Category Archives: Justice

Movie Review: The Secrets, Lies and Elisions of J. Edgar

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Interested mostly in Hoover’s celebrity surveillance, Eastwood et al. barely mention COINTELPRO, and completely elide the assassinations of Fred Hampton and many other Black Panther Party members, the development of the violent proto-terrorist Secret Army Organization, the pervasive incitement of gang violence, and the vast array of life-ruining black-op schemes inflicted on tens of thousands of citizens.

The FBI’s reaction to the Civil Rights era protests–in actuality, every type of Constitution-desecrating espionage imaginable directed at virtually everyone who raised a left-of-Goldwater voice–is reduced to Hoover’s conservative-paranoid rants. There’s a danger here, for a viewer unfamiliar with history, to take Hoover as simply a blackmailing big mouth, and not a man whose opinions were actually realized by bloody federal misdeed, over and over again.

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Emma Goldman Occupies Wall Street

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If ever there was a life that embodied the spirit that is driving the Occupy Wall Street movement it is that of Emma Goldman, who went to jail in 1893 for having stood on a soap box in Union Square in the midst of one of America’s worst depressions and, pointing at the mansions on Fifth Avenue, implored 3,000 unemployed men and women to ask the ruling class for work. “If they don’t give you work,” she cried, “ask them for bread. If they deny you bread, take it!” These words made those listening to Emma erupt in thunderous cheers; they also made J. Edgar Hoover describe her in 1919 (when he was urging the government to deport her) as The Most Dangerous Woman in America.

Read more of “The Nation Magazine” article here . . .  

Hazmat Suits to Break Up Occupations? How Mayors Feign Concern for Health to Trash a Growing Movement

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Mayors and police around the country have pretended public health is the reason for shutting down Occupy protests, but their actions belie their words. . .  Michael Ratner [president of the Center for Constitutional Rights] noted that the idea of protesters being unclean has a long history in this country, that various generations of immigrants were described as dirty, as outsiders, as not really American. “What it does is it paints the protesters as a dangerous infection in america that has to be cut out, it’s like saying they’re a cancer or radioactive, that’s saying they’re not part of our country, not part of our tradition of protest.”  . . . Instead, it seems that the real contagion is community, as Fagin said, but more than that, the very idea of fighting back. Whether it’s a mayor shutting down an occupation in his or her city or a businessman complaining that his workers want to collectively bargain, the idea that people might work together appears to be, itself, a hazard.

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From Occupation to “Occupy”: The Israelification of American Domestic Security

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The Israelification of America’s security apparatus, recently unleashed in full force against the Occupy Wall Street Movement, has taken place at every level of law enforcement, and in areas that have yet to be exposed. The phenomenon has been documented in bits and pieces, through occasional news reports that typically highlight Israel’s national security prowess without examining the problematic nature of working with a country accused of grave human rights abuses. But it has never been the subject of a national discussion. And collaboration between American and Israeli cops is just the tip of the iceberg. . . Revelations like these have raised serious questions about the extent to which Israeli-inspired tactics are being used to suppress the Occupy movement. . . the Israelification of American law enforcement appears to have intensified police hostility towards the civilian population, blurring the lines between protesters, common criminals, and terrorists.

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