Tag Archives: Media

Is Dzhokhar Tsarnaev guilty of a worse crime than US forces commit overseas?

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Dzhokhar TsarnaevDoes the “Boston Marathon Bomber” look like he deserves the death penalty? Funny, you don’t even know what he looks like. US authorities have been meticulous about controlling images of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev since the manhunt for the teen and his older brother ended in extrajudicial firing squads which teen Dzhokhar survived. He’s been in custody since then and the only more recent image his captors released was of Dzhokhar giving the finger to a jail cell surveillance camera. This to influence the jury to give the death penalty. Why the embargo on images? Are authorities afraid the public will feel sympathy for the disfigurement Dzhokhar suffered from his fusillade? Where defense attorneys not permitted to submit images of Dzhokhar smiling? Is the image ban in effect a media blackout? Remember how Saddam Hussein’s trial was broadcast without sound? Now US dumb justice has become literally blind, all Star Chambers and spectral evidence.
 
Is Dzhokhar Tsarnaev guilty of a worse crime than US forces commit overseas? If an American sniper turned in the Tsarnaev brothers headcount, he’d be handed a potato peeler and punished with kitchen duty. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is a small fry. US drone pilots eat massacres like the Boston Marathon for breakfast.

Five Rag-Tag Protestors Beat On Plastic Buckets and the Rich Shit Their Pants

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As Chris Hedges observed below, you can’t have a revolution while sitting at home in front of the TV watching the next installment of Kim Kardashian.
 
If you can find the courage to skip just one show, go to the streets; what you find, might surprise you, Likeminded people, just like yourself. That is what the people of Baltimore discovered. Some people saw only rioting, but that was the corporate media spoon feeding the citizens. What really happen was the citizen got really pissed off at the system and went to the streets demanding change; it made the rich panic to the point that they indict some of the policemen. I remind you, they were only charged not convicted. This was a tactic used to defuse and distract the organized citizens.

If you think the rich did not panic over the citizens in the streets of Baltimore, you need to read about the federal surveillance.

This week in Denver; Tattered Cover 5 Receive Mixed Verdicts, One Courtroom Observer Arrested.

Of all the courtrooms and trials I have set through, I don’t believe I ever saw a grander puppet show. The rich used all of their power in the system to stop a few protesters from beating on a plastic buckets. The long and short of it; these 5 rag-tag protestors, beating on their plastic buckets, scared the shit out of the rich.

The rich used their puppet policemen and prosecutor, all at the expense of the taxpayer.

At this mockery of justice, I observed something I had never seen before, the policeman, who was the prosecutors star witness, and supposed to be impartial (you know; only doing his duty) sat between the two prosecutors for the entire trial as though he were a back up prosecutor.

In those famous word of Martin Luther; “How Long?” and the people responded, “Not Long”.

Many cities in America watched as the sleeping giant in Baltimore awoke from a slumber and this is what made the “Rich Panic”. There is more of us then there is of them and they know it.

Time to turn the corporate TV off and organize.

Make the Rich Panic
Posted on May 3, 2015
By Chris Hedges

“This is called revolution. It is about ripping power away from a cabal of corporate oligarchs and returning it to the citizenry. This will happen not by appealing to corporate power but by terrifying it. And power, as we saw in Baltimore, will be terrified only when we take to the streets. There is no other way.”

“The fundamental law of revolution, which has been confirmed by all revolutions, and particularly by all three Russian revolutions in the twentieth century, is as follows: it is not enough for revolution that the exploited and oppressed masses should understand the impossibility of living in the old way and demand changes, what is required for revolution is that the exploiters should not be able to live and rule in the old way. Only when the “lower classes” do not want the old way, and when the “upper classes” cannot carry on in the old way —only then can revolution win”

Mother Teresa was the Janet Matzen of Calcutta

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(The above photo is of Janet on May Day 20015 feeding a group of 50 people in front of the state capital, still wearing that warm smile for all the homeless and hungry.)
 
Janet Matezen was a 54 year old working mom. She had recently lost her job at a local market where she worked as a meat cutter. Like many of the middle class, Janet was also struggling to make ends meet. It was October 2011, Occupy of Denver made camp in Denver’s Civic Center Park. Their number began to grow daily as word of the movement spread via the media. Janet had never been a protester or even been to a rally such as Occupy, but she was curious. She decided one day that she would drive to the park to see what it was all about.

When I first saw Janet in the park, she looked like any other mother from any city in America. She was average with one difference, she always had a warm smile. She began to talk with the others there in the park, and the more she heard their stories the more shocked she became at the conditions many there were living under. She never spoke of her own problems. Janet’s struggles seemed to fade as she listen to their stories. After all, she had a home and food for her table.

I believe the old adage “I use to feel sorry for myself because I had no shoes, and then I met a man who had no feet” best describes Janet’s experience there with Occupy in Denver’s Civic Center Park.

In the past four years, Janet has transformed herself into an advocate and champion of the homeless and hungry of Denver. Whenever the city council is considering new legislation such as the Anti Camping Ban, Janet is always there to lend her voice in defense of the poor and homeless.

When the Colorado House of Representatives were recently considering a bill of rights for the homeless, Janet was present at every stage of the hearings.

When the homeless are arrested for falling asleep in the park, she is always there to help, even if it’s only to be with them in court.

One spring day in 2012, I interviewed Janet in the city park; one of the questions I ask her was; “Did she have any fears of the people there in the park” her reply surprised me, she said “Oh no! I know they would protect me, it’s the police that I’m afraid of.” I did not miss the irony of her answer; to think that a 54 year old mother in the park would be more afraid of the police than the homeless.

I could only conclude, that Janet, after witnessing so much of the violence by the police against the homeless knew who in truth would serve and protect her.

