down-to-earth 1

If you want pictures you can find these stories all over the net.

Down-to-Earth 1.

"And the Hammers Batter Down the Door"
 
Miami thug cops shoot Nikki Hartman in back with rubber bullet 
(www.tacitconsent.com)

November 24, 2003--These lyrics from Pink Floyd's "Run Like Hell" 
(The Wall, 1979) are taking on an ominous relevance with each passing day. 
As Operation Iron Hammer drops 2,000-pound bombs on Iraqi villages, 
last week Miami police viciously attacked a peaceful anti-globalization 
protest with rubber bullets, tear gas, pepper spray and Taser stunners. 
Eight legal observers from the National Lawyers Guild were arrested; four 
were beaten. More than 50 protesters, including Nikki Hartmann in the above 
photo, were arrested for disobeying police orders to disperse and resisting 
arrest.

But photos like the one above prove that the protesters were dispersing when 
the cops opened fire and shot Nikki in the back. The armed capitalist state 
apparatus lies as much at the local level as it does nationally and 
internationally. 

Justin Lipson, an Indymedia Video activist, was pepper sprayed while filming
the protest and attacked when he refused to stop shooting. Lipson is being 
held in the Dade County jail on $10,000 bail and faces felony counts of 
resisting arrest and assaulting an officer.

On November 16, New York City cops violently attacked a Brooklyn fundraising
event for Anarchist People of Color in the offices of Critical Resistance, 
a national grassroots organization that educates people about prisons and 
police brutality. About 100 people were assaulted by nightsticks and sprayed 
with chemical agents. Eight were arrested, and injuries included bruised ribs, 
blows to the head and a spinal injury. The gathering was peaceful; the assault
unprovoked.

These latest manifestations of cop violence and police state tactics in Miami
and Brooklyn are only a glimpse of what the US rulers have in store for the 
US working class. Increasingly, the violence being inflicted on the American 
people resembles the horrifying violence Washington is unleashing on Iraqis.  
Nothing captures the synchronicity of this repression than the fact that the 
$8.5 million spent on the 2,500 Miami-area police came out of the $87 billion 
Congress just passed to fund the occupation of Iraq!

In a recent interview with Cigar Aficionado magazine, General Tommy Franks, 
former commander of the US invasion of Iraq, predicted that the US Constitution
will not survive another successful terrorist attack on this country. In the 
event of a devastating biological, nuclear or chemical attack, Franks declared,
"the Western world, the free world, loses what it cherishes most, and that is 
freedom and liberty we've seen for a couple of hundred years in this grand 
experiment that we call democracy."

Franks elaborated, "It means the potential of a weapon of mass destruction and 
a terrorist, massive casualty-producing event somewhere in the Western 
world--it may be in the United States of America--that causes our population 
to question our own Constitution and to begin to militarize our country in 
order to avoid a repeat of another mass, casualty-producing event. Which in 
fact, then begins to unravel the fabric of our Constitution. Two steps, very, 
very important."

The image from Pink Floyd's "The Wall" that accompanies the above-quoted lyric,
"And the hammers batter down the door," consists of red and black hammers 
marching in a threatening, goose step manner. The name that the warmaniacs in 
the Pentagon chose for the current military campaign of terror from the skies 
over Iraq--Operation Iron Hammer--was also the name used by the Nazis for an 
aborted plan to bomb Soviet power plants near Moscow and Gorky in 1943.

The US working class will organize a fightback against the ruling rich and the 
war criminals who serve them. We will discover our own proletarian values, our 
own self worth, and our own dignity. We will not run like hell, and we will 
not remain on our knees forever. The day of reckoning is coming for Bush, 
Rumsfeld, Cheney, Powell, Rice, Kristol, O'Reilly, Hannity, Coulter, Friedman,
and all the other ruling class scum determined to drag us into hell defending 
their empire.

 
MORE ON THE SYNCHRONICITY OF REPRESSION

November 24, 2003--This past weekend, more than 10,000 people showed up at Fort
Benning, Georgia, to demand the closure of the Western Hemisphere Institute for
Security Cooperation, a US-sponsored "combat"-training school for Latin 
American soldiers. Formerly known as the notorious "School of the Americas," 
the institute has trained over 60,000 soldiers of right wing military 
dictatorships on the finer points of terrorizing the workers and peasants of 
Latin America--torture, psychological operations, and counterinsurgency 
campaigns. 

Hundreds of Fort Benning graduates have made their teachers proud by returning
to their native El Salvador, Guatemala, Colombia, and Mexico, to name a few, 
and become hated and feