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Oct 25, 15

All The News You Didn’t Even Know Was Going Down

Originally posted to It’s Going Down

According to the Halifax Media Co-op, in New Brunswick RCMPs have been trading notes and flying out to meet with American police and FBI agents on how to better police shale gas developments from protesters. One pig report stated:

“New Brunswick is at the exploratory stages of a Shale Gas industry and there has been considerable protests and criminality with a great deal of rhetoric and misinformation from many sources. This visit will give us an opportunity to meet with a police department that has been dealing with issues associated to Shale Gas development since 2008. Initial teleconferences have been held and the value to be gained from a face to face meeting is significant.”

The article then goes to write:

Pennsylvania has an embarrassing history of collusion between private security firms, industry, state police, Homeland Security Offices, as well as the FBI, in targeting anti-shale gas activists (read: peaceful protesters). Information sharing between private security and police and with industry, along with intimidatory house visits to anti-shale gas activists, are well-documented. Inappropriate abuses of state powers in targeting anti-shale gas protesters have, over the years, resulted in a variety of high-level resignations.

Readers will also remember, especially given the Indigenous-led demographic of New Brunswick’s 2013 protests, that a variety of information sharing between industry, the RCMP and the Assembly of First Nations took place. The RCMP also employed a variety of tactics to undermine the strength of the anti-shale gas protests during 2013, the least of which involved several paid informants on site.

As with the policing, intelligence gathering, and counter-insurgency methods used against the recent Occupy and Black Lives Matter movements, we can be sure that government agencies across Canada, the US, and Mexico will be monitoring and seeking to subvert and hinder combative resistance movements against fracking.

At the same time, we have to draw sides against self-policing within our struggles and take issue with Halifax Media Co-op’s notion of ‘peaceful protesters’ being targeted. This is problematic because it seems to imply that the State unjustly only targets “good protesters” while the “bad” and “violent” ones walk free. As A Murder of Crows wrote:

Liberals, progressives, and most activists draw up official statements denouncing violence, sabotage, and illegality, all in hopes of proving to the government that they are just good citizens who like to follow the rules and who are interested in “positive” social change. This spineless response is standard for the left, and serves to flank the state’s actions. Disassociation is not only a cowardly act, but is also based on faulty logic.

In actuality, repression is a long-term strategy employed by the state regardless of specific illegal acts and is an attempt to maintain the status quo by any means necessary. Repression, then, is always present in many forms. It is the police, the courts, the prison system, the proliferation of security cameras, the immigrant detention centers and the like. If anyone needs further proof that the state doesn’t merely punish people for breaking its laws, and instead represses in order to destroy its opposition, one need only take a look at recent events.

As shown by FBI infiltration of anarchist demonstrations and events and local police infiltration of protest groups, it is easy to see that they were not investigating crimes that had taken place, but rather they were investigating possibilities of concrete resistance, which by necessity, generally break the law. It is not intermittent, and does not always respond to particular violations of the law; it is a long-term strategy of the state to destroy opposition. This strategy, however, has wider implications beyond the bounds of the radical milieu and affects the exploited as a whole.

Let’s cut that liberal shit out of our thinking, ok?

In Chicago, Illinois, the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) Conference drew protests outside in the streets which blocked traffic and also produced some insane ass tweets from inside. Check out this shit from New York Year Zero and try not to poop yourself:

Those trading cards tho…But really, luckily not everyone (check out #StoptheCops) was duped by the buffet of techno-police state trick or treats as a large group of people blockaded the area outside the conference leading to over 60 arrests. According to one report:

Other speakers called for the firing of Officer Dante Servin, who shot and killed unarmed black woman Rekia Boyd in 2012. A police conduct board has recommended Servin be fired, but he has yet to be dismissed and the process to fire him could take several months.

