Expect more arrests...the oligarchy is getting more uptight

Recent charges against Jill Stein and Amy Goodman are a sign that the oligarchy is warning us that it is going to be rougher from here on. Yes there have been arrests all along, but big oil is worried. The native People are challenging their ability to do as they please and costing them money in the process.

Being arrested is an experience one does not easily forget. My arrest came during the draft resistance movement while I was Acting Chairman of Biophysics at SUNY at Buffalo, NY. Often a person being drafted would resist and do it publicly. There would be a support demonstration outside the Draft Board in the early morning hours. ACLU observers came to stand by to make sure the police behaved themselves.

I was a leader in the anti-draft movement and was working with Dr. Spock and others. I was at these demonstrations as often as I could be. Usually things were planned out the day before and all went smoothly. On one particular morning I got a call around 3AM asking me to be out there at 5. This particular student made up his mind at the last minute and the usual preparations were not possible.

It turns out that I was the only one there outside the students. The ACLU could not be summoned at the last minute. I help the students organize themselves and quickly reviewed how to keep the demonstration legal and orderly. We were at it for a few minute when Buffalo's finest arrived. They quickly sized up the lack of ACLU observers and other non-students. They got out their billy clubs and menaced the students. I kept reminding everyone that this was a legal demonstration and that it would remain orderly. AS the police moved too close for comfort I said

This is still a free country and we still have freedom of speech.

I immediately felt a hand on my shoulder and I was led to a police car and shoved inside.

I was booked for disorderly conduct and resisting arrest. That was at the city level. Just as we were leaving the courtroom the infamous Buffalo Anti-Subversive Squad arrived and we were called back. They talked to the judge and I was booked again on state charges which were far more serious. The charge sheet actually used the above quote as the only infraction I had done!

Later that day my Dean had the ACLU taking my case and I was out on bail. There were a series of preliminary hearings strung out over time. Each time the prosecution was not ready and the harassment nature of all this was quite clear. Each time significant members of the University Administration, faculty and students filled the courtroom in support. Finally the charges were dropped.

Now as you read this and other accounts of such happenings you are not able to get the feeling for what Stein and Goodman and the many, many others feel as they are shown what it is like to be under the control of the agents of the oligarchy. I won't belabor the point but suffice it to say I'll never forget it.

It did not stop me from turning in my own draft card on the steps of the Justice Department in 1968 when we had the massive draft card turn in. As an honorably discharged USMC officer I was 4D but it still was a felony worth 10 years in prison. The upshot is history but you may not recall that The Justice Department charged Dr. Spock and four others under an obscure 1918 conspiracy law rather than let the draft laws be challenged in court. Had they been convicted I was among those to be rounded up next.

Maybe this little piece of my personal history will help you understand my politics a little better. I long ago understood what this system is all about and that the oligarchy will not yield significant power to elections or peaceful protest.

We must do what we can but we must expect the responses we get. When the situation matures to a massive resistance to their power they will lash out like never before. We are still in the early stages and Bernie's enlightening of the people has made our ranks grow. It is always good to cut through the theater and look at the nature of the real conflict before us. It will be a difficult struggle. Prepare yourself please.

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studentofearth's picture

thought they were soon not have to worry about any local (national) laws and protestors once TPP was implemented. So the push back was hard, but not extreme. Just enough to keep protester off balance for a while, then let the big hammer of the TPP drop.

We are now seeing historically classic violence and law enforcement alliance with Big business.

I so appreciate your teaching us what you have learned over the years.

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Still yourself, deep water can absorb many disturbances with minimal reaction.
--When the opening appears release yourself.

snoopydawg's picture

by militarizing the police. They have the same equipment that the military has and many cities and states send their police to Israel to be trained by their military.
Remember how the DHS worked with mayors all over the country to violently take down OWS?
And after the Boston bombings, the police and swat teams kicked people out of their houses and entered them without a warrant and the people didn't object.
Was that a trial run to see how people would react to that action? As the saying goes, what happens during wartime finds its way to home.
They have already used a robot to kill the sniper in CA, another city has weaponized their drones with 'none' lethal items but how long until they use lethal means on them?
Oh yes, they are ready for any uprising.
And look at how a lot of people cheer the cops when they violently break up peaceful protests. OWS, the BLM and the protest happening now in North Dakota.
Jill Stein has an arrest warrant for spraying paint on a tractor, but the security forces get away with letting the dogs bite people including children and spraying pepper spray. There's something wrong with that!

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Which AIPAC/MIC/pharma/bank bought politician are you going to vote for? Don’t be surprised when nothing changes.

Equinespectre's picture

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is that Jill Stein spray painted on the blade of a Bulldozer... which would almost immediately be scraped off by a minute, or two of use. Dozer blades are a shiny as can be when being used. They rust quickly sitting unused, and unprotected from the weather. It ain't like they have to invest anything to remove the paint, or like the paint diminishes the function of the machine one iota

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Alligator Ed's picture

It took guts to do what you did. It took guts for what Bernie did. It took guts for what Jill and Amy are doing. There aren't enough police and militia in this country to control millions of people--but it does take guts. I'm glad the Natives are not letting themselves being pushed around. The spirit of genocidalist Andrew Jackson still infests portions of this country.

