society that is not going to be erased by any infusion of capital.

On the other side are the romanticizers, who  have such tight blinders on that they cannot see anything wrong with anything the Cuban government does. They refuse to admit that the central management system in Cuba suffers from severe bureaucratism, and they rationalize away the human rights abuses that certainly do take place on the island with a Bush-like excuse of, “we’ll they’re under constant threat, so they have to take tough security measures.” What, so it’s OK to torture somebody if you’re a Cuban government official but not if you’re a Bush Administration one?

Really, the only way we’re going to get a better perspective on any of this is to get rid of the idiotic embargo and restore full diplomatic relations between the two countries. That’s when the dirty laundry will also come out. Like Cuba’s relationship with the Stasi.