alias Bruce.

Watch this video "mockumentary" in which child actors portray adult roles in the rampant violence, corruption, and suffering that is sweeping Mexico.

The video was produced by an assemblage of groups who want to shake things up in Mexico's public discourse. From the stormy response to the vid, they appear to be succeeding.

In its final scene, a young girl faces the camera and, speaking to candidates in Mexico's upcoming presidential election, says: "If this is the future that awaits me, I don't want it. Enough of working for your political parties instead of for us. Enough of cosmetic changes."

 

Thanks to Tina at The Agonist.

The Tulsa shootings. And a little deep background.

The Tulsa shootings have "hate crime" written all over them. This has yet to be established legally, but circumstantially it is generally agreed, for obvious reasons, that it's likely.

Two suspects are in custody and are expected to be indicted for murder and shooting with intent to kill. Local authorities, and black citizens, have so far been notably restrained in their public statements about two white men going on a murder rampage in a black community, which is interesting when you consider the likely public explosion if two black men were to drive through a white community and shoot five white strangers within a matter of minutes on Easter weekend.

Showing restraint under brutality, of course, is a learned trait in black communities that goes back to slavery and Jim Crow.

Tulsa, in fact, has a spectacularly bloody history when it comes to white attacks on black communities. Neither the CNN story nor the NYT account mentions this -- which is interesting in itself -- but Tulsa was the scene of one of the deadliest white-on-black racial mob massacres in American history in 1921. From Wiki:

The Tulsa Race Riot was a large-scale racially motivated conflict, May 31 - June 1, 1921, between the white and black communities of Tulsa, Oklahoma, in which the wealthiest African-American community in the United States, the Greenwood District also known as 'The Negro Wall St' [1] was burned to the ground. Aerial fire bombing of black residential neighborhoods was reported. During the 16 hours of the assault, over 800 people were admitted to local hospitals with injuries, more than 6,000 Greenwood residents were arrested and detained at three local facilities.[2] An estimated 10,000 were left homeless, and 35 city blocks composed of 1,256 residences were destroyed by fire. The official count of the dead by the Oklahoma Department of Vital Statistics was 36, but other estimates of black fatalities have been up to about 300.[2]

The events of the riot were omitted from local and state history; "The Tulsa race riot of 1921 was rarely mentioned in history books, classrooms or even in private. Blacks and whites alike grew into middle age unaware of what had taken place." [3] In 1996, the state legislature commissioned a report, completed in 2001, to establish the historical record. It has approved some compensatory actions, such as scholarships for descendants of survivors, economic development of Greenwood, and a memorial park, dedicated in 2010, to the victims in Tulsa.

But don't make the mistake of thinking that today's horrible news about the shootings is just about Tulsa. The Tulsa murders draw together things that are going on at multiple levels in neighborhoods nationwide: White-panic Florida gun laws and the killings and hatred they let loose (see the armed neo-Nazis from Detroit who recently decided to patrol Sanford, Florida in proclaimed defense of white citizens); a corporate monarchy and its recession pummeling the brains of many whites into a paste of blind rage; a reactionary and fascist white "restore the homeland" movement (aka the Tea Party), with theocracy and vicious racism just beneath its surface, now being treated as a mainstream political force.

More soon.

Update on the Trayvon Martin killing:

CNN reports that George Zimmerman's attorney has now declared that the Florida stand your ground law doesn't figure in the case, and that his client will argue straight-up self-defense. The stand your ground law, the lawyer says, applies primarily to people being threatened in their homes, while Zimmerman, he claims, has a broader case for self-defense.

This seems a curious stance, since all the readings of the law I have seen, such as this one, clearly describe it as applying anywhere a person has a right to be, whether a public or private place. As such, stand your ground appears to offer Zimmerman's best chance at avoiding or beating prosecution. If a burly adult who actively chases a slender unarmed 17-year-old and then shoots him can't claim self-defense under the Swiss-cheese stand your ground law, how in the world is he going to make that claim under the traditionally more stringent standards of conventional self-defense?

It may be that Zimmerman's lawyer is retreating from the sheer public odiousness of a stand-your-ground defense, now that even the two Republican sponsors of the infamous Florida law are saying that the law doesn't protect Zimmerman and are calling for his arrest.

So, just as the law's authors are distancing themselves from him, perhaps Zimmerman's attorney is trying to distance his client from this now globally-detested law. Especially since Zimmerman is already a widely reviled figure, with public outrage spreading and unfavorable media coverage everywhere.

