Anarchoblogs

Happy Sunday, everyone. Time to get Shameless.

Around here, I am trying to get my office into some semblance of tidiness, doing some background reading for a paper on the emergence of the fast-food industry, and making the final arrangements to get myself up to Birmingham for Alabama Coalition for Immigrant Justice’s May 1st march for immigration freedom. (Wednesday, May 1, 4pm–7pm, starting in Linn Park, Birmingham, Ala. See you there?) ¿Y tú? How’re things where you are? Got anything big coming up? Anything you’ve been working on lately? What have you been up to this week? Write anything? Leave a link and a short description for your post in the comments. Or fire away about anything else you might want to talk about.

You know, I live in Alabama and I spent about a decade of my life in Alabama state schools. I hate that the current state code includes a provision requiring high-school sex-ed classes to include stigmatizing, bigoted and false anti-gay content. And I’m glad to see that there’s a bill pending in the state legislature that would just delete that entire section and all the minimum content requirements along with it.^[1] I’ve lived in Alabama for much of my life and I’ve often tried to take a hand in changing local culture and building more positive alternatives in my community. But when I see a liberal freethought blog linking to a story about this, and (1) the very first comment, and (2) over half of the comments that follow it, are from comfortable progressives cracking jokes about incest or marrying cousins or having sex with farm animals,^[2] I— well, actually I just don’t get the feeling that y’all are really on our side, somehow. Or that you are quite as un-bigoted as you might have thought that you were.

1. ^[1] Of course there is no right way for government to do sex education, or any kind of education, or to run schools at all; so the best thing to do is simply to get rid of all government control over education, period. In the meantime, when state laws specifically require schools to insert content into lessons which is harmful and false, I’ll be happy to see those specific requirements get axed. ↩
2. ^[2] See, it’s funny because poor people living in rural areas have often been socially marginalized and ridiculed with broad stereotypes about their supposed deviant sex practices. Ho, ho. ↩

To-day’s clipped stories, from the Opelika Auburn News (September 20, 2012).

• Front Page. Nothing to clip here, actually. The biggest real estate is occupied by a story about how some super-millionaire said something in private that turned out to be aired in public that may or may not hurt his chances on the margin in his attempt to go from being one of the most massively privileged people in the entire world to the single most massively privileged person in the entire world. This may or may not help out the chances of his super-millionaire opponent to remain the most massively privileged person in the entire world, if it convinces more people that the super-millionaire challenger cares less about ordinary folks than the incumbent super-millionaire does. Somebody is supposed to care about this. I don’t: it couldn’t possibly matter less how much the most massively privileged person in the entire world cares, or who he or she cares about, because the existence of such massive, ruinous and lethal structures of social and economic privilege is exactly the problem, and it is the one problem which such debates over the less-worse of a pair of party-backed super-millionaires will never raise.

• 2A. Donathan Prater, Bo’s nose: Auburn police get new K-9 tracker. A fairly typical police puff piece to announce that the police force occupying Auburn, Alabama has a new dog that they are going to use to hound people who are trying to get away from them, and to get or fabricate probable cause for harassing people suspected of nonviolent drug offenses.

  Bo has a nose for finding trouble. But in his line of work, that’s a good thing.^[1]

  The Auburn Police Division welcomed Bo, an 11-month-old Belgian Malinois, to the force on Wednesday.

  Trained in both narcotics detection and human tracking, Bo was officially introduced to members of the media at Auburn Technology Park North.

  For years, we have called on (Lee County) Sheriff Jay Jones and (Opelika Police) Chief Thomas Mangham for use of their tracking K-9s, for which we’re thankful, but we felt like it was time for us to have our own, Auburn Police Chief Tommy Dawson. We’re very excited about putting this dog to work.

  … Dawson said Bo was purchased last month from the Alabama Canine Law Enforcement Officers Training Center in Northport with approximately $10,000 in seized assets from drug arrests.

  … The acquisition of Bo puts the APD’s number of K-9 officers at four, said Dawson, a former K-9 handler.

  — Donathan Prater, Bo’s nose: Auburn police get new K-9 tracker. Opelika-Auburn News, September 20, 2012. A2.

  Well, that’s a damn shame. The primary purpose that they will use Bo for, as they use all police dogs, will be to provide pretexts to justify what are essentially random sweeps, searches and seizures; to harass, intimidate and coerce innocent people on easily fabricated, often mistaken and incredibly thin probable cause, with the minutest of ritual gestures at a sort of farce on due process, in order to prosecute a Drug War that doesn’t need to be prosecuted and to imprison, disenfranchise, and ruin the lives of people who have done nothing at all that merits being imprisoned, disenfranchised, or having their lives ruined by tyrannical drug laws. It’s not the dog’s fault, of course; he looks like a perfectly nice dog. But the people who bought him (with the proceeds from their own search-n-seizure racket), and who are using him, are putting him to a violent and degrading use, and they ought to be ashamed of themselves.

• Op-Ed Page, 4A. Muslim religion should be feared in US. Rudy Tidwell, of Valley, a God-and-Country fixture on the Op-Ed page, decides that he doesn’t like Church-State integrationists when they aren’t part of his favorite church. Then, by means of an insanely ambitious collectivism, he assimilates the actions of his least favorite hypercollectivists to the thoughts and feelings of literally all 1,600,000,000 (he rounds up to 2 billion) Muslims in the world.

  The phrase Arab Spring has become a catchphrase for the media and other liberals to minimize the real dangers of the actual enemy of America.^[2] The so-called Arab Spring is actually a Muslim Spring, meaning that the growing takeovers we see in various Middle Eastern countries^[3] are Muslims rising up worldwide.

  Why is this aspect of the Middle East unrest not recognized for what it is? The euphemism^[4] made between so-called radical Muslims and peaceful Muslims. Islam is a dangerous body of more than 2 billion people who are determined to convert or kill, and there is no compromise to be made?

  It’s not just a few radical Muslims who make terrorist attacks. How then do you account for the fact that when the attacks on 9/11 occurred, Muslims around the world rejoiced and danced in the streets?

  More recent events in Libya and Egypt have been recognized as and declared to be planned attacks, not benign protests. Were all the people burning the embassies and tearing down and burning the American flags peace-loving Muslims?

  We have a growing number of Muslims in the United States. There are enclaves of Muslims who rule with rigid and brutal Shariah law. Dearborn, Mich, is perhaps the most notable. Muslims are entering the U.S. in numbers that would shock us if we knew the full extent.

  I encourage you to get a copy of the Quran and read it. It is a frightening book that demands faithfulness to its teachings to the point of death. It is the guide book for a worldwide takeover, not by reason and diplomacy as Communism said it would do over time,^[5] but by conversion or death.

  Rudy Tidwell
  Valley

  Well, then. 2,000,000,000? Really? Did they all do the converting and killing and rejoicing and dancing all at once, or do they maybe take it in turns? Well I suppose the gigantic hive mind that they all link up to when they join that dangerous body no doubt ensures that such problems of coordination don’t really arise.

• Op-Ed Page, 4A. Today in History.

  On Sept. 20, 1962, James Meredith, a black student, was blocked from enrolling at the University of Mississippi by Democratic Gov. Ross R. Barnett. (Meredith was later admitted.)

  . . .

  In 1884, the National Equal Rights Party was formed during a convention of suffragists in San Francisco.

  In 1958, Martin Luther King Jr. was seriously wounded during a book signing at a New York City department store when Izola Curry stabbed him in the chest. (Curry was later found mentally incompetent.)

  In 1973, in their so-called battle of the sexes, tennis star Billie Jean King defeated Bobby Riggs in straight sets, 6-4, 6-3, 6-3, at the Houston Astrodome.

  In 1996, President Bill Clinton announced that he was signing the Defense of Marriage Act, a bill outlawing same-sex marriages, but said it should not be used as an excuse for discrimination,^[6] violence or intimidation against gays and lesbians.

  In 2011, repeal of the U.S. military’s 18-year-old don’t ask, don’t tell compromise took effect, allowing gay and lesbian service^[7] members to serve^[8] openly.

Section A contains no international news at all today, unless you count the collecto-eliminationist letter from Rudy Tidwell on the Op-Ed page.

1. ^[1] [For whom? —R.G.] ↩
2. ^[2] [Sic. Of course what he means, as he makes clear, is the enemy of the United States government. Which is not true either, but in any case obviously not the same thing. —RG.] ↩
3. ^[3] [Sic. Of course all governments are usurpers, and thus are ongoing takeovers by nature. That includes transitional and revolutionary states; on the other hand it also obviously includes the hyperauthoritarian regimes recently challenged or thrown out. What the hell was the Mubarak regime, say, if not a constantly repeated, jackbooted takeover of innocent people’s lives? —RG.] ↩
4. ^[4] [Sic. What he describes is not a euphemism, but rather a distinction that he regards as being misapplied. —RG.] ↩
5. ^[5] [Rudy Tidwell is speaking outside of his area of expertise. —RG.] ↩
6. ^[6] [. . . —R.G.] ↩
7. ^[7] [Sic. —RG.] ↩
8. ^[8] [Sic. —RG.] ↩

This is from the OA News from a few days ago.

