http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cartoon/2011/mar/28/cartoon-steve-bell-tuc-rally

“Police said 211 people were arrested for offences including using threatening or insulting words or behaviour, criminal damage, aggravated trespass, violent disorder and for going equipped with intent to cause criminal damage.”

Of those approximately 200 arrested, only 149 have been charged. So it seems a quarter of those arrested shouldn’t have been and many of those being charged may well include people accused of using “threatening or insulting words or behaviour”… that could include someone telling an officer to fuck off for smacking them in the head with a truncheon.

Until we have full disclosure on the nature of the role of plainclothes provocateurs in the crowd (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QmskOljRxsw) I think we should tone down the pro-State frothing.

It was a fabulous day. Not perhaps as staggering as the Iraq protest, but damn close.

This is common practice in these sorts of actions. That it sounds like parody to you reveals only how disconnected you are from the actuality of modern resistance movements. By and large, these are real, dimensional people, who, despite the continued attempts by police and corporate media to portray them all as mindless, opportunistic hooligans, actually care deeply about ethics. Whatever you may wish to believe, functional non-hierarchical self organization through consensus-building not only exists, but has become more practicable than ever thanks to the abundance of communication networks available to contemporary protestors.

Such actions, even if they accomplish nothing else (a point I’m certainly not willing to concede) unquestionably serve to activate more people, giving them direct proof of the feasibility of non-hierarchical organization, and inspiring them with the transformative, incandescent, unforgettable feeling of equality and empowerment that such systems impart.

This, perhaps more than anything else, is what Empire fears: Not that people will smash some windows or block an intersection. But that, by taking action, and experiencing for themselves the practicable, humanistic reality of anarchism, they will become irrevocably infected with a permanent hunger for true freedom, rather than the debased simulacrum that Empire shoves down our throats, and sells to us from every shop window and billboard.

We can test this – right before the Saturday protest march the reliably left wing Guardian showed polling that 57% of the public supported current cuts or wanted even more cuts – lets see in a months time whether those numbers have moved significantly.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2011/mar/25/voters-cuts-coalition-poll

This isn’t about me taking a stand for or against one side or another – in the 90s a couple hundred thousand people who like to kill foxes marched in London – most of them were Tory scum – the fox hunt ban was passed and polling unchanged – same goes for marches by anti-abortion folks, the big Beck rally, etc. –

What a masterful deception Empire has achieved, when its subjects reflexively defend the agents of the state—soldiers whose increasingly unconcealed function is chiefly to prevent the disenfranchised from ever reclaiming their fair share from the plutocrats that are so shamelessly exploiting them—rather than siding with their sisters and brothers, the real human beings of the working class.

It is as if we all suffer from the delusion that one day, we too might be rich, we too might win the lottery, or somehow magically ascend into our imagined rightful place among the ruling classes, and, having clung to this delusion so desperately and for so long, can do nothing else but make choices that support and defend these imagined future selves, rather than choices that accept and genuinely improve the reality of our present.

Such sociopathic self-deception is toxic for us all. Wake up! Life is the reality of your here and now, not some nostalgic fantasy of an idealized past, or a desperate mystical entitlement to a better tomorrow. It is this, now, and only this. Look around you. If your life is not as you wish it to be, if your society is unjust, take action to change it today!

Or at the very least, don’t demonize those who have the bravery to try.

The last is the important point. Protesters are kept in check by the police. The police reaction is never kept in check by anyone. The result is, slowly but steadily, that the response becomes less and less reasonable.

She saw the protestors “organising themselves into a non-hierarchial consensus-building team.”

Here is a problem for protesters: we reject the use of violence, but we’ve been taught to ridicule the language of peace.

And as for your defense of private property, perhaps take a moment to consider how functional or ethical it is to apply the same notion of property rights that we grant individuals (quite sensibly and comprehensibly, for the most part) to vast, multinational corporate entities who, unlike individuals, have no direct accountability for their ravenous, capitalism-driven sociopathy.

Forgive me if, until corporations are held as accountable for stealing millions as a mugger is for stealing £50, I am inclined to accept an equal disparity in people’s respect of “corporate property rights”.

None of those are offences under British law. The closest is “breach of the peace” which has a strict definition and people don’t often get arrested for it in a public order situation because it takes officers away from their serial unnecessarily. Saying that the police get to decide who is breaking the law doesn’t make any sense… if the officer believes an offence has been committed they can arrest for it, but they need an actual offence first. Sometimes there’s overlap between different offences, for example there can be quite a fine line between sections 5, 4a and 4 of the Public Order Act, and someone who gets arrested for one offence will be charged with another.

