Occupy Wall Street 3: Now What?

yeah it's like saying if we had even fewer laws w/r/t political or police corruption, it would be 'an industry'

― iatee, Wednesday, February 8, 2012 12:58 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

??? my point is that the industry we're talking about (highly leveraged market speculation) exists because the regulations that constrained it were struck down. and because it's crazy profitable.

if there were potential for huge profits in busting heads (and i suppose there is, one way or the other), and there were no laws against it, then i'm sure it would be a viable industry.

my point is that leveraged market speculation isn't a mistake. it's entirely intentional, something to which we allow people to dedicate their lives. police brutality, on the other hand, is generally considered an error, whether a mistake or deliberate transgression. it's either an individual error (poor judgment, bad apple, w/e) or an institutional error (corruption, entitlement, oppression, failure of oversight, etc).

I don't think that's the root cause of WHY individual cops are violent. in general, people don't do everything they are authorized to do, simply because they can.

individual causes will always be individual, but in general, i think people do do everything they are authorized to do. and a little bit more. i'd almost go so far as to call this a rule of nature. the recognition of this rule is what makes the constitution's attempted "balance of powers" so brilliant.

police brutality, on the other hand, is generally considered an error

wow I totally disagree with this, it is a specific tactic that is used in specific circumstances to get specific results, with total collusion by all relevant authorities (as regards OWS and demos, maybe not in general)

“If their real target actually was the cops and not the Occupy movement, the Black Bloc would make their actions completely separate from Occupy, instead of effectively using these others as a human shield.

this part of Jensen's quote bears repeating and is in line with my own thinking on the subject after literally 20 years of watching people argue about this (and sometimes arguing myself).

with total collusion by all relevant authorities

I don't know about that, I'm pretty sure there are plenty of cases of rogue copes engaging in police brutality that isn't exactly supported by their higher-ups.

oh sure, but when you get situations like the cops during Seattle '99 deliberately beating the shit out of the first person on each prison bus that talked back, that is where it becomes an accepted tactic.

yeah, come on, when a cop starts beating someone/shoots somebody/whatever the tendency of the other cops present is to close ranks and either protect the cop or participate themselves

"brotherhood of the badge" and all that bullshit. you will never see cops argue amongst themselves about tactics in public, EVER.

wow I totally disagree with this, it is a specific tactic that is used in specific circumstances to get specific results, with total collusion by all relevant authorities (as regards OWS and demos, maybe not in general)

then we really have to work at defining terms. because a certain amount of a police officer's work is likely to involve the application of physical force, perhaps even lethal force. this is a big part of the job description.

we typically use the phrase "police brutality" not to describe police violence we find acceptable, but rather unacceptable and even criminal applications of violence by police officers and forces. thus "police brutality" is inherently unacceptable, transgressive.

if the brutality we're speaking of is institutional, then yes, it's typically authorized from on high, at least tacitly, but again, adequate oversight and constraint of police forces should prevent and/or punish this.

But thats not what I was saying at all, you are completely otm Shakey, but I don't think its as simple as saying that all incidents of police brutality receive "total collusion by all relevant authorities".

"brotherhood of the badge" and all that bullshit. you will never see cops argue amongst themselves about tactics in public, EVER.

― max buzzword (Shakey Mo Collier), Wednesday, February 8, 2012 1:29 PM (14 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

agree, and it's a huge problem that should be addressed. but that's my angle here: address it. the problem isn't that cops are evil, but that we don't work hard enough to make a police force we can live with.

if the brutality highly-leveraged finance we're speaking of is institutional, then yes, it's typically authorized from on high, at least tacitly, but again, adequate oversight and constraint of police forces the financial industry should prevent and/or punish this.

oh so it's OUR fault? xp

we do not have anything remotely approaching "adequate oversight and constraint of police forces" in this country, and that is because cops and govt resist it at every step.

I know this isn't what contenderizer is actually saying here, but sometimes his posts itt read a little, "if we all ask nicely, the police won't abuse their authority".

we do not have anything remotely approaching "adequate oversight and constraint of police forces" in this country, and that is because cops and govt resist it at every step. we don't demand it. period.

― sleeve, Wednesday, February 8, 2012 1:32 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

cops and government resisted democracy, too, and black civil rights, and cetera.

my point is more that we have to power to address police brutality, if we care to. just as we have the power to address economic inequalities and abuses.

xp.

Well, yeah, but "address" is a choice word instead of "change".

dude we have been working to get a real police review committee going in my town since 1997, you ghave clearly never done any actual organizational work on this issue.

xp

have

Serpico was the only honest cop in NY, right?

iatee: though we can swap them in and out of sentences without eroding sense, i don't think there's any sense in which police brutality and highly leveraged speculation are terribly similar. from a social engineering standpoint, they might both be described as "tactics" i suppose, but they're tactics with very different ends. one attempts to fleece, the other to control. a well matched set, perhaps, but still quite distinct from one another.