Activists then marched from headquarters to McCormick Place, 2301 S. Lake Shore Drive. Protesters had lain down around the roads surrounding McCormick Place, locking and chaining themselves so they could not be moved. They laid down alongside mock coffins that bore the names of people killed by police, including Boyd. They had, one speaker said, shut down McCormick Place.

https://twitter.com/PaulGottinger/status/658013261468692480

In the United States as of this writing, police have killed a staggering 975 people since the start of 2015.

In Denver, America continued its commitment to housing the homeless by breaking up a “Tiny House” village and throwing a bunch of poor people in jail. Apparently people are undeterred from the attempts by the pigs to keep them from taking and using a empty community garden to house people and have returned since the arrests. Stay strong D-dawgs!

As with Occupy, the threat to the State lies not in a physical threat, but in people coming together and meeting their needs outside of the law and property relations (which, let’s face it, is mostly what the law is). What’s interesting for us is that such “positive” projects such as building homes for people show clearly the need for “negative” forms of resistance (good ol’ riotin’) and defense of occupied space. We need to take living, and we need to take fighting, and slap those bastards together in a delicious medley akin to chocolate and peanut-butter.

A recent report published by the big-pigs at the FBI shows how huge a group of whine-whines American law enforcement really are:

The report found that across the entire country, only 76 LEOs were killed in “line-of-duty” incidents. 27 died as a result of “felonious” acts and 49 officers died in accidents–namely, automobile (ironically, of the 23 killed in car accidents, 14 were not wearing seat belts–a violation for which cops routinely ticket drivers). More officers die from accidents than actual murders on the job. The report also outright admits that intentional murders of cops were down from 2004 and 2009.

Further, 49,851 officers were assaulted–a statistic that seemingly proves police are at risk. 29.2%, or 14,556, were actually injured (an admittedly high number). Still, a suspect fact is that 79.8% of the time, “assailants used personal weapons (hands, fists, feet, etc.).” This means that in a vast majority of cases, there was no physical evidence that assault occurred (outside of potential bruises and cuts, but this information is not public). Punches and kicks can be damaging, but nowhere near firearms and knives, which constituted a very small percentage of “assaults.” The report also does not specify what constitutes an “injury,” making designations of injury potentially arbitrary and subjective.

This means that the common police tactic of misrepresenting scuffles and charging people with assault could be at work (such as when a cop squeezed the breast of an Occupy protester so hard he left a bruise and in the chaos, she accidentally elbowed a cop. She went to jail for “assaulting” an officer). Of course, it’s a possibility that all 49,851 officers were simply “doing their jobs,” but at the very least it is important to be skeptical.

In labor news, in Oakland people picketed a KFC after a Fight for $15 organizer was fired. Port Truck drivers are also continuing to organize and carry out protests. Stay up with them here.

In anti-fascist news, the website, ah…antifascistnews.net has a slew of new articles up that we encourage everyone to check out. This includes a call to confront and shut down the National Policy Institute’s conference at the National Press Club in Washington DC. The National Policy Institute’s yearly event has:

[B]ecome one of the intellectual centers of a neo-fascist American movement that runs under the auspices of antiquated philosophy, pseudo-science, fringe politics, and big personalities.  The associated website, Radix, has become a who’s who of the “alt right,” which we prefer to identify as “alt fascist.”  This means far right ideas that associate with counter-cultural and intellectual elements, including neo-paganism, radical environmentalism, and other more spiritually and intellectually inclined folks, while also bridging to former paleoconversatives and beltway types.

The blog also have several other recent reports on the merging of the anti-immigrant movement with more open white nationalists, Neo-Fascist folks bands, National ‘Anarchists,’ and a new anti-fascist defense fund.

For further reports to wet your antifa appetite, we suggest checking out recent posts and reports from NYC Antifa and Three Way Fight. Don’t forget, the US based Torch Anti-Fascist Network Conference is happening in Philadelphia on November 7th and 8th. People should go and send us back reports on what they got out of the conference.

