Progressive Calendar 11.17.11 /2
From: David Shove (shove001umn.edu)
Date: Thu, 17 Nov 2011 00:48:53 -0800 (PST)
P R O G R E S S I V E   C A L E N D A R   11.17.11

1. Day of action 11.17 3/4/5/5:30pm
2. Libya             11.17 7pm

3. Juan Cole         - Police crackdowns on OWS coordinated among mayors,
FBI, DHS
                            DHS= *D*epartment of *H*omeland *S*ecurity
turned vs the people
4. Glen Ford         - Bloomberg personifies what the Occupation opposes
5. Ted Rall           - Our f— you system of government
 6. Phil Rockstroh - The police state makes iIts move
7. ed                   - What would God do?  (nonnet and comment)

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From: kim defranco <kimdefranco [at] yahoo.com>
Day of action 11.17 3/4/5/5:30pm

STOP POLICE REPRESSION of OUR MOVEMENT!
We, the 99%, have the right to PEACEABLY ASSEMBLE!
We, the 99%, have the right to DEMAND JOBS and EDUCATION!
We, the 99%, have the right to OPPOSE BUDGET CUTS!
We, the 99%, have the right to make WALL STREET PAY FOR THEIR CRISIS!

*** A Day of Action is Planned that will culminate in a...
Thursday, 5:30pm RALLY on the PEOPLE'S PLAZA

---- SCHEDULE for THURSDAY, NOV. 17 ----

3:00pm Student Rally @ Northrop Plaza (U of M East Bank) to demand funding
for schools, not tax breaks for the rich, and an end to the student debt
trap. We will march from Northrop at 3:30 to join union and community
activists for the 10th Ave Bridge action. Student rallies will take place
at Macalester College and elsewhere.

4:00pm March onto the 10th Ave Bridge to “Bridge the Gap on Jobs and Racial
Equity.”With unemployment for African Americans three times that of whites,
we demand a federal jobs program for all funded by taxes on corporations
and the rich who sit on trillions in reserves. The 4pm Rally is organized
by Minnesotans for a Fair Economy.

At 5pm we will march from the 10th Ave Bridge to the People's Plaza for:

5:30pm Rally on the Peoples’ Plaza (Government Plaza) to oppose police
repression of our movement. We will also highlight opposition to the
looming congressional Super Committee's plan for trillions in budget cuts
to vital social safety net programs, education, environmental protection,
and more. Make Wall Street pay, not working people!

We are uniting to say:
* No to police repression of the Occupy movement!
* No to the congressional Super Committee's plans to cut trillions for
education, public sector jobs, and vital social programs!
* We need more funding for education and jobs to rebuild our crumbling
infrastructure!
* Wall Street and rich should pay for the crisis they created, not working
people!

Organized locally by OccupyMN Events Committee, in coalition with
Minnesotans for a Fair Economy who is organizing the 4pm action. OccupyMN
is calling these actions in solidarity with the "Jobs Not Cuts Week of
Action" (jobsnotcutsprotest.org) endorsed locally by Amalgamated Transit
Union Local 1005 and United Auto Workers Local 879.
For more information contact OccupyMN Events Committee
Ty @ 612-760-1980 or Deb @ 612-816-4321


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From: Joe Schwartzberg
Libya 11.17 7pm

THIRD THURSDAY GLOBAL ISSUES FORUM
             Free and open to the public. Come and bring a friend.

Where? Hennepin Avenue United Methodist Church,
              511 Groveland Avenue, Minneapolis (at Lyndale and Hennepin).
Park in church lot.

November 17, 7:00-9:00 p.m.  LIBYA. Given its small population, Libya has a
curious modern history as a prototype for “something or other.” But what
that “something” might be changes from era to era. This talk will look at
the question in relation to the contemporary situation, examine what is
currently happening in Libya and explore ways of thinking about what lies
ahead for the country and its people.

Presenter: Professor MARTIN SAMPSON. Decades ago, Martin Sampson, then a
Peace Corps volunteer, taught seventh grade English in a southern Libyan
oasis village and spent a third year in Tripoli as an Associate Director of
Peace Corps / Libya. His 1994 article, “Exploring the Seams: External
Structures and Libyan Foreign Policy,” reflects two academic interests,
development under conditions of affluence and, second, weaker actors
exploring seams in structures established by the strong. He is an Associate
Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of
Minnesota and has won the U. of M. Morse Alumni Distinguished Teaching
Award and the U. of M.’s President’s Award for Outstanding Service.