There’s not some conspiracy on the police side to stitch people up, in fact you’ll often find that the majority of arrests are made later after CCTV and other evidence has been gathered, and that in a ‘riot’ situation police will actually stand by and watch offences being committed that in any other circumstances would result in immediate arrest of the offender.

The automatic panning of the police as ‘robots of the state’ or ‘fascist footsoldiers’ is laughable. I’d like to see these self-righteous anarchist naifs spend a 14 hour shift dealing with rape, robbery and car accident victims, and seeing the worst of society, before believing that because they really passionately believe in something, it gives them the right to smash up other people’s stuff without a nasty brutal police officer taking them away to a police station where the worst that will happen to them is they’ll get a microwave meal that isn’t very good. Most countries in the world would DREAM of having a police force as accountable and professional as the Met.

Rant over.

I don’t really know what the problem is here?

… and you probably never will.

The problem with both protests is that they lacked direction. The main protest was just, “hey, stop the cuts”, without any attempt to propose an alternative. Ed Milliband’s speech was cringe-inducing, attempting to compare his call for a reduced rate in cuts funded by longer-term debt repayments to the protests by Martin Luther King, Neslon Mandela and the Suffragettes. I bet he disowns the violence too, despite 2 of his 3 inspirations using violent protest to pursuer their aims. Lightweight.

The alternative protesters were even worse. They targeted Fortnum & Masons. What? That’s like attacking Whole Foods. They have nothing to do with the cuts at all. Maybe Philip Greene once bought a bottle of wine there?
They also attacked branches of Santander and Barclays. What do these 2 banks have in common? Well done fact fans, they needed no bailout money from the government!
They did do a protest at TopShop, which was about the only action that seemed sensible (it’s owner Philip Greene pays his multi-million salary to his wife in Monaco to avoid tax while simultaneously working as a government advisor on cost-cutting).

BBC News 24 covered the protests live all day, with lots of helicopter shots showing the size and activities of the main protest (OMFG HUEG! Peaceful) and alternative protests (a few hundred guys dressed in black knocking over bins and being surrounded 10:1 by press photographers if they look like hurling a brick through a window).

Did your local news address “What does this march mean?” and “Why does it matter??? “Is this a growing movement with previous events (YES!)?

The news headlines are often misleading or minimizing, and the body never fails to mention the relative small incidences of violence (in an otherwise very peaceful, organized event).

And what about the peaceful but effective UK Uncut??

Fortunately there is The Guardian and The Independent of London and You Tube. I couldn’t find the story in SFGate/SF Chronicle (an often highly selective and corporate tilted publication oft dependent on tilted AP). Unfortunately MOST people do not regularly use the internet to get detailed news from around the world.

The London protest, march, demonstration, rally, (notice all the names), on Saturday was one of the largest there ever–500,000. It is about rejection of “austerity” measures and disgust with their government, and far exceeded one of the organizers, Trade Union Congress, expectations.

The March for the Alternative protest last Saturday March 26 WAS A KEYSTONE EVENT OF MASSIVE SOCIAL AND POLITICAL IMPORTANCE–a sign of what is coming to the US and what is happening around the globe, yet it is so poorly covered overall, with few exceptions. Where is the Who, What, When, Where and WHY??

More people would have attended, but transportation couldn’t handle the crowds. BUT like any large protest that is in the majority of the average person’s interest involving civil rights, or fair labor practice, or anti-war, it is buried in a variety of ways.

Contrast this with the billionaire Koch corporate, right wing backed, media loving Tea Party type rallies, which had extensive coverage (even though coverage often failed to express the deeper justified frustrations that most political stripes share, but rather marginalized attendees as extremists or whackos or bigots, often rightly, but not always).

(haven’t heard a peep about any protests here in L.A.)

I applaud focus on tax-avoiding corporations. Let’s collect the fair share from these legal “persons”. Make multi-nationals stand in line at DMV too.

It’s not novel, it happens dozens of times a year, all over the world. As someone who’s been on the wrong side of a police cordon a few times, I have found it ever more tiresome to read armchair psychopaths gloating over whatever violence the police committed. If you really love the idea of protesters being beat down so much, why don’t you do it yourself? “Sooner throttle a baby in its crib than nurse unacted desires,” eh?