In other conference news, Earth First! announced:

The 2016 Earth First! Rendezvous organizing collective is hard at work trying to make the Rendezvous next summer in Michigan as great as possible! We’ll roll out updates as they become available but in the meantime if you have any comments or questions feel free to direct them to our email: [email protected].

Hopefully these gatherings can reach beyond the ‘radical’ subculture that generally attends such events and be a real place for reflection, organizing, and networking that is needed for militants across various struggles to become more of a concrete social force.

One last gathering taking place in North America is the ‘Yes to Mother Earth, No To Mining’ happening in Oaxaca, Mexico. Currently several people are fundraising to travel from Canada to Mexico. Drop them a few bills and hopefully when they come back they’ll tell us about it.

In eco-news via our friends at the Earth First! Journal, a North Dakota oil well continues to spew and leak tens of thousands of gallons of crude oil and salt-water, Florida began a horrific assault on the black bear population, and this September was the hottest year on record.

In disgusting patriarchy news, attacks, both physical and in terms of cuts and closures, to abortion and reproductive health clinics continues across the US.

Resistance to fracking and oil pipelines continued across the United States and elsewhere. In Boston, 12 people were arrested for protesting a pipeline that ran through a residential area. In Vermont, a large crowd of hundreds gathered to protest a natural gas pipeline that would cut through rural areas. Hopefully the US can take a cue from militant, grassroots, and confrontational struggles happening in France to protect the ZAD and in Germany to save the Hambach Forest; its time to move beyond the symbolic.

While parades, protests, and marches like the ones described above are a chance for people to meet and network, they are still designed to simply petition a level of anger to those in power; not to blockade, destroy, or attack a system which day by day threatens life on this planet. The rich and powerful aren’t going to act on our behalf in any way that benefits us, we have to do that on our own.

In Mexico, teacher union protests and encampments have begun, with people occupying public squares and organizing demonstrations. A recent article in TruthOut makes the case that teachers in the US could learn much from those in Mexico:

The weakening of the public sphere in US education, painful as it is, is minor compared to recent developments in Mexico. For nearly two years, tens of thousands of Mexican teachers have mobilized against so-called “education reforms,” especially in the southeastern Mexican state of Oaxaca, though virtually nothing of this massive teacher movement has been reported in mainstream US media. In Oaxaca and beyond, protesting Mexican teachers have demonstrated, gone on strike, seized buildings, closed highways and confronted the police and army, mainly nonviolently…President Enrique Peña Nieto’s administration have nothing to do with educational improvement and everything to do with an aggressive neoliberal political agenda, the privatization of schools and attacks on hard-earned labor union rights and protections.

But resistance continues among activist teachers, not only in Oaxaca. We remember the experiences of teachers in Wisconsin, and the re-emergence of the teachers’ union movement in Los Angeles, Portland, St. Paul and Chicago. We recognize the profound struggles of teachers and parents today against high-stakes testing across the United States and ponder the perils of not engaging their voices in the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. We also ponder the possibilities of how much more powerful teachers and their allies could be if we would recognize our shared experiences and open up new paths for cross-border solidarity and action.

In Oaxaca, we are witnessing a form of contestation to the corporate agenda in education that includes teachers, students and the public. Despite media misinformation or silence, the resistance is sustained…

In weird and totally horrific racism news:

https://twitter.com/rembert/status/657317523554177024

That’s it for us this week. A big shout out to the Crimethinc folks who are touring the US currently. If you haven’t checked out their presentation check out their site to find out what tour dates are left. Stay tuned this week for all new articles with hopefully some new original content on the way very soon. Also, if you have an idea for an article, interview, column, or photo montage of epic proportions, hit us up and submit that shit!

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In search of new forms of life. It's Going Down is a digital community center and media platform featuring news, opinion, podcasts, and reporting on autonomous social movements and revolt across so-called North America from an anarchist perspective.

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