--------3 of 7---------

Police Crackdowns on OWS Coordinated among Mayors, FBI, DHS
by Juan Cole
Published on Wednesday, November 16, 2011 by Juan Cole
Common Dreams
[This has to mean that Obama is fully in on it. -ed]

Oakland Mayor Jean Quan let slip in an interview with the BBC that she had
been on a conference call with the mayors of 18 cities about how to deal
with the Occupy Wall Street movement. That is, municipal authorities appear
to have been conspiring to deprive Americans of their first amendment
rights to freedom of assembly and freedom to petition the government for
redress of grievances.

Likewise, A Homeland Security official let it slip in a phone interview
that the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security had been strategizing
with cities on how to shut down OWS protests. The FBI is said to have
advised using zoning ordinances and curfew regulations, and to stage the
crackdown with massive police force at a time when the press was not around
to cover the crackdown.

Wonkette suggests that the PATRIOT Act is implicated here, but I’m not sure
how that works. Actually the techniques discussed are standard for US
police forces in dealing with peaceful protests (the only routine technique
missing is that of putting saboteurs among the protesters who cause
destruction and create an image of them as violent.

What these two reports show is a high-level conspiracy to deprive Americans
of their constitutional right to protest peacefully.

When will we see Occupy Wall Street protesters hooded, dressed in orange
jump suits, and sent to Guantanamo for military trials? When you let the
government act without regard for the rule of law toward foreigners
suspected of terrorism, you open yourself to be treated the same way if the
rich decide to sic their police on you (it is mostly their police). This is
why a rule of law has to be maintained. Anything less ratchets toward
tyranny.

© 2011 Juan Cole

Juan Cole teaches Middle Eastern and South Asian history at the University
of Michigan. His latest book, Engaging the Muslim World, is just out in a
revised paperback edition from Palgrave Macmillan. He is also the author of
Napoleon's Egypt: Invading the Middle East (New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2007). He has appeared widely on television, radio and on op-ed pages as a
commentator on Middle East affairs, and has a regular column at Salon.com.
He has written, edited, or translated 14 books and has authored 60 journal
articles. His weblog on the contemporary Middle East is Informed Comment.


--------4 of 7--------

Bloomberg Personifies What the Occupation Opposes
by Glen Ford
Published on Wednesday, November 16, 2011 by The Black Agenda Report

New York’s mayor Michael Bloomberg justified clearing the tents and other
materials of Occupation from Zuccotti Park, saying the protesters will now
“have to occupy the space with the power of their arguments.” This is a
strange kind of logic from the 12th richest man in America, who occupies
City Hall for one reason only – because he has bought the office three
times since 2001. Mr. Bloomberg’s $20 billion fortune maintains him in the
Executive Mansion, not the power of his arguments.

Bloomberg was a lifelong Democrat until he found it more convenient to run
as a Republican, and then as an independent – thus proving that money, not
party, is what counts in New York, as in all American politics. Everything
else is a diversion, and a lie. Bloomberg has used the mayor’s office to
make the city more hospitable to his fellow economic one-percenters from
all around the planet. But, in that sense, he is no different than the
mayors of other American cities – including most of the Black ones – who
collaborate in every rich man’s scheme to expel the poor in favor of
wealthier populations. They’ve all got a lot of Bloomberg in them; they are
operatives for whoever has the money.

When Bloomberg moved to end the 24-7 physical occupation of Zuccotti Park,
it was not on the strength of his argument – which was full of lies and
wholly unconvincing – but with the raw power of his police force and its
monopoly on violence.

So Mayor Bloomberg, like all the rich man’s mayors in all the U.S. cities
that are determined to end their local Occupations, pays his hypocritical
respects to democracy and reason, when in fact his authority is nothing but
an extension of the rule of capital.

Bloomberg, the personification of Wall Street, made his vast fortune
selling a machine called the Market Master. Having mastered the market, the
logic of money was all that was required for Bloomberg to become master of
politics in the nation’s most important city. Bloomberg’s career is the
story of today's America, a place where people who market machines and
schemes so that money can produce more money for themselves and their
fellow Lords of Capital, can then purchase governments and write their own
laws in order to maintain their power in perpetuity.

