Why the NSA? Look to Brazil right now

Associated Press photo

Increasingly, a faceful of pepper spray is how the plutocrats (via their thugs, of course) respond to commoners who dare to demand better conditions. Commoners are told that if they — we — want substantial change, we have to use the system that already has proven itself to be ineffective in meeting our needs and to be unwilling to change in any significant way. This young Brazilian woman is attacked by one of the plutocrats’ thugs during a massive protest in Rio de Janeiro this week. (What, she doesn’t look like a seriously dangerous person to you?)

Take a look at what’s happening in Brazil right now and you’ll see what the primary purpose of the National Security Agency and the rest of the U.S. domestic surveillance infrastructure is: It’s to control us chickens in the case of a significant chicken revolution — and to keep the minority of Colonels Sanders safe from us majority chickens.

It’s great to see Brazil explode, great to see the people of Brazil reject the plutocrats’ shiny, new sports stadiums while so many Brazilians go without. I love news images like this:

Associated Press images

Those images, also taken in Rio de Janeiro this week, are vibrant images of democracy, of freedom struggling to be born. The plutocrats — of course — tell us, no, these young people are criminals, when it’s the plundering plutocrats who are the criminals, the traitors, the enemy, and who cause far more damage to nations and to the world than do those who struggle for a better world.

Not dissimilarly to the sociopoliticoeconomic dynamic in Brazil, while the government of the United States of America squanders our tax dollars on such unnecessary things as a bloated-bey0nd-belief military (including, of course, our bogus wars) and a blatantly anti-constitutional vast domestic spying apparatus (to be clear, it’s as wrong to spy on the peoples of other nations as it is wrong to spy on Americans), “our” government tells us, the people, that our government just cannot afford us.

The plutocrats continue to get only richer, regardless of what the nation’s economy is doing, while the rest of us are told that we have to accept “austerity” measures. Curious, isn’t that?

Such grievous injustice inherently is sociopolitically unstable — thus, we have the vast spying infrastructure to give our plutocratic overlords the heads up should the chickens rise up and come for them.

Will it work?

I’m thinking that it won’t.

Once the government that stopped representing the actual interests of we, the people, long ago, actually starts to maim and kill everyday Americans who have risen up to protest, all hell will break loose.

You will see Americans who never have joined together before — such as those of us on the actual left (and not Barack Obama’s and the Obamabots’ “left”) and the right-leaning-but-also-civil-liberties-loving libertarians — joining together, even if only uneasily and even if only temporarily, to take back our government. Those in the middle will have to pick a side, as those in the middle had to do during the American Revolution.

How out of touch are our elitist overlords?

They assure us that the NSA prevented a “terrorist” attack upon the treasonous, thieving weasels of Wall Street — as though we commoners are going to be thrilled to hear that the precious asses of the millionaires and billionaires of Wall Street, who robbed us fucking blind, have been kept safe through the use of our tax dollars — so that they can continue to rob us fucking blind.

That’s some continuing fucked-up shit, to continue to try to push off on to the American people the blatant propaganda that what’s good for the plutocrats actually is good for us commoners.

What’s good for the plutocrats of course is not good for the rest of us, and if — when — the sleeping giant awakens, the NSA won’t be enough to save the Colonels Sanders from the legions of chickens who finally have had far more than enough.

Let us give thanks to God for pepper spray

I celebrated Buy Nothing Day today by buying nothing today. Not only did I do my part to refuse to contribute to mindless, runaway consumerism, but I avoided being pepper-sprayed, too.

Yes, apparently taking a cue from our wonderful law enforcement officers, some woman at a Southern California Walmart reportedly pepper-sprayed her shopping competitors in order to get to an Xbox. Reports The Associated Press:

Ten people were slightly injured by the pepper spray and 10 others suffered minor bumps and bruises in the chaos, [police Sgt. Jose] Valle said. They were treated at the scene.

“People could have gotten trampled,” he said. “Good thing there were no small kids.”