You could think of it as a lawyer in a rickety house hustling his client into the next room as the ceiling collapses.

At any rate, it looks like a desperate move by the attorney, and it may not be his last.

Not that there isn't a feasible chance that Zimmerman will get off, with or without a trial. But if he does, it may make the Rodney King riots look like a Sunday parade.

BTW, here is an interesting piece detailing a variety of cases in which Florida's stand your ground law has been used to fend off criminal charges for homicides in which the killers would otherwise likely have been indicted.

And here is a fact you personally need to know: although Florida was the first to enact a stand your ground law, similar laws have since been adopted by at least 25 states – that's half of America – including Alabama, Arizona, Mississippi, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and Texas. Think about that the next time some stranger pushes a confrontation with you.

Dissecting the killing of Trayvon Martin.

On the night of February 26, Trayvon Martin, a black 17-year-old walking back to the home of his father's fiancé in a gated community in Sanford, Florida after having bought Skittles and an Arizona Iced Tea at a nearby convenience store, was shot to death by neighborhood watch volunteer George Zimmerman. Zimmerman, who is a white Hispanic, claims self-defense, despite a 911 recording in which Zimmerman apparently chases Martin on foot against the instructions of the 911 dispatcher, and another 911 recording in which a voice later identified as that of the unarmed Martin repeatedly screams for help before being silenced by a gunshot. The Sanford Police Department has filed no charges against Zimmerman.

All hell has since broken loose. The Sanford City Commissioners passed a no-confidence vote on the local chief of police, and he has subsequently taken a temporary leave after a (white) constituent reportedly sent an email telling him he "deserve[d] to be shot down like a dog" for neglecting the killing of Martin. Activists from Al Sharpton to the NAACP's Ben Jealous have descended upon Sanford. The U.S. Justice Department has opened an investigation into the shooting. Protest demonstrations are roaring, and growing, nationwide. More than 1.6 million people, as of this writing, have signed a Change.org petition calling for the arrest of Zimmerman. President Obama and every major Republican presidential contender have spoken about the case. Corporate media – in their single-sensational-event-driven way – are on a feeding frenzy. Outrage is approaching what a friend of mine calls a potential "Emmett Till moment" -- a possible tipping point in awareness and rage over blacks being killed with impunity.

Let's take a quick look at the two ingredients of the Trayvon Martin case: race and guns.

RACE
A central defense offered by George Zimmerman's family and his lawyer is that he is not a racist because 1.) he is a Hispanic who knows the meaning of discrimination, 2.) he has mentored black youths, and 3.) he welcomed and befriended a black female newcomer to his neighborhood. All of this, if true, tells us exactly nothing about how Zimmerman would regard an unknown young black male on the street. We do have some other clues, though: A Miami Herald reporter who reviewed Zimmerman's history of neighborhood watch 911 calls said, "What you see there is a pattern where every time George Zimmerman sees an African American who he doesn't recognize, he calls the police." Racism has a funny way of exempting some from its fears – non-threatening women and clearly needy students, for example – while leaping to fight-or-flight mode in the presence of an unknown young black male in a hoodie. Racial prejudice is also an equal-opportunity illness: today's police and vigilante cultures have plenty of participants of color – blacks, Hispanics, Asians – who are ready and eager to profile by race. Ask me, or any of millions of other law-abiding black American males, about our experiences with police of all colors.

Whether or not George Zimmerman is a conscious racist in his heart means nothing. What matters is what he did. Which leads to the second issue in the Trayvon Martin case.

GUNS
Florida's so-called "stand your ground" gun laws – recently-passed legislation that allows ordinary folks to carry concealed firearms and to use them, without retreating, whenever they feel threatened -– are what made it possible for Zimmerman to feel empowered as a civilian to kill the unarmed Martin with a semi-automatic handgun. The Sanford Police Department's explanation for its lack of action on the case, in fact, has been that without a witness they have no evidence to contradict Zimmerman's claim that his killing Martin complies with the stand your ground law. Without this law, a neighborhood volunteer of questionable judgment, like Zimmerman, would not be legally carrying a handgun with which to lethally judge when he felt "threatened." Without this law, the Martin case would have been, at worst, a fistfight culminating in a lawsuit -- instead of a killing.