Janet has also had her small victories, besides feeding the homeless, as reported in the “Popular Resistance”

**STAFF NOTE: Planned protests at Palm Restaurants are cancelled today.**

DENVER, CO. (October 18, 2013) – The Boycott the Urban Camping Ban Coalition is pleased to announce that The Palm Restaurant has officially withdrawn support for Denver’s Urban Camping Ban Ordinance passed in May 2012.

On May 6, 2012, Occupy Denver held their first Boycott in protest of the Urban Camping Ban at Snooze A.M. Eatery.1 It was attended by not just members of Occupy Denver, but activists from Denver and surrounding areas who were concerned about the treatment of their fellow human beings, the homeless. The “Urban Camping” Ban Ordinance was passed by the Denver City Council on May 14, 2012, at which time an ongoing weekly protest lead by Janet Matzen and Occupy Denver began at Snooze A.M. Eatery and later attracted coalition partners. On April 5, 2013, Snooze issued a statement reversing their position in support of the Ban.

On April 26, 2013, the Boycott was moved to The Palm Restaurant Denver and a weekly Friday night boycott began. Despite concerted efforts by the Denver City Council through the Denver Police Department to quash Boycotters’ Constitutional rights to free speech and protest, the protest continued strongly and garnered International support.

Today, we are pleased to announce that The Palm Restaurant, who we truly believe cares for the plight of the homeless, announced they no longer support the “Urban Camping” Ban Ordinance. We thank The Palm Restaurant for standing with the homeless and calling for the repeal of the “Urban Camping” Ban in Denver.
Once again, we urge all businesses and organizations in Denver to review the Denver Homeless Out Loud Report on the implementation and impacts the Ban has had and call for its repeal.

I’ve often been amazed that Janet can be in so many places doing so many different things and all for the benefit of the homeless and poor. Most recently you will find Janet, every Friday in front of the Tattered Cover book store where she continues to protest the anti camping while at the same time feeding the hungry and homeless of Denver.

We often hear the word “Grassroots” but I never saw in action as I’ve seen it with Janet. She gives real meaning to the phrase “Grassroots Activist” with her compassion for others.

Suzanna Arundhati Roy spoke so eloquently when she said: “And so it is, in the quiet breathing of Janet, I see that possible world.”

The frequently cited St Paul Principles had their time and place: ST PAUL

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In my circle they’re called “Saint Paul’s Principles” because my colleagues think the edicts are Catholic I guess. The St Paul Principles came from St Paul Minnesota, circa 2008, and were formally adopted by the varied groups organizing to disrupt the Republican National Convention of 2008. They’ve lived on as guiding principles for activists of all ilk. In 2011 many Occupy encampments ratified the StPP as their own code of conduct, indifferent to whether they were applicable or even beneficial. Let’s examine the well intended dogma. Do they apply universally? Are they constructive? And how did they work out for St Paul? The last one is easy. As you may remember, disruption of the 2008 RNC failed spectacularly.

The St. Paul Principles

1. Our solidarity will be based on respect for a diversity of tactics and the plans of other groups.

2. The actions and tactics used will be organized to maintain a separation of time or space.

3. Any debates or criticisms will stay internal to the movement, avoiding any public or media denunciations of fellow activists and events.

4. We oppose any state repression of dissent, including surveillance, infiltration, disruption and violence. We agree not to assist law enforcement actions against activists and others.

It’s hard to argue against this elegant expression of solidarity. With the SPPs, the protest organizers aimed at preempting COINTELPRO style disruption from generating conflict within the movement. The implicit condemnation of violence was of state sponsored violence, not authentic barricade defense. And no snitching. The SPPs addressed the problems which were already scuttling Denver’s 2008 DNC protests. In Denver, “Recreate ’68” planners let the press infer they meant to revive the Chicago riots of 1968, prompting almost every traditional social justice group to circulate a contract which everyone was expected to sign. It was a vow of nonviolence. Organizations who refused to sign were ostracized and could expect the violent police clobbering they invited.

Essentially the SPPs aimed to unite the nonviolent and non-nonviolent activists, to ensure neither denounced the other, and that physically neither wound up caught in each other’s fights or sit-ins. Probably the chief concession was being asked of the nonviolent crowd: Please, as long as we promise not to shroud your family atmosphere and your baby strollers in tear gas, please let the Black Blocs do their thing without your repudiation. Please. We share the same goals.

Can you begin to see where such a strategy might fail to lead?

But the St Paul organizers did share the same goals. Their aim was to disrupt the RNC via a strategy they called “3S” actions. SWARM, SEIZE. STAY. It’s easy to see why three years later Occupy Wall Street was attracted to these directives. “3S” defines Occupy and another three years on, OWS activist followed the 2014 Climate March with an action called “Flood Wall Street” the instructions for which rephrased 3S aquatically.

The “movement” to which the SPPs refer shared a goal, to disrupt the RNC, by means of swarming, seizing, and staying, by whatever tactic each member group wanted. They shared a further agreement, that the city of St Paul was to be partitioned in sectors allowing groups to conduct their actions in isolation, united in time, but separated geographically so that red zone, yellow zone and green zone participants needn’t mix and find themselves out of their respective confort zones.

The groups organizing against the 2008 RNC shared one more thing in common, bound as they were to the St Paul Principles, they were all signatories to the principles.

Do the St Paul Principles apply universally?
It’s easy to see that the 2011 OWS occupations in major cities across the country shared a similar goal. It was, if perhaps more vague than to prevent a party convention, to disrupt the wheels of commerce by means of encampments; the “3S” tactic now reduced to a single verb “Occupy”. Allies such as unions and antiwar organizations, while sympathetic, cannot be said to have shared the same determinaton to disrupt. Even MoveOn with their “99% Spring”, FireDogLake with their merchandizing, and Adbusters had to relent with the revolutionary rhetoric. Eventually OWS spinoffs like Occupy Sandy Relief began to serve functions diametrically opposed to disruption. Did they expand the “movement”? Of course. But did the more inclusive “movement” outgrown the capacity for St Paul Principles to maintain its unity? Are activists bent on disruption expected to respect and support activists determined to prevent disruption?

