Tag: police brutality

Wall Street's treasonous sonsabitches are now destroying U.S. energy security in their locust-like quest for profit growth. Their latest move is to sell America's fossil fuel reserves to the highest bidder and export them for foreign consumption. Our sellout Congress cleared the way during the Christmas dark period with a discreet rider buried in a big appropriations bill, ending the ban on oil exports enacted after the 1973 oil embargo. The U.S. energy industry has used "energy security" for the past 40 years to justify pushing drilling rigs into sensitive environmental areas, like The Arctic and offshore coastal regions such as the Gulf of Mexico. It's also been their justification for fracking - a geographically destabilizing process whereby huge amounts of water are injected into rock formations to fracture them and release the oil and gas trapped within them. Fracking is so volatile that it causes localized earthquakes and leaves local residents with flammable drinking water coming out of their kitchen faucets. Those hefty negatives make sense in the context of national security. Not corporate greed. The premise behind energy security has always been that if we produce enough fossil fuel to meet our own needs we will no longer have to live in fear of the huge economic weapons wielded by The House of Saud and the rest of the OPEC price-fixing cartel. However, that premise always assumed we would consume American oil and natural gas here at home. Why would Wall Street sellout their fellow Americans like this? Because the U.S.-based energy companies playing this game are no longer American. They're multinationals with no national loyalty whatsoever in a new global economic order in which corporations are people, executives and political hookers are royals, and working stiffs like you and I are a perishable commodity to be used up and discarded. (Click here for the rest of this article)

The autumn air was crisp and cold as I walked into the parking lot behind the Marble Hill Projects in the Bronx back in 1984....

A fascinating conversation about the militarization of U.S. police and their recent string of assaults on members of the black community is now underway...

Trauma is always a possibility in any conflict. One would think the probability of developing war wounds at the kind of nonviolent actions associated with Occupy Wall Street would be small, but trauma is a reality for activists like Cecily McMillan, who experience both police brutality and the symptoms of trauma they produce.
 
Occupy has natural buffers to prevent a brutal crime from becoming a traumatic episode, but Occupiers still needs to be trauma-minded enough to look after their own. Especially those who try to tough it out by pretending nothing hurts them after being physically assaulted by an enraged officer they have been raised to admire.
 
What is trauma?
 
We tend to think of trauma in terms of its symptoms: withdrawal, anxiety and panic, fear, flashbacks, nightmares, mood swings, hyper-vigilance, detachment and the search to numb these experiences through drug use or self harm. But this is all very clinical and dry.

A more human understanding of trauma is that it is an event someone cannot yet write into their personal narrative, which separates that person from him or herself.

A nonviolent protest against police brutality in New York City played out like a script from the satirical Colbert Report on Saturday as at least 14 marchers were arrested and many more were manhandled, including a 16-year-old girl whose shirt was torn off.

"Another day, another few notches out of the right to assembly in Bloombergistan," Nick Mirzeroff said of the March 24 arrests. "A march against police violence was broken up by – guess what – police violence."

Messiah Hamid's arrest stunned veteran members of the Occupy Wall Street movement, who shouted at police "that is a 16-year-old girl"  and "that's a kid" as she was carried away, hands tied behind her and shirt torn open to expose the red bra underneath.

One video of the incident suggests Messiah was targeted by officers after she exchanged words with the driver of a police scooter heading the wrong way through marchers on a congested one-way street. The 16-year-old and several other young women subsequently became entangled and fell to the pavement, according to a bystander.

Two police officers have been suspended for using pepper spray against nonviolent protesters on Nov. 18 at the University of California, Davis, in a...