zn wrote:

zn wrote:

I was a police officer for nearly ten years and I was a bastard. We all were.

Highly recommended read.

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Well, it would be better if it wasn’t anonymous. How do we know its not fake?

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Shannon Sharpe on racism and owners.

Oh my goodness. Stick with it for the 18-19 minute mark. Excellent stuff.

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Of course, Rogan had him on:

Seattle. An enigma wrapped in a conundrum.
The chief of police says they dont know who to negotiate with because no-one is in charge…

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Nikkita Oliver:https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2020/06/nikkita-oliver-on-seattles-extraordinary-protests
“Building People Power”: Nikkita Oliver on Seattle’s Extraordinary Protests and What Comes Next

The activist and former mayoral candidate has been an integral part of protests that led to the creation of a seven-block, police-free “autonomous zone” in a central Seattle neighborhood—whether Trump likes it or not.

By Jacob Uitti
June 11, 2020

In Seattle, as in nearly every major city in America, protesters clashed with police for over a week in early June, demanding justice for George Floyd and other victims of racial violence and police brutality. But what happened next, and is still happening, was completely different. On Monday the police effectively abandoned the area surrounding the East Precinct police station, allowing protesters to establish a seven-block area they are calling the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ).

Within that space protests are ongoing, but so are history lectures, art exhibits, movie nights (Ava DuVernay’s 13th screened Tuesday), concerts, town hall meetings, and street art. There is no formal leadership of the Seattle protests, but among the most prominent figures is Nikkita Oliver, who ran for mayor in 2017 and was the first candidate of the independent Seattle Peoples Party. Also the codirector of the Creative Justice Northwest program, Oliver has been busy organizing protests, facilitating communication among the various groups, and getting down to the autonomous zone when she can—which sometimes means at 3 a.m.

The CHAZ has drawn the attention of none other than Donald Trump, who tweeted threats late Wednesday to “take back” Seattle, and was swiftly rebuked by Washington governor Jay Inslee as well as Mayor Jenny Durkan, who has faced calls to resign after the police used flash bangs and tear gas against protesters.

Not long after the president’s tweet, Oliver got on the phone to talk about not only Trump’s attempt to “incite violence,” but also the historical precedent for movements like this one, the beauty of a movement without a figurehead at the front of it, and how the protests have even bolstered the reputation of another controversial Seattle group: cyclists….

….
…In Seattle there is the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, local residents providing heavy security, medical stations on call. Given those, how is change playing out differently compared to other areas in the country?

You know, I’ll be transparent. I don’t know how it’s playing out differently compared to other areas, but what I can say is what I am in awe of. You know, protesters maintained a sort of occupation at the East Precinct. So essentially, the police left. The people have now actively started building an autonomous safe zone that has art, has music, has food, has community care, and all of that started during the barricade when medics were bringing supplies and community members were dropping off support, when people were donating money and building bail funds, when lawyers were volunteering their time, when people started to develop tactics like umbrellas and bringing gas masks, just a sense of mutual aid and care for each other.

When I look at the rallies happening across the city, there is also this incredible bike brigade that’s started. I think generally people think of cyclists in our city as irritating [laughs], unless you are a cyclist. And to see this bike brigade come up, I think for some folks, has really transformed the way we even think about cycling. They helped marshal the march; they’ve kept people safe. Honestly, today a car tried to run into a group of high school students protesting. And one of the bike brigade folks literally threw their bike under the car to slow it up. There is a real sense of care and support and love for people.

There is a medic squad that rotates and is around at every protest, every march in the autonomous safe zone. There are people providing food. There are stores in places in the autonomous safe zone that are letting people come in and use the restroom, wash their hands, and store things. It really is incredible to see the care and compassion people have for each other, even in the face of this very oppressive force. Governor Inslee sent the National Guard here. There are some very terrifying things happening here, and yet there is a lot of care and compassion for each other, which I think is going to be the marker of how we do or don’t come out of this well.

Why do you think people are angry now and poised to protest?

It is not just Black and indigenous and people of color experiencing the oppression of the system. I think you have middle-class and poor white people who are realizing that they were never safe under capitalism either. It’s creating this convergence, and in the midst of that, people saw the—all of the murders are horrific, but you saw the murder of George Floyd happen, where a police officer knew he was being filmed, could hear the man crying out for his mom, saying he could not breathe. Which then brings us back to Eric Garner, and we’re seeing these things come up over and over again. Tony McDade, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and you’re seeing all these things repeat themselves. I think people are awakening to the fact that the system has actually been set up to work for almost none of us.

Seattle’s peaceful protesters fought for eight days before the city police surrendered the East Precinct. The next night they took City Hall. Are you involved in how these movements are being mobilized and, if so, what might be next?

Yeah, there’s a lot of coordination. I wouldn’t say I’m, like, exclusively involved. I mean, the beauty of what is happening is people are just wanting to be involved. So they’re starting to organize their own actions. I think it’s significant and important because if you look at what has happened in similar movements, we’ve ended up with figureheads—and when the figurehead is gone, the movement dies. The beauty of what’s happening now is that it’s becoming diffuse and harder to tell who the figurehead is because there are so many leaders all over the city doing their own thing but aligning to the common values and goals, which is incredibly powerful.