I know it’s lovely to imagine every social justice effort as anti-authoritarian, and whether nonviolent or indulgent, each comprises a unique wing of a broad anti-government movement. If you are prepared to pretend that everyone’s aims are progressive, we share similar enough goals and we are reformists. But if some aims are revolutionary, explicitely anti-Capitalist for example like Occupy Wall Street, then reformists are counterrevolutionary. If you think reformists aren’t Capitalism’s first line of defense, even as they consider themselves activists, then you don’t know your adversaries from your allies. To imagine that activists shouldn’t address such chasms of understanding in favor of upholding popular delusion is going to get a movement nowhere.

At last year’s Climate March in NYC, the prevailing sentiment was against Capitalism. The organizers didn’t want to mouth it, but a vast number of marchers began to grasp instinctively that Capitalism has no solution for Climate Change. The anti-Capitalist movement can become “the movement” but reformists will have to understand they are obstructionists before they as individuals can be said to share the common goal.

The St Paul RNC Welcoming Committee aimed to disrupt the Republican National Convention for a WEEK. Can activist groups as they grow and transform over years and compete for membership and community resources expect that they shouldn’t be critical of one another’s missteps or aggressions even as their goals diverge?

How scalable are the St Paul Principles? Do they apply to no matter who considers themselves part of a greater “movement”. Do they apply to signatories and non-signatories alike?

Are the St Paul Principles constructive?
I would argue: Hardly. While it seems safer to segregate the Black Bloc from the civil disobedients from the family picnic crowd, you’re not going to reach critical mass with each on its own. With public dischord still in its infancy and while we have nowhere near the numbers to defend against or deter violent repression, perhaps it is only reasonable to program our street protests according to color zones, as if marches were amusement rides for protest tourism.

If you’re satisfied to lead combatants to jail and probation for mere symbolic shows of defiance, and you’re prepared to let nonviolent activists subject themselves to brutality which even when filmed will not awaken the conscience of the sociopathic oligarchs, and you’re resigned to let the masses burn themselves out with boredom given nothing to challenge their apathy, then the St Paul Principles are for you.

An Open letter to the Denver Police Department

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I can see you, as you sit there reading this; yeah, you with the donut jelly and crumbs all over the keypad and mouse. Searching Facebook and all social media sites looking for information. Doing a little undercover spying and investigative work so that you can run back to inform your buddies on what’s going down. There is a term for that; you are a “SNITCH”. In case you don’t know, a snitch is someone who hides in the shadows gathering information so that they might betray another.
 
We know what information you want. What are the protesters’ plans? How many of them are there? Where will they be? What are their names? We are happy to give that information to you. Unlike you, we are not a secretive in our goals. But before we give you that info we’re going to give you a little mix of commentary and history wrapped up in the truth. You seem to get very upset when the protesters call you pigs or holler “Fuck The Police”.

Personally, I think calling you pigs is a bit of and upgrade. When every human is born there is a residue left over, it’s called, afterbirth; it serve no useful purpose, it is waste left over from making of a human being. And this is how I see you, you are the “Afterbirth” that serves no useful purpose, you are the waste product. You want and demand respect from the citizens, yet you fail to understand that respect is something that is given, not taken. Respect is given for acts of valor, courage and bravery.

Do you believe it was an act of bravery when you murdered a 17 year old girl, Jessica Hernandez, in the alley, or when you murdered Marvin Booker in the county jail? Was it courage when you pepper-sprayed a 12 year old child in Civic Center Park on April 29th? Did one of you even think to go to that child and give medical assistance or maybe an apology? Or were you too busy looking for the next victim to assault? I can only assume you are brain-dead if you think these act will gain you respect.

The advent of the cell phone camera and internet has shown who and what you really are, that afterbirth, I mentioned above.

Back in the 60s we did not have cell phones to record your criminal conduct, but if you take the time to Google “Art Winstanley” you will discover you are not the first criminal cops. Art was one of Denver’s Serve & Protect cops who was also a burglar while on duty. When Art got caught, he “Snitched” on over fifty other cops who were in the burglary ring. He began his snitching after he was served a piece of cherry pie. How’s that for serve and protect?

And somewhere in your ranks is another Art who will come forward and expose your criminal deeds against the citizen. We don’t know who or when, but you can be sure, he or she is there to snitch on the rest of you.

Now about that information you looking for; I won’t give you any names, because unlike you, I’m not a SNITCH.

How many is there of us? We are many and our numbers are growing, your days and deeds are numbered.

Where is our next action? It will be everywhere on the streets, calling you out for your criminal deeds. The days of hiding your crimes are over and we will expose you.

Get a job you dirty hippie! Unhelpful advice which activists take personally.

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Occupy Wall Street composed a chant to rebut the ageless heckle hurled at protesters: GET A JOB YOU DIRTY HIPPIE! After Zuccotti Park was razed and Occupiers regrouped, they offerd this rejoinder. Remember it?
    “Got a JOB. Took a SHOWER.
    We’re still occupying, speaking truth to power!”
Of course it wasn’t true, or at least whether we did or not was as irrelevant as the original misconception. But street activists come up against misguided advice much more pernicious than the crudely insulting. Consider the constructive advice from journeymen activists who’ve been at this for a long time and know how it’s done. You know the ones, who preach nonviolence or you’ll never get anywhere, as if they have a record of success or fount of experience more illustrative than the old grindstone. False history has even robbed them of the authentic lessons to glean from Gandhi and MLK. Yet even the best-intentioned of our peers caution that movements will never take hold without blablabla. This sacred cow, for instance: community outreach.

A colleague of mine recently asked about my ideas to better reach out to the African American community vis-a-vis the protests which Occupy Denver has been spearheading to show solidarity with the Black Lives Matter uprisings in Baltimore and Ferguson. At face value it’s a reasonable question as Occupy franchizes across the country have been predominantly white. At base however, the distinction is academic and the implication insulting.