Even proponents of Florida's stand your ground law, though, are distancing themselves from Zimmerman. That is because, against the instructions of a telephone dispatcher, Zimmerman reportedly got out of his car and pursued and confronted Martin. His breathless chase, in fact, can be heard on one of the 911 recordings. One of the stand your ground bill's co-sponsors told CNN after the Martin shooting, "Quite frankly, anyone who steps out in a pursuit in a confrontational mode with a firearm? That's not a self-protection act. You've initiated something."

But the law is what put the gun in the hands of an amateur like Zimmerman and made him feel free to use it. Such laws are among the latest symptoms of an American firearms fetish whereby panicked citizens can suckle at the nipple of a warm gun. The United States is becoming the laughingstock of the industrialized world for its reckless embrace of access to firearms. What, after all, is some heavy-breathing neighborhood watch schlump doing with a gun in his possession while he roams the streets? Like Alabama's recent draconian anti-illegal-immigrant law, which now has many of that state's businesses in open revolt as their crops rot in the fields and their Hispanic former employees go into hiding, Florida's wild-west gun law is revealing its consequences.

Trayvon Martin paid for this law, and for the public paranoia and police collusion it enables, with his life. Others have as well; the number of Florida homicides ruled "justifiable" has almost tripled since the law took effect. The bodies continue to stack up.

We'll see where this goes. One thing is clear: As has happened so often before in so many places, it will take a concerted and ferocious national shove for Florida lawmakers to awaken to reality.

The video of police pepper spraying peaceful students at UC Davis

 

doesn't require a lot of commentary: an overweight, battle-outfitted cop following orders and flexing his flabby sense of power over a group of passively sitting demonstrators because somebody told him he should or could. The message is clear: The ruling class understands that OWS is ripping the scab off the suffering of the working and middle class and the poor, and the elites are afraid of the truthful and disciplined anger cultivated by the OWS movement, and they are determined to shut it down before it spreads into anything like a mass uprising against corporate monarchy. The bosses' chief weapon, to paraphrase the hysterical enforcer in the old Monty Python "Spanish Inquisition" sketch, is fear: fear that if you protest you will be injured, fear that your dissent will place you in personal physical danger, fear that gathering in public against a Wall Street dictatorship will put you more at risk than you can possibly afford. You can be angry, is the message, but you'd damn well better keep your anger at home and not make public trouble for us.

This may well be an explicitly coordinated strategy. We know, for instance, that the mayors of many cities with active OWS movements have shared ideas in large-scale conference calls about how to respond. We also know that law enforcement has both the national means and the motive to share recommended methodologies for cutting off OWS participants at the knees.

In any case, the plutocrats are scared, and police are being called upon to kick serious ass. This isn't at all new in poor communities of color, where illegal and humiliating public body searches and sodomy attacks and cold-blooded murders by police have been going on for decades as a tool of terror and control. But it is new for today's generation of college-aged and twenty-something mostly-white Wall Street occupiers and protesters, accustomed as they are to freedom from rampant police abuse. Further, this kind of explicitly political national movement of young people (of all colors) against capitalist injustice is something the United States has not seen for nearly a half-century. And so police at places like UC Davis, and Oakland, and Portland, are now being called upon to review the DEFCON pages of their manuals, to pull on their riot gear, and to report for Conan the Barbarian duty.

White kids being brutalized by swaggering over-armored cops doesn't play well on national television. The courage and discipline of a crowd of students who responded by peacefully forcing the storm troopers to retreat while they chanted "Shame on you!" and "You can go!" also makes a strong impression on national TV. Just as powerful (see video below) was the ruthlessly silent shaming of weak UC Davis Chancellor Linda Katehi by a sea of students who drowned Katehi in their deafening silence as she slunk though them to her car after unsuccessfully begging for their understanding after the pepper-spraying attack. The UC Davis faculty and many others have called for her resignation.

The War on Drugs provided a pretext for militarization of police in low-income communities of color. The culture of police thuggery, having been honed in places like the Bronx and South Central Los Angeles, is now being brought to bear against a potential national anti-corporate movement that taps into popular grievances. We'll see how this plays out. My bet is that OWS and the evolving ideas and actions it has set into motion will give the rich a run for their money.

 

The latest "Stop 'Stop & Frisk'" civil disobedience action in NYC took place

on Saturday with a march to the 103rd police precinct in Queens, near where the unarmed Sean Bell was shot to death on the eve of his wedding day by five NYPD officers who fired 50 bullets.