. . . On another issue, AU is requiring all students, staff and faculty bringing a bicycle to campus to register it with AU’s Parking Services, Smith said.

Although people have previously been asked to register, the requirement will be more strictly enforced now, something Smith said is necessary as the campus has become more pedestrian.

We’re seeing many, many more bikes on campus and because of that we’ve got to get a handle on how many we have …

— Donathan Prater, Opelika-Auburn News, August 15, 2012

(No, you don’t.)

. . . and registering them is a good way to do that, Smith said.

— Donathan Prater, Opelika-Auburn News, August 15, 2012

(No, it isn’t.)

You register your car on campus and the same is true for bicycles.

— Donathan Prater, Opelika-Auburn News, August 15, 2012

(This is a completely specious comparison.)

Registration is free.

— Donathan Prater, Opelika-Auburn News, August 15, 2012

(Don’t count on that lasting forever.)

Smith said the number of bicycles registered with the university will help ensure that an adequate number of bicycle racks are available on campus.

— Donathan Prater, Opelika-Auburn News, August 15, 2012

The reason the University requires you to register cars is specifically to limit and control access: parking space near campus is extremely limited, it’s expensive to build more, and the parking tags regulate who can park in which zones. None of these rationales apply to bicycles on campus, no matter how many there may be. The idea that you just have to know the exact number of bicycles might be brought in at any given time is inane. If you’re seeing many, many more bikes on campus, then evidently you have some idea of the order of magnitude you’re dealing with, and if you want to tell whether you need to install more bike racks, you can do this pretty easily by looking at the bike racks and seeing whether or not they’re full up all the time, or by watching for bikes chained up to lightpoles when the racks are all full. If you see these problems, you need more bike racks. If you don’t, you don’t. The cynic in me would point out that one reason to enforce this policy is that it’s a way of making up for the declining revenues from on-campus cars, by extracting a little more revenue from the bicycles they are going to seize and impound. But really this, and a lot of other policies controlling bicycling that are justified by the same kind of specious comparisons to motor-cars, seems to be driven, more than anything, by a reflexive belief if there’s ever a lot of any damn thing at all, it’s a Problem that has to be counted out and controlled; that any and every important part of civic life, or campus life, must be registered with, and legible to, the controlling authorities. There is no reason at all to enforce this policy, other than an irrational compulsion to control anything that moves in your field of vision. In practice, the effect of the policy will be to waste students’ time, to cost students money, to punish bicyclists, to impound bikes, and to make campus less accessible to the rest of the community. (A lot of us have bikes. But we’re not eligible to register them.)

Also.

• Randy Cohen, If Kant Were a New York Cyclist, in the New York Times, August 4, 2012.

This was on the front page of to-day’s OA News (front page, continued on p. 8A). The online copy is a bit longer than what appeared in print (there are a couple paragraphs at the end that the OA News cut from the printed edition). The U.S. Civil Rights Commission recently held a meeting in Birmingham to discuss SB 1070 and HB 56, the international apartheid police-state bills in Arizona and Alabama. Demonstrators showed up to inject some reality into the proceedings.

Quarrelsome commission

Civil rights panel has first meeting to discuss laws

BIRMINGHAM — A quarrelsome U.S. Commission on Civil Rights held its first hearing on state laws that target illegal immigration, with Republican backers arguing Friday that the measures are vital to protecting American jobs and fighting crime.

Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who helped write similar immigration laws in Arizona and Alabama, said unemployment in Alabama has dropped three times faster than the national average since parts of the state’s law took effect last fall — a change he credited at least in part to the act.

Attempting to head off claims that the laws lead to racial profiling by police, Kobach said the immigration enforcement specifically bars officers from making stops or arrests based on appearance.

As he spoke, four Hispanic women and a girl stood in the audience with their backs toward Kobach. Demonstrators, some speaking Spanish, stood up holding signs that said Undocumented and shouted at Kobach.

These laws are based on hate, said one man.

The meeting room quieted after officers escorted protesters away, but the commissioners still bickered among themselves. . . . Congressional appointee Todd Gaziano, legal director of the conservative Heritage Foundation, accused the demonstrators of hateful speech . . . . Gaziano and chairman Martin R. Castro, appointed by President Barack Obama, exchanged sharp words throughout the opening session. Members even disagreed over who should be allowed to testify, with organizations accusing each other of being hate groups.