In Denver, as probably in many multicultural urban centers since Ferguson, authorities have succeeded in working with community leaders to redirect street protest into the usual back channels. In Denver the spiritual leaders have kept their flocks locked in their churches. When Denver high schoolers began to stage walk-outs, school administrators put the schools on lockdown. Traditional social justice groups fell victim to academics and their identity politics diatribes. White priviledge must “make space”, in effect, step back, whether or not alternative leaders were knocking. In Denver the most significant protest entity impervious to scholatisc impotence or the wiles of religious submission was Occupy Denver. Since 2011 this ad hoc collection of protest-hardened activists could mobilize at the flick of a switch, usually through social media. By definition, Occupy refused to bind themselves to everybody else’s longstanding arrangements of detente.

Of course this persistence is not static and there are ceaseless internal pressures to conform and play for crumbs. Table scraps are sustenance after all, and all mature decisions are compromises. Adults choose lesser evils, safety nets, the bird in the hand, wisdom over altruism. Can dreamers even be sure the burning stove isn’t an adage meant to waylay us from our childish intuition about freedom? From the frying pan into the fire is more probably the forbidden roadmap to revolution.

You want to know the sage advice that burns me up the most? Comrades telling me the struggle will be a long haul. A marathon. Are you kidding me? Revolution is a sprint! We’ve got to light a fire under your ass!

In any case. Community outreach. What’s the problem? My first thought was of the criticism protesters still face everyday: “GET A JOB!” Everyone seems to have their own idea about what other activists are supposed to be doing.

On the subject of Occupy and “outreach” I offer six points:

1. Did Occupy Wall Street reach out to the community of brokers and bankers on Wall Street? It did not. Occupy was about disruption, gathering on the street and uniting activists. Community organizing was another sort of activism. Occupy was not voting, or going around trying to get out the vote, or lobbying legislators, or gathering petition signatures, or fundraising, or taking in cats, or walking in people’s shoes. All of these are perfectly constructive things, but they’re fundamental to what Occupy was not. I know it sounds mature to talk about building community and helping out and being less disruptive but those are tasks that keep conventional social justice groups too busy to occupy.

2. I am reminded of a lesson learned as occupiers coordinated their efforts. If you feel there is a task going undone, you probably should step up to do it. Others have their hands full with what they are doing. If you feel there is a deficiency and it’s important to you, fill it.

3. That said, there is an imperative not to dillute the fundamental mission. If tangential efforts drain the human resources needed for the goal that brought everyone together, then somebody is winning and it’s not Occupy.

4. Denver’s African American community already has their leaders, most of them undisposed to street activism. Occupy Denver’s community is with activists of all colors. We reach them through the message, our actions, and our unending persistance. None of these are based on color lines.

5. Occupy has many black activist allies. On the street we support them EVERY TIME regardless of whether they support us. Even if it’s “their” issue. If they are not able to rally as frequently as we can, it’s not their fault. (That is White middle class privilege.)

6. If you think the African American community is central to addressing the probem of racism, that’s a problem. It should be up to the WHITE AMERICAN COMMUNITY to shout “BLACK LIVES MATTER” the loudest of all.

If Walmart is going to halt labor unrest with punitive “plumbing problems” its workers could plumb the same depths

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CementWalmart has reportedly closed a smattering of its stores across the country citing “plumbing problems”. The mega-retailer’s media cohorts are reporting the mystery but won’t say that the closures coincide with stores which have been hardest hit by labor unrest. It turns out, Walmart has opted to close its doors where employees have most successfully organized “Fight For Fifteen” actions. By suddenly closing the stores Walmart preempted further organizing and punished the upstarts by laying off all the store’s employees with only a few hours notice. Walmart claims the plumbing problems will take a half year to fix. I think what remains of Walmart’s workforce has been given a wonderful opportunity to retaliate in kind. What of these plumbing problems? Are Walmart’s other stores showing signs of plumbing problems too? Might a larger wave of plumbing problems be induced? I think Walmart’s union-busting advisors have loosed a weapon that will prove more consequential for Walmart than its wage-slave victims. Foisted on their own petard, I believe is the expression. Petard in this case is substituted by toilette. Walmart customers can even get in on the act, err, investigation, for free. Come to Walmart empty handed, find a bag of cement in the hardware aisle, proceed to the public bathroom, flush it presto plumbing problem. Citizen plumbers can turn this plumbing mystery into a plumbing thriller.

“Going postal” takes aeronautic twist: Campaign reform whoop-whoop de doo

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Common American highschoolers have eclipsed what used to be the purvue of disgruntled post office workers: GOING POSTAL. Norwegian post-adolescent Anders Breivik could even be said to have “killed it”. So leave it to a mail carrier to set the new trend in making a mess of things to make a point. Retired mailman Doug Hughes thought outside the semi-automatic box to conceive an unconventional package delivery system for his letters to Congress. Hughes piloted a gyrocopter unto the White House grounds as his take on Mister Smith Goes to Washington and we wish him all the best. Hughes has a website The Democracy Club and because he didn’t kill anyone, or because his issue is merely campaign finance reform, the site was not taken down and the media is not calling his material a manifesto. Whoop-whoop whoop-whoop-de-doo. The White House nevertheless sidestepped the topic. When asked what President Obama thought of Hughes’ stunt to call for campaign finance reform, the president was said to remark: “what’s a gyrocopter?”

What does “member-supported radio” mean? Friends don’t let friends air junk

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NPR is not what it used to be
It is that time again. Twice a year local public radio affiliate KRCC holds a fund drive during which it expects community support for its exclusively corporate programming. By what stretch of the imagination should listeners feel they need to pony up for somebody else’s agenda? Of course, bathed in enough misinformation and indoctrination, a community will wallow, and pay for the upkeep of their own barbed wire. Yeah, those fence-sitting fence-keepers are going to be a bitch –and creative I expect, with their sardonic apolitical joie-de-rire. I don’t look forward to it, but the next local effort to elevate KRCC begins Saturday. KRCC: Enough with COStupid.