The woman got away in the confusion, but it was not immediately clear whether she got an Xbox, Valle said. …

The store remained open and those not affected by the pepper spray kept shopping. [Of course.] …

The woman could face felony battery charges if she is found, Valle said.

The AP story also calls the pepper-spray incident “the only major violence reported at a Southern California store involving Black Friday Thanksgiving holiday sales.”

So the pepper-spraying shopper committed “major violence” and “could face felony battery charges,” according to the AP, but according to Faux “News,” pepper spray is a “food product.”

Indeed, “Let them eat pepper spray!” is the attitude of the treasonous 1 percent, the 1 percent’s treasonous thugs (a.k.a. “law enforcement officers”), and the treasonous supporters of the 1 percent and the 1 percent’s thugs, but is this how it’s going to be — pepper spray is just a “food product” if the pigs use it against peaceful protesters, but if anyone else aggressively and not in self-defense sprays someone else with pepper spray, it’s felony battery?

I can’t imagine that the pepper-spraying Black Friday shopper was not inspired by our pigs’ recent abuse of pepper spray. Aren’t the pigs supposed to stop crime — and not inspire it?

Pepper spray is going to become so popular, I predict, that next Black Friday, shoppers will be pepper-spraying each other in order to be the first to get to the cheap fire-extinguisher-sized canisters of pepper spray.

In other Thanksgiving-related news, President Hopey-Changey has taken flak from the “Christo”fascists because he didn’t explicitly thank God in his Internet Thanksgiving address, even though Hopey-Changey did say “God bless you” in his address.

President Hopey-Changey didn’t thank Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny or the Tooth Fairy, either — because they’re mythical, too.

But seriously, I give thanks for living in such a nation of intellects that they are butt-hurt that Barack Obama neglected to explicitly thank a non-existent Zeus-like deity for whatever. (Actually, in a written Thanksgiving proclamation that he’d issued earlier, Obama did explicitly thank the Flying Spaghetti Monster. In that written proclamation, he proclaimed, “As we gather in our communities and in our homes, around the table or near the hearth, we give thanks to each other and to God for the many kindnesses and comforts that grace our lives” — like pepper spray, which our cops find very comforting, and which must be a kindness, since it’s a food product.)

No, really — I give thanks for living in a nation in which others don’t try to shove their stupid religious beliefs down others’ throats. Because that would be just like living under Sharia law.

P.S. Here’s an alternate graphic for this piece:

And while looking for a graphic for this piece, I saw this one —

— which is only tangentially related to this piece, but which is pretty fucking funny, since some of the green, villainous pigs in the videogame Angry Birds indeed, just like UC Davis Police Lt. John Pig — er Pike — have mustaches and wear helmets…

Stormtroopers gone wild! Part 3!!!

Jesus fuck. First, on Tuesday, a tiny 84-year-old woman was among non-threatening individuals pepper-sprayed by the pigs in Seattle:

Associated Press photos

Then, on Thursday, a tiny 20-year-old woman, who also is non-threatening, was blasted with pepper spray by the pigs in Portland, Oregon:

Associated Press photo

Now, closer to home, a pig at the University of California at Davis, which is near my home base of Sacramento, has created the latest viral video. Yesterday the pot-bellied pig casually pepper-sprayed a group of young protesters who were doing nothing but sitting on the ground and refusing to move. Here is a screen grab —

Associated Press image

— and you can watch the video here.

The Sacramento Bee reports that UC Davis’ chancellor has called for a review of the pepper-spraying, but I’m thinking that what really needs to happen is that the cop who did it needs to have his motherfucking fascistic ass kicked. Hopefully, his personal safety is now at stake. He does not deserve personal security.

Our violent pushback against the 1 percent’s routine violence against the 99 percent of us probably will have to begin with their thugs, who are just as treasonous as are the 1 percent, although there’s no reason that we can’t also go directly after the treasonous 1 percent themselves.

It’s time to roll out the guillotines and make some heads roll.

Stormtroopers gone wild!

