February 11, 2012 by Mike.

Chris Hedges made a few waves with his recent piece describing the black bloc as the cancer in occupy.

I  believe in diversity. I think diversity is a fundamental natural law of the universe.  But I understand that human beings have a tidiness gene that makes us think that we can organize and be more efficient through suppression of diversity, by rejection of the natural order and diversity that constantly arises and evaporates back in to the order of chaos.  Chaos is not merely disorder.  There may be a level of order benefit and diversity in chaos that is not easily observed and is under-appreciated.

The black bloc tactic is something that arises from police violence toward non-violent protest and the willingness of society to choose order over the bedrock right to peacefully assemble and petition for redress of grievance.

Diversity of tactics and tolerance of the diversity of tactics is something that I embrace whole-heartedly.  Things can go wrong.  I have seen that.  Things can go right.  I have seen that as well.   I am usually pleased to see a black bloc tactical option in a crowd of protesters.  I believe Hedges could not be more wrong about the black bloc tactic.

Here is an interesting and informative piece in response to Hedges cancer article.  I recommend that you read the piece if you don’t understand and appreciate the black bloc tactic or if you read the Hedges article and thought what he said made a lot of sense.

After you read the piece, you might want to look through the n + 1 zine that is carrying the piece.  Looks like a pretty informative vehicle.  A weapon of mass instruction.  I am down with that. Thanks to my friend Elliot Stoller for bringing this piece to my attention.

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December 23, 2011 by mike.

A couple of quotes and some thoughts.

“[The founding fathers] conferred, as against the Government,
the right to be left alone — the right most valued by civilized men.”
— Justice Louis D. Brandeis  (1856-1941) US Supreme Court Justice, 1928

Indeed, the right to be left alone.  That’s a profound thought in a new era when the battlefield of the war on terror has gone global and our fundamental right to freedom and due process have been set aside.

McWorld is a product of popular culture driven by expansionist commerce. Its template is American, its form style. Its goods are as much images as matériel, an aesthetic as well as a product line. It is about culture as commodity, apparel as ideology. Its symbols are Harley-Davidson motorcycles and Cadillac motorcars hoisted from the roadways, where they once represented a mode of transportation, to the marquees of global market cafés like Harley-Davidson’s and the Hard Rock where they become icons of lifestyle. You don’t drive them, you feel their vibes and rock to the images they conjure up from old movies and new celebrities, whose personal appearances are the key to the wildly popular international café chain Planet Hollywood. Music, video, theater, books, and theme parks—the new churches of a commercial civilization in which malls are the public squares and suburbs the neighborless neighborhoods—are all constructed as image exports creating a common world taste around common logos, advertising slogans, stars, songs, brand names, jingles, and trademarks. Hard power yields to soft, while ideology is transmuted into a kind of videology that works through sound bites and film clips.
-Benjamin R. Barber, Jihad vs. McWorld, 1995

Yowzer!  Jihad vs. McWorld?  Mr. Barber could be headed to Homeland Security Halliburton Hilton for those thoughts.  I think it’s a shame that American branding has devolved from images like walking lady liberty, a light held aloft by the statue of liberty, the blindfolded lady of justice to Planet Hollywood, Hummers, big macs and assault weapons.

Hope you all have a wonderful holiday with family members, that you enjoy a good meal and good company and that you cleave to values that cannot be marked down for quick sale.

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November 26, 2011 by mike.

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November 26, 2011 by mike.

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September 27, 2011 by mike.

Thanks to Abby Zimet at Common Dreams for her thoughts about this and for running this video there.

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September 26, 2011 by mike.

There are reports of police assault on the occupation of Wall Street.   The first amendment grants us the right to assemble and speak out.  It’s a shame that this country has so little tolerance for first amendment rights.

I am reminded of the video I have seen from China when the military was streaming toward Tiananmen Square and the Chinese people flooded into the streets to slow the military, they pleaded with the soldiers to join the protest, to side with the people. The pleas were not heard.

It’s going to be hard for the protestors who occupy Wall Street to reach the police who are ordered to come in and disperse the crowds, but things change when the shock troops of the empire hear the message that peace, freedom, equality, justice are not always compatible with order.   We have to reach across the lines and ask the police to choose constitutional freedoms over order.

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September 22, 2011 by mike.

What better place than Olympia to gather if the Washington State economy has put you on the street?  Come to Olympia to assemble and petition for redress of grievance.   Come and sit on the streets of Olympia as a demonstration and act of free speech.  Come to Olympia and greet the legislators and the policy makers who will have to step over you, or walk around you, as they move around in their daily lives.  The City of Olympia is criminalizing poverty in the downtown area, but the First Amendment comes in…    uh…  First!  We have the right to sit, recline, sing, grieve, and beg for good public policy in Washington State.  Come to Olympia.

If you get hassled by the Olympia Police Department for exercising your free speech rights, email the particulars:  Where, when, police officer name to olympiacopwatch@gmail.com and we will challenge the City and the Police Department to justify the violation of your first amendment rights.

I know that some folks get scared when they have to be close to houseless people.  I encourage those folks to come down to the Artesian Well during daylight and introduce themselves to the people who move through that setting.  There are lots of tattoos, piercings, and a fair amount of cursing, but there is also a lot of openness, music, support, and community. There are scary, dangerous folks everywhere, on the street, in the burbs, in the police force, but most of the folks everywhere are just human being like you and me.  Make the effort to connect and see what happens.  Stop thinking, “there but for the grace of God, go I” and start thinking “there by the grace of God, go I.” Really attempt to connect with the folks and see what happens.  If they ask you or tell you to leave them alone, leave them alone.  It ain’t rocket science.

