Cecily McMillan’s Guilty Verdict Demonstrates How American Dissent Will Not Be Tolerated

From BenSwann.com:

By: Ben Swann May 6, 2014 

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Her story is one that so few in the media have talked about and yet the ramifications of her guilty verdict in a New York courtroom Monday will have a powerful affect on the right to protest, and the rights of protestors.

Cecily McMillan, 25, now stands to face as much as seven years in prison behind bars for elbowing a New York City Police officer in the face during an Occupy Wall Street protest 2 years ago.

To understand this story, you have to understand not only what McMillan did but why she says she did it. She was participating in an OWS demonstration in New York City during the spring of 2012 when she was manhandled by the NYPD. While McMillan was being detained, she received multiples cuts and bruised ribs. While handcuffed, McMillan suffered from a seizure for upwards of seven minutes before reportedly fainting.

But it was what happened only moments earlier that has McMillan facing seven years in prison. According to the arresting officer, 35 year-old Officer Grantley Bovell, McMillan elbowed him in the face as she was being taken from Zuccotti Park. McMillan claims that the elbow thrown was a reaction to the officer grabbing her by the breast so hard that he left significant bruising.

In the trial, the defense insisted that this photograph was the “smoking gun” saying “This is, to the extent that there is one, the smoking gun in this case. This is actual physical evidence that backs up Miss McMillan’s account of what took place – that she got grabbed, and she reacted.”

The reaction, to being grabbed, was not assault, the defense claimed, but rather a reaction of instinct to her breast being grabbed. The prosecution disagreed, claiming that McMillan had injured herself, noted that the bruising had not been detected during two hospital checks on the night of the incident. The prosecutor claimed that Officer Bovell would have needed “razor blades for fingernails” and “a hot iron for a hand” to have caused her injuries. “You don’t need a doctor to tell you these things are fabricated,” said Choi. “You just need to use your common sense.”

When the verdict of guilty was handed down, there were shouts of protest in the courtroom as several people yelled “Shame!” One witness explained on Twitter the immediate response.

Nicky Ocean ⚓ @SeaNick_

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28 court officers in the room. Once everyone started chanting, a hidden door opened and 22 more came out with zip ties #Justice4Cecily

3:43 PM - 5 May 2014 New York, NY, United States

Meanwhile, protestors who gathered outside say they were shocked and disheartened by the verdict.

Here is a portion of the statement read on McMillan’s behalf,

In the two years awaiting trial, Cecily was never offered anything less than a felony charge, a charge that would stay with her for the rest of her life. While awaiting a trial, Cecily has lived in limbo for two years, not knowing what her future would be, forced to re-live her trauma every one of those days,” they wrote.

Beyond the sexual assault and physical injuries she sustained, Cecily suffered PTSD and has had difficulty finishing her master’s degree and continuing her work as a union organizer and activist,” the statement continued. “Despite the chilling precedent this verdict puts forth for activists, we will not be deterred from seeking social and economic justice, as evidenced in the courtroom today.”

Cecily McMillan will next be transferred to an area women’s prison ahead of her sentencing. But her guilty verdict raises a number of questions including whether or not seven years in prison is an excessive sentence for giving someone a black eye. This does not attempt to take away from any pain the officer claims to have felt but his primary medical condition was “sensitivity to light” for a number of days. The physical harm that came to Cecily, even if you don’t believe her breast was grabbed and bruised by the officer, was still in excess of any injury he claims. If the person “assaulted” was not a police officer, would there be any chance that someone could be given a seven year prison sentence for an elbow to the face?

What this guilty verdict will no doubt do, is provide a chilling effect on those who would protest in the face of what they consider injustice.

Follow: @BenSwann_ on Twitter

The Bundy Paradigm: Will You Be a Rebel, Revolutionary or a Slave?

From Activist Post:

“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”—John F. Kennedy

John W. Whitehead
Activist Post

Those tempted to write off the standoff at the Bundy Ranch as little more than a show of force by militia-minded citizens would do well to reconsider their easy dismissal of this brewing rebellion. This goes far beyond concerns about grazing rights or the tension between the state and the federal government.