The commission will issue a report within months on the findings of the hearing, which focused on whether the state laws foster discrimination and run counter to civil rights laws. But the panel doesn’t have any enforcement power, and it can’t make states alter their laws.

The U.S. Supreme Court struck down three parts of Arizona’s law in June, but it upheld a section that requires police to check the status of people who might appear to be in the country illegally. The ruling was closely watched because Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, Indiana and Utah have approved similar laws.

Courts have blocked all or parts of the laws in each state, and legal challenges are now moving forward since the justices ruled on the Arizona statute . . . .

Law opponent Tammy Besherse, an attorney with South Carolina Appleseed Legal Justice Center, accused law officers of destroying immigrants’ legal documents and of playing computer games in which participants kill Mexican immigrants.

GOP state Sen. Scott Beason, a key sponsor of Alabama’s law, said opponents of the laws and the media place more value on the rights of illegal immigrants than the plight of legal U.S. citizens who can’t find work because of people living in the country unlawfully.

We cannot solve the world’s problems, but we can make sure we don’t import some problems, Beason said. Responding to a question about a U.S. Chamber of Commerce that cast immigration in a positive light, Beason said the business organization is pretty slanted because some of its members employ illegal immigrants.^[1]

Castro said the Alabama hearing was the commission’s first outside Washington, D.C., in years. The panel’s first-ever was held in Birmingham in 1958, when state and local laws mandated racial segregation.

— Jay Reeves, Associated Press, Quarrelsome commission: Civil rights panel has first meeting to discuss laws. Opelika-Auburn News, 18 August 2012.

The article goes to some effort to make it out that the fights amongst the panel members were signs of a clear divide between Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and liberals. Of course the notion that the Democratic Party appointees maintain any divide, or have any quarrel, other than a purely rhetorical one, from the Republicans, is absurd. In 2008, presidential candidate Obama promised comprehensive immigration reform, paths out of the shadows for undocumented immigrants, and promised that immigration reform would be a top priority in my first year as President. In 2012, four years later, Liberal Democratic President Barack Obama has accomplished nothing at all towards comprehensive reform or towards paths to citizenship. The claim that it would be a top priority in his first year in office was a lie; he abandoned it as soon as he sat down in the Oval Office, concentrated on pushing stimulus bills and fighting wars and bailing out failed capitalists — and then he radically escalated the militarization of the border, and he presided over the largest mass deportations of peaceful immigrants in the history of the United States. Even his weakest, latest-coming promises have been lies, broken as soon as they were made. But there is a real divide here. It’s not a divide on the panel; it’s the divide between the panel, and the protesters who courageously stood up to challenge them. I am glad to see people calling out Kobach, and challenging this kind of political palavering over the lives and livelihoods of immigrant families. More power to them.

Also.

• GT 2012-08-06: Free Alfonso Perez
• GT 2011-10-24: Letter to the Editor of the Opelika-Auburn News, October 10, 2011
• GT 2011-10-22: Change You Can Believe In (Vol. III, No. 10)

1. ^[1] [I-word and xenophobia sic. —RG.] ↩

• The Paradox of Property. Roderick, Austro-Athenian Empire (2011-05-05). Nonlibertarians are often puzzled as to why libertarians accept such strong property rights claims (sometimes called “absolute” property rights, though I’ve never figured out what “absolute” is supposed to mean in this context). The answer I’m going to give here is one I’ve already offered elsewhere (see here and here),... (Linked Thursday 2011-05-05.)

• History News Network | Because the Past is the Present, and the Future too. hnn.us (2011-05-05). Mutual Aid in Tuscaloosa. (Linked Thursday 2011-05-05.)

• TomTom Sold User Data to Police, Motorists Then Targeted With Speed Traps. John Gruber, Daring Fireball (2011-05-02). Consumer Reports: Following reports that TomTom had sold traffic data collected from GPS device users to police who then used it to determine locations for speed traps, the company has issued a statement and video in an effort to appease angry customers. Shameful.  ★  (Linked Thursday 2011-05-05.)

• Jon Stewart on the Photos of Osama bin Laden. John Gruber, Daring Fireball (2011-05-05). Jon Stewart: Maybe we should always show pictures. Bin Laden, pictures of our wounded service people, pictures of maimed innocent civilians. We can only make decisions about war if we see what war actually is — and not as a video game where bodies quickly disappear leaving behind a shiny... (Linked Thursday 2011-05-05.)