If the Occupy Wall Street movement has been about anything, it is the
absolute necessity to rid the nation – and the world – of the collective
tyranny of the Bloombergs, the dictatorship of the moneyed classes. If
there is to be any lesson in this two-month-long Occupation that is
actually useful to people, it is that people's power cannot long coexist
with the power of massed capital. Capital will ultimately shut the people
down. The people must, therefore, have at least the goal of shutting down
the infernal machines of capital.

© 2011 The Black Agenda Report

Back Agenda Report executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at
Glen.Ford [at] BlackAgendaReport.com.


--------5 of 7--------

Our F— You System of Government
Anti-Occupy Crackdowns Highlight Lack of Services
by Ted Rall
Published on Wednesday, November 16, 2011 by Ted Rall

Governments are supposed to fulfill the basic needs of their citizens. Ours
doesn’t pretend to try.

Sick? Too bad.

Can’t find a job? Tough.

Broke? Can’t afford rent? We don’t give a crap.

Forget “e pluribus unum.” We need a more accurate motto.

We live under a f— you system.

Got a problem? The U.S. government has an all-purpose response to whatever
ails you: f— you.

During the ’80s I drove a yellow taxi in New York. Then, as now, there were
no public restrooms in the city. At 4 in the morning, with few restaurants
or bars open, the coffee I drank to stay awake posed a significant
challenge.

It was—it is—insane. People pee. People poop. As basic needs go, toilets
are as basic as it gets. Yet the City of New York, with the biggest tax
base of any municipality in the United States, didn’t provide any.

So I did what all taxi drivers did. What they still do. I found a side
street and a spot between two parked cars. It went OK until a cop caught me
peeing under the old elevated West Side Highway, which later collapsed due
to lack of maintenance. Perhaps decades of taxi driver urine corroded the
support beams.

“You can’t do that here,” said the policeman.

“Where am I supposed to go?” I asked him. “There’s aren’t any restrooms
anywhere in town.”

“I know,” he replied before going to get his summons book from his cruiser.

The old “f— you.” We create the problem, then blame you for the results.

I ran away.

In recent days American mayors have been ordering heavily armed riot police
to attack and rob peaceful members of encampments allied with Occupy Wall
Street.

Like NYC, which won’t provide public restrooms but arrests public
urinators, government officials and their media allies use their own
refusal to provide basic public services to justify raids against
Occupations.

In the middle of the night on November 15th NYPD goons stormed into
Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan. They beat and pepper-sprayed members of
Occupy Wall Street and destroyed the books in their library. Citing
“unsanitary conditions,” New York’s billionaire mayor, Michael Bloomberg,
then told reporters: “I have become increasingly concerned…that the
occupation was coming to pose a health and fire safety hazard to the
protesters and to the surrounding community.”

Four days before the police attack The New York Times had quoted a city
health department statement worrying about the possible spread of
norovirus, vomiting, diarrhea and tuberculosis: “It should go without
saying that lots of people sleeping outside in a park as we head toward
winter is not an ideal situation for anyone’s health.”

So why don’t they give the homeless some of the thousands of abandoned
apartment units in New York?

Anyway, according to the Times: “Damp laundry and cardboard signs, left in
the rain, have provided fertile ground for mold. Some protesters urinate in
bottles, or occasionally a water-cooler jug, to avoid the lines at [the
few] public restrooms.”

Of course, there’s an obvious solution: provide adequate bathroom
facilities—not just for Occupy but for all New Yorkers. But that’s off the
table under New York’s f— you system of government.

Doctors noted a new phenomenon called “Zuccotti cough.” Symptoms are
similar to those of “Ground Zero cough” suffered by 9/11 first responders.

Zuccotti is 450 feet away from Ground Zero.

Which brings to mind the fact that the collapse of the World Trade Center
towers released 400 tons of asbestos into the air. It was never cleaned up
properly. Could Occupiers be suffering the results of sleeping in a
should-have-been-Superfund site for two months?

We’ll never know. As under Bush, Obama’s EPA still won’t conduct a 9/11
environmental impact study.

Sick? Wanna know why? F— you.

One of the authorities’ most ironic complaints about the Occupations is
that they attract the mentally ill, drug users and habitually homeless.

To listen to the mayors of Portland, Denver and New York, you’d think the
Occupiers beamed in bums and nutcases from outer space.

When mentally disabled people seek help from their government, they get the
usual answer: f— you.

When people addicted to drugs—drugs imported into the U.S. under the
watchful eyes of corrupt border enforcement officers—ask their government
for help, they are turned away. F— you again.

When people who lost their homes because their government said “f— you” to
them rather than help turn to the same government to look for safe shelter,
again they are told: “f— you.”

