"From the outside, anarchy might look threatening and scary and exciting. From the inside, anarchy can seem quite boring. But it is a profoundly hopeful type of boring." This more nuanced account of what anarchism is and what anarchists do is a refreshing change from the usual shrill MSM version. A must-read. "

Adam Gabbatt | Montreal | May 24

The Guardian - More than 500 people were arrested in Montreal on Wednesday night as protestors defied controversial new law Bill 78

Protests that began in opposition to tuition fees in Canada have exploded into a political crisis with the mass arrest of hundreds of demonstrators amid a backlash against draconian emergency laws.

More than 500 people were arrested in a demonstration in Montreal on Wednesday night as protesters defied a controversial new law – Bill 78 – that places restrictions on the right to demonstrate. In Quebec City, police arrested 176 people under the provisions of the new law.

Demonstrators have been gathering in Montreal for just over 100 days to oppose tuition increases by the Quebec provincial government. On Tuesday, about 100 people were arrested after organisers say 300,000 people took the streets.

Zach Epstein

BGR - Hackers associated with well known hacker-activist group “Anonymous Operations” have released a massive cache of data they say was obtained when they hacked a website belonging to the United States Department of Justice. “Today we are releasing 1.7GB of data that used to belong to the United States Bureau of Justice, until now,” Anonymous wrote in a statement on its website. The hackers claim the file contains emails as well as “the entire database dump” from the DOJ website.

“We do not stand for any government or parties, we stand for freedom of people, freedom of speech and freedom of information,” the hackers wrote. ”We are releasing data to spread information, to allow the people to be heard and to know the corruption in their government. We are releasing it to end the corruption that exists, and truly make those who are being oppressed free.”

Over at AmericaBlog, Gaius Publius cogently argues that "if Occupy leaders (organizers) don't take on and reject violence, they will do lasting damage both to Occupy and to the broader movement of which Occupy is just one part." The heart of his argument is that:

You don't stop police violence with non-violence; but you justify it by violent acts of your own. Your violence guarantees escalation of violence on both sides, and guarantees that their violence (police beatings; pepper-swabbed eyeballs and throats; multiple strip searches; extended stays in urine-soaked solitary cells) will be sold as "necessary" by the entire troop of millionaire news-blond(e)s.

But if non-violent protest won't halt police violence, in a time when it is increasingly normalized, what will? And if it cannot be halted, where do we end up?

Robert Naiman:

At the intersection of Cermak and Michigan streets in Chicago yesterday, veterans who served in Afghanistan and Iraq told their stories when they threw back their service medals in protest at NATO leaders, echoing a famous protest against the Vietnam War.

A lot of media coming out of Chicago last night focused on street skirmishes between a handful of apolitical adventurists and the Chicago police. But some media got the real story.

Zach LaPorte, a 28-year-old mechanical engineer from Milwaukee who served in Iraq in 2005 and 2006, said, "I witnessed civilian casualties and civilians being arrested in what I consider an illegal occupation of a sovereign nation," Reuters reported. Former U.S. Army Sergeant Alejandro Villatoro of Chicago, who served during the Iraq 2003 invasion and in Afghanistan in 2011, said: "There's no honor in these wars... There's just shame."

Chicago spent $1 million on riot control equipment in anticipation of the NATO summit, and funded, at unknown cost, a secret police control center where "officials from more than 40 different agencies sit side by side with a giant central screen before them". Bernard Harcourt, Julius Kreeger professor of law at the University of Chicago and chair of the political science department there, writes for the Guardian that "The Nato summit will come and go, but Mayor Emanuel has authorised a 'new normal' of militarised social control in Chicago."

First, it is astounding – but sadly, not surprising – that the City of Chicago would deny protest permits or make protest so difficult in Chicago because of alleged inconveniences to traffic and ordinary business. Our new Chicago lockdown belies any suggestion that the city cares about such inconveniences. While Mayor Emanuel has bent backwards for Nato, first amendment free speech receives dramatically less accommodation.

Second, this police state serves, in reality, as our new welfare state. The security mania represents our truly unique way of stimulating the economy, of employing piece labor, of creating government jobs and subsidized contracts. Just think of the amount of overtime pay that we are disbursing with all this policing. Instead of investing in schools and education, in job training, or in re-entry programs, this is how we invest in our future. And we never think of it as government welfare because it falls in that sacred space of security – because, essentially, of the American paradox of laissez-faire and mass punishment.

Third, and finally, all of this is, sadly, here to stay. Nato will come and go, but the new anti-protest laws, the new riot-gear, the two LRAD sound cannons, and all the normalization of this police state … that will be with us for a long time.