• On the Road to Nowhere With Johnson and Paul. Thomas L. Knapp, Center for a Stateless Society (2011-04-28). Is it just me, or is the silly season of electoral politics — the presidential election cycle — arriving earlier and earlier in each successive four-year stretch? Last time around, it was nearly Memorial Day of the year preceding the election before pundits started speculating about when the obvious odd... (Linked Thursday 2011-05-05.)

Utah, Alabama, Idaho and six other states in the Union have a monopoly on alcohol.

M.S. at The Economist‘s “Democracy in America” blog wrote on “the peculiar issue of state liquor monopolies” today

Nine of the nineteen alcohol beverage control states maintain a very direct monopoly on the good:

There are nine states in the union where the government maintains a direct monopoly on the sale of hard liquor. These lonely outposts of American socialism are not the country’s most liberal states; they’re mainly conservative ones, including three of the seven most conservative states, Utah, Alabama and Idaho. They also include one state that’s becoming gradually less conservative, and may be about to give up its liquor monopoly: Virginia.

Ever since the end of prohibition in 1934, to buy a bottle of Kentucky bourbon in the state of Virginia, you’ve had to go to a government-run ABC (Alcoholic Beverage Control) store.

First, They Came for the Booze

The resistance against opening up the marketplace is, of course, that government seek to extract more money taxing as a direct middleman than indirectly via taxation:

Republican Governor Bob McDonnell is trying to privatise the system, but is running into opposition in the legislature, because the state liquor monopoly is an important source of government revenue. (Just like in Soviet Russia!) The state makes at least $230m a year from the ABC stores, $110m from taxes and $120m in profit. For a sell-off plan to stay revenue-neutral, it would have to sharply raise taxes on alcohol, including a new tax on alcoholic drinks in restaurants and bars.

[...]

Some experts think it’s impossible for the state to make as much from taxes as it does from its sales monopoly, the Washington Post‘s Rosalind Helderman reported last month. Maryland has liquor prices nearly as high as Virginia’s, but made just $25m in excise taxes last year. A study by the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States found liquor taxes in Virginia would have to reach five times the average in privatised states to keep the revenue stream at current levels. The Post‘s Steven Pearlstein disagreed, hazarding that by recapturing revenues from customers who currently buy out-of-state, increasing sales, raising taxes to make up for private-sector “efficiency savings”, raising taxes on bars and restaurants to make up for new wholesale discounts, and sunsetting liquor licenses after ten years so it can charge new license fees, the state could conceivably earn its $230m and still leave $75-100m of after-tax profit for retailers and distributors. But that plan seems considerably more aggressive than the private liquor enterprises pushing for privatisation would like. (Mr Pearlstein also noted that private distributors would pay corporate income tax on profits, but others have countered that the distributors that move into the market will likely be headquartered in other states.)

Of course, “this entire argument seems nuts”, M.S. notes because the central question ought to be: “What on earth is the government doing in the liquor sales business in the first place?”

There’s not even the weak reasoning to propose that alcohol is a “public good”, but he speculates that the lesser access to alcohol—because of government’s inability to provide in a manner that meets the genuine demand—could be a modern-day prohibition-lite:

Virginia has just 0.6 liquor stores per 10,000 inhabitants, compared to a national average of 3.2. Research indicates that alcohol consumption in ABC states is 16-20% below that in decontrolled states, and there’s some evidence that incidence of drunk-driving crashes and fetal alcohol syndrome may be lower as well. And, indeed, some Virginians apparently object to privatising the ABC stores on the grounds that this will lead to more alcohol consumption and hence more crime.

Government agents pride themselves on generating revenue toward the state apparatus and probably just see this route as more politically expedient that raising taxes and licensing fees. Of course, the immediate downfall is—as M.S. noted—”that for any normal good, that kind of argument would be grossly outweighed by the increased efficiency, productivity and social utility of free-market enterprise”.

He added that “it’s not clear that more and cheaper liquor provides greater utility”, but the more indirect downfall is much more obvious, reasonable scrutiny: If I want to open a liquor store in Idaho and find a cheap, efficient distributor, what justifies the government in using violent force to shut my establishment down? What justifies locking me up for an obviously non-violent crime? What justifies them locking me up for doing the exact same thing the government claims to do, outright? Why is it reasonable to stop this line of reasoning past alcohol and violently prevent open entry into the market for actual public goods like banking, dispute resolution, social dilemma, etc.?

