noted. 10/27/2011

• Red Channels - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

  • Red Channels: The Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television is an anti-Communist tract published in the United States at the height of the Red Scare. Issued by the right-wing journal Counterattack on June 22, 1950, the pamphlet-style book names 151 actors, writers, musicians, broadcast journalists, and others in the context of purported Communist manipulation of the entertainment industry. Some of the 151 were already being denied employment because of their political beliefs, history, or mere association with suspected "subversives". Red Channels effectively placed the rest on the industry blacklist.

• Red Channels - About

  • Red Channels is an open collective. We have weekly meetings where we discuss and plan for upcoming events and projects. If you would like to come to one, to learn more about what we do, and find ways to collaborate, please write to collective[at]redchannels.org
    
    

• Snake March | MORE OF THE SAME

  • Within the snake: The accompanying thrill felt by its participants, the frantic excitement of recognizing that one is beyond the baton’s reach, represents more than a vulgar masturbation, but rather a glimpse of possibility.  A moment of insight where the mouse trapped citizen becomes live, if only for a petty second.

     

    Who would not yell for joy?

     

    Who would not celebrate the intrusion into their doggedly boring daily dramas?

     

    To wild: to wield one’s limbs against the police mechanism is to affirm one’s own radical creativity.  In this fraction of an instant / in refusal / no stroke, no gesture, no movement is impossible.  All is permitted.  Poetics themselves are affirmed.

     

  • The literal façade of a society’s policing (its uniformed officers) makes up only one branch within the totality of its control systems.  Nevertheless, for many, first encounters with this force will outline constraints once invisible.  A composite is made: a portrait of denied possibilities, militarized spaces, passions aggressively extinguished, coupled w/ the awareness that movement w/ out prescribed purpose w/ out branded function, that is to say creative social activity, is fundamentally criminalized.

• Occupy Oakland and the Militarization of America's Police - Esquire

  • Basic law enforcement in this country is thoroughly, totally militarized. It is militarized at its most basic levels. (The "street crime units," so beloved by, among other people, the Diallo family.) It is militarized at its highest command positions. It is militarized in its tactics, and its weaponry and, most important of all, in the attitude of the officers themselves, and in how they are trained. There is a vast militarized intelligence apparatus that leads, inevitably, to pre-emptive military actions, like the raids on protest organizations that were carried out in advance of the 2008 Republican National Convention in Minneapolis. Sooner or later, this militarized law enforcement was going to collide head-on with a movement of mass public protest, and the results were going to be ugly. (There already had been dry runs elsewhere, most notably in Miami, in 2003, during protests of a meeting of trade ministers.)   

• They shoot the wounded, don’t they? « SOUTH / SOUTH

  • The police opened fire with tear gas and rubber bullets on the crowd and flashbang grenades. One woman fell to the ground bleeding. She was lying their unconscious bleeding. A bunch of us ran back to try to pick her up, and when we ran back the police opened fire, a second round, hitting me [...] She was already lying on the ground bleeding. And I watched a flashbang grenade land right next to her head and explode right in her face.

     

  • Veteran For Peace member, Scott Olsen, a Marine Corps veteran twice deployed to Iraq, is in hospital now in stable but serious condition with a fractured skull, struck by a police projectile fired into a crowd in downtown Oakland, California in the early morning hours of today.

     

  • Make no mistake about it: The actions of the police department in Oakland last night were a military assault on a legitimate political demonstration. That it was a milder military assault than it could have been, which is to say it wasn’t a massacre, is very much beside the point. There was no possible provocation that warranted this display of force. (Graffiti? Litter? Rodents? Is the Oakland PD now a SWAT team for the city’s health department?) If you are a police department in this country in 2011, this is something you do because you have the power and the technology and the license from society to do it. This is a problem that has been brewing for a long time. It predates the Occupy movement for more than a decade. It even predates the ‘war on terror,’ although that has acted as what the arson squad would call an ‘accelerant’ to the essential dynamic. Basic law enforcement in this country is thoroughly, totally militarized. It is militarized at its most basic levels.

     

• Veterans For Peace :: News Item

  • Veteran For Peace member, Scott Olsen, a Marine Corps veteran twice deployed to Iraq, is in hospital now in stable but serious condition with a fractured skull, struck by a police projectile fired into a crowd in downtown Oakland, California in the early morning hours of today. 

• The Fight for Autonomy in Oakland » Counterpunch: Tells the Facts, Names the Names

  • In the largely Black, immigrant and working class expanses of West and East Oakland the cops are widely despised because of their itchy trigger fingers and rough methods.

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