And then, after days and years and decades of shirking their responsibility
to provide us with such staples of human survival as places to urinate and
defecate and sleep, and food, and medical care, our “f— you” government has
the amazing audacity to blame us, victims of their negligence and
corruption and violence, for messing things up.

Which is why we are finally, at long last, starting to say “f— you” to them.

© 2011 Ted Rall
Ted Rall is the author of the new books "Silk Road to Ruin: Is Central Asia
the New Middle East?," and "The Anti-American Manifesto" . His website is
tedrall.com.


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The Police State Makes Its Move
by Phil Rockstroh
November 15th, 2011
DissidentVoice

For days now, we have endured demonstrably false propaganda that the fallen
soldiers of U.S. wars sacrificed their lives for “our freedoms.” Yet, as
that noxious nonsense still lingers in the air, militarized police have
invaded OWS sites in numerous cities, including Zuccotti Park in Lower
Manhattan, and, in the boilerplate description of the witless courtesans of
the corporate media, with the mission to “evict the occupiers”.

U.S soldiers died protecting what and who again? These actions should make
this much clear: The U.S. military and the police exist to protect the 1%.
At this point, the ideal of freedom will be carried by those willing to
resist cops and soldiers. There have been many who have struggled and often
died for freedom–but scant few were clad in uniforms issued by governments.

Freedom rises despite cops and soldiers not because of them. And that is
exactly why those who despise freedom propagate military hagiography and
fetishize those wearing uniforms–so they can give the idea of liberty lip
service as all the while they order it crushed.

When anyone tells you that dead soldiers and veterans died for your
freedom, it is your duty to occupy reality and inform them of just how
mistaken they are. And if you truly cherish the concepts of freedom and
liberty, you just might be called on to face mindless arrays of fascist
cops and lose your freedom, for a time, going to jail, so others might, at
some point, gain their freedom.

I was born in Birmingham Alabama, at slightly past the mid-point of the
decade of the 1950s. Many of my earliest memories involve the struggle for
civil rights that was transpiring on the streets of my hometown.

My father was employed at a scrap metal yard but also worked as a freelance
photojournalist who hawked his work to media photo syndicates such as Black
Star who then sold his wares to the major newsmagazines of the day. A
number of the iconic photographs of the era were captured by his Nikon
camera e.g., of vicious police dogs unleashed on peaceful demonstrators; of
demonstrators cartwheeled down city streets by the force of fire hoses; of
Dr. King and other civil rights marchers kneeled in prayer before arrays of
Police Chief Bull Connor’s thuggish ranks of racist cops.

In Birmingham, racist laws and racial and economic inequality were the
progenitors of acts of official viciousness. The social structure in place
was indefensible. Reason and common decency held no dominion in the
justifications for the established order that was posited by the system’s
apologists and enforcers; therefore, brutality filled the void created by
the absence of their humanity.

And the same situation is extant in the growing suppression of the OWS
movement in various cities, nationwide, including Liberty Park in Lower
Manhattan. The 1% and their paid operatives–local city officials–are
striving to protect an unjust, inherently dishonest status quo. Lacking a
moral mandate, they are prone to the use of police state forms of
repression.

Dr. King et al faced their oppressors on the streets of my hometown. Civil
Rights activists knew that they had to hold their ground to retain their
dignity…that it was imperative to sit down in those Jim Crow-tyrannized
streets when necessary in order to stand up against the forces of
oppression.

At present, we have arrived at a similar moment. If justice is to prevail,
it seems, the air of U.S. cities will hold the acrid sting of tear gas, the
jails will again be filled, the brave will endure brutality–yet the corrupt
system will crumble. Because the system’s protectors themselves will bring
it down by revealing its empty nature, and the corrupt structure will
collapse from within.

Yet, when riot police attack unarmed, peacefully resisting protesters, the
mainstream media often describes the events with standard boilerplate such
as “police clash with demonstrators.”

This is inaccurate (at best) reportage. It suggest that both parties are
equal aggressors in the situation, and the motive of the police is to
restore order and maintain the peace, as opposed to, inflicting pain and
creating an aura of intimidation.

This is analogous to describing a mugging as simply: two parties engaging
in a financial transaction.

Although mainstream media demurred from limning the upwelling of mob
violence at Penn. State as involving any criteria deeper than the mindless
rage of a few football-besotted students unloosed by the dismissal of
beloved sport figure.