Filed under: National News Tagged: Alabama, Alcoholic beverage control states, anarchism, Idaho, Kentucky, libertarian, Mitch McConnell, privatization, prohibition, public goods, Utah, Virgina, Virginia

So, as you may have noticed, it’s June 27^th; I don’t know if you know this, but it’s quite a day for radical birthday parties. To-day take some time to say:

• Happy birthday to Emma Goldman, revolutionary Anarchist organizer, agitator, speaker, writer, and publisher — born June 27, 1869, in Kaunas, Lithuania (then occupied by the Russian Empire).

  The STATE IDEA, the authoritarian principle, has been proven bankrupt by the experience of the Russian Revolution. If I were to sum up my whole argument in one sentence I should say: The inherent tendency of the State is to concentrate, to narrow, and monopolize all social activities; the nature of revolution is, on the contrary, to grow, to broaden, and disseminate itself in ever-wider circles. In other words, the State is institutional and static; revolution is fluent, dynamic. These two tendencies are incompatible and mutually destructive. The State idea killed the Russian Revolution and it must have the same result in all other revolutions, unless the libertarian idea prevail….

  … There is no greater fallacy than the belief that aims and purposes are one thing, while methods and tactics are another, This conception is a potent menace to social regeneration. All human experience teaches that methods and means cannot be separated from the ultimate aim. The means employed become, through individual habit and social practice, part and parcel of the final purpose; they influence it, modify it, and presently the aims and means become identical. —My Disillusionment in Russia (1923).

  At the dances I was one of the most untiring and gayest. One evening a cousin of Sasha, a young boy, took me aside. With a grave face, as if he were about to announce the death of a dear comrade, he whispered to me that it did not behoove an agitator to dance. Certainly not with such reckless abandon, anyway. It was undignified for one who was on the way to become a force in the anarchist movement. My frivolity would only hurt the Cause. I grew furious at the impudent interference of the boy. I told him to mind his own business. I was tired of having the Cause constantly thrown into my face. I did not believe that a Cause which stood for a beautiful ideal, for anarchism, for release and freedom from convention and prejudice, should demand the denial of life and joy. I insisted that our Cause could not expect me to become a nun and that the movement would not be turned into a cloister. If it meant that, I did not want it. I want freedom, the right to self-expression, everybody’s right to beautiful, radiant things. Anarchism meant that to me, and I would live it in spite of the whole world — prisons, persecution, everything. Yes, even in spite of the condemnation of my own closest comrades I would live my beautiful ideal. —Living My Life (1931)

• Happy birthday to FW Helen Keller, the Alabamian author, scholar, lecturer, and radical agitator — born June 27th, 1880 in Tuscumbia, Alabama. Remembered today mainly for being blind and deaf and an inspirational example for the moral uplift of the young, what didn’t make it onto stage or screen was how, in her adult life, Keller won fame and infamy as a radical agitating for worker’ freedom, feminism, peace, anti-militarism, and the revolutionary unionism of the Industrial Workers of the World, which she joined in 1912.

  I became an IWW because I found out that the Socialist party was too slow. It is sinking in the political bog. It is almost, if not quite, impossible for the party to keep its revolutionary character so long as it occupies a place under the government and seeks office under it. The government does not stand for interests the Socialist party is supposed to represent. … The true task is to unite and organize all workers on an economic basis, and it is the workers themselves who must secure freedom for themselves, who must grow strong. Nothing can be gained by political action. That is why I became an IWW.

  —Helen Keller, interviewed by Barbara Bindley, Why I Became an IWW, New York Tribune (January 16, 1916)

  [Bindley:] What are you committed to—education or revolution? [Keller:] Revolution. She answered decisively. We can’t have education without revolution. We have tried peace education for 1,900 years and it has failed. Let us try revolution and see what it will do now. … Again the advisability of printing all this here set forth. And this finally from the patience-exhausted, gentle little woman: I don’t give a damn about semi-radicals! —Helen Keller, interviewed by Barbara Bindley, Why I Became an IWW, New York Tribune (January 16, 1916)

  The future of the world rests in the hands of America. The future of America rests on the backs of 80,000,000 working men and women and their children. We are facing a grave crisis in our national life. The few who profit from the labor of the masses want to organize the workers into an army which will protect the interests of the capitalists. You are urged to add to the heavy burdens you already bear the burden of a larger army and many additional warships. It is in your power to refuse to carry the artillery and the dread-noughts and to shake off some of the burdens, too, such as limousines, steam yachts and country estates. You do not neet to make a great noise about it. With the silence and dignity of creators you can end wars and the system of selfishness and exploitation that causes wars. All you need to do to bring about this stupendous revolution is to straighten up and fold your arms.