At the same time, I’m getting bored with the willingness of people in protest movements to set themselves up, over and over again, to be knocked down like so many bowling pins by the forces of repression. If we’re going to win these fights, we have to figure out ways to disrupt that tired old script I’ve enumerated above. Mass peaceful demonstrations are fine for some things, but they’re never going to convince a resolute government to change its policies. You can use them to test the resolve of a government, sometimes to very good effect, but no president or prime minister ever looked down on a throng of protesters and thought to him or herself “Gosh, I guess they’re right! I’m going to change that policy immediately!”

Ultimately, the thing that changes society is direct action. Sometimes that’s going to include destroying some property, sometimes it’s not. Sometimes, as in the case of the people who ran the Underground Railroad, it’s going to be destroying property by denying its status as property, and raising it up to the status of a human being. As we move into an ever-more mediated world, where reification mounts to levels that Marx and Bakunin could hardly have imagined, I think we’re going to have to be doing a lot more of that good old Abolitionist-style direct action, without waiting for the government and the corporations to come around via moral suasion.

If you were in the slightest bit interested in why UK Uncut targeted Fortnum & Mason a quick search will help you no end.

“UK Uncut, the anti-cuts direct action group, are currently occupying Fortnum & Mason over the tax dodge of over 40 million by its owners Whittington Investments which have a 54% stake in Associated British Foods who produce Ryvita, Kingsmill and others and own Primark. ABF have dodged over £40 million in tax.”
http://ukuncut.org.uk/blog/press-release-uk-uncut-occupy-tax-dodgers-fortnum-and-mason

and

“We are told that the only way to reduce the deficit is to cut to public services. This is certainly not the case. There are alternatives, but the government chooses to ignore them, highlighting the fact that the cuts are based on ideology, not necessity.

* One alternative is to clamp down on tax dodging by corporations and the rich, estimated to cost the state £95bn a year
* Another is to make the banks pay for a crisis they created: last year they paid out over £7bn in bonuses and just four banks made £24bn in profit

The tax avoided and evaded in a single year could pay for the £81bn, four-year cuts programme.”
http://ukuncut.org.uk/about/cuts

Address poverty, onerous drug laws, encourage treatment and health care any most property crimes (and others) would go away. Corporate and white collar crime doesn’t seem to go away, no matter how well to do the perpetrators are. That is what greed, envy and addiction does.

As far as the crimes you listed,(rape, robbery and car accident victims), are crimes the police often can’t or won’t prevent, but only respond to but under enforce and prosecute.

Interviews and investigation of major civil protests where the please over-reacted do show patterns of physical and emotional abuse and over-application of disturbing the peace or disorderly conduct or incitement statutes.

The laws against civil disobedience ARE purposely overly general and open to broad interpretation resulting in many inappropriate arrests as evidenced by the lack of prosecutions and releases without charge, well after the protest has passed. They are this way to give “legal” coverage to this wishing to quell these events.

Look into the lawsuits and press releases that follow.

“Mob? Who’s a mob? I don’t see a mod here.”

“You are. You are all a mob!”

“A mob? I thought we were a a non-hierarchal consensus-building team.”

“Help! Help! I’m being repressed!”

In general, it is about whether and how Canadian police over-reacted to protesters or marchers, many/most of whom were quite peaceful and innocent. This is a rare type televised analysis of this protest incident.

G20: The Untold Stories -You Should Have Stayed At Home
http://www.cbc.ca/fifth/2010-2011/youshouldhavestayedathome/index.html

The take home story isn’t just about the trend of unpleasantries committed by Canada (Haiti unrest,indigenous peoples abuse, tar sans of Alberta, onerous Olympics cost trade-off, involvement in oil-wars), so much as it is about suppression of civil disobedience and globalization vs anti-gloablization.

It’s about abuse by authority and loss of civil rights, “Kill it before it grows” as Bob Marley lamented in song. “It” in this case being the the fifth estate & its transformation from apathy to opposition.

The police and accompanying enforcers presence was the largest in Canadian history and what happened around the G20 event will likely change your impression of “peaceful” Canada.

I am sure many Canadians are or would be ashamed of how this protest was managed.

I really like the Canadians I’ve met, and admire them and their country for many reasons, mostly, but advise Americans to re-consider that maple leaf flag on your globetrotting backpack.

G20: The Untold Stories You Should Have Stayed At Home – the fifth estate
http://www.cbc.ca/fifth/2010-2011/youshouldhavestayedathome/in