Iconic pig

Joni Spigler collects Sgt. Pepper's icons.

Pig herding for beginners

After police officer Lieutenant John Pike (Phone number +1.530.752.3989, email japikeiii@ucdavis.edu, please let him hear from you) attacks sitting, peaceful students with pepper spray, the students of UC Davis, in a display of effective popular discipline, herded the pigs and led them out peacefully.

American Leftist has great coverage of the daily developments in the West Coast.

The Nation published Norm Stamper, chief of the Seattle Police Department during the WTO protests in 1999. Stamper describes the police decision that started the Seattle events as a mistake, and laments the growing militarization of US police forces around the US. His most important paragraph however is one about the link between the brutality of the police and the hierarchical organization itself.

The paramilitary bureaucracy and the culture it engenders—a black-and-white world in which police unions serve above all to protect the brotherhood—is worse today than it was in the 1990s. Such agencies inevitably view protesters as the enemy. And young people, poor people and people of color will forever experience the institution as an abusive, militaristic force—not just during demonstrations but every day, in neighborhoods across the country.

Much of the problem is rooted in a rigid command-and-control hierarchy based on the military model. American police forces are beholden to archaic internal systems of authority whose rules emphasize bureaucratic regulations over conduct on the streets. An officer’s hair length, the shine on his shoes and the condition of his car are more important than whether he treats a burglary victim or a sex worker with dignity and respect. In the interest of “discipline,” too many police bosses treat their frontline officers as dependent children, which helps explain why many of them behave more like juvenile delinquents than mature, competent professionals. It also helps to explain why persistent, patterned misconduct, including racism, sexism, homophobia, brutality, perjury and corruption, do not go away, no matter how many blue-ribbon panels are commissioned or how much training is provided. (The Nation)

Perhaps introducing Occupy Wall Street consensus based General Assembly model to the police would be a good thing, though I am afraid that this will probably have to wait for after the revolution. As it were, I'd disagree with Stamper here, as the problem of police brutality is has much to do with the "professional" corporate mindset that the police both embodies and serves as it is to "juvenile delinquency" of police officers. Professional culture only provides a simulacrum of personal liberty while hiding the hierarchies beneath motivational speaking jargon. As long as the police work for the 1%, it will be brutal when the 1% feel threatened. But one could agree with Stamper that the brutality of certain police officers is inculcated through the dehumanizing process to which which the lower ranks of the police are themselves subjected.

Some UC Davis academics have risen to the occasion, and not in the typical way of trying to contain and tame student anger, but in genuine solidarity. Bob Ostertag describes the concrete changes in police strategy that we are witnessing. Nathan Brown, Assistant professor in the English department, wrote a sharp open letter calling for a resignation of the UC Davis Chancellor, Linda P.B. Katehi.

Of course, the militarization of the police is equal parts a reflection of the ruling class preparing for over a decade to exactly what is happening today, and a business, indeed one of the few sectors of capital that is not just doing fine but booming today. In Egypt, the Tahrir Intifada entered a new phase:

The tear gas used against the Egyptian people, as reported by the Hossam el-Hamalawy, and Patrick Connors, is manufactured by CSI, which bills itself as "a leading manufacturer and marketer of tactical munitions, pyrotechnics, less-lethal crowd control and launching systems sold under the CTS and Penn Arms brands." CSI is a venture capital project owned partly by Point Lookout Capital, whose two partners are no doubt making a killing, quite literally, in the death business, including the "less lethal" franchise of CSI. It is perhaps worth pondering the uncommon honesty of CSI, whose products for "law enforcement" are marketed as "less-lethal" rather than non-lethal. As usual with violence, there is an Israeli connection. CSI sells the gas canisters that Israeli soldiers use, not only to attack protesters, but also to kill them. The pepper spray used in UC Davis is manufactured by another company, whose name will be revealed in due course. But the differences between companies is not as important as the unity of the class of people who own all of them.

Update from Nedster: Egyptian thugs show the world how it's done:

Explaining race to OccupyWallStreet

Manissa McCleave Maharawal writes powerfully about how she was drawn to the occupation of Wall street and her experience with challenging the invisibility of race in the that space. You should go read the whole piece, but here are below a few paragraphs:

...I think this is what Occupy Wall Street is right now: less of a movement and more of a space. It is a space in which people who feel a similar frustration with the world as it is and as it has been, are coming together and thinking about ways to recreate this world. For some people this is the first time they have thought about how the world needs to be recreated. But some of us have been thinking about this for a while now. Does this mean that those of us who have been thinking about it for a while now should discredit this movement? No. It just means that there is a lot of learning going on down there and that there is a lot of teaching to be done.

On Thursday night I showed up at Occupy Wall Street with a bunch of other South Asians coming from a South Asians for Justice meeting. Sonny joked that he should have brought his dhol so we could enter like it was a baarat. When we got there they were passing around and reading a sheet of paper that had the Declaration of the Occupation of Wall Street on it. I had heard the “Declaration of the Occupation” read at the General Assembly the night before but I didn’t realize that it was going to be finalized as THE declaration of the movement right then and there. When I heard it the night before with Sonny we had looked at each other and noted that the line about “being one race, the human race, formally divided by race, class…” was a weird line, one that hit me in the stomach with its naivety and the way it made me feel alienated. But Sonny and I had shrugged it off as the ramblings of one of the many working groups at Occupy Wall Street.

But now we were realizing that this was actually a really important document and that it was going to be sent into the world and read by thousands of people. And that if we let it go into the world written the way it was then it would mean that people like me would shrug this movement off, it would stop people like me and my friends and my community from joining this movement, one that I already felt a part of. So this was urgent. This movement was about to send a document into the world about who and what it was that included a line that erased all power relations and decades of history of oppression. A line that would de-legitimize the movement, this would alienate me and people like me, this would not be able to be something I could get behind. And I was already behind it this movement and somehow I didn’t want to walk away from this. I couldn’t walk away from this.

And that night I was with people who also couldn’t walk away. Our amazing, impromptu, radical South Asian contingency, a contingency which stood out in that crowd for sure, did not back down. We did not back down when we were told the first time that Hena spoke that our concerns could be emailed and didn’t need to be dealt with then, we didn’t back down when we were told that again a second time and we didn’t back down when we were told that to “block” the declaration from going forward was a serious serious thing to do. When we threatened that this might mean leaving the movement, being willing to walk away. I knew it was a serious action to take, we all knew it was a serious action to take, and that is why we did it.

I have never blocked something before actually. And the only reason I was able to do so was because there were 5 of us standing there and because Hena had already put herself out there and started shouting “mic check” until they paid attention. And the only reason that I could in that moment was because I felt so urgently that this was something that needed to be said. There is something intense about speaking in front of hundreds of people, but there is something even more intense about speaking in front of hundreds of people with whom you feel aligned and you are saying something that they do not want to hear. And then it is even more intense when that crowd is repeating everything you say– which is the way the General Assemblies or any announcements at Occupy Wall Street work. But hearing yourself in an echo chamber means that you make sure your words mean something because they are being said back to you as you say them.