When comments distract from posts: The dirty ice cream stick in your hand

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The Guardian covered the immigrant mothers protesting their detention in the private facilities run by GEO in Texas. Reading the comments on this article, I’m reminded of a story from my youth, some 60 years ago. We young boys would all head for the Midway of the “Iowa State Fair”.

The Midway is where all tents were set up with the tattoo artist, the two headed calf and the bearded lady. This area was sometimes referred to as “The Freak Show” They also had the scantily clad women who came out and danced on a stage for a few minutes to entice the men to buy a ticket for a more revealing show inside.

While the men stood mesmerized by the hoochie-coochie girls dancing on stage, we boys would quietly slip up behind them. Picking up a dirty ice cream stick, we would gently place it in their open hand. Without thinking, unable to tear their eyes away from the girls, they would close their hands tightly on the ice cream stick.

When the girls left the stage the men would come back to their senses; they would look down at their hand holding the dirty ice cream stick with a bewildering look on their face and then fling the stick to the ground, glancing around to see if anyone noticed.

You can be sure of one thing; GEO, the private prison corp. is reading these comments and loving it.

They have you all distracted while they put the “dirty ice cream stick in your hand” (picking your pocket).

I never quite figured out why they called it “The Freak Show”. Was it because of the bearded lady or those who bought the tickets to see her?

If you don’t stand up for these mothers, you probably wouldn’t stand up for your own mother.

Pikes Peak Community College teaches climate denial to meteorology students

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COLORADO SPRINGS, COLO.- Overheard on FM 89.9, PPCC’s radio station: a spot for the General Meteorology Course MET-150, where students can learn about the earth’s cyclic temperature rises, how after this year warming is expected to level off, and how 99% of world scientists are dissatified with the way Climate Change is being reported in the media. Here the statistic is reinterpreted to mean: scientists agree with PPCC students and Springs radio listeners, and think our worries are overblown.

The police murder of Jessie Hernandez -what happened? (to the outrage)

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DENVER, COLO.- The Denver police had really stepped in it this time. At 6:30am on January 26, officers opened fire on a parked car full of unarmed teenage girls, killing Jessie Hernandez with eighteen bullets. This time the most homocidal police force this side of Baltimore used lethal force against a charismatic 17-year-old Latina. Even if officers had confused the queer tom-boy for a male, Jessie wouldn’t pass for a boy over eleven. Jessie’s killing follows a year rocked by public protests against police excessive force in Ferguson and New York City. Victims Mike Brown and Eric Garner were black males with the attendant stigmas. This victim was literally a poster child. If Jessie had a criminal record it was as a juvenile. The official account immediately began to unravel as witnesses came forward. Most notably, after the passengers were released from jail, one of them said the police fired first, before an officer was struck by the vehicle and not afterward as the officers claimed. Yet the public’s revulsion has been measured and dimminishing. What happened? Was the outcry stage-managed? By whom? The aftermath of Jessie’s execution was captured on video, in defiance of officers threatening the bystanders. It’s only been described to reporters but the Denver Post has it.

If the family of Jessie Hernandez decides they don’t want people to protest, do we cease protests? If the family doesn’t want to see the video, do we stop demanding its release? Of course they don’t want to relive the brutality of Jessie’s murder, no one does. But the DPD and the Denver Post must not be allowed to draw the curtain on the teen’s brutal death. The DPD’s actions must be exposed. The family doesn’t own this tragic crime. The responsibility to demonstrate against police brutality doesn’t fall on them, or the Latino community or the queer community. It falls on everyone. The Denver police own Jessie’s murder. They own all eighteen bullets, they own the handcuffing and searching of Jessie’s still-live body, they own the jailing of the four other traumatized teens, and they own all the subsequent lies told to excuse the inexcusable, shooting at a carload of unarmed children. If the public is not given the chance to face the reality of police brutality, we’ll never stop the DPD.

NE Patriots are serial cheaters, so are their namesakes. The unfair advantage is an essential of Capitalism.

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First the New England Patriots got caught spying on their adversaries, now they’ve been tweaking the air-pressure of their game balls to sneak a ballistic handling advantage. Rules be damned, Patriot quarterback Tom Brady prefers his ordnance two pounds psi shy, hollow-points –if you will– which are also against regulation. For how long have the Patriots been manipulating advantages? And how else? They weren’t satisfied with the home field advantage on Sunday. Maybe officials should bring protractors to investigate the Boston gridiron. A level playing field doesn’t likely suit the Patriots either.

OF COURSE it doesn’t. Who expects sportsmanship from “patriots?!” Patriotism is the antisocial insistance on your own cultural superiority. American exceptionalism is an endorsement of tactical superiority, covert war, disproportionate force, drones, extrajudicial assassination, death squads, snipers, collateral damage, and torture. Formal US policy is to FLAUNT international law. American materialism profits from insider trading, extortion, usury, and corporate hegemony uber alles! Why would our surrogate Sunday warriors pretend there is honor among thieves?

Of course America underinflates footballs to best our opponents. We also diligently deploy inspectors to ensure our intended defeatees can’t recallibrate theirs. Meanwhile our leaders dissemble when plausible deniability stretches thin.

Of course NFL officials are not discussing a Super Bowl disqualification for the recidivist Patriots. Instead they’re weighing minor penalties, no doubt manageable, if not tax deductible. If America’s best cheaters don’t advance to the Super Bowl, the outcome would be hypocritical. Go Team! America Fuck Yeah!

I’m kidding of course. Sack the quarterback, disqualify the Patriots, send whoever else to the Super Bowl, then march the entire US defense and offense departments to the Hague.