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don mikulecky's picture

There aren't enough police and militia in this country to control millions of people

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An idea is not responsible for who happens to be carrying it at the time. It stands or it falls on its own merits.

lunachickie's picture

I've been thinking that for awhile, but have been having a little trouble buying into the "mass incarceration camps" stories...

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hellinahandcart's picture

shooting Black men in the street (and I read the percentage of police shootings of Native people are actually a higher percentage)-- and some poor whites, too (which will get worse but they've got to escalate slowly); killing Black females (and, again, a few whites) in jail; and flooding the streets w/ opioids, heroin and fentanyl-- to which drugs like Kartom that help w/ addiction are made illegal (that just happened this week).
It's the boiling frog thing... we've become 'used to' a lot of really horrible things, already, and they'll just keep ramping up.
I agree that TPP is meant to finally just hand it all over, and that the elites are seeing that they have to turn the valve a little to let off some pressure-- but they're not going to give up. I agree with Don in that this is going to get a. lot. more. messy.
I would also add, this is not the time to further piss off our poor, white "Trump supporter" brothers and sisters, but time to try harder to reach out and inform and try to include. People think Hillary made a big gaffe w/ the 'deplorables' comment, but I think it was purposeful... to widen the divide-- which is part of the whole bigger scheme.

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don mikulecky's picture

try this for starters....Hubert Humphrey co sponsored it: McCarran Internal Security Act It had provisions for using the old camps from WWII and making more.

Oh and by the way....why are our jails so full?

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lunachickie's picture

don't get all defensive, okay? I'm approaching geezerhood myself and I agree with you.

I've read plenty of history. The thing that comes up from the paranoiacs is the whole "New World Order/Mass Incarceration" where they say "They're Already Built". It's not that I think this government wouldn't do that, but that's a hard sell right now.

The reason I bring it up is that these people flat-out don't have enough jail space for all of us that anyone can demonstrate. The Federales keep screaming for more money to build more prisons, because--as you note--the ones we have are at max capacity.

I completely agree that they're getting desperate, but there are over 300 million people in this country, too. They've clearly got their work cut out for them.

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of for profit prisons may soon end. Not enouigh federal prisoners?? That will open up a whole new stream of profit for the corporatists invested in incarcerating people.

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don mikulecky's picture

why? Do you count the Trump supporters for example? You seem to forget the 1930s and how easy it was then.

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An idea is not responsible for who happens to be carrying it at the time. It stands or it falls on its own merits.

Lookout's picture

The definition of oppressed people...and they are standing up. Maybe it is time?
http://sfbayview.com/2016/08/sept-9-strike-against-prison-slavery-strike...

How about the protests in India that no one is talking about?
Indians Staged One of the Largest Strikes in History, But No One on U.S. Cable News Covered It
https://theintercept.com/2016/09/06/indians-staged-one-of-the-largest-st...

Are we ready? One can hope.

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“Until justice rolls down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.”

hester's picture

Dakota Access Pipeline Donation fund
http://standingrock.org/

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Don't believe everything you think.

Entrapment & Agent Provocateur-incited violence seems less evident (so far) than in the late 1960s and early 1970s (perhaps because this type of bandwidth of law enforcement agencies has been focused on Muslims since 9/11).

The last year or so of broad-based opposition to business-as-usual seems to have caught many elements of the powers-that-be unprepared, with the result that their response has been incremental, and has failed to "shock and awe".

Today's more complex environment poses challenges to selling a conceptual framework for all-out repression. Compared to the consistently messaged 'Global Domination-Seeking Communism', which justified everything during the 1950s-1980s, today the 'biggest foreign menace' frequently skips between Jihadism, Chinese State Capitalism, Russian Revanchism, and Climate extremism.

Perhaps more importantly, half or more of Nixon's White "silent majority" no longer believes that they are assured a place inside the gunboats of American diplomacy. This portion of the US population has not needed to be repressed since the 1930s, so the agents of repression have no direct operational or psychological experience doing so.

But the highly coordinated para-military actions that were used to clear out the Occupy Wall Street movement can, presumably, be reactivated on a much larger scale, unless deterred or resisted by ever-increasing types and locations of resistance.

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that we may be learning something from our neighbors to the north. The First Nations have won some big fights up in the great white north. Anybody read Naomi Klein's book This Changes Everything?

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It's true right now like it was back then. The old devils are at it again. When I say devil you know who I mean these animals in the dark malicious politicians with nefarious schemes charlatans and crooked cops. - 'Old Devils' William Elliot Whitmore

pswaterspirit's picture

Here too. In this day and age the tribes are legally very savy and they have very good lawyers who are most often also tribal members. Many specialize in treaty rights or environmental law. We are a force to be reckoned with.