Few conflicts are ever black and white, and the Bundy situation, with its abundance of gray areas, is no exception. Yet the question is not whether Cliven Bundy and his supporters are domestic terrorists, as Harry Reid claims, or patriots, or something in between. Nor is it a question of whether the Nevada rancher is illegally grazing his cattle on federal land or whether that land should rightfully belong to the government. Nor is it even a question of who’s winning the showdown— the government with its arsenal of SWAT teams, firepower and assault vehicles, or Bundy’s militia supporters with their assortment of weapons—because if such altercations end in bloodshed, everyone loses.

What we’re really faced with, and what we’ll see more of before long, is a growing dissatisfaction with the government and its heavy-handed tactics by people who are tired of being used and abused and are ready to say “enough is enough.” And it won’t matter what the issue is—whether it’s a rancher standing his ground over grazing rights, a minister jailed for holding a Bible study in his own home, or a community outraged over police shootings of unarmed citizens—these are the building blocks of a political powder keg. Now all that remains is a spark, and it need not be a very big one, to set the whole powder keg aflame.

As I show in my book A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, there’s a subtext to this incident that must not be ignored, and it is simply this: America is a pressure cooker with no steam valve, and things are about to blow. This is what happens when a parasitical government muzzles the citizenry, fences them in, herds them, brands them, whips them into submission, forces them to ante up the sweat of their brows while giving them little in return, and then provides them with little to no outlet for voicing their discontent.

The government has been anticipating and preparing for such an uprising for years. For example, in 2008, a U.S. Army War College report warned that the military must be prepared for a “violent, strategic dislocation inside the United States,” which could be provoked by “unforeseen economic collapse,” “purposeful domestic resistance,” “pervasive public health emergencies” or “loss of functioning political and legal order”—all related to dissent and protests over America’s economic and political disarray. Consequently, predicted the report, the “widespread civil violence would force the defense establishment to reorient priorities in extremis to defend basic domestic order and human security.”

One year later, in 2009, the Department of Homeland Security under President Obama issued its infamous reports on Rightwing and Leftwing “Extremism.” According to these reports, an extremist is defined as anyone who subscribes to a particular political viewpoint. Rightwing extremists, for example, are broadly defined in the report as individuals and groups “that are mainly antigovernment, rejecting federal authority in favor of state or local authority, or rejecting government authority entirely.”

Despite “no specific information that domestic rightwing terrorists are currently planning acts of violence,” the DHS listed a number of scenarios that could arise as a result of so-called rightwing extremists playing on the public’s fears and discontent over various issues, including the economic downturn, real estate foreclosures and unemployment.

Equally disconcerting, the reports use the words “terrorist” and “extremist” interchangeably. In other words, voicing what the government would consider to be extremist viewpoints is tantamount to being a terrorist. Under such a definition, I could very well be considered a terrorist. So too could John Lennon, Martin Luther King Jr., Roger Baldwin (founder of the ACLU), Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson and Samuel Adams—all of these men protested and passionately spoke out against government practices with which they disagreed and would be prime targets under this document.

The document also took pains to describe the political views of those who would qualify as being a rightwing extremist. For example, you are labeled a rightwing extremist if you voice concerns about a myriad of issues including: policy changes under President Obama; the economic downturn and home foreclosures; the loss of U.S. jobs in manufacturing and construction sectors; and social issues such as abortion, interracial crimes and immigration. DHS also issued a red-flag warning against anyone who promotes “conspiracy theories involving declarations of martial law, impending civil strife or racial conflict, suspension of the U.S. Constitution, and the creation of citizen detention camps.”

Fast forward five years, with all that has transpired, from the Occupy Protests and the targeting of military veterans to domestic surveillance, especially of activist-oriented groups and now, most recently, the Bundy Ranch showdown, and it would seem clear that the government has not veered one iota from its original playbook. Indeed, the government’s full-blown campaign of surveillance of Americans’ internet activity, phone calls, etc., makes complete sense in hindsight.

