ALERT! NEW WAR ON PROTEST: Beating Down Your Rights For The Corporate State
Political repression is burning across the country as the corporate state devises new tools to criminalize dissent, collective citizen action and force compliance with the rising fascism.
ILLUSTRATION BY ADRIÀ FRUITÓS / In These Times magazine (May 2024)
Editor’s Note: If you are politically active at all, you need to read this article from the current edition of In These Times. We now live in a country where merely signing a petition can get you jailed on terrorism charges. Sound like a hyper-ventilating overstatement? You need to read this article featuring new laws happening from local municipalities all the way up. Our Bill of Rights is crumbling before our eyes as a fully bipartisan fascist state in service to Wall Street is coming to being. BTW, I would encourage you to subscribe to In These Times. I have no financial ties but do subscribe and donate to fundraisers. — Mark Taylor)
New York’s bill, introduced by Democratic lawmakers, is perhaps the most extreme, declaring that blocking public roads, bridges or transportation facilities — or even “act[ing] with the intent” to do so — is a form of domestic terrorism.
By Adam Federman
In These Times (4/17/24)
Amin Chaoui had been in Atlanta less than 24 hours when things took an unexpected turn. Chaoui, then 31, drove down from Richmond, Va., to attend a March 2023 music festival organized by activists trying to stop the construction of the police training facility known as Cop City. The sprawling compound in one of Atlanta’s largest urban parks would require clearing at least 85 acres of partly forested land that abuts a predominantly Black neighborhood in DeKalb County. It faced growing opposition from racial and environmental justice advocates, including an occupation of the forest that began in November 2021.
Chaoui was loosely familiar with Cop City — he’d seen flyers around Richmond — but hadn’t been involved in the campaign. He’d also never been to Atlanta, and was especially drawn to the music. There was also an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting at the festival that appealed to Chaoui, who had started a recovery program five months prior. “I honestly just thought I was going to spend a few days in the forest and then go home,” Chaoui said.
But before the hour-long AA meeting ended his first night there, Chaoui noticed heavily armed police officers encircling the venue. About a half-mile away, a group of protesters had staged an impromptu march through the development site, setting fire to some of the construction equipment. As the sun began to set, plumes of smoke rose above the forest, providing the only pretext law enforcement needed to round up anyone in attendance. As Chaoui tried to leave, he and about 50 other people were corralled and handcuffed in a parking lot. By the end of the night, 23 of them were thrown in the DeKalb County jail.
Facing a very different future
When Chaoui was released 18 days later, he faced a very different future: He’d been charged with domestic terrorism, which, in Georgia, is punishable by up to 35 years in prison.
In September, the city of Atlanta published the full names and addresses of more than 100,000 people who signed a Stop Cop City petition, effectively doxxing them. Afterward, many locals said “they would never sign another controversial petition again.”
Several months later, in August, Chaoui and 60 others were also indicted under anti-racketeering laws designed to go after organized crime, known as the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO). Allegations against members of the group include being part of a criminal conspiracy among an “organized mob” to “occupy the DeKalb forest and cause property damage.” Chaoui has struggled to find work since then; he’s been relying on fundraising networks to pay his rent. Chaoui’s relationships with friends and family have also frayed. As a Muslim American, the domestic terrorism charge — one of the first results that appears if you search him online — is an especially heavy burden. “My personal life is in shambles now,” Chaoui told me.
The sweeping nature of the Cop City arrests and charges may be novel, but the targeting of protesters and social movements is not. Since 2017 — the same year Georgia expanded its domestic terrorism law to include property destruction — 21 states have passed legislation to enhance penalties and fines for common protest-related crimes, such as trespassing or blocking highways.
“We’re in a really unique moment with the amount of legislation that we’re seeing, [with] this legal assault on protesters and the right to protest in the U.S.,” says Nick Robinson, a senior legal advisor at the International Center for Not-for-Profit Law, which tallied nearly 300 anti-protest bills introduced in state legislatures since 2017, 41 of which passed.