Last night there was an impromptu showing of the Ava DuVernay documentary 13th in the middle of what used to be one of the city’s busiest intersections. And the East Precinct police station’s sign now says: “Seattle People Department.” When you see these symbols of change, what do you think?

Honestly, I start to immediately think about what’s the vision for this space? And how can it actually be a people’s station, and what are the things that the people need, and how can we organize to make that happen? It’s one thing to take a space, it’s another thing to turn a space into something functional that actually serves the community. You know, Seattle is the second city to have a Black Panther Party, and one of the hallmarks of the Black Panther Party was that they met the needs of the community. That’s why people responded to them: their breakfast program, in some places they had an extermination program, the Black Panther newspaper—all of these things met needs in the community.

So if you want to continue to galvanize people, at some point you have to start feeding the people, caring for the people, building with the people. That’s what builds people power; that’s what sustains people power; that’s what sustains commitment to a movement. So honestly, I see it and it’s incredible the way that the area is being turned into a safe zone. Then I immediately go into, Alright, what can we do in this space to take care of the people?

Protests are happening all over the world. But what would prevent the work from coming to fruition locally and nationally moving forward?

One thing would be if we give up. How many times have we seen uprisings start and then people get tired? One of the things that’s going to happen is people are going to go back to work at some point as things calm with COVID—though it also may eventually get worse again. People will go back to work. And the toll that capitalism takes on our ability to organize will once again be present. Right now people are at home. Maybe they work in the morning and work a little bit at night but are able to be out and have a presence at rallies.

I think another thing is just the overall government structure. The structure of the system we live in is inherently white supremacist. It’s inherently built on white supremacy. Policing is inherently racist. Those structures were not made to be transformed from the inside out. They have to be transformed by the pressure that we’re creating. In some ways we’re going to see the government get in the way, whether it’s our local government, where we have leaders that lack the political will to do what needs to be done, or it’s the president, who literally just tweeted today that our city has been taken over by domestic terrorists.

The socialist adolph, is swimming upstream on this one.
At about the five minute mark (if anyone can make it that far) he talks about the race/neoliberalism thing.

Cal wrote:

Before I read that Reed article I tried having a conversation with my wife, who is kind of a mainstream Dem, about my frustration and reluctance to accept BLM as a meaningful and important reaction to America’s racial problems.

Reed comes pretty close to voicing my own frustration:

“And the shrill insistence that we begin and end with the claim that blacks are victimized worst of all and give ritual obeisance to the liturgy of empty slogans is in substance a demand that we not pay attention to the deeper roots of the pattern of police violence in enforcement of the neoliberal regime of sharply regressive upward redistribution and its social entailments.”

My conversation went no where and my wife and I probably din’t move beyond the basic idea that America has serious racial problems and at least the 8:46, George Floyd, BLM protests draw attention to this.

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I just wish ole Adolph was a better…’communicator.’ Heck i agree with him, and i still get lost in the labyrinth of his paragraphs. I’ve never finished one of his articles in my life.

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counterpunch:https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/06/12/the-capitalist-limits-of-police-reform/
June 12, 2020
The Capitalist Limits of Police Reform
by Shamus Cooke

“….Demanding reforms is critical to any social movement, and many police reforms can save lives and reduce harm, but they are often fleeting, as Alex Vitale explains in his book “The End of Policing”. The especially complicated dynamics of police reform have deep roots twisted together with the base of class society, where capitalist fueled austerity creates the social disruptions that police are called to “manage”.

Vitale’s book discusses the complex web of legal, social, and institutional barriers to reform that ebb and flow over the decades but ultimately remain in place, because the police are themselves the byproduct of historic economic relationships that have evolved over the years— police power grows as inequality grows, which widens as pro-market politicians shrink social services.

Banning specific weapons or tactics will be replaced by other forms of violence, because as Vitale explains, police are ‘violence workers’, experts in force that view all problems as nails to be hammered….
…
…..Vitale notes that the nature of the police “since its earliest origins, is to be a tool for managing inequality and maintaining the status-quo. Police reforms that fail to directly address this reality are doomed to reproduce it.” And ultimately “as long as the basic mission of police remains unchanged, none of these reforms will be achievable”

The “mission” of the police is tightly wound up with deeply-entrenched economic relationships…
…..
….The demands to “defund the police” are moving energy in the right direction since such demands will quickly expose the undemocratic nature of city budgeting. The budget is not transparent because its purpose, largely speaking, is to promote and protect the interests of those who run the government— the wealthy. Participatory budgeting has long been a demand of the Left, but the budget is so highly protected that little gains have been won.

Divesting from police and investing in working people is the way forward, but there are gigantic class barriers that need to be recognized so that the power needed to overcome them can be amassed.

Defunding the police involves moving the money into public services, housing, etc. But this is a much more complicated demand than it appears because it directly challenges the direction that the wealthy are taking the economy. Similar ideas emerged after the nationwide riots that erupted after the Rodney King verdict in ’92. The outcome was more austerity and mass incarceration….see link…”

At the 50:40 mark or so:
Krystal: “No-one trusts anyone. And for good reason…you know youre getting spun”

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