Time for a Revolution

By Carl Gibson, Reader Supported News

17 August 12

"Those who make nonviolent revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." - JFK

"God forbid we should ever be 20 years without such a rebellion." - Thomas Jefferson

"Power concedes nothing without a demand ... The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress." - Frederick Douglass

f you've ever noticed an inconspicuous dome-shaped camera out in public, chances are good that a private company called Abraxas, consisting of highly-skilled CIA elites in Northern Virginia, have noticed you. And above just noticing you on camera, they have your face on file, track your movements from place to place, and know what car you drive, your home address, your occupation, and only God (and the CIA) knows what else, thanks to a program called TrapWire unearthed by Wikileaks and Anonymous. A whitewash scrub story by the New York Times calls the program "counter-terrorism software," but these leaked Stratfor emails show that TrapWire is mainly used to monitor activists, not terrorists.

The biggest news of the week that nobody's noticed thanks to the Olympics and Miley Cyrus's new haircut is that the Obama administration is appealing Manhattan federal judge Katherine Forrest's ruling that the indefinite detention clause of the National Defense Authorization Act is unconstitutional. The White House has presented no evidence to support their case, but they're still appealing, based on their claim that the executive branch has the right to put anyone deemed a potential terrorist threat in military jail for an indefinite period of time. The most troubling part of this story is that the White House refuses to say whether or not they're still indefinitely detaining people even after Forrest's ruling.

And the anti-protest law, HR 347, that was easily passed through both houses of Congress and signed into law by President Obama without so much as a peep from the media, makes it a felony for anyone to protest anyone, anywhere, where there is secret service protection. To capture the sad irony award of the year, the Department of Homeland Security assisted the Philadelphia Police Department in arresting dozens of nonviolent protesters guilty of nothing else than expressing First Amendment rights of free speech and free assembly at the Occupy National Gathering, in the same city that's home to Independence Hall and the Liberty Bell of all places, on the 4th of July weekend, of all times. On this chilling video, the last feed of the last livestreamer shortly before an unjustified arrest, you can hear the cameraman remind his fellow kettled protesters that they haven't been given any charges, nor any opportunity to disperse before a mass illegal arrest, which is technically a kidnapping.

Perhaps the calculated media silence is because corrupt governments and corporations don't like to have their corruption documented on film and seen by the public. In my current city, Manchester, New Hampshire, one man is facing 21 years in prison, or 3 7-year counts of felony wiretapping, for recording a Manchester police officer slamming the face of a high school student into a cafeteria table.

Our securitized surveillance police state has shown how it reacts to nonviolent protest movements - harsh and brutal retaliation. Protesters nonviolently demonstrating at a meeting of Northeastern governors and Canadian officials in Burlington, Vermont, were attacked with pepper balls and rubber bullets. Anaheim, California, is under what amounts to martial law after the unprovoked murder of an unarmed man by police. Even chalk drawings now are apparently cause for police to shoot artists with rubber bullets, like they did recently in Los Angeles. And in London before the Olympics, a group of bicyclists were tackled by police, pepper-sprayed and arrested for doing nothing other than riding bikes.

So, just to recap - we live in a country where your every move is monitored and tracked by thousands of cameras, where you can be deemed a terrorist threat without a shred of evidence, where protesting politicians and filming police is a felony, and anyone can be indefinitely detained without trial or representation at the order of the President. This means the entire bill of rights is being blatantly disregarded by the current government, with the exception of amendments 2 and 3. The only things that don't appear to be serious crimes worthy of government action are mass shootings like the recent ones in Colorado, Wisconsin and Texas, and, of course, the deliberate mortgage fraud perpetuated by the world's biggest banks, who all just got a free pass from the United States Department of Justice.

The only appropriate government response to mass shootings seems to be thoughts and prayers, combined with more prayers and and thoughts. And the government's official response to bankers kicking families out of their homes so they could buy a newer Bentley was to not press any charges. After all, there are more serious criminals to pursue, like people protesting the behavior of banks.

In a nation with a somewhat reasonable government, like Iceland, a nonviolent protest movement can sometimes lead to the current government being voted out, tried for their crimes, and replaced with a new government that arrests bankers, forgives fraudulent mortgage debt, and crowdsources a new constitution directly from the people.