UPDATE 1/23:
While fans and media try to belittle the scandal (ie. “Deflate-gate” and “Ballghazi”), statisticians have noted a damning anomaly relating to the advantage gained from underinflated footballs. After the rules were changed to allow offensive teams to use their own footballs –Brady was among the quarterbacks lobbying for the change– New England’s ball handling superiority grew beyond the realm of probability.

Probably all teams know that well-inflated footballs fly further but underinflated balls are easier to grab. Maybe the purpose of making a personalized array of game balls available is so offensive teams can exploit alternate characteristics as needed. Maybe the NFL understood this when they granted the rule change. Maybe the Patriots just couldn’t pass up every opportunity to cheat, until the statistics made plain their greed. Whether by hubris or head-injury numbskulledness, Tom Brady and his receivers thought they coud break PT Barnum’s rule too.

The American Dream hinges on equality of opportunity and fair play, but of course Capitalism idealizes the unfair advantage.

Btw I abhor the theatre of corporate sports, but when it exposes the reek of America’s national character, I like to make sure to smell it.

Je suis a manipulated photo, like statue of Saddam toppled by fake Iraqi crowd

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HEY! Where are the Parisian masses supposed to have been marching behind the World Leaders?! Media images were cropped to suggest the Euro cabal headed the populist march, but a long shot establishes the illusion to have been a lie. It turns out the forty figureheads held their own parade for Charlie Hebdo in a vast no man’s land of high security. Video footage shows the leaders surrounded by only media, beckened to move hither and forth to simulate an advance, marching in place more or less like a chorus line of marionettes.

The photo-op is disgracefully contrived, the subjects looking cluelessly right and left at imaginary onlookers, waving occasionally at what are probably only government snipers on the rooftop. An audio track records applause generated by a small number of determined clappers, while stage managers bark cadences to prompt the line forward, repeating “Vite, vite, vite” and “Ein, Zwei, Drei.”

The complicity of the international press recalls the iconic toppling of Saddam Hussein’s statue by US marines, flanked by an entourage of Iraqi collaborators made to look like jubulant masses by means of judiciously cropped camera angles, unmasked in the alternative press by under-populated far shots. Even if the leaders’ isolation is dismissed as pragmatic, what does a complicit media tell you about whose agenda is rolling out the JE SUIS CHARLIE offensive?

The impromptu summit had media waxing that Paris at that moment was the “Capitol of the World.” An Anglo-Capitalist Putsch, yes. The march in Paris was a self-congratulatory televised re-declaration of the War On Islam. President Obama’s non-attendance is a red herring, and points to another missed opportunity. Had Obama been any kind of people’s hero he could have sent a drone in his stead to dispatch this Islamophobic assembly like just another Afgan wedding party.

Office of Colorado Springs N.A.A.C.P. bombed for some reason but whose?

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NAACP office in Colorado Springs
COLORADO SPRINGS, CO- Someone tried to firebomb the Springs office of the NAACP yesterday. A pipebomb failed to ignite a can of gasoline left leaning behind the building located in Hillside, the city’s traditionally African American community. The FBI claims to be interested in a white male with a beat up pickup truck. Across the state activists are alarmed at the subdued media response and lack of outrage. I’d like to explain why this bomb, a typical racist MO, has yet to resonate here.

Colorado Springs is a cesspool of racism and institutionalized Jim Crow, but as usual the drama is complicated and local minority leaders are hesitant to point the finger. As befits the Springs’ conservative nature, the local NAACP is headed by a card-carrying member of the TEA PARTY! You heard that right! For a decade this NAACP chapter has been estranged from its black community, mostly poor and neither elitist nor libertarian. Dr. James Tucker, publisher of the African American Voice, accuses this NAACP of complacency, malfeasance and worse. He claims they are under investigation so it’s hard to predict whose interests might be served by torching the office.

I’m certainly not suggesting that Colorado Springs bigots are not also too stupid to attack an ineffectual organization, but taking the high road means profiting from no accusation until the facts are in.

Outsiders may want to protest, but locals also don’t want to be mistaken for supporting this chapter, which has actively de-escalated calls for solidarity with Ferguson. Actually the national NAACP too deployed counter-insurgency tactics to calm the Ferguson rebellion.

Whether yesterday’s bombing was authentic or not, we don’t need to get to the bottom of it before repudiating the usual pattern of racist acts of domestic terrorism against colored institutions. Of course we must also protest that the corporate media looks the other way. But let’s not get distracted from figuring out that today’s N.A.A.C.P. has no Association with the Advancement of Colored People unless they’re bourgeois.

Goddamnit! 100 years on, KRCC plays soldier to butcher Ludlow miners again

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Ludlow
COLORADO SPRINGS, CO- This is what happen when apolitical wits want to dribble their sardonic apathy on a subject of historic import. Or as they see it, unimport. The 100-year anniversary of the Ludlow Massacre passed in April, with considerable media attention and unfortunately the requisit controversy that comes of celebrants numbering equal parts decendents of the perps and not the miners. You’d think KRCC might have heard the dissonance in April, the attempt of National Guard to rewrite the history in accordance to today’s culture of military-worship and the ensuing protestations, but no. Tonight a locally produced radio show called “Wish We Were Here” aired a one-hour episode about “Ludlow” on public radio franchise KRCC. Noel Black, Jake Burnell and Andrea Chalfin put the program together and relied on the same revisionists which dogged the official commemorations.

TEDx comes to Dumbville, or, Colorado Springs reads Horton Hears a How

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COLO. SPRINGS- TED-TalksTM likes to say it offers “a spa for your brain” and when I saw that an X-variant was coming to Colorado Springs (“TEDx”s are unaffiliated affiliates. Yeah, uh-oh.) I wondered if a spa might only be as good as its mineral water. Or its mud, or masseurs, whatever. Yes, I foresaw the inevitability of Dumbass Springs confirming its nature, but the lure of a train wreck was strong. I confess my expectations were lower still because incessent shared posts on Facebook have inoculated me with an aversion to the TED motivational formula, no matter the click-bait hyperbole they are AHA-moments For Dummies.