All that we have been subjected to in recent years—living under the shadow of NSA spying; motorists strip searched and anally probed on the side of the road; innocent Americans spied upon while going about their daily business in schools and stores; homeowners having their doors kicked in by militarized SWAT teams serving routine warrants—illustrates how the government deals with people it views as potential “extremists”: with heavy-handed tactics designed to intimidate the populace into submission and discourage anyone from stepping out of line or challenging the status quo.

It’s not just the Cliven Bundys of the world who are being dealt with in this manner. Don Miller, a 91-year-old antiques collector, recently had his Indiana home raided by the FBI, ostensibly because it might be in the nation’s best interest if the rare and valuable antiques and artifacts Miller had collected over the course of 80 years were cared for by the government. Such tactics carried out by anyone other than the government would be considered grand larceny, and yet the government gets a free pass.

In the same way, the government insists it can carry out all manner of surveillance on us—listen in on our phone calls, read our emails and text messages, track our movements, photograph our license plates, even enter our biometric information into DNA databases—but those who dare to return the favor, even a little, by filming potential police misconduct, get roughed up by the police, arrested, charged with violating various and sundry crimes.

When law enforcement officials—not just the police, but every agent of the government entrusted with enforcing laws, from the president on down—are allowed to discard the law when convenient, and the only ones having to obey the law are the citizenry and not the enforcers, then the law becomes only a tool to punish us, rather than binding and controlling the government, as it was intended.

This phenomenon is what philosopher Abraham Kaplan referred to as the law of the instrument, which essentially says that to a hammer, everything looks like a nail. In the scenario that has been playing out in recent years, we the citizenry have become the nails to be hammered by the government’s henchmen, a.k.a. its guns for hire, a.k.a. its standing army, a.k.a. the nation’s law enforcement agencies.

Indeed, there can no longer be any doubt that militarized police officers, the end product of the government—federal, local and state—and law enforcement agencies having merged, have become a “standing” or permanent army, composed of full-time professional soldiers who do not disband. Yet these permanent armies are exactly what those who drafted the U.S. Constitution feared as tools used by despotic governments to wage war against its citizens.

That is exactly what we are witnessing today: a war against the American citizenry. Is it any wonder then that Americans are starting to resist?

More and more, Americans are tired, frustrated, anxious, and worried about the state of their country. They are afraid of an increasingly violent and oppressive federal government, and they are worried about the economic insecurity which still grips the nation. And they’re growing increasingly sick of being treated like suspects and criminals. As former law professor John Baker, who has studied the growing problem of overcriminalization, noted, “There is no one in the United States over the age of 18 who cannot be indicted for some federal crime. That is not an exaggeration.”

To make matters worse, a recent scientific study by Princeton researchers confirms that the United States of America is not the democracy that is purports to be, but rather an oligarchy, in which “economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy.” As PolicyMicexplains, “An oligarchy is a system where power is effectively wielded by a small number of individuals defined by their status called oligarchs. Members of the oligarchy are the rich, the well connected and the politically powerful, as well as particularly well placed individuals in institutions like banking and finance or the military… In other words, their statistics say your opinion literally does not matter.”

So if average Americans, having largely lost all of the conventional markers of influencing government, whether through elections, petition, or protest, have no way to impact their government, no way to be heard, no assurance that their concerns are truly being represented and their government is one “by the people, of the people, and for the people,” as opposed to being engineered expressly for the benefit of the wealthy elite, then where does that leave them?

To some, the choice is clear. As psychologist Erich Fromm recognized in his insightful book, On Disobedience: “If a man can only obey and not disobey, he is a slave; if he can only disobey and not obey, he is a rebel (not a revolutionary). He acts out of anger, disappointment, resentment, yet not in the name of a conviction or a principle.”

Unfortunately, the intrepid, revolutionary American spirit that stood up to the British, blazed paths to the western territories, and prevailed despite a civil war, multiple world wars, and various economic depressions has taken quite a beating in recent years. Nevertheless, the time is coming when each American will have to decide: will you be a slave, rebel or revolutionary?

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. He is the author of A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State andThe Change Manifesto.