  … They know that if the government dresses them up in khaki and gives them a rifle and starts them off with a brass band and waving banners, they will go forth to fight valiantly for their own enemies. They are taught that brave men die for their country’s honor. What a price to pay for an abstraction—the lives of millions of young men; other millions crippled and blinded for life; existence made hideous for still more millions of human being; the achievement and inheritance of generations swept away in a moment—and nobody better off for all the misery! This terrible sacrifice would be comprehensible if the thing you die for and call country fed, clothed, housed and warmed you, educated and cherished your children. I think the workers are the most unselfish of the children of men; they toil and live and die for other people’s country, other people’s sentiments, other people’s liberties and other people’s happiness! The workers have no liberties of their own; they are not free when they are compelled to work twelve or ten or eight hours a day. they are not free when they are ill paid for their exhausting toil. They are not free when their children must labor in mines, mills and factories or starve, and when their women may be driven by poverty to lives of shame. They are not free when they are clubbed and imprisoned because they go on strike for a raise of wages and for the elemental justice that is their right as human beings.

  … Strike against all ordinances and laws and institutions that continue the slaughter of peace and the butcheries of war. Srike against war, for without you no battles can be fought. Strike against manufacturing scrapnel and gas bombs and all other tools of murder. Strike against preparedness that means death and misery to millions of human being. Be not dumb, obedient slaves in an army of destruction. Be heroes in an army of construction.

  —Helen Keller (January 5, 1916), Strike Against War, speech at Carnegie Hall on behalf of the Women’s Peace Party and the Labor Forum

• And while we’re on the subject, let’s also wish happy birthday to the Industrial Workers of the World! The IWW’s founding convention began 105 years ago today in Chicago, on June 27, 1905.

If the workers of the world want to win, all they have to do is recognize their own solidarity. They have nothing to do but fold their arms and the world will stop. The workers are more powerful with their hands in their pockets than all the property of the capitalists. As long as the workers keep their hands in their pockets, the capitalists cannot put theirs there. With passive resistance, with the workers absolutely refusing to move, lying absolutely silent, they are more powerful than all the weapons and instruments that the other side has for attack.

—FW Joe Ettor, in the Bread and Roses textile strike of 1912

• And happy birthday to the radical gay and trans liberation movements! Late at night, 41 years ago today, on June 27th, 1969, and early in the morning on June 28th, the Public Morals Squad [sic] of the New York City government’s police force infiltrated and then assaulted the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village, believing that they would use violence, prison, and social shaming yet again in their ongoing campaign on behalf of the Basher State. But something happened that night that they didn’t expect — when the poorest and most marginalized in the queer and trans community said no more, began to resist, and then fought back against the cops. When people dressed as women refused to be taken back to the bathroom to have police verify their sex, men began to refuse to show their IDs, and cops started bullying and groping lesbians during frisks, the police shoved the people in the bar outside. Those who hadn’t been singled out for arrest refused to leave, and stayed to witness in solidarity. People began to shout Gay Power! and sing We Shall Overcome. When a cop smashed a stone butch over the head with a billy-club for complaining that her handcuffs were too tight, the crowd finally erupted, turned on the police, and freed the prisoners from the police wagon. The police, humiliated and massively outnumbered, barricaded themselves inside the bar until the NYPD’s Tactical Police Force arrived to pull them out and beat a hasty retreat. Running battles with police in Greenwich Village streets continued the next night. Witnessing the example of street kids, gay men, lesbians, drag queens and trans folks rise up, fight back, and win against the government violence of the Morals Police brought about a new urgency, a new daring, and effectively a new movement. Within a few months, the Gay Liberation Front, Gay Activists Alliance, and Gay Pride organizing committee had sprung up in New York, with the first Gay Pride march in New York City’s history being held on June 28, 1970, in honor of Christopher Street Liberation Day. As Frank Kameny, a longtime organizer for the Mattachine Society put it, By the time of Stonewall, we had fifty to sixty gay groups in the country. A year later there was at least fifteen hundred. By two years later, to the extent that a count could be made, it was twenty-five hundred.

  We all had a collective feeling like we’d had enough of this kind of shit. It wasn’t anything tangible anybody said to anyone else, it was just kind of like everything over the years had come to a head on that one particular night in the one particular place, and it was not an organized demonstration. It was spontaneous. That was the part that was wonderful.