Typically a TED theme holds water for about as long as it takes to incubate a viral meme, but I wondered if in unedited presentation form, do they permit the scrutiny of live input from the audience? They are popular after all. A complementary pass offered the chance to see, and our local franchise had sold out. Could I gag the reflex of skepticism about TED’s curated plethora of inspirational vehicles? To my mind they never fail to carry water (Let’s cross the metaphors) for the neoliberal false-Left, its outside-of-the-box thinkers never truly asserting a POV remote from Capital’s doomed ship whose last exertions mimick being radically progressive enough to impersonate credibility, cross fingers spark hope. TED’s appearance of being crowd-sourced has already been eroded by its gatekeeping against populist lay disciplines. Its novelty was its social media distribution model, otherwise TED is merely another consent-manufacturing think tank of unchanged spots for the pedestrian academic. Will a local TEDx event outsource its attractions or will it local-source from luminary wattage? I ask because our backwater tradition is to elevate dimbulbs. When we mob Ticketmaster it’s for star talent of our ilk. Upcoming exhibit A: Dennis Miller. Ok TED, a full report to follow.

Film critics toe corporate line to re-kill messenger Gary Webb, after Hollywood

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Gary Webb
AT BEST “KILL THE MESSENGER” portrays suspiciously deceased journalist Gary Webb as a heroic sleuth who refused to compromise his principles. At best, the film re-reports the enormous crime which Webb exposed in his series DARK ALLIANCE, that the CIA’s support of the Nicaraguan CONTRAs in the 1980s involved facilitating the smuggling of drugs into the US, in such large quantities as to precipitate the crack cocaine epidemic, delivered to our major inner cities by the CIA. UNFORTUNATELY the film muddies the crack connection, as Webb’s detractors did back then. Two deliberate plot omissions suggest this is probably not a coincidence.

Conveniently the screenplay ends before the years when Gary Webb was able to elaborate on those links. By then he’d lost his audience. Unfortunately the film that might have given his life’s work a main stage reprise chose not to go that far. Does it matter anymore? These days the CIA and its covert cohorts are understood to have authored a litany of unimaginable evils. So it’s not too early to demonize the CIA. Evidently someone thinks the American public is not ready to be shown the racist stratagems of corportate class war.

Exposing the genesis of the crack attack on African American ghettos is clearly a missed opportunity for a film in 2014. Given Ferguson. Given the rising awareness of our government’s coordinated and premeditated containment and criminalization of dark-skinned populations. Let’s remember that while the US was fighting Nicaraguan rebels, it was also at war with the Black Liberation Army. Funding and arming drug warlords was the same strategy Brazil used to administrate the favelas, via proxy gangs. One might say that LA’s Bloods and Crips played domestic Contras set loose to destabilize community building efforts by militant Black Power.

UNPARDONABLE however are the film’s departures from the truth, which paint a curious fiction as if to indemnify the national press from its complicity with the intelligence community. Two lies will stand out to anyone who was there. (Did the filmmakers think their audience would be only millennials?)

First, the San Jose Mercury News was hardly a “local news outlet” unfamiliar with handling national stories and unknown to the average reader. The Mercury News was an award winning paper which competed with metropolitan mastheads. I can’t imagine its employees aren’t indignant by the film’s yokel characterization. The Los Angeles Times’ vindictive campaign to defame Gary Webb was hardly driven by professional embarassment over a missed scoop.

Second, the Contra-CIA drug smuggling link was suspected well before Gary Webb brought it to the mainstream. I remember during the Iran-Contra Hearings a decade earlier, the alternative media often lamented that the official investigation had been narrowed to exclude mention of the cocaine connection.

These amendments might be excused for simplifying the plot except that they minimize the breadth of the corporate identity of Webb’s censors. How very 90s of this narrative to pretend that Capitalist media outlets compete for news scoops like highschoolers at a science olympics. Newspapers and networks have always only ever peddled the themes their owners dictate. Media consolidation has only meant the manufacturing of public consent has become more uniform, perfectly illustrated by the collusion of the tag-team that hit Gary Webb.

AND AFTER HOLLYWOOD FAILED GARY WEBB, the film critics were waiting with daggers.

David Denby begins his New Yorker review by associating KTM with other crusading journalist thrillers, “some depicting real events, some not”, then pointing to director Michael Cuesta’s “paranoid” TV work, finally contriving that the film botches “many contraditory assertions.” Um, sorry, neither. But I do worry that giving all thumbs down will succeed in scaring away viewers. Denby finishes by making it all about actor Jeremy Renner, un-ironically aping the campaign waged on Gary Webb, overtly described in the film, shifting the focus from the story to all about the messenger.

The Washington Post dispatched one-time Webb adversary Jeff Leen to reprise the hatchet job begun when Gary Webb broke the story. Labeling Webb as “no journalism hero”, Leen’s rebuttal hangs on the technicality that no CIA “employees” were implicated, ignoring what everyone knows post-Blackwater, post-Wikileaks, that the US has long outsourced its crimes, from torture to food service. Dimwit.