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don mikulecky's picture

Global Insanity: How Homo sapiens Lost Touch with Reality while Transforming the World

The Global Economy that sustains the civilized world is destroying the biosphere. As a result, civilization, like the Titanic, is on a collision course with disaster. But changing course via the body politic appears to be well nigh impossible, given that much of the populace lives in denial. Why is that? And how did we get into such a fix? In this essay, biologists James Coffman and Donald Mikulecky argue that the reductionist model of the world developed by Western civilization misrepresents life, undermining our ability to regulate and adapt to the accelerating anthropogenic transformation of the world entrained by that very model. An alternative worldview is presented that better accounts for both the relational nature of living systems and the developmental phenomenology that constrains their evolution. Development of any complex system reinforces specific dependencies while eliminating alternatives, reducing the diversity that affords adaptive degrees of freedom: the more developed a system is, the less potential it has to change its way of being. Hence, in the evolution of life most species become extinct. This perspective reveals the limits that complexity places on knowledge and technology, bringing to light our hubristically dysfunctional relationship with the natural world and increasingly tenuous connection to reality. The inescapable conclusion is that, barring a cultural metamorphosis that breaks free of deeply entrenched mental frames that made us what we are, continued development of the Global Economy will lead inexorably to the collapse of civilization.
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An idea is not responsible for who happens to be carrying it at the time. It stands or it falls on its own merits.

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It's true right now like it was back then. The old devils are at it again. When I say devil you know who I mean these animals in the dark malicious politicians with nefarious schemes charlatans and crooked cops. - 'Old Devils' William Elliot Whitmore

it seems to me that as a group they may be in unique position to battle climate change. In Canada, they have won some big legal battles since the First Nations never ceded land to Canada. I have no idea statuses in the US but maybe a legal angle will reveal itself?

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It's true right now like it was back then. The old devils are at it again. When I say devil you know who I mean these animals in the dark malicious politicians with nefarious schemes charlatans and crooked cops. - 'Old Devils' William Elliot Whitmore

hellinahandcart's picture

or as effective as the physical/emotional/spiritual angle.
They are a people 'of the land'-- and everyone knows this, understands this. They are speaking straight to the heart of the matter: Water is Life. They are bringing us back to the very essence of life. They are changing the message from protestation to protection- of the essence of life. It's simple, and it's undeniable.
I for one have not been so excited- and so hopeful- about a "protest" in my lifetime, as the coming together of hundreds of tribes of Native people in N.D.. They are 'bringing it home,' so to speak, and they know it. They know we need them to lead us.

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I for one have not been so excited- and so hopeful- about a "protest" in my lifetime, as the coming together of hundreds of tribes of Native people in N.D.

I totally agree!

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It's true right now like it was back then. The old devils are at it again. When I say devil you know who I mean these animals in the dark malicious politicians with nefarious schemes charlatans and crooked cops. - 'Old Devils' William Elliot Whitmore

Roger Fox's picture

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FDR 9-23-33, "If we cannot do this one way, we will do it another way. But do it we will.

Song of the lark's picture

That's a fine paragraph but you could have just said Jensen's premise number one. "Civilization is unsustainable, particularly industrial civilization." And re your fine diary. All our laws are backed up with the threat of violence. This is what we call justice.

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lotlizard's picture

In their own minds, all evil is projected onto Trump — and onto anyone who dares to put in a good word for the anti-neocon, anti-neolib, anti-establishment voter sentiment Trump represents.

Many folks are so busy riffing off Trump’s fantasy fascism to signal their own virtue, they’ve lost any interest in opposing the fascist twists and turns real administrations and their real Justice Departments have taken in both past and present.

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snoopydawg's picture

The bipartisan neoconservatives and lies to us about how ISIL has attracted the US, brags about the sanctions put on Iraq and Iran without mentioning how many people had died because of the sanctions not allowing essential medicines in to those countries. Basically threatened Iran , Russia and China.
She said that even with the sanctions against Iran they still were able to make centrifuges and are working on creating nuclear weapons. Accuses Putin of invading Crimea when it was her BFF Nuland and the CIA who overthrew Ukraine's elected government and installed the puppet president who used to live in Virginia and told Hillary that if he was president then he would open the country to foreign companies which the previous president refused to do.
As Stein said,"I know what Trump has said he would do, but I know what Hillary has done ".

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Which AIPAC/MIC/pharma/bank bought politician are you going to vote for? Don’t be surprised when nothing changes.

Meteor Man's picture

That's not entirely true. The arrest part gets boring and annoying, but even short county time gives you another run in with Gladiator School. You know, where the youngsters going upstate practice their skills in preparation for the big house.

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"They'll say we're disturbing the peace, but there is no peace. What really bothers them is that we are disturbing the war." Howard Zinn

don mikulecky's picture

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An idea is not responsible for who happens to be carrying it at the time. It stands or it falls on its own merits.