This is, I'd contend, in perfect tune with the Obama administration's continuation of the notion of the Imperial Presidency, which holds simply that if the President's doing it then it's not illegal and that the "elected monarch" has veto powers over the Constitution. Such a mindset stems from 1%-er dislocation from the people and is absolutely to be expected from members of the elite like Emmanuel too. If only we'd asked the damn question.

The Uptake:

Tracey Pollock, a credentialed photographer for The UpTake, is attacked by police in Chicago during an anti-NATO protest on Saturday. Before the attack, police were using their bicycles as weapons to force back the crowd which was staging a march without a permit.
Police had formed a barricade; as you can see from the video, there was some sort of incident along the barricade. Pollock tried to get closer to see what was happening when a police officer reached up, grabbed her lens and tried to rip her camera away. The officer then pushed her over some bicycles.

Pollock was wearing a large press badge and as you can hear from the audio, even bystanders could tell she was part of the press. Protesters behind the bicycles pulled her to safety.

Pollock was bruised in the incident but not seriously injured. She says she never crossed the police barricade.

Matthew Walberg, Lolly Bowean, Jeff Coen, David Heinzmann & Annie Sweeney | Chicago | May 19

Chicago Tribune - Chicago Police and NATO protesters clashed repeatedly in a series of pushing and shoving confrontations tonight in the Loop following a day of cat-and-mouse marches that tested the physical and mental stamina of both sides.

Police detained several protesters but allowed the march to continue as night approached and the crowd -- as few as 300 strong earlier in the day -- swelled to many times that.

The first big confrontation flared at Washington and State Streets when protesters tried to push through a line of police on bicycles. An officer went down, police in heavy garb and riot helmets moved in and several protesters were detained.

Berlin | May 19

AP - At least 20,000 people held a major rally of the local Occupy movement in Frankfurt on Saturday to decry austerity measures affecting much of Europe, the dominance of banks, and what they call untamed capitalism.

The protesters peacefully filled the city center of continental Europe's biggest financial hub on a warm and pleasant afternoon, said Frankfurt police spokesman Ruediger Regis. He said 20,000 people were there, while organizers put the number at 25,000.

Noam Chomsky writes that "The current US economy is built on 'growing worker insecurity' - people who are too busy and poor to make demands," and has a couple of new terms for us.

Plutonomy refers to the rich, those who buy luxury goods and so on, and that's where the action is. They claimed that their plutonomy index was way outperforming the stock market. As for the rest, we set them adrift. We don't really care about them. We don't really need them. They have to be around to provide a powerful state, which will protect us and bail us out when we get into trouble, but other than that they essentially have no function. These days they're sometimes called the "precariat" - people who live a precarious existence at the periphery of society. Only it's not the periphery anymore. It's becoming a very substantial part of society in the United States and indeed elsewhere. And this is considered a good thing.

Read the whole thing.

Barack Obama taking on Mitt Romney's abysmal job creation record is a little like critiquing Stalin's abysmal human rights record:

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama is casting Mitt Romney as a greedy, job-killing corporate titan with little concern for the working class in a new, multi-pronged effort that seeks to undermine the central rationale for his Republican rival's candidacy: his business credentials.

At the center of the push — the president's most forceful attempt yet to sully Romney before the November election — is a biting new TV ad airing Monday that recounts through interviews with former workers the restructuring, and ultimate demise, of a Kansas City, Mo., steel mill under the Republican's private equity firm.

50 years ago student protest movement leaders published the Port Huron Statement, a key foundational document in the then-embryonic counterculture. Decades later, the global Occupy movement has finally taken the next step and crafted a manifesto of its own. That occupiers have decided to establish a foundation for the movement by building a stable to fill up all the ponies they want should not diminish the import of this announcement.

Sure, some may scoff at the seemingly glacial pace at which Occupy has reached what most would consider a key initial step in shaping a social movement. But as anyone who is at all familiar with the theory of inclusive democracy, the pace is drastically different when you're trying to work out so many issues on such a vast scale via a consensus-based model like Occupy is doing. Entrenching these practices in the public consciousness is clearly a vital step before anything truly concrete can take place.

Though the myriad equine proposals contained within will likely never be corralled exactly as specified, that really isn't the point. As Steve noted via FB chat, these sorts of documents "aren't final words but meant to stimulate debate to get to a later more realistic one, which is then a spingboard again," a fact acknowledged by occupiers in the intro:

The statement below does not speak on behalf of everyone in the global spring/Occupy/Take the Square movements. It is an attempt by some inside the movements to reconcile statements written and endorsed in the different assemblies around the world. The process of writing the statement was consensus-based, open to all, and regularly announced on our international communications platforms. It was a hard and long process, full of compromises; this statement is offered to people's assemblies around the world for discussions, revisions and endorsements. It is a work in progress.