Updated below (on Saturday, November 19, 2011)

To anyone who believes that I’ve been hysterical in my last few posts, I offer this photo from The Associated Press:

Associated Press photo

The photo’s caption reads: “A police officer uses pepper spray on an Occupy Portland protestor at Pioneer Courthouse Square in Portland, Ore., Thursday, Nov. 17, 2011.”

Yes, that’s not water — that’s pepper spray. And clearly the young woman is such a dire threat to the jackbooted thugs who serve and protect the 1 percent that spraying her directly in the face with a massive amount of pepper spray was necessary for the stormtroopers’ safety.

Where is Barack Obama speaking out against these outrages?

Oh, right — he puts Wall Street weasels on his cabinet and makes them his advisers. He’s on the side of the 1 percent.

Face it, folks, if you haven’t already: Barack Obama just isn’t that into you. He’s not on the side of the 99 percent. He wants your money and your vote — it got him into the White House, after all — but expect only empty promises from President Hopey-Changey in return.

And the message is clear: The 1 percent decide where and when and how the rest of us can protest and demonstrate. They make sure that our protests and demonstrations are so restricted that they can be toothless at best. Our plutocratic overlords even have established so-called “free-speech zones,” for fuck’s sake. If we step outside of these rigidly, plutocratically proscribed “free-speech” lines, we will be pepper-sprayed — or worse.

Look at the news photo above and reflect upon the fact that this is the blue state of Oregon that we’re talking about. If this is what the plutocratic-protecting pigs are doing on the Left Coast, what’s next? Can concentration camps for anti-plutocratic, anti-corporate dissenters be far behind?

Update (Saturday, November 19, 2011):

If you are wondering about the young woman who took the blast of pepper spray to the face, The Oregonian yesterday posted a piece on her. The Oregonian identifies the woman as Liz Nichols, a “soft-spoken 20-year-old who’s only about 5 feet tall,” and reports of her:

Raised in Mountain Home, Ark., a town of about 1,600, she plans to stay in Portland as long as the Occupy movement is alive. She’s motivated to protest by the plight of her parents. Her mother has multiple sclerosis and her father was disabled by a back injury. They’re both surviving on his Social Security disability checks.

 The Oregonian reports of the pepper-spray incident caught by a photographer:

A police van blared a warning, telling people they risked arrest if they ventured into the street. Nichols and others stayed on the sidewalk. Laura Seeton,  a 31-year-old Portlander who locked arms with Nichols, said they had nowhere to go as people in back pushed and the riot police in front shoved back.

“It was terrifying,” Seeton said.

Nichols said a policewoman jabbed her in the ribs with a baton and pressed it against her throat. That made her angry.

She yelled at the officer, saying she was being mistreated. That’s when another officer shot her with pepper spray. A photo by The Oregonian’s Randy L. Rasmussen, which flashed across social media websites, shows Nichols was sprayed from a few feet away.

“It felt like my face, ears and hands were on fire,” she said.

She dropped to the ground, and police yanked her into their ranks.

“She was dragged away by her hair and disappeared into the black of their uniforms,” Seeton said.

Why in the fuck are our so-called “police officers” not only pepper-spraying non-threatening citizens, but also actually dragging women by their hair? This kind of police brutality is different from that practiced by dictators’ thugs how?

I also thought that I would share this cartoon on the topic of nonviolence by Ted Rall:

That’s pretty much it, in a nutshell, but also worth reading is Rall’s recent column on the topic, titled “The Occupier’s Choice: Violence or Failure.” And if you haven’t read his book The Anti-American Manifesto yet, what the fuck is the matter with you?

Time to fight fire with fire

Associated Press photo

Did you know that cops are using pepper spray against citizens who peaceably are voicing their grievances in canisters that are the fucking size of fire extinguishers?

