The Toronto G20 Riot Fraud: Undercover Police engaged in Purposeful Provocation At Tax Payers’ Expense
Robocops Come to Pittsburgh…and Bring the Latest Weaponry with Them
hat tip: Opednews.com
By mike ferner
No longer the stuff of disturbing futuristic fantasies, an arsenal of “crowd control munitions,” including one that reportedly made its debut in the U.S., was deployed with a massive, overpowering police presence in Pittsburgh during last week’s G-20 protests.
Nearly 200 arrests were made and civil liberties groups charged the many thousands of police (most transported on Port Authority buses displaying “PITTSBURGH WELCOMES THE WORLD”), from as far away as Arizona and Florida with overreacting”and they had plenty of weaponry with which to do it.
Bean bags fired from shotguns, CS (tear) gas, OC (Oleoresin Capsicum) spray, flash-bang grenades, batons and, according to local news reports, for the first time on the streets of America, the Long Range Acoustic Device (LRAD).
Mounted in the turret of an Armored Personnel Carrier (APC), I saw the LRAD in action twice in the area of 25th, Penn and Liberty Streets of Lawrenceville, an old Pittsburgh neighborhood. Blasting a shrill, piercing noise like a high-pitched police siren on steroids, it quickly swept streets and sidewalks of pedestrians, merchants and journalists and drove residents into their homes, but in neither case were any demonstrators present. The APC, oversized and sinister for a city street, together with lines of police in full riot gear looking like darkly threatening Michelin Men, made for a scene out of a movie you didn’t want to be in.
As intimidating as this massive show of armed force and technology was, the good burghers of Pittsburgh and their fellow citizens in the Land of the Brave and Home of the Free ain’t seen nothin’ yet. Tear gas and pepper spray are nothing to sniff at and, indeed, have proven fatal a surprising number of times, but they have now become the old standbys compared to the list below that’s already at or coming soon to a police station or National Guard headquarters near you. Proving that “what goes around, comes around,” some of the new Property Protection Devices were developed by a network of federally-funded, university-based research institutes like one in Pittsburgh itself, Penn State’s Institute for Non-Lethal Defense Technologies.
Raytheon Corp.’s Active Denial System, designed for crowd control in combat zones, uses an energy beam to induce an intolerable heating sensation, like a hot iron placed on the skin. It is effective beyond the range of small arms, in excess of 400 meters. Company officials have been advised they could expand the market by selling a smaller, tripod-mounted version for police forces.
Obama: G-20 Protests Too Abstract To Make A Difference
hat tip: Huffington Post
9-21-09
President Obama, in an interview with the Toledo Blade, cautions would-be protesters of the upcoming G20 Summit that while such protests are “are a sign of a healthy democracy,” they’re not likely to have much of a net impact:
“I was always a big believer in – when I was doing organizing before I went to law school – that focusing on concrete, local, immediate issues that have an impact on people’s lives is what really makes a difference and that having protests about abstractions [such] as global capitalism or something, generally, is not really going to make much of a difference.”
I’m not at all sure that an effective protest seeking more justice in the global economy will never “make much of a difference,” but there is definitely something to Obama’s admonition to be more concrete. For a long while now, I’ve despaired of the fact that protest assemblies have degraded into a constant spectacle of mixed-message and pointless shock. The best protests of yore were focused. By contrast, most modern protests are like watching a reality-show competition, in which everyone is out for themselves and there is an intra-protest competition to do the most property damage or carry the most shocking sign.
Your typical gathering of anti-globalization protesters these days isn’t so different from what we’ve seen with the Tea Parties. Everyone’s excited about what they’ve shouted, no one remembers what they heard. And so, their accomplishments are mainly logistical ones: everyone gets to the same place at the same time, it’s a minor inconvenience to everyone else, and the content of their grievance dissipates just as quickly as it is amassed. No one is under any illusion that those who have gathered are anything but outliers — electoral sunk costs to politicians and a liability line item on the balance sheet of global finance.
Who Controls The Black Bloc Anarchists?
Hat tip: Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Thursday, April 2, 2009
Stage-managed? Press photographers outnumber anarchists as the RBS siege is perfectly “produced” for a live television audience.
The British authorities seemed to have little problem with allowing a group of violent black bloc anarchists to smash up the RBS building while provoking police yesterday, despite the group announcing their target in advance, yet a legitimate anti-poverty organization has had its “accreditation” to protest at the G20 removed on the orders of Downing Street.
This once again underscores the completely undemocratic power of the government to decide who is allowed to protest against them and who is not. When you have to get permission from the government to exercise a God-given right, as in China or Russia, then we know we are already living in a police state. The freedom to protest is not one that has to be “accredited” by the state, a license to protest as it were, it is an innate human right.
Apparently, if you wear black hoods and scarves, smash up private property and provoke police, then that’s absolutely fine and you’ll be left largely untouched. But God forbid if you’re a middle of the road anti-poverty group that just wants to peaceably march down the street.
“An anti-poverty group expressed ‘outrage’ after its accreditation to attend Thursday’s G20 summit was suddenly withdrawn on Wednesday,” reports the Telegraph.
“The World Development Movement said it had no idea why the decision was taken but claimed it was on the orders of 10 Downing Street.”
“The group, which was part of last weekend’s huge (and peaceful) Put People First Alliance which held a rally in London, said the Foreign Office received a note from 10 Downing Street telling it to revoke the accreditation.”
Benedict Southworth, the group’s director, said that the decision was part of the government’s plan to “stage-manage events and prevent voices of dissent and disagreement being heard.”
The black bloc anarchist assault on the Royal Bank of Scotland building yesterday certainly had an air of being stage-managed. The target was announced in advance, the authorities knew that the building was a prime target, and yet it was the only one in the street not boarded up. A cafe across the street was boarded up and yet the RBS building was left completely vulnerable to attack.