Saturday's SS&F action, one of a continuing series of protests that have involved Cornel West, Carl Dix, and community residents and members of Occupy Wall Street among others, was in part a memorial to Bell. 20 people were arrested and jailed. Reports here and here provide details.

More protests are planned against Stop and Frisk, an outright police state tactic by which NYC police stop, jack up, and feel up hundreds of thousands of citizens each year for no defined cause. The vast majority are black and Latino and nearly all of them are innocent of any crime; practically none are arrested. The obscene statistics are here. It's all about police using fear, trauma, and intimidation as weapons of power.

More and more people are stepping forward to insist that this unconstitutional police thuggery has to stop.

Welcome to the 2011 Days of Rage.

In the past day alone, mass Occupy Wall Street actions, as chronicled here and here, give us a hint, just a hint, of what can happen when a too-mad-to-be-denied constituency hugely outnumbers the blue-clad and helmeted enforcers who are paid to subdue them.

The most eloquent statement I have yet heard from the decentralized OWS movement came from one of its New York City leaders, who said on the radio that OWS actions, spectacular and dramatic though they are, serve as but a vehicle for a kind of colossal public education on the way the American and global capitalist economy really works -- and on the massive power that can be unleashed when popular awareness merges with popular rage.

It is worth repeating again and again: although most Americans are not part of OWS, most do agree with its stated positions against income inequality and the rule of the rich. When was the last time you saw those explicit and widespread public grievances forced onto the front pages and the anchor desks of the corporate media?

If you don't think Occupy Wall Street is part of a serious movement,

then read this about the massive clashes underway this very minute in NYC, where police have at times been overwhelmed by huge crowds;

and this chronology of what has happened in NYC since early this morning, including the delay of the opening bell of the New York Stock Exchange;

and this about how cities are braced for more.

I've said it before and I will keep saying it: the elites have no idea of the depth and breadth of the anger felt toward them in America.

So what does Tuesday's court ban of Occupy Wall Street camping in Zuccotti Park

really mean for OWS?

The short answer is that we don't know. The eviction could mean that occupiers will insistently return to Zuccotti with tents, and risk almost sure arrest to dramatize the repression of the occupation by the city and its monied sponsors (read: banks and others spooked by the newly unrestful peasantry). It could mean that the park will remain a site for (carefully police-controlled and -monitored) protest without further attempts at overnight stays. It could mean that former park occupiers will take residency in other public NYC spaces, or move cleverly and strategically from one site to another. It could mean that OWS in NYC will graduate to overtly political organizing that is not dependent on specific spaces. It could mean that the NYC occupation, already facing the question of what was to happen as winter descended, will be unintentionally strengthened and pushed to the next level of practical function by the city's forced eviction and the attention and outrage it has garnered. It could mean that OWS will accelerate toward a splintering into factions with differing agendas for what is wrong with American capitalism and what is to be done about it. Or it could mean any combination of these things, along with things not yet envisioned. OWS is a nationwide and international phenomenon, and the lessons of Oakland and Portland and many other cities, in addition to New York, are neither coalesced nor completed.

There is one clear thing, however, that the eviction does not mean. It does not mean the end of what OWS represents, which is a broad anger with the corruption and unfairness of the American (and global) economy and a fierce desire for remedies. That anger and hunger -- reflected not only in the shared actions and declarations of occupiers but in national opinion polls about taxes on millionaires and reining in the rule of the rich -- is still here because the conditions that create and sustain it are still here. So, like mercury in a maze, the anger will flow from one closed channel to the next open one. And the next. The richest of the rich, who like all ruling classes lack the ability to save themselves from themselves, will ensure through their reflexive greed and ironclad hubris that the anger and hunger of the rest of us is steadily nurtured via a regime of obscene unfairness and economic and ecological unsustainability. 

The funny thing about repression and injustice is that its inability to stop itself also makes for unstoppable and ever-shifting resistance.

Occupy Wall Street in NYC was raided and cleared by police in riot gear early this morning, but a court order

hours later told the city to allow protestors to return and camp out. As I write, a hearing is reportedly in progress regarding the court order.

You likely already know about all this. I learned of it at Agonist.org at 3:30 a.m. The violent eviction by police isn't a surprise. The court order, though, is a wild card. In any case, whether the encampment can legally resume or not, Mayor Bloomberg is fooling himself if he thinks this is going away.

More later.