FAIR crunched the numbers and found that when the Occupy movement slowed down over the winter, so too did corporate media mentions of class isssues. The use of key phrases "income inequality" and "corporate greed" in newspaper and broadcast media reports from June 2011 to March 2012 tracked exactly with frequency of reporting on the Occupy movement. Their conclusion:

What these data show is that “changing the conversation” isn’t a one-time thing. Corporate media and their owners have every incentive to ignore not only protest movements, but also the underlying causes of those protest movements...Occupy Wall Street reminded the country of the deep economic divisions running through our society, but it appears the only way to keep the issue in the media discussion is to keep OWS—or some other form of large-scale protest—in the news.

Sad but true.

Update Naomi Wolf pens a must-read "May Day alert for the Occupy movement".

Yes, I know Loyalty day is an official US holiday, instituted in 1958 and following a US tradition of sidelining International Labor Day. However, no President issues a proclamation on it every year, so that Obama picked this year of massive leftwing protests against the established order sends a massive "fuck you very much" message to those protesters.

EDIT Moley has pointed out to me that the Wikipedia entry I was reading was apparently incorrect and has since been edited to show that there has been a presidential proclamation of Loyalty Day every year since it's institution except for two years Eisenhower missed. So it's more of a generic establishment FU than one Obama has specifically perpetrated. I try always to admit a mistake when it's pointed out, this was one.

Over at Firedoglake, they're live-blogging May Day protests in the U.S. See here and here. Yahoo! has a list of the major protests

Across Europe, protesters are marching and striking in their hundreds of thousands against austerity measures imposed to protect the 1% and their investments but which do most harm to the poor and infirm.

A couple out of the very many protests have already led to violence. A group in San Fransisco's Mission District vandalized cars and businesses this morning in the single largest example to date. I'm going to simply condemn this as reprehensible. There may be a time and place for violence in a campaign of civil disobedience against repression, although that's a discussion that deserves its own post so I will confine myself now to saying that if there is any such time and place it is in direct and immediate response to hugely inappropriate and assymetric violence by the authorities to put down legitimate protests. You can't support violent protest in response to violence by authorities in Syria, Egypt or Bahrain while condemning it in the U.S. without a lot more explanation and examination of your premises than "well, it's different."

Rightwing bloggers are trying to tie another example of an FBI sting operation run on wannabe terrorists to the Occupy movement, simply because the people arrested in a putative plot to blow up a bridge near Cleveland, Ohio were self-described anarchists. Never mind that these people obviously didn't understand anarchy as a political theory, were entirely clueless and egged on by the FBI (who don't seem to be able to arrest terrorist wannabes they didn't hothouse themselves, nowadays) or that tarring with such a broad brush is as dumb as one trying to conflate National Review with abortion clinic bombers. This rightwing faux-outrage is politics-as-sport, team cheering, nothing more.

Finally, from the UK's Ekklesia online Christian mag: a good piece on why Christians should support the Occupy movement.

Solidarinosc!

"If any man tells you he loves America, yet hates labor, he is a liar. If any man tells you he trusts America, yet fears labor, he is a fool. All that harms labor is treason to America."
Abraham Lincoln.

I am a democratic socialist, not a liberal. And I for one am delighted that a combination of labor activists, immigration advocates and the Occupy movement are planning a massive day of action and protest tomorrow across the US, in solidarity with those who constitute the 99% around the globe. It's high time that "we, the people" in the U.S. reclaimed the date of the people's holiday: May Day. Moving Labor Day was always about disassociating the left in the US from the international community, and thus weakening both. The Occupy movement in all its forms is about giving that 99% a great deal of its voice back. Thus Michael Kazin, a Georgetown professor, tells MoJo:

the closest historical precedent to Occupy is the anti-monopoly movement of the late 19th century, when socialists, anarchists, and populist reformers united to bust the trusts. Much as Occupy has embraced social media and live-streaming, the anti-monopolists published hundreds of independent newspapers. But, Kazin adds, they also worked to elect sympathetic politicians. "I think history teaches that when people to the left of liberals are able to advance is when you have people who at least talk about reform in power," he says.

I think that's exactly right.

Mark Abelson | New York | April 26

Bloomberg - The world’s biggest banks are working with one another and police to gather intelligence as protesters try to rejuvenate the Occupy Wall Street movement with May demonstrations, industry security consultants said.