Many of those laws seemed like direct responses to specific protest campaigns, says Nora Benavidez, senior counsel for the nonprofit group Free Press and lead author of the 2020 PEN America report, Arresting Dissent: Legislative Restrictions on the Right to Protest. “For every progressive movement — irrespective of its actual views — there’s so quickly a crackdown that occurs in language and narrative and law.”
Bipartisan attack on our rights
Among recently passed state laws, 19 enhance penalties for or make it a felony to engage in protest on or near energy infrastructure— a clear reaction to the mass protests over the Dakota Access Pipeline at Standing Rock in 2016. After 2020’s Black Lives Matter protests, five states enacted laws — and nine others have pending legislation — that impose harsh penalties for individuals who block traffic or even sidewalks. Some states added laws granting immunity to drivers who strike protesters and extending liability for crimes committed during protests to any organizations that support them. This January, in response to growing opposition to the war in Gaza, Democrats in New York proposed a bill that would expand the definition of domestic terrorism to include blocking public roads or bridges.
But it’s not just state legislatures cracking down on protest. …
“A decade ago, protesters in Georgia and other states who engaged in civil disobedience — knowingly breaking the law to advocate for their cause — likely would have faced misdemeanor charges and perhaps a night in jail. Today, they can spend months in pretrial detention — as several activists involved in the Stop Cop City campaign have — before facing lengthy and expensive legal battles to clear their names. The new laws, stiffer penalties, and more aggressive policing have, in addition to landing more activists in jail, had a corrosive effect on social movements across the country.”
OWELLIAN: The Government’s New Spying Powers Are TERRIFYING By Making The Illegal Legal!
“This is why China is so bad.”
Jimmy Dore Show (4/18/24)
It’s not just tech companies and wi-fi providers, it could include house cleaners, contractors and most small businesses you deal with. — MT
12-minute video
The Same Thing Is Happening In England: Victimize People Who Raise A Voice In Britain? Then Destroy Their Families? Not In My Name
The hatred, disgust and fear with which elite power has long regarded the people is reciprocated with fear and deference: we know what happens when we step out of line.
By George Monbiot
The Guardian (4/19/24)
When the traditional ruling class was obliged to concede to demands for democracy, it gave away as little as possible. We could vote, but it ensured that crucial elements of the old system remained in place: the House of Lords, the first-past-the-post electoral system, prerogative powers and Henry VIII clauses, and above all a legal system massively and blatantly biased towards owners of property.
In combination, these elements ensured that the system remained predisposed to elite rule, even while it pretended the people were in charge. The portcullis excluding us from power has never been properly lifted since the Norman conquest. The relationship between rulers and ruled remains, in effect, a relationship between occupier and occupied.
Before our eyes, the law and its application are being radically shifted even further towards the interests of property owners: in this case, oil and gas companies.
For almost a thousand years, we’ve celebrated those who resisted in folklore and fantasy: the Robin Hood myth commemorates Eadric the Wild and other “silvatici” who held out in the woods, launching raids against the occupiers. But in the real world, few dare to raise their heads. The hatred, disgust and fear with which elite power has long regarded the people is reciprocated with fear and deference: we know what happens when we step out of line.
If this were a real democracy, it would have evolved. Preposterous rules and rituals would have been retired. Representation would have been tempered with participatory, deliberative decision-making. Instead, across the 157 years since some working-class men were first allowed to vote, the system has stagnated by design. We are still asked to apply industrial-strength credulity in accepting that our “representatives” have our best interests at heart, and will defend us faithfully for five years at a time.
But the ruling classes granted one small concession: the right to protest against the decisions they make. Since the Peterloo massacre in 1819, they knew the system had to bend if it were not to break, and upheld “the undoubted right of Englishmen to assemble together”. Nonviolent protest has long been recognised as a legitimate means of challenging and improving our political settlement. Were it not for protest, the franchise would never have been extended in the first place, and the thing we call democracy would not exist.
But as an economic elite has reasserted power, protest has become ever less tolerable. Far from being seen as an essential political modifier, it has increasingly been treated as a threat to be stamped out. …
