Protesters charged with 'Terrorism Hoax' for too much glitter on their banner (opens in new tab)

I had an inkling, as I think most people do, even the people who most benefit from the status quo. But, being born white and male into a middle class household granted me a tremendous amount of privilege to avoid ever having to see it too closely, without even trying very hard. Having been exposed to technology at a young age, and encouraged in that pursuit, granted me a near complete lack of need to actually work all that hard to survive. It's easy to believe in a meritocratic society when you believe you're meritorious enough to deserve all the good things that happen to you and to avoid all the bad things being inflicted on others.

Let's just say I've grown as a person over the past few years.

I believe the odds of activism like this stopping fracking companies is actually very good. Which is why they are being met with police brutality. Suppose fracking protestors can reduce the likelihood of fracking companies to get local land exploitation permits from 95% to 90%, then that is a huge win and will save many wildlife areas.

It may not be "meaningful change" in the large scheme of things, but wins in many small fights compound and leads to bigger changes. Convincing people that they can't make a difference is the most efficient method for suppressing dissent.

"Ideally the protestors in the film should represent the entire range of the political spectrum (right wing to left wing. gun rights to animal rights. pro-life to pro-choice. etc)."

Ideal is hard to find in the real world. This is a very one-sided battle, and pretty much always has been in the US. The powerful and rich are aligned against the powerless, and have the police, courts, and lawmakers, on their side.

You'd be very hard pressed to find right wing protesters being abused in the same way as environmental protesters (or, at all, for that matter). Because the right wing protesters aren't fighting for anything that oil companies, for example, would find threatening. It takes a combination of vast wealth and state/corporate collusion to get the kind of violence we've seen in the environmental activist community.

I've been amused to note that Alex Jones-sponsored gun rights rallies are vastly less likely to be harassed by cops than anything I would be involved in.

The kind of dissent that is most likely to be quashed is that of the powerless against the very powerful. White guys who support the death penalty don't fall into the category of "powerless" and their opponents are not the powerful (the powerful like having more tools to keep poor people in line and to give teeth to their threats, so are unlikely to worry about someone supporting the death penalty).

Pro-life vs. pro-choice? This one I'm really familiar with. Take Texas as an example...during the recent battle over womens reproductive rights here, the surprisingly peaceful pro-choice side had their heads smashed in (http://www.dallasvoice.com/watch-12-arrested-tx-senate-oks-s...), were aggressively searched , had tampons removed from their purses (http://www.thedailybeast.com/witw/cheats/2013/07/12/texas-co...), were falsely accused of trying to bring feces and urine into chambers (http://www.elpasotimes.com/ci_23960175/el-paso-times), were spied on by DPS officers. No pro-life proponents were arrested, or detained, or harassed, despite the occasional actual assault on pro-choice protesters. All of this, despite the fact that pro-life supporters have literally murdered people in support of their cause...I'm not suggesting that DPS should have been harassing pro-life folks the way they were harassing pro-choice folks; just that it's clear which side the power was aligned on, and to what end.

Most right-wing "dissent" is manufactured outrage over imagined slights (or wealthy white people being pissed off that poor brown people could possibly want to be treated equally). I lean libertarian, some days, and so I'm sympathetic to some "right" causes...but, it's clear that when business and the poor go to war, it is a one-sided battle and nearly all the violence is being initiated by police. If we have to find examples of right wing protesters being abused in the ways that those on the left are being abused, we'll never see anything resembling the documentary you've imagined.

Anyway, I went looking to see if such a documentary existed, since I'd like to show such a thing at one of the Revolution in the Park movie nights I host in Austin. Couldn't find anything exactly along those lines, though it looks like someone was planning to make one last year, but seems to have stopped updating: http://examplesprotestdoc.wordpress.com/

But, most documentaries about protest cover the outsized response of police, because that's always a big part of the story. Of recent films, We Are Legion, 99%: The Occupy Walls Street Collaborative Film, Blockadia Rising (which is about an earlier stage of the Keystone XL fight, and includes some of the folks I know who've been charged with felonies), all cover how government responds to peaceful dissent.

Especially in a democracy.

The amount of apathy in this country is staggering.

Anti-choice protesters have assaulted women trying to get low cost health care, have murdered doctors, and have aligned themselves against the poorest, least powerful people in this country (poor women of color). Recently, a pro-life group distributed a message suggesting pretending to provide rides to women needing health care, but actually kidnapping them and taking them to a church. This is crazy shit, and some of them are terrifying people.

I also believe you're misrepresenting the state of affairs. Anti-choice protesters can protest right outside of clinics on sidewalks, streets, etc. At least in my state, they can. And, I've not seen much in the way of police violence against anti-choice protesters. I haven't seen police setting up anti-choice protesters and encouraging them to commit violent acts. Maybe this is happening, and I just don't know it, because I'm not in those circles (I think it's assumed here in this thread that I'm left wing, but that's not really accurate; though I am firmly pro-choice). I know it isn't happening in my state, however, as I saw it with my own eyes. Pro-choice groups were stalked by police, while pro-life groups were ignored even when they became aggressive and got physical.

