Experience the terror the Occupy Philly protestors faced when being charged by police horses. Filmed by indy media journalist, Vanessa Maria, in the midst of being trampled and injured by police horses.
Friday, December 2, 2011
Experience the Terror of the Philadelphia Police
Evoking the ghost of general strikes past
Excerpt:
Each threat of a one-day strike is now accompanied by dark allusions to the General Strike of 1926 and/or the Winter of Discontent of 1978-1979. And each time it becomes more ridiculous to try to make such historical claims and comparisons. The historical reasons why it’s not 1926 or 1979 all over again were examined at some length in an article I wrote on spiked at the time of the June walk-outs (see British trade unions: General Shrug now!), and there is no wish here to do a Dave Prentis by simply repeating myself this time around.
Suffice to say that this week’s token and half-hearted one-day strike bears no comparison to the nine-day General Strike of 1926, which came at the end of an era of revolution in Europe and class warfare in Britain and saw workers across many industries strike in support of the miners, in a battle against a Tory government that deployed emergency powers, troops and an army of middle-class scabs, whilst waging a fierce propaganda war (led by Winston Churchill) against the ‘Red Menace to the Nation’.
Nor does it help to compare the current action to the Winter of Discontent, when the public-sector unions went on strike against the Labour government’s policies of pay restraint. In 1979, 29million working days were lost due to industrial action. Last year, the estimated figure was 365,000 days - not much more than one per cent of the 1979 record. Indeed, there have been fewer strike days in the past 20 years added together than in 1979 alone. So, claiming ‘the biggest strike in decades’ does not take much – and means even less.
However, there is really no need to harp on these points. Because behind the headlines, the leaders on both sides of this dispute know that the historical allusions are part of a phoney war, and that they are engaged in a bit of PR sparring rather than a class struggle.
In the past, some of us might have caused outrage in trade-union circles by arguing that such a one-day strike, however large, was little more than a gesture. Now, however, trade union officials themselves admit the same thing. Their explanations for this week’s action talk about how it allows their members to ‘express their anger’ at the proposed changes to public-sector pensions or, in the words of Trades Union Congress (TUC) chief Brendan Barber, to show ‘the power of the sense of grievance that people feel’.
General strike brings Greece to a surprisingly calm halt
A crippling general strike and street protests by hundreds of thousands of Greeks marked the second anniversary of the eurozone debt crisis on Thursday.
For the prime minister, Lucas Papademos, who is facing his first test since his interim administration assumed power less than a month ago, the mass demonstrations were unusually peaceful and, therefore, a huge success: in a nation used to street violence, not a single shot was fired as riot police refrained from lobbing tear gas into the crowds and stone-throwing anarchists stayed away.
But beneath the apparent calm the anger was still palpable. Trade unionists representing civil servants and private-sector workers said that Papademos, a former vice-president of the European Central Bank (ECB), should expect "sustained battle" against cutbacks that are widely seen as unfair. Hit by a barrage of tax increases and salary cuts, poorer Greeks have seen their purchasing power slashed by up to 70% since the crisis erupted.
See also:
Transparency International: Greece & Italy Most Corrupt among EZ countriesGreece: Anatomy of a Financial Crisis - A Conversation with Richard Parker
Martial Law declared in United States
Although the American people are not hearing the term martial law, the right to habeas corpus (1) has been indefinitely suspended. Habeas corpus literally means “you may have the body”. It is one of the most basic rights of law which essentially demands a person be brought before a judge. Without the right to habeas corpus, a person may be arrested on suspicion alone, whisked off to a secret prison, and held indefinitely. Although defenders of the National Defense Authorization Act (2) claim it is necessary to detain subversives, one must wonder exactly what a subversive is considered these days. Speaking against the National Defense Authorization Act, Rand Paul claimed that currently a US citizen who owns firearms or maintains more than seven days of food in his or her home can be considered a terrorist suspect. (3)
Although this might sound reasonable to an urban dweller, here in the foot hills of Kentucky you would be hard pressed to find a person without a few guns or seven days of food in their home. This time of the year, there is a coyote gun over the back door, the garden is put up in the root cellar, and I imagine most of my neighbors have also prepared for winter. Just the other year, we had an ice storm which took out our electricity and left us on our own for about two weeks. Evidently, being prepared for winter is now reasonable suspicion of terrorist activity.
“That’s right the military will now have the power to lock up anyone, even American citizens without due process and without being convicted of a crime.” (3)
Making matters scarier, the Army Times (4) reported that the ACLU has expressed concerns over US troop training and deployment. That report, written in 2008, details troop development and deployment within the United States for activation in late 2011. Their purpose is clearly for use against US citizens, crowd and riot control. The ACLU has demanded further information from the US Federal Government. (5)
So while the press might not be telling you we are now living under martial law, the military has been deployed to the United States for crowd control and your constitutional rights have suspended. If not the definition martial law (6), what is it? As the president of the United States is himself the commander in chief of the US armed forces, one might also use the term dictatorship. Time will tell how this plays out, but things are not looking good for the freedom and liberty that US citizens value so much.
- Habeas Corpus at Wikipedia
- National Defense Act
- Rand Paul speaks up.
- Army Times
- ACLU Demand
- Wikipedia on Martial Law
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