activism

The crowd cheered. I hustled to slide the fresh battery into place, snap the latch closed, click on, and survey the scene. On their knees, protestors in front of the newly erected fence applauded as a cop on the other side took a knee. Around him, other cops seemed to take no notice, shifting in their riot gear as the sun slowly dipped behind the White House. I didn’t bother taking a picture. Shallow displays of solidarity are easy and pathetic, both in practice and in pictures.

The system is rigged.
The system is rigged, the government is corrupt, and “we the people” continue to waste our strength by fighting each other rather than standing against the tyrant in our midst.
Because the system is rigged, because the government is corrupt, and because “we the people” remain polarized and divided, the police state will keep winning and “we the people” will keep losing.

Credit: Cubacooperation

The current uprising against police violence and racism is just beginning. It is rapidly shifting public consciousness on issues of policing, violence against Black people and others, and systemic racism. The movement is deepening and becoming broader as well as putting forward solutions and making demands.

The marriage of post-Lockdown and George Floyd protests has nurtured a rough beast that is still immune to any form of civilized debate in the U.S.: the Seattle Commune.
So what really is the Capital Hill Autonomous Zone cum People’s Republic all about?
Are the communards mere useful idiots? Is this a refined Occupy Wall Street experiment? Could it survive, logistically, and be replicated in NYC, L.A. and D.C.?


The system based on a combination of police brutality, mass imprisonment, and evictions at gunpoint may be collapsing, but if it’s going to fall in the direction we want it to fall in, we need to push it that way.  And if we want to make that happen, we have to organize to stop the impending wave of evictions before it starts.
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"This is not the first time a black man has been killed for sleeping."

It is hard to ignore the striking parallels between the recent scenes of police brutality in cities across the United States and decades of violence from Israel’s security forces against Palestinians.
A video that went viral late last month of a Minneapolis police officer, Derek Chauvin, killing a black man, George Floyd, by pressing a knee into his neck for nearly nine minutes has triggered a fortnight of mass protests across the US – and beyond.

If I’m gonna die I’ll die now, right here, fighting you.
— Muhammad Ali to a white college student who challenged his opposition to the Vietnam War

Derrick Broze was arrested and jailed for 16 hours last week.