Yet there exists an element that the Penn. State belligerents and OWS
activists have in common: a sense of alienation.

Penn State students rioted because life in the corporate state is so devoid
of meaning that identification with a sports team gives an empty existence
said meaning…These are young people, coming of age in a time of
debt-slavery and diminished job prospects, who were born and raised in, and
know of no existence other than, life as lived in U.S. nothingvilles i.e.,
a public realm devoid of just that–a public realm–an atomizing
center-bereft culture of strip malls, office parks, fast food eateries and
the electronic ghosts wafting the air of social media.

Contrived sport spectacles provisionally give an empty life meaning…Take
that away, and a mindless rampage might ensue…Anything but face the
emptiness and acknowledge one’s complicity therein, and then direct one’s
fury at the creators of the stultified conditions of this culture.

It is a given, the cameras of corporate media swivel towards reckless
actions not mindful commitment…are attuned to verbal contretemps not
thoughtful conviction–and then move on. And we will click our TV remotes
and scan the Internet–restless, hollowed out,eating empty memes–skimming
the surface of the electronic sheen.

These are the areas we are induced to direct our attention–as the oceans of
the earth are dying…these massive life-sustaining bodies of water have less
then 50 years before they will be dead. This fact alone should knock us to
our knees in lamentation…should sent us reeling into the streets in
displays of public grief…

Accordingly, we should not only occupy–but inhabit our rage. No more
tittering at celebrity/political class contretemps–it is time for focused
fury. The machinery of the corporate/police state must be dismantled.

If the corporate boardrooms have to be emptied–for the oceans to be
replenished with abundant life–then so be it. If one must go to jail for
committing acts of civil disobedience to free one’s heart–then it must be
done.

Yet why does the act of challenging the degraded status quo provoke such a
high decree of misapprehension, anxiety, and outright hostility from many,
both in positions of authority and among so many of the exploited and
dispossessed of the corporate/consumer state.

For example, why did the fatal shooting incident in Oakland, California,
Nov. 1, that occurred near the Occupy Oakland Encampment–but, apparently,
was wholly unrelated to OWS activity cause a firestorm of reckless
speculation and false associations.

Because any exercise in freedom makes people in our habitually
authoritarian nation damn uneasy…a sense of uncertainty brings on dread–the
feeling that something terrible is to come from challenging a prevailing
order, even as degraded as it is.

Tyrants always promise safety; their apologist warn of chaos if and when
the soul-numbing order is challenged.

Granted, it is a given that there exists a sense of certainty in a prison
routine: high walls and guards and gun mounts ensure continuity; an
uncertainty-banishing schedule is enforced. Moreover, solitary confinement
offers an even more orderly situation…uncertainty is circumscribed as
freedom is banished.

The corporate/national security state, by its very nature is anti-liberty
and anti-freedom. Of course, its defenders give lip service to the concept
of freedom…much in the manner a pick-pocket working a subway train is very
much in favor of the virtues of public transportation.

A heavy police presence has ringed Zuccotti Park from the get-go, and whose
ranks have now staged a military style raid upon it, a defacto search and
destroy mission–because the ruling elite want to suppress the very impulse
of freedom. These authoritarian bullies don’t want the concept to escape
the collective prison of the mind erected and maintained by the corrupt
jailers comprising the 1% who claim they offer us protection as, all the
while, they hold our chains…all for our own good, they insist…for our
safety and the safety of others.

Although, from studying on these prison walls, the thought occurs to
me…that what we might need is protection from all this safety.

Phil Rockstroh, a self-described, auto-didactic, gasbag monologist, is a
poet, lyricist and philosopher bard living in New York City. He may be
contacted at: phil [at] philrockstroh.com. Read other articles by Phil, or visit
Phil's website.

This article was posted on Tuesday, November 15th, 2011 at 8:00am and is
filed under Activism, Police.


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What would God do?

God says "I’m
voting for the lesser
evil in Twenty Twelve. I’m not a
corporation; what else
can I do?"

Indeed. Some say that if He doesn't do as He's told (by You Know Who) ,
He'll be killed just like the Kennedys and King and Wellstone. If The Son
can be killed, so can The Father. If God has to sell His soul for His life,
why, so does Obama, and so do we all. But we still have to chant that we're
free and democratic, and have boundless hope. -ed  [A nonnet (rhymes with
sonnet) is a poetic form with 3 6 9 6 3 syllables, invented by a
clove-rhyming-editor with nothing worse to do.]


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