The caption for the Associated Press photo above reads: “Seattle Police officers deploy pepper spray into a crowd during an Occupy Seattle protest on Tuesday, November 15, 2011, at Westlake Park in Seattle. Protesters gathered in the intersection of 5th Avenue and Pine Street after marching from their camp at Seattle Central Community College in support of Occupy Wall Street. Many refused to move from the intersection after being ordered by police. Police then began spraying pepper spray into the gathered crowd, hitting dozens of people” — including the 84-year-old Dorli Rainey, who has become the poster woman for the police brutality that we have seen in the Occupy Wall Street movement.

The use of pepper spray on people whose “crime” is simply refusing to move from an intersection is not justified. Before you argue with me on that point, note that seattlepi.com reports:

Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn on Wednesday apologized to protestors, including an 84-year-old woman, who were pepper-sprayed during a face-off with the Occupy Seattle demonstration in downtown.

McGinn said he spoke personally to Dorli Rainey, the former school teacher and activist who was photographed by seattlepi.com with red, swollen eyes just after she’d been doused with pepper spray Tuesday. The photo went international and captured an iconic moment for the Occupy movement.

“To those engaged in peaceful protest, I am sorry that you were pepper sprayed,” McGinn said in a statement. “I spoke to Dorli Rainey (who I know personally) to ask how she was doing, and to ask for her description of events.”

McGinn said he asked Police Chief John Diaz to review the police use of pepper spray and to ensure appropriate commanders are on-scene during such events. He said he did not want overly aggressive enforcement to exacerbate a situation.

He said police agreed that what happened Tuesday night was not “their preferred outcome.”

“My instruction to police and other city departments has been to protect free speech rights, protect public safety of protestors and the public, and protect other legitimate public and private uses of property,” McGinn said.

A pregnant woman and a priest were among those hit with pepper spray during a march from the Occupy movement’s current camp at Seattle Central Community College to Westlake Park. They were marching in support of protesters who were kicked out of Zuccotti Park in New York. The Seattle protesters were blocked by police officers at the intersection of Fifth Avenue and Pine Street, where the confrontation took place, according to reports.

A police spokesman said Tuesday that pepper spray was used only on people who refused to disperse or who engaged in assaultive behavior toward officers. …

That obviously is a fucking  lie. We have photographic evidence that the Seattle pigs — and that’s what they are, pigs — wantonly sprayed pepper spray from large canisters all over whoever happened to be in front of them. There very apparently were no surgical strikes of pepper spray only upon those individuals who might actually have been aggressing upon the pigs. (And when a cop claims that he or she actually was aggressed upon by an unarmed citizen, take that claim with a grain of salt unless their is photographic or video evidence to back it up.)

And let’s not act like it’s only a crime if it’s the elderly, pregnant women and priests who are pepper-sprayed without very good cause. Anyone who is pepper-sprayed unnecessarily by the legalized thugs for the 1 percent whom we call “law enforcement officers” is a victim of a violent crime him- or herself.

 

The AP photo above eerily reminds me of images like these:

 

 

 

Those are photos of fascistic firefighters protecting the 1 percent hosing down civil-rights demonstrators in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963.

 

Non-violence? Bullshit.

 

When those who are supposed to protect us and to serve us — we fucking pay their salaries for them to do so — instead attack us, it’s time for us to attack back. I don’t believe in starting it, but I believe in ending it, and nothing fights fire better than fire. The only effective way to deal with a fucking bully is to give back to him what he has dished out himself.

 

To protect and to serve — the 1 percent

Associated Press photo

Treasonous taxpayer-funded thugs in Seattle — a.k.a. the cops — recently pepper-sprayed this tiny 84-year-old woman in the face.* Cops don’t deserve non-violence from the people they are paid to protect and to serve but instead brutalize. They deserve to be brutalized right back. It’s called karma.

If it wasn’t clear by now, it sure the hell is now: Law enforcement in the United States of America has been corrupted to serve the interests of the rich and the super-rich, and no longer serves the interests of the vast majority of the rest of us (the 99 percent, you might say).

Law enforcement has been bastardized from protecting and serving us, the people, to protecting and serving the 1 percent, to serving as the private security thugs for the rich and the super-rich. And to rub the fascistic salt in our wounds, we, the taxpayers (and the rich and the super-rich are tax evaders), pay for these thugs to oppress us for the rich and the super-rich.