I have no problem with an ordinance against aggressive panhandling.  I am politely asked to share what I have in my pocket on regularly and I share what I can.  When I say, hey, wish I could, but I am short, I almost always get an “ok, thanks” type of response.  I don’t want to be harassed when I say no, and it doesn’t happen to me. I suspect it doesn’t happen because I really engage with the people asking, I look them in the eye when I tell them I am short.  I don’t avoid the folks.  I treat them with respect and they respond in kind.

Although I am not keen on the whole idea of prohibition (I have some libertarian impulses) I think I am supportive of a ban on fortified wines in downtown.  I hope for a day when there alcohol, drug consumption and possession are not a crime and when the money saved from the “war on drugs” is redirected to substance abuse treatment on request, fully funded. I guarantee you that this approach to dealing with drugs will be more cost-effective and humane.

Come to Olympia.  I will see you in the streets.

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August 23, 2011 by mike.

and Washington CAN had an image they wanted to share with Paul Allen, Jeff Bezos, Steve Balmer and a few others.

Don Smith has the story at Washington Liberals

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June 5, 2011 by mike.

and B Media Collective descend and dance for justice.  B Media does some great work. Peace, justice, economic pressure. Boycotts work.

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June 5, 2011 by mike.

I posted the first 4 points about organizing here.  This is my condensed presentation of the 14 pages, the full presentation that is available here.  This website title - The End of Capitalism - suggests that the folks behind this project are thinking like I am.  I think that unfettered capitalism, free market globalism, is an abject failure.  Read and think carefully.  I think that free market energy, style, human waves of fashion and style, free enterprise are forces like weather.  They do good things if they are harnessed and fettered. Free market globalism, the elevation of the free market as an end in itself, the commodification of the natural world, the exploitation of people and nature that is a natural byproduct of unfettered, unregulated free market economy is a bad thing.  Environmental degradation, exploitation of individuals are economic activities that can be very profitable. Regulation of free markets, of globalism, runaway capitalism must happen or we face a bleak future.  There are powerful, minority forces working against regulation and for profit as the primary goal.  I hope the end of that form of capitalism is coming.

Ok, back to the Organizing Points.  I did the first four points in Part I.  I expect this will take 3 parts, so here we go:  Part II.

5.  What Does Solidarity Mean, Especially with the Immigrant Justice Movement?

A. Solidarity is not just financial or administrative support of other people’s struggles but fundamentally recognizing the ways in which we all would benefit by the successes of movements of oppressed people

B. Demonstrating an active notion of solidarity where people with privilege don’t sideline themselves but instead endeavor the difficult task of both providing and respecting other’s leadership in the movement

C. Managing the conflict between political analysis and understanding of successful movement building strategies and letting local immigrant communities set the terms of their movement

6.  What Is the State of the Struggle Today, Particularly Internationally

A. National liberation struggles are not the primary mode of struggle today because capitalist globalization has weakened the state as a means of achieving self- determination

B. “Three-way fight” politics argue that the struggle today consists of the global capitalist/imperialist ruling class (of liberal, moderate, and conservative persuasions), the revolutionary left, and the revolutionary right (al-Qaeda, neo-Nazis, etc.) See www.threewayfight.blogspot.com for background
C. Recognizing ideas about direct and participatory forms of democracy that arise from local and indigenous traditions of self-governance and self-management and the under- theorized state of the the struggle

7.  How Do We Organize Simultaneously on Local, Regional, National, and International Levels?

A.  Many activists express the desire to organize as a national or international movement, but are not certain how to make the connections.

B.  We need to continue to make connections between groups that are arising and working toward closely aligned goals.

C. We can look at various organizations that have made headway with local, regional and inter/national organizing. These include Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) that is largely active on college campuses, Northeast Federation of Anarcho-communists (NEFAC) that is active in union organization in Boston and Montreal, and Project South, a Black training and leadership development group based in Atlanta, that was key to the 2007 US Social Forum.

The underlying piece at the End of Capitalism is from November 2009 so it is a little dated.  The Social Forums and events like the April 2011 Power Shift conference may reflect the current best practice for organizing simultaneously at local, regional, national and international levels.

The solutions and changes that we desire require that we work in cooperative manner.  With an open attitude toward groups whose ideas and tactics may make us uncomfortable, but whose visions and goals are closely aligned with our own.  Liberals, progressives, radicals, whatever we choose to call ourselves are not a group that likes to walk in lockstep.  We must demonstrate solidarity and resist a puritanical call for any distinct set of ideas or tactics that are mandatory or absolutely prohibited.  I would suggest in this regard that points 3. C. and 3. E. are very important to keep in mind.

We must

3. C.   Maintain relationships with other activists and groups who may not have engaged in the same tactics but who remained committed and sympathetic

3. E. Build mass movements where militant tactics can be present without dividing the movement

I don’t need to stress 3. D. about helping increase militancy because I am pretty mainstream in my radicalism.  I am in touch with enough folks who share my visions and goals and are more militant in their tactics, so 3. D. is not critical to me.

I do not feel that I can tell the more militant that their tactics are wrong.  We face police in riot gear at peaceful demonstrations as a regular event.  We can get roughed up and arrested for dancing at the Jefferson Memorial.  We face an electoral system that is wildly degraded now by unlimited corporate money and that continues to resist the accountability of paper ballots that can be used to make sure that votes are counted accurately. In this environment, I am not certain about how we should proceed, but I think we liberals, progressives, and radicals need to proceed together, in solidarity.

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