Concerning less reasonable governments, like the Assad regime in Syria, a nonviolent protest movement had no choice but to take up arms against their government when their protesting was met with cold-blooded murder of children at the hands of state military and police. And after the loss of thousands of lives, the people appear to have almost achieved the seemingly impossible victory of overthrowing their tyrant. Good for them.

Though our elections are rigged, the state isn't yet massacring its citizens in the streets. I'd like to think the ability for the US government to be reasonable lies somewhere between Iceland and Syria. Because Occupy's methods of nonviolent, momentary disruption of society for the sake of civil disobedience were only met with state-sponsored violence and blatant suppression of freedoms, this means tactics must now be amplified if we're to force meaningful change. Acts of protest must now become acts of rebellion, like refusing to waive your 4th amendment rights at a border patrol checkpoint. It can mean blocking the Texas leg of the Keystone XL pipeline. It could even be similar to Roger Pion's retaliation to police in Vermont, when he ran over all their cruisers with his tractor in response to their constant harassment.

The state's first mistake was thinking they could continue their goal of redistributing the last of the wealth owned by the middle class to the richest 1% without resistance. Their second mistake was brutally suppressing the nonviolent uprising that swept the country last Fall, and then continuing their class war as if nothing had happened. If this government makes the third mistake of not responding to the multiple demands that have been made for accountability, for fair elections, or even just an equal shot at a good life for everyone, then the citizens have every right to do what according to Jefferson, should've rightfully been done a long time ago. If small acts of rebellion are ignored, the United States could become the next Syria. In all of history, no tyrannical power has ever conceded peacefully.

Carl Gibson, 24, of Lexington, Kentucky, is a spokesman and organizer for US Uncut, a nonviolent, creative direct-action movement to stop budget cuts by getting corporations to pay their fair share of taxes. He graduated from Morehead State University in 2009 with a B.A. in Journalism before starting the first US Uncut group in Jackson, Mississippi, in February of 2011. Since then, over 20,000 US Uncut activists have carried out more than 300 actions in over 100 cities nationwide. He currently lives in Manchester, New Hampshire. You may contact Carl at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.

Why Republicans Have to Lie

By Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast

16 August 12

f I were writing a political novel about a presidential campaign, I would never dare have the government-hating, free-market, Rand-adulating vice presidential candidate of the right-wing party have inherited his fortune from a grandfather who made his money from government contracts. It's too obvious, too pat. A fiction editor would say, "Come on, Tomasky, this is just too heavy-handed."

Especially if the same candidate and his running mate were attacking the other guy with a lie that specifically distorted what he'd said about, of all things, roads and bridges! ("You didn't build that.") Grandpappy Ryan did exactly what Obama says other people did to help small businesses thrive. He built the roads. And he was paid to do so by government contracts. Forget fiction. That's even too pat for Hollywood.

Ryan tries to address this by saying there's no contradiction between the source of his wealth and his views because of course he's not anti-government, that's a caricature of his views, etc etc. This is absurd. No one who got into politics because of some arrested-development reaction to reading Ayn Rand is pro-government. He can talk pretty to Ryan Lizza, knowing that he's talking to New Yorker readers, and try to pass himself off as nuanced, but there's nothing nuanced about the numbers.

Back in 2001, Paul O'Neill wrote some talking points as debate prep for Dubya. As Jon Chait wrote in my journal, Democracy, of those talking points:

One frankly conceded, “The public prefers spending on things like health care and education over cutting taxes. It’s crucial that your remarks make clear that there is no trade-off here.”

Put more bluntly, what O'Neill was saying here is: You have to lie. By definition, you have to lie. You can't tell people that tax-cutting will result in less money for these programs, which is the truth, so you/we Republicans have to invent a fiction of no trade-offs, of a free market that can deliver everything. What Bush delivered to us was essentially no net job growth in eight years and the worst crisis in 80.

So the Ryan-Romney ticket, as it should properly be called, has to say things like "we want government to do the things it does well." Romney has to say things like he said on TV this morning, "No one is talking about deregulating Wall Street," when in fact he is talking about exactly that. Because they can't tell the truth and hope to get elected.

"What we're going to do here is make sure society's very richest people have a lot more money. Our theory is they will spend it and that will help the whole economy. History hasn't been kind to this idea, but it's our theory and we're sticking to it. These are the people who pay us to run, after all. Besides which, we really don't like poor people; we think at bottom that it's their fault they're poor, so it doesn't really matter to us whether anything trickles down to them." That's the truth. How would that sell?