Anyway, I've never asked for pro-life activists to be silenced. I do think that if they physically prevent someone from getting medical care, they are violating that person's basic rights. I also find it particularly reprehensible that they target the poorest and least powerful people. Wealthy white women get abortions all the time at places other than Planned Parenthood or other free and low cost clinics; but, pro-life groups would rather harass the weak and poor, who are often just needing birth control or medical services unrelated to abortion.

"In America, you’re simply guaranteed the right to speak without the government taking action against you. However, that doesn’t mean your employer can’t fire you for bad-mouthing him on Facebook, and it certainly doesn’t mean you can say whatever you want whenever you want with full impunity"

http://www.nogalesinternational.com/opinion/guest_opinion/fr...

Abortion protestors don't merely express a point of view, they deliberately attempt to prevent people from accessing health services at places where an abortion may be provided. A protestor that disrupts a business or barricades themselves to a door can reasonably be expected to be detained or arrested, but not charged with terrorism or charged with major felonies.

It is one of many chilling effects that makes large scale movements all but impossible in the US. Police simply wander around spotting people they think might have something in their past that allows them to arrest them. I'm a middle class white guy, and I've been detained and had my ID run at least a dozen times in the past two years, merely for having the gall to show up at a protest. I've never been arrested, and never had a warrant, so I don't fear being detained the way many would...but knowing that you will very likely be targeted just for being present, even if you aren't breaking any laws, insures a whole lot of people simply don't show up.

So, by saying this is OK, as long as it is not a "completely fabricated charge" you're insuring that there is no such thing as a large scale movement to change anything in the US. Most people cannot afford to be targeted by police in the way that a lot of activists I know have been.

I believe that undocumented workers have the right to free speech. I believe that people with warrants have the right to free speech. They don't have that free speech because they know they are likely to be targeted by police if they exercise that speech for dissent (just like anyone expressing dissent becomes a target). It's just that the cost of being targeted by police is so much higher than it is for someone like me.

You are implying that only people who follow the laws in the US have the right of free speech. That's a very, very sad way to look at things, as it means anyone trying to actually change anything has no basic rights.

i.e. same sex couples, people smoking weed, etc. etc. These people are breaking the law (in most of the country) but they absolutely must be allowed free speech to talk about it. If not, how can anything ever change or get better?

Taking away free speech from people that don't follow the current laws of the US means a very bleak future.

I think they should be, too. The judge had some harsh words for the APD, and the charges were reduced to misdemeanors and the sentence (which was originally looking like years in prison) to time served. Though, one of the protesters in this case ended up spending about 2 years in jail because he had a past warrant (he missed his court date for that old warrant in Dallas because he was in jail on a felony charge in Houston, so they punished him for missing that date). He was just released a few weeks ago.

It's also worth mentioning that APD did not reveal their officers had made the devices or suggested their use in the action, and fought to not reveal their involvement in court. The Houston police department, who were prosecuting the case, didn't even know APD was involved in the protest, until a few lucky breaks led to three of the six undercover officers being outed. It is, frankly, miraculous that those seven kids aren't still in jail and shackled with felony convictions. Dumb luck revealed that they'd been setup, and the prosecutors were forced to fold.

But, it's happening every day. This is standard operating procedure when dealing with protesters; and, not just at the national level. And, as far as we can tell, the chain of command on this particular operation went all the way up to the chief of police. It was not rogue cops going beyond their assigned duties to set kids up for felony charges.

Some references, so this doesn't end up being dismissed as a paranoid fantasy (I know it's pretty unbelievable stuff):

http://www.statesman.com/news/news/local/austin-police-infil...

http://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/article/Undercover-A...

http://www.austinchronicle.com/news/2012-09-07/apd-infiltrat...

More came out later based on open records requests, but my google fu is failing me at the moment. In short, it was actually worse than we knew during the early stages of the trial when these three articles were written.

"Why are Police officers encouraging crime to begin with?"

You tell me.

Why would police officers encourage crime, encourage violence, encourage escalation in tactics, etc.?

And it would be hard to convince a jury that these guys actually intended to perpetrate a terrorism hoax. Who'd believe that someone could mistake glitter that fell off a sign for a dangerous substance?

The above is all paraphrased from a couple of news reports in Russian that I watched last week.

There is a well known phenomenon in politics and society of the pendulum swing. Childhood friends who discovered politics in University and hated each other because one was socialist and the other capitalist, find that after 40 years they have EACH reversed their positions and still can't reconcile. Or the USA who used to hold up the Soviet Union as an example of the wrong way to do things and consequently avoided doing things that might appear to be Soviet style. But now that there is no Soviet Union to compare itself to, the USA has copied the worst excesses of Stalin's KGB. Meanwhile, the Russian Federation still holds out the Soviet Union as a standard of comparison -- it is their history after all -- and actively moves away from Soviet style solutions embracing capitalism and individual liberty to a far greater degree than Western countries. While corruption in the USA grows unchallenged, the Russian Federation is in the second decade of a campaign to root it out both high and low.

If they could pull off 9/11, I'm sure they can do that again with domestic "enemy". But then what's the purpose? Why to do that? Usually, not to loose power. But they are in the power all the time anyway (military/industrial complex). So, what gives?

<update> The state of Oklahoma has historically gone after activist groups. The IWW (Industrial Workers of the World) & Green Corn Rebellion being the extreme examples.