HELP U.S. Military Veteran Emily Yates, Violently Arrest for Standing in the Shade

Via Revolution News:

Veteran and activist with Iraq Veteran’s Against the War, Emily Yates was violently arrested by Federal Parks Police for standing in the wrong place, enjoying the shade tree’s during a ‘No war with Syria’ rally in Philadelphia.

Emily Yates -I used to think that as a veteran of the U.S. military, I was safe, at least while in America, from being brutally arrested with no warning, thrown into a tiny cell by myself for three days, and then charged by my own government with assaulting the very officers who had dragged me around by my wrists and ankles.

As you can see in the video, I had my back turned when multiple Park Service rangers grabbed me by my wrists, bent me over a park bench, picked me up by my arms and legs, dragged me away from a crowd, dropped me face-first on the ground then carried me to a truck, threw me in – again face-first – and dropped me off at the Philly Federal Detention Center, where I was kept for three days without any explanation. Now, believe it or not, I’m being charged with assaulting these rangers. My trial date is July 2, 2014.

Insist Emily’s case be tried in a Veterans Court! Sign and Share this Petition

My attorney has explained to the prosecutor that the violent nature of my arrest triggered PTSD from traumas I’d experienced in the military, and requested that the government’s case against me be tried in a Veterans Treatment Court, so that my experience as a combat veteran would be a serious factor when considering my reaction to being grabbed from behind without warning.

The prosecutor has refused my attorney’s request, even though his boss, Attorney General Holder, has personally been a cheerleader of Veterans Treatment Courts:

“There’s a crying need for more of these kind of efforts … It was once said that so many owe so much to so few, we owe them in the most profound of ways.”

The article goes on to report that under Attorney General Holder, official Department of Justice policy now states that veterans get ‘involved in the criminal justice system with co-occurring substance abuse and mental health issues’ – they risk going to prison because of drugs and strain from their service, basically.  The Department encourages Veterans Courts as a rehabilitation model, noting they better serve ‘veterans struggling with addiction, serious mental illness’ and PTSD, problems associated with ‘higher rates of drug abuse, domestic violence and other criminality.’”

So why is it that a prosecutor in Eric Holder’s Justice Department is so blatantly disregarding his public support for veterans like me, who have already been asked to risk life and limb to support America’s wars?

It’s just one of the many things about this case that doesn’t make sense.

That’s why I’m asking you to help me keep Attorney General Holder and his entire department honest – sign my petition if you believe he should honor his commitment to try PTSD- and miltary trauma-related cases against veterans in Veterans Treatment Courts. That’s one very clear way he can “support the troops.”

Insist Emily’s case be tried in a Veterans Court! Sign and Share this Petition

Images via desrow visuals

Revolution News: Brazil: “Pacification” Unleashes Terror On Favelas, Aims to Silence Anti-Capitalist Social Movements

From Revolution News:

March 24, 2014 - Brazil, Revolution News - Tagged: Brasil, capitalism, favelas, Latin America, NãovaiterCOPA,Police Brutality, Police Corruption, racism

Military police occupying slums in Rio de Janeiro, in a new wave of terror against poor people.

As thousands took to the streets this weekend to protest the civil and military dictatorship – which left a legacy of some of the most sadistic and brutal repression against political prisoners seen in Latin America – the military police have unleashed a new war on the poor of Brazil, and the State is preparing to enforce new “anti-terrorism” laws which raise legitimate fears that they will bring back the practices of the fascist dictatorship. (Note: On March 22nd, Brazilian fascists called for protests under the slogan “march for family.” They were a failure, much like the white man march in North America. In some places, groups of six or less people participated.)

Police have used fabricated reasons to justify repression against poor communities and anti-capitalist social movements, ahead of a powerfully contested Word Cup in Brazil.

A police station was set on fire, and cops came under armed attack, possibly by drug lords they haven’t “pacified” yet. Drug leaders in pacified communities are typically ex-military police, who the capitalist media misrepresent as “community leaders,” in order to forcefully associate them with social movements against capitalist oppression. The mainstream capitalist media have consistently referred to Brazilians living in favelas as “criminals,” in a clear attempt to increase hatred against poor people, who mostly have nothing to do with drug trafficking.

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Read the whole story here. Remember what I said about "antiterrorism" laws? 

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