  Everyone in the crowd felt that we were never going to go back. It was like the last straw. It was time to reclaim something that had always been taken from us…. All kinds of people, all different reasons, but mostly it was total outrage, anger, sorrow, everything combined, and everything just kind of ran its course. It was the police who were doing most of the destruction. We were really trying to get back in and break free. And we felt that we had freedom at last, or freedom to at least show that we demanded freedom. We didn’t really have the freedom totally, but we weren’t going to be walking meekly in the night and letting them shove us around—it’s like standing your ground for the first time and in a really strong way, and that’s what caught the police by surprise. There was something in the air, freedom a long time overdue, and we’re going to fight for it. It took different forms, but the bottom line was, we weren’t going to go away. And we didn’t.

  —Michael Fader, quoted in David Carter (2004), Stonewall: The Riots that Sparked the Gay Revolution, p. 160.

Here’s to many happy returns.

One reason to be glad for YouTube is that it gives me a chance to keep up with some of the things from back home that I’d miss out here in Vegas if it weren’t for the Internet. It’s summer in Alabama now, and it’s an even-numbered year. Which means it doesn’t matter if you get the local TV or not — no matter where you may be, thanks to YouTube it’s the season for Alabama state politics — the greatest show on earth.

Here’s Fob’s boy Tim, offering a soft-lit and touching tribute to monolingualism and belligerent ignorance:

Meanwhile, Dale By-God! Peterson is going to kick the ass of the Republican nomination for Alabama Commissioner of Agriculture and Industries.

It’s a dime a dozen for cowboy-themed campaign commercials in Alabama state politics. But this is something special. Listen up: the moment when Dale Peterson, having just finished off a completely out-of-right-field tirade about migrant workers somehow hurting farming in Alabama (?) and a paranoid rant about Facebook bragging and the minions of his political opponents stealing his yard signs in the dead of night, then goes on to shout We’re Republicans! and hefts a rifle up over the fence — well, it may be one of the most wonderful unintentional Happenings that I have ever seen on television.

(Via Roderick Long and Tennyson McCalla)

Here’s Jenn Rowell in the Montgomery Advertiser on a recent murder in Tallassee. Notice the amazing disappearing subject:

Tallassee police have released additional information about a fatal shooting that involved officers.

In the news, fatal shootings just happen somehow, and officers, poor things, somehow end up involved.

Of course, what actually happened is that some white cops working on the Tallassee city government’s police force chased a black man down and then they shot him to death. Their victim, Michael McIntyre, was not actually accused of any crime whatsoever; the cops were in the housing projects where he lives because they were looking for somebody else to serve a warrant. (Who they found, and arrested, without any trouble. But Michael McIntyre ran away, which cops in America take as a crime in itself, and sufficient reason to chase after you, force a violent confrontation, and take you down by any means necessary, even if it means lighting you up (the police so far have refused to disclose how many shots were fired, beyond the fact that their victim was hit multiple times).

Cops claim that McIntyre brandished a weapon — after a gang of heavily-armed strangers had chased him for 200 or 300 yards. I don’t know whether that’s true or not — there’s certainly no reason to just take the police at their word — but even if it is true, I don’t much care. If I had no reason to be looking for you, no reason to hang around bothering you — if you were never accused of any crime and I had no basis to arrest or detain or harass you over anything — and you decided to leave, then you have a right to leave. If I took your decision to leave as an offense against my person or prerogative, and then chased you down, threatening to use my small arsenal of weapons to restrain you by any means necessary, and so forced a violent confrontation with you when, again, you were not suspected of committing any crime, or of posing any threat to anyone, and if I then ended it all by lighting you up, in self-defense against a threat which, if it existed at all, was purely the product of my own belligerence and escalation, then I would be considered a dangerous maniac, and I would probably be in prison for the next couple decades, if not the remainder of my natural life.

Of course, here the dangerous maniac is a gang of cops armed and uniformed by the city government. So instead they get a crowd control goon squad to clear the area of upset black people, while the Mayor pro tem of the city government takes time out to roll up and do some damage control, while their colleagues in the Alabama Bureau of Investigation perform a perfunctory investigation that will almost certainly end up by declaring that everything they did was done According To Official Procedures.

(Via Roderick 2009-12-31.)

See also:

• GT 2009-10-21: Wednesday Lazy Linking (Tucumcari, New Mexico: Unarmed 14 year old girl tasered for running away)
• GT 2009-09-16: The Police Beat: Shot in the Back (Las Vegas, Nevada: shot to death for running away)
• GT 2009-06-02: The Police Beat (Detroit, Michigan: Tasered to death for running away.)
• GT 2009-05-26: Over My Shoulder #45: How Empire comes home in sado-statism and police brutality. From Fred Woodworth, “Evil Empire Notes,” in The Match! # 107 (Summer, 2009)