(Similarly, trillions of our tax dollars go to their bogus wars for their war profiteering and their corporateering. The U.S. military also has been corrupted — it stopped being about national defense and started being about corporate expansion and bloated-beyond-belief, unnecessary military spending in the noble names of “national security” and “spreading democracy” and the like decades ago [and especially in the Middle East for at least the past decade].)

This is the deal: If you are part of the 1 percent, you most likely are a traitor to your fellow Americans, the 99 percent of the rest of us. You don’t become filthy rich because of hard work. You become filthy rich only by paying your workers much less than the value of their work — you get filthy rich off of others’ hard work — and by charging your customers much more than the value of the product or service that you provide (which, under capitalism, is just legalized thievery).

When you harm your fellow citizens in order to try to satiate your own insatiable fucking greed — such as by launching illegal, immoral, unjust and unprovoked wars on other nations for your war-profiteering and corporateering cronies based upon your bold-faced lies (that you later blame on “faulty intelligence”), or by being a Wall Street weasel knowingly bilking others out of their money for your own lust for obscene amounts of money, or by knowingly polluting the environment and contributing to global warming and medical conditions such as cancer — then you are a traitor.

There is nothing American about knowingly seriously harming other Americans for your own fucking selfish gain. If you commit treason, then you deserve to hang.

And if you support the 1 percent in their treason, such as being one of their thugs in law enforcement or in the U.S. military who fights their unjust battles against the people for their profits (including their war profiteering), then you are a traitor also.

Cops who brutalize people who peaceably are expressing their First Amendment rights deserve to be brutalized right back. There is no other way that bad, self-serving cops will learn that we, the people, vastly outnumber them and that they are accountable to us, and they don’t deserve that we, the victims of their treasonous violence, should turn the other cheek like a bunch of pussies.

Non-violence is bullshit. The 1 percent use violence against the 99 percent of us (at home and abroad) all the fucking time — only because the 1 percent are too pussified and too weak and too few to fight their own battles, they must recruit dipshits into the U.S. military and into law enforcement and brainwash these dipshits into believing that they really are doing anything more noble than serving the interests of the 1 percent.

The worst nightmare of the 1 percent that a good chunk of the 99 percent of us wake up and stop taking it.

You hear the traitors within the treasonous Repugnican Tea Party “leadership” in Washington talking about the specter of Americans turning against Americans — precisely because this is what they most fear: that we Americans whom they turned against long ago at long last will turn the table on their sorry, treasonous asses.

Class warfare? Real Americans (the vast majority of us) against “Americans” (the 1 percent and those who aid and abet their treason)? I say: Bring! It! On!

We’re long overdue for another civil war.

It probably is the only thing that will save what’s left of this nation.

—

*Reports The Associated Press:

Seattle — A downtown march and rally in support of the Occupy Wall Street movement turned briefly chaotic as police scattered a crowd of rowdy protesters — including a pregnant 19-year-old and an 84-year-old activist — with blasts of pepper spray.

Protest organizers denounced the use of force, saying that police indiscriminately sprayed the chemical irritant at peaceful protesters.

The Occupy Seattle movement released a written statement late Tuesday expressing support for “a 4-foot 10-inch, 84-year-old woman, a priest and a pregnant woman who as of this writing is still in the hospital.”

Dorli Rainey is an activist who has supported liberal causes in the Seattle area for decades. A photo showing Rainey being cared for by fellow activists in the immediate aftermath of the police incident appeared on news websites around the world.

Seattle police spokesman Jeff Kappel said he didn’t have specifics on the Rainey incident, but he said pepper spray is “is not age specific. No more dangerous to someone who is 10 or someone who is 80.”

He added, that if it were harmful, “we probably wouldn’t be using pepper spray if that was the case.” …

Pepper spray is no big deal? Then surely our treasonous cops won’t mind when we pepper-spray their treasonous asses right back!