Knapp Commission findings (Serpico) in the early '70s got us a NYC civilian complaint review board... in 1993.

attempts to reform the Oakland PD, including recent actions by the Justice Department, have proven er ineffective, to say the least. I'm not sayin reform can't be done, but it is a long, long uphill battle.

and then we had Rudy G for 8 years so u know

xp

jeez you guys i go apply for jobs with the national park service and the koch brothers for 10 damn minutes and i miss all the fun

like I said upthread, I count it as a small miracle that the OPD hasn't murdered anybody from Occupy Oakland yet.

xp

*literal facepalms*

you ghave clearly never done any actual organizational work on this issue.

that's ridiculous. people have been trying to disempower rapacious capitalism in america for ages, with little success. this does not prove that someone who argues that it's possible to address capitalism's problems is ignorant.

attempts to reform the Oakland PD, including recent actions by the Justice Department, have proven er ineffective, to say the least. I'm not sayin reform can't be done, but it is a long, long uphill battle.

this i agree with. same as everything to which OWS has dedicated itself.

it is a specific tactic that is used in specific circumstances to get specific results, with total collusion by all relevant authorities (as regards OWS and demos, maybe not in general)

i mean everything i know about policing in the war on drugs suggests this ~is~ the case in general--if it isn't a matter of deliberate strategy, there's at least a deliberate blue wall

contendo I never said "ignorant", I find your statements naive and I think you are overthinking and intellectualizing these issues, to their detriment.

as much as I love a good tactics debate, I have to go do a radio show.

what thread are we on again?

smtg about Kaputt i think

fwiw the new ubiquity of 'non-lethal' weaponry, studies have shown, actually make them more likely to be deployed against 'passively resisting' people, rather than as mere non-lethal alternatives to lethal force

of course there's a blue wall! we allow cops to police themselves, and we allow them to do it badly. their union is powerful, they view themselves as under constant siege, and they have nothing to gain from failing to support one another.

this isn't conspiratorial, it's something we openly accept. i tried to explain why (imo) a ways upthread, before this went all clusterfucky. my only point here is that if we don't like the blue wall, don't like the way our governments use police brutality to get results, we need to work for a change in public attitudes towards law enforcement.

this could be done in exactly the same manner that OWS is working (successfully!) to change public attitudes about economic disparity. but only if enough people agree. that's the rub. absent some dramatic change or event, i don't imagine that this issue is going to seize the public imagination atm, and that's a shame.

as much as I love a good tactics debate, I have to go do a radio show.

― sleeve, Wednesday, February 8, 2012 1:46 PM (7 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i'm not even really talking tactics, though i did begin to slide that way towards the end. i was initially trying to counter what i saw as naivete: "cops are evil" reductionism mixed with the optimistic idea that "the truth" about police brutality might be communicated to the american people in a way that would transform their awareness.

my read is that we get the police forces we demand - or at least we get what we'll accept. and americans in general seem to demand and accept some rather brutal policing. the "awful truth" loses much of its transformative power when it's generally understood and accepted, after all...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JIXEmeTRdUQ

I'm still hung up on the fact that a 3% "failure rate" is considered anything but deplorable. No industry anywhere would accept that. Like if your surgeon says there's a 3% mortality rate with this procedure, what they're actually saying is "this shit is dangerous"

it's just 3% rat feces!

3% of your coworkers being useless wastes of space?

3% of people buying into convenient good/evil binaries

THERE IT IS

so

http://www.salon.com/2012/02/05/dc_occupiers_tumble_as_cops_move_in/singleton/

as much as i like the idea of people using 'the battle of mcpherson' as shorthand for saturday's events, i don't think it's gonna catch on

Sadly, not if its just covered this way on Salon, as opposed to local tv news show coverage and Washington Post coverage (which I do not believe strayed from a "neutral" or pro-police and cleaning up dirty mess meme).

The anti-CPAC conservative gabfest protests coming upon Saturday will likely only get covered if there's a traffic jam and someone gets hit by a car, or if there's another altercation with the police

Ha, according to Politico, at the conference Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell plans to launch a fierce attack on the Obama administration and congressional Democrats, calling out “liberal thugs” for intimidating their opponents in the name of political expediency.

at CPAC I advocate snatching the hairpiece off the dome of some prominent wingnut for TV time

lol

David Graeber's open-letter response to Chris Hedges criticism of Black Bloc: http://nplusonemag.com/concerning-the-violent-peace-police

haha was just about to put that here

in other news, my livetweets of sunday's GA

http://storify.com/hoosteen/what-s-next-for-occupydc

It was back in 1999 that people used to pretend “the Black Bloc” was made up of nihilistic primitivist followers of John Zerzan opposed to all forms of organization. Nowadays, the preferred approach is to pretend “the Black Bloc” is made up of nihilistic insurrectionary followers of The Invisible Committee, opposed to all forms of organization. Both are absurd slurs. Yours is also 12 years out of date.

MY MAN

this is good too:

After the fiasco of Seattle, of watching some activists actively turning others over to the police—we quickly decided we needed to ensure this never happened again. What we found that if we declared “we shall all be in solidarity with one another. We will not turn in fellow protesters to the police. We will treat you as brothers and sisters. But we expect you to do the same to us”