The People’s Climate March will move the United Nations if marchers push it

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I heard a dispiriting conceit at yesterday’s 350.ORG whistestop rally at Denver’s Union Station to cheer climate activists bording the Amtrak Zephyr destined for the New York City #S21 People’s Climate March. This young, otherwise energetic and charismatic environmentalist told the crowd that she did not expect anything to come of the hoped-to-be-massive demonstration but would attend anyway. Ironically this was addressed to supporters who’d already decided not to join the march based I’m guessing on the same logic. Yet we cheered, chanted about the imperative to act, and applauded a successive speaker who added that if world leaders ignored this people’s march, there would follow another and another, ever larger. Hmm. I doubt it. Activism is already showing diminishing returns and drawing numbers to unsuccessful actions doesn’t help. I appreciate not wanting to seem to hold foolish expectations, but I’d rather accept defeat having believed it was not inevitable. The antiwar movement laments the election of Barack Obama because he herded the populist anti-Bush groundswell toward supporting the other corporate war party. But I blame Obama for a larger malpractice: innoculating Americans against hope. Extended generations of altruists lost their cherry to the hope-change-artist and while they wise up incrementally, I have yet to see hopefulness normalize the defeatism. This doesn’t mean that hopefuls don’t keep falling for smooth promises, but the promises are smaller, to be believable. Bill McKibben’s 350 march for example doesn’t even want to make demands, yet insists that your personal attendence will be the biggest impact you can make against climate change. And if the march doesn’t move UN leaders, come back and do it again. Until what? Until world leaders are convinced that the public is serious. Why are we not serious? Should McKibben admit that traveling to New York could be distracting activists from where their bodies really need to be, in front of coal plants, blocking pipelines, and organizing communities against fossil fuel extraction? Pressuring the UN is similarly immediate but we have to apply veritable pressure. If a march is meant to impress, even as a gesture, it must be more than a parade.

Video evidence supports uncompelling theory that ISIS is an army of one

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ISIS beheading videoWestern warmongers have caught on to viral videos for scaring up public support for military airstrikes against Iraq and Syria. So far three videos have emerged appearing to show a Western captive being beheaded by a faceless executioner presumed to represent “the Islamic State”. Though viewers are purported to be screaming for Islamic blood, the evidence at hand doesn’t implicate more than one person, himself faceless and of indeterminate identity, nationality and religious preference. It could be Mr. Califate himself, if the video is genuine –as usual we have only the CIA’s word on that– or it could be a mercenary under anyone’s employ. Apparently experts are convinced this is provocation enough to launch a war. I say, let the US and its military allies show the intellectual honesty to release videos of detainees they’ve tortured or of families they’ve executed with drones. If videotaped atrocities are going to govern international policy, let the global viewership determine whose side of the war they want to be on.

September 11 marks 13th anniversary of a pinnacle of American ignorance

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9/11- Could Joseph Goebbels have conceived a more preposterous lie? Modern skyscrapers felled by aluminum aircraft, steel structures melted by mere jet fuel, hijacked planes not intercepted, black boxes vanished, at the Pentagon an entire plane not only vaporized but invisible to surveillance footage, a third WTC building was demolished by no impact at all, conflicting testimony from the authorities involved, air traffic control evidence destroyed, the official investigation foreshortened, and media gatekeepers ensuring that skeptical viewers are marginalized as “truthers.” Does it take an engineer or scientist to understand that the Twin Towers fell to demolition charges and not airliners? Apparently under-educated Americans think so and are willing to outsource all heavy thinking. I don’t subscribe to the theory that “if Americans only knew” our empire could change its stripes, but I do believe that unmasking “9/11” as a false-flag propaganda event in the mold of the Reichstag Fire could shed light on the fascism behind our Kabuki democracy.

Popularity of “mind blowing” posts points to collective lack of imagination

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Click bait posts on social media promise surprise and wonder, such that “you will not believe” and “this will blow your mind” but doing so reveal the terrifying vacuum of the average reader’s mind. As the internet allows users to cloudsource their brain functions, very consciously the memory storage, we are also consigning it our processing. In interspace no one can hear you think.

Colo. Springs peaceniks, Unitarians and NAACP fall for latest Africom campaign

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They fell for Darfur and Kony (and Obama!) and now the Colorado Springs social justice community confirms that the city’s national repution for dim-bulbedness doesn’t reflect just its conservatives. Even the dissenting voice in this belly of the US military-judeo-christian-racist beast, is pro-imperial, toe-the-line, neoliberal dumbass. They’re against war and injustice, they even understand illegal war, but cloak it in terms of “intervention” and they stand beside their warmonger neighbors cheerleading for US aggression in Sudan, Libya, Syria, and wherever Pax Americana dictates we bomb in Africa. Where the local armed-forces community might be slow on the uptake regarding a Democratic president’s pandering to transnational corporate needs, the Springs peacekeeping Left will lead the way. On Monday, the usual shepherds of non-confrontational conformity held a vigil for the Lost Girls of Sudan -pardon- Nigeria, echoing the White House call to #bringbackourgirls. Unlike authentic antiwar vigils, this action got press, quelle surprise, from the media war machine! Congratulations AFRICOM-dupes! Nevermind non-American girls lost to US collateral malfeasance, no official hashtag for them, ergo no Springs peacenik campaign that would give a conscience indigestion.
 
Would we care more if the 267 kidnapped schoolgirls were not black? (!) If they were white they wouldn’t be from a country we’re trying to destabilize.

Want to save Nigerian girls? Buy them! But first ask who is abducting whom?

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Western interest are desperate to create public consent for airstrike interventions in Africa, having failed with their KONY 2012 campaign, the Rwanda remembrance handwringing, ad infinitum. Now Nigerian insurgents have thwarted a military “rescue” of two hundred schoolgirls abducted by Boko Haram by announcing that the girls will be put up for sale. The western media is spinning a horror story of sexual bondage while trying to ignore the obvious solution: purchase the girls. It’s even cheaper than euthanizing them with drone strikes. The US kills dark-skinned children by the thousands without a care. I have yet to hear anyone consider the circumstance of these Nigerian schoolgirls before they were abducted? Can we know the Chibok girls weren’t repossessed by dissident factions of their own communities? The White House hashtag campaign #bringbackourgirls seems dreadfully Freudian. The kidnapped girls were liberated from our clutches and we want them back. BOKO HARAM is an Islamic movement which opposes Western indoctrination. While it’s labeled “terrorist” outside of Africa, certainly its methods are no worse than those of the Western-imposed dictators ravaging Africa for corporate extraction interests. Western schools in Africa are entry points for providing the labor pools for Capitalism. Are African children better off in our recruiting mechanisms or out of them?