Among 99 protest targets in midtown Manhattan on May 1 are JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM) and Bank of America Corp. (BAC) offices, said Marisa Holmes, a member of Occupy’s May Day planning committee. Events are scheduled for more than 115 cities, including an effort to shut down the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, where Wells Fargo & Co. (WFC) investors relied on police to get past protests at their annual meeting this week.

Vivian Ho, Jill Tucker, Carolyn Jones & Kevin Fagan | San Francisco | April 24

San Francisco Chronicle - Several hundred Occupy protesters massed in front of the downtown San Francisco headquarters of Wells Fargo Bank on Tuesday with the intention of disrupting a shareholders meeting there.

Waving picket signs and broadcasting over speakers on a pickup truck parked in front of the 465 California St. bank building, demonstrators chanted, "Let us in," and, "They got bailed out, we got sold out."

Demonstrators said 30 shareholders who are protesters had gotten inside and would try to state their demands during the meeting. Others said they would try to stop other shareholders from going inside.

First, do nothing:

Obama turned his call for middle-income tax breaks into law within a month of taking office, incorporating a $400-a-person tax credit for workers into the 2009 stimulus law. In late 2010, with the economy still weak and Republicans gaining political clout, Obama agreed to an $858 billion tax cut that extended all of the George W. Bush-era tax cuts for two years.

"The tax policy has been substantially in the conservative direction whereas the rhetoric has gone in the exact opposite direction," said Don Susswein, a tax aide to former Republican Senator Bob Dole who said he supported Obama in 2008.

Samantha Tata & Robert Kovacik | Santa Monica, CA | April 4

NBC Los Angeles - About 30 students were treated for pepper spray, and two were transported to the hospital.

At least one campus police officer pepper-sprayed a crowd protesting outside a board of trustees meeting at Santa Monica College Tuesday night after demonstrators attempted to enter the meeting room, according to witnesses.

About 30 people were treated for pepper spray, and two were transported to the hospital. No arrests were reported.

Priscillia Omon, 21, said she was standing behind a police officer when he pulled out the pepper spray and fired it in the mouths and eyes of people standing arm’s length away. She described a man next to her convulsing and spitting up foam after being hit with the pepper spray.

Meghan Barr | New York | March 16

AP - As spring approaches, Occupy Wall Street protesters who mostly hibernated all winter are beginning to stir with plans for renewed demonstrations six months after the movement was born. The global protests against corporate excess and economic inequality are generally thought to have begun Sept. 17 when tents sprang up in a small granite plaza in lower Manhattan.

The movement has lost steam in recent months, with media attention and donations dropping off as Occupy encampments across the country were dismantled, some by force.

On March 7, the finance accounting group in New York City reported that just about $119,000 remained in Occupy's bank account -- the equivalent of about two weeks' worth of expenses.

You'd think Vladimir Putin would have learned a lesson from last year's civil unrest in the Middle East and America.

You'd think Putin would have learned that stealing an election does a President no good, and that it taints not only him but his administration and party orgnization for at least a decade. After all, he was Bush's "Pootie Poot."

And you'd be wrong.

There were "serious problems" in the vote that returned Vladimir Putin to the Russian presidency, the head of the major international election observer mission said Monday, adding fuel to an opposition testing its strength with plans for a massive protest rally.

The Wall Street Journal suggests that big banks should be broken up. Citing the inadequacy of the Volcker Rule in the Dodd-Frank bill now wending its way through Congress, the Journal states any real reform should include "a Congressional plan either for allowing large banks to fail or for breaking them up."

Horrors! Nationalizing banks? The Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal?

More astounding: Jamie Dimon, the head of JP Morgan Chase Bank and an proud 1%er (he once claimed to feel safer in Lebanon than amongst the Occupy Wall Street members) is for raising his own taxes:

Professor Jeffrey Sachs was on Countdown last night, talking about the budget proposal President Obama submitted to Congress this week. His appearance was in response to an op-ed he submitted to the Financial Times of London in which he states:

President Barack Obama’s budget for 2013 will set off a vitriolic battle. Republicans will rail against the Democrats’ “class warfare” and Democrats will rail against the Republicans’ “coddling of the rich”. Yet it is mostly for show. The rich will win in their fund balances while probably losing at November’s presidential polls, and the poor and working class will probably re-elect Obama but suffer a continuing decline in relative and perhaps absolute incomes.

Meet Richard Florida (pronounced "Flo-rid-DUH," unlike the hip hop artist).

Even with the president’s approval rating showing signs of life and the Republicans busily bashing themselves over the head — “one is a practicing polygamist and he’s not even the Mormon,” retired Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor recently quipped about her party’s two frontrunners — America continues to track right, according to polling data released by the Gallup Organization last week.