Salt City Sinner

Quick update: as of this writing, the police are dismantling the #OccupyLA camp site at City Hall in Los Angeles. Image from CBS NPR's write-up   here  . The Raw Story has a live feed for who knows how long (probably not long)   here  . CNN's LA write-up (with additional information about the police taking down #OccupyPhiladelphia)   here  . The Socialist Worker has a very insightful, very sharp article today entitled " Co-opt-upy Wall Street? " which recounts an #OccupyWallSt event from November 17: New York City activists from OWS spent weeks planning the November 17 day of action alongside organizers from unions and community organizations, including the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). But when the Occupiers showed up for the day's culminating rally and march over the Brooklyn Bridge, they found a completely different event from the one they had planned.  Instead of a series of platforms for coordinated "people's mic...

(Initial post   here  , follow-up from yesterday   here  . Information about #OccupySLC can be found   here  ,   here  , and   here  .) Last night a friend of mine tweeted me the following: She is referring to a meticulous blog post by Joshua Holland, syndicated at Alternet , that takes a hatchet to Naomi Wolf's piece in the Guardian (" The shocking truth about the crackdown on Occupy "). Quoth Holland: There has been a flurry of speculation surrounding various reports suggesting that a "coordinated," nationwide crack-down on the Occupy Movement is underway. The problem with these stories lies in the fact that the word "coordinated" is too vague to offer any analytic value.  The difference between local officials talking to each other -- or federal law enforcement agencies advising them on what they see as "best practices" for evicting local occupations -- and some unseen hand directing, incentivizing or coer...

Please forgive my periodic absence of late - my home internet has been acting up, and between that and Thanksgiving, a mini-breather seemed in order. As I mentioned more than a week ago , there is a fairly convincing case emerging that the Federal Government in the guise of one agency or another definitely helped -- and may have played a lead role -- in coordinating the brutal series of high-profile, "show of force" evictions of #Occupy protesters in many cities across the US, including good old Salt City Central . Since the initial story broke that los federales almost certainly had a hand in the tactical coordination of many cities' ridiculously jackbooted, overfunded and militarized police forces, one article in particular has been rocketing around #Occupy on social media. Naomi Wolf wrote it and it was published in the Guardian under the tag " The shocking truth about the crackdown on Occupy ": ...just when Americans thought we had the picture -- w...

Today, NPR featured an interesting (and useful!) piece called " For Thanksgiving, Debunk Your Family's Chain Emails ." Fortunately for me, I do not come from a family that would necessitate such an exercise, but it's still handy to note an intriguing detail from the introduction: ...as part of our Message Machine partnership with NPR, [the St. Petersburg Times'] PolitiFact has put together this handy guide to chain emails and other viral messages. Hide it under the green bean casserole and you can pull it out if your uncle brings up the chain emails.  You should start by telling him that the emails are nearly always wrong. PolitiFact has checked 104 claims from emails and rated 80 percent of them "False" or "Pants on Fire." Only 4 percent of the claims have earned a "True."  The emails, heavy on exclamation points and ALL CAPITAL LETTERS, are typically sent by conservatives who dislike Obama. Lately, though, we have seen ...

Photo by Laimis Urbonas If you were to ask a group of ten long-time Utahns why they love this state, I'm willing to bet that at least eight of them would say "the natural beauty" or some variant thereof. It's a gorgeous place to live - the mountains, the canyons, the red rock, all of it. We have a diverse and amazing assortment of natural goodies, valuable both for their own sake and for the tourism and recreation revenues they haul in. Photo by Robert Riberia Unfortunately, Utah is also a state dominated by extremely right-wing politics. One of the longest-standing divides in the state is between outdoorsy types (environmentalists, recreation enthusiasts and hunters/fishers) and developers. The belittling shorthand used to dismiss people who kick up a fuss when corporations lay waste to natural landscapes used to be NIMBY - an acronym for "Not In My Back Yard" - as though opposing the destruction of your own back yard  were somehow unusual ...

Representative Ted Deutch, D-FL, member of the House Judiciary Committee, might have a good heart deep down, but I sincerely doubt it. One of the websites I keep in my RSS feed is ThinkProgress. It's a blog with a reliably "new Left" / progressive slant. I try to read news from a variety of ideological perspectives, and it's good to keep a pair of left-Democrat lenses handy. I consider this a valuable exercise for many reasons, but the primary purpose is to make sure that my bull$h!t detector has fresh batteries and still works on "my side" as well as on those with whom I disagree. Today I was pinged with the headline " Rep. Deutch Introduces OCCUPIED Constitutional Amendment To Ban Corporate Money In Politics ." Well there's something you don't see every day, I thought. Let's crack that sucker open. In one of the greatest signs yet that the 99 Percenters are having an impact... Okay, I have to say that right off the b...

It seems that while I was otherwise preoccupied  this last week, an interesting and (so far) experimental new phase in the strategy of national #Occupy protests was launched. Adbusters, the situationist anti-capitalist magazine that originally incubated the idea of the national #Occupy protests, published a blog post on 11/9/11  that reads: Throughout the day [of strikes and protests that shut down a major US port in Oakland, CA], there had been talk of escalating #OCCUPY from being a movement to take the squares into a movement to reclaim foreclosed space. The tantalizing idea of turning bank-owned, dormant buildings into radical housing, squats and community spaces floated amongst the encampment. This is a direction that has enormous potential. Unlike the use of force to remove #Occupy protesters from public encampments like the one in Pioneer Park - which ultimately is a simple matter of enforcing curfew or anti-camping ordinances - evicting committed activists ...

#Occupy national hub   here  . #OccupySLC hub   here  . Twitter   here  . Earlier today - at 11:09 AM MST, to be exact - I received a glorious piece of news. Moon Base Alpha, the second #OccupySLC base camp, formerly located at the vacant lot across the street from the Fed and now located in Gallivan Plaza , is still standing. That's right - like a Persistent Sinus Infection of Justice, it has outlived the mighty antibiotic that was the SLPD's recent raid on the original #Occupy base camp in Pioneer Park. And yea, though they pitch their tents in the valley of the shadow of massive financial institutions, they shall fear no evil, apparently. While the cops were kicking down #Occupy's sand castles in Pioneer Park, it seems that the clever denizens of Moon Base Alpha worked out some sort of quasi-formal compromise to keep their camp as long as it stayed tiny, remained completely drug-and-alcohol-free, and kept a "low profile" before du...

There's a photograph I would like you to look at. Courtesy of the Associated Press . The caption reads: "Seattle activist Doris Rainey, 84, reacts after being hit with pepper spray during an Occupy Seattle protest, Nov 15, 2011 at Westlake Park in Seattle." Many of us grew up in the suburbs, and heard over and over that the police are our friends, that they are here to protect and serve, &c. &c. I honestly think that most friends of mine who have positive impressions of the police are not being contrarian - I think that many of them have had few interactions with cops at all, and that those few have been from an unrecognized position of privilege. Even so, would the people who taught us to respect and obey the police have believed this picture? Would they have even let children see it, or would they have considered it "too graphic?" Whose side are the police on?

[Edit: Please see below for an important caveat] I have never thought of myself as overly trusting of authority, especially police authority. It had never occurred to me that the similarities between the #OccupySLC crackdown and other police incursions in other cities were anything other than coincidence or shared "best practices." Stop what you are doing right now and read this piece from Examiner.com (emphasis mine): Over the past ten days, more than a dozen cities have moved to evict "Occupy" protesters from city parks and other public spaces. As was the case in New York City, each of the police actions shares a number of characteristics. And, according to one Justice official, each of those actions was coordinated with help from Homeland Security, the FBI and other federal police agencies.   The official, who spoke on background to me late Monday evening, said that while local police agencies have received tactical and planning advice from nationa...

Once upon a time, I took a course at the University of Utah called "Neighborhood Democracy" - for all I know, now Professor-City-Councilman Luke Garrott, who used to be plain old Professor Luke Garrott, is still teaching it. As far as political science courses are concerned, it still stands as one of the best I've ever taken - Dr. Garrott was and is a fantastic professor, and it wasn't until relatively recently that I fully realized why I got so much out of his classes. I should have caught on sooner. When, for example, we were assigned Jane Mansbridge's Beyond Adversary Democracy , a book that is about the art and practice of that most Utopian of meeting structures - the non-adversarial small-d democratic model (also known, for those who are into the whole brevity thing, as "unitary democracy"). Mansbridge is excerpted in an informative and succinct fashion here . The trick to which I should have wised up sooner was Dr. Garrott's expert use of...

Over the weekend, #OccupySLC wasn't the only protest having difficulties with Officer Friendly and his ilk. #OccupyPortland was disassembled by police, according to the AP : Several hundred protesters, some wearing goggles and gas masks, marched past authorities in a downtown street Sunday, hours after riot police drove Occupy Portland demonstrators out of a pair of week-old encampments in nearby parks. #OccupyDenver met a similar fate, according to the Denver Post : Tensions between police and Occupy Denver reignited Sunday, a day after 17 protesters were arrested when officers cleared the sidewalks of a makeshift encampment.  Three more protesters were arrested Sunday, while a Denver police officer and a Colorado State Trooper sustained minor injuries in a shoving match over a table used to serve food. More from the Huffintgon Post : After a peaceful march last weekend as occupiers celebrated "Bank Transfer Day," tensions ran high again as Occupy ...

In my last post I detailed how the Salt Lake Police Department, in a massive display of force , swooped in on  the #OccupySLC Base Camp on the evening of 11/12/11 and demolished the entire thing, evicting all the longstanding #Occupants of the settlement. #OccupySLC has released a statement to the media regarding last night's police action. An excerpt: As the sun was setting on Salt Lake City last night, scores of police from several different agencies occupied 400 South and 400 West outside of Pioneer Park to shut down the camping operations for #OccupySLC. Those wishing to remain steadfast in their belief in the meaning of occupying public space were arrested. Eighteen demonstrators were handcuffed and sent off to the county jail while another demonstrator was released with a citation. All those arrested were picked up by 2:00 AM and were promptly picked up by supporters.  There were no incidents of physical violence from those occupying or the police. Police shov...

In my post yesterday, I said of the SLPD that I did not think they were bluffing about shutting down #OccupySLC's longstanding Base Camp in Pioneer Park. I was correct. Since I've written a bit about #OccupyTheFedSLC's camp on State Street (and later at Gallivan Plaza), and because I received a personal invitation to be there for the showdown, that's where I started. The weather was nasty - spitting rain, and later, snow. Thankfully I was warm and cozy voting an IWW SLC GMB into existence during an earlier snow flurry. I quickly heard from some of the #Occupants at Gallivan that the real action was going to be at Pioneer Park. I arrived at Pioneer Park as groups were separating into the "arrestables" and "nonarrestables." The anarchists pulled their masks or kerchiefs over their faces, the legal observers and ACLU folks put on their orange vests and IDs, and I produced from beneath the folds of my coat the world's most ghet...