Protest

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This is something I ran into which coincidentaly was written just before
the recent police disruption of the protests at the democratic
convention.
I also learned that the LAPD sent a memo to all the officers describing
the protesters at the convention as being "anrchists" and extremists",
that the protestors carried egg shells full of acid with the intent of
disturbing the peace. For more info on this stuff, check out Democracy
Now
on radio pacifica or ZNET at http://www.lbbs.org/ZNETTOPnoanimation.html
Later
Chris

Police Abuses Won't Stifle Protests

By Mark Weisbrot

"When protest becomes effective, governments become repressive." Tom
Hayden summed it up in an axiom three decades ago, while describing his
own trial on conspiracy charges for organizing protests against the
Vietnam War.

The Seattle protests last December knocked the millenium round of WTO
negotiations out of commission, and demonstrators have faced increasingly
hostile government actions ever since. This is especially true for those
who have kept to their principles of non-violence and no destruction of
property-- which includes almost everyone who showed up in Washington DC
last April to protest the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, and
in Philadelphia last week for the Republican Convention.

The city of Philadelphia upped the ante with the arrest last week of John
Sellers on conspiracy charges, and the setting of bail-- for misdemeanor
charges-- at one million dollars. A higher court reduced the bail, which
was more typical for a murder suspect than someone who is accused of
conspiring to block traffic, to $100,000 on Tuesday. But the message was
clear.

Sellers heads the Ruckus Society, a group that has trained activists in
the techniques of non-violent civil disobedience. The group was
instrumental in organizing both the Seattle and Washington, D.C.
protests.
He was apparently singled out not for anything he had done in
Philadelphia, but for who he is. The use of special punishments on the
basis of a person's political identity certainly contradicts the
principle
that we are "a nation of laws, not of men."

Philadelphia is not alone. In Washington DC, the police went so far as to
close down the meeting center of the organizations that were planning the
protests. This was a flagrant violation of civil liberties more commonly
seen in countries like Indonesia or Burma than in the United States.
(Philadelphia police staged a similar, almost certainly illegal raid last
week on a warehouse used for making puppets and other protest props,
"preventively arresting" 70 people). Washington police also rounded up
hundreds of people on the street one night, including some unlucky
tourists, and launched "pre-emptive strikes" against people who looked
like they might be on their way to a demonstration.

Although there were some scuffles between police and a few protestors in
Philadelphia, it is important to understand that police abuses have not
been committed in response to violence or even property damage. In
Seattle, for example, a handful of people on the fringes of the protests
broke windows and overturned trash bins. But the police mostly ignored
the
window-breakers and let loose their tear gas, pepper spray, and rubber
bullets on the thousands of peaceful demonstrators.

It may seem inflated to compare these protests to the much larger
demonstrations of the Vietnam era, but the Seattle and DC demonstrations
were enormously effective. The WTO has yet to recover from the collapse
of
its millenium round, and last April's protests in Washington gave
millions
of Americans their first glimpse of the IMF and the World Bank. These two
organizations head up a creditors' cartel that controls the major
economic
decisions for more than 60 countries. They are the most powerful
financial
institutions in the world, and they have relied on public unawareness for

55 years to maintain-- and regularly abuse-- their power.

The protestors have solid moral authority for invoking the long-standing
tradition of non-violent civil disobedience. Martin Luther King once
compared such infractions to an ambulance going through a red light on
its
way to the hospital. The issues raised by the protestors certainly have
the moral urgency that King was describing.

Fifteen million Africans have already died from AIDS, and our
government's
policies (together with the IMF, World Bank, and WTO) could cost the
lives
of millions more. Extracting the maximum debt service from these
devastated countries, and protecting US patent holders from the spread of
affordable, generic anti-AIDS drugs, appear to remain as these
institutions top priorities.

At home, we now have nearly two million prisoners languishing behind
bars,
hundreds of thousands convicted on drug charges for which no civilized
society would incarcerate them.

These are among the issues that the mostly young people whom Philadephia
Police Commissioner John Timoney described as "a cadre of criminal
conspirators" have sought to bring to public attention.

Million dollar bail, conspiracy charges, illegal raids, and police abuses
are unlikely to be any more effective than tear gas and pepper spray in
discouraging these protests. Nor will Mayor Street's threat to prosecute
low grade misdemeanor charges "to the full extent of the law." He should
take a lesson from Washington, DC and release the protesters still being
held in Philadelphia's jails.

Mark Weisbrot is co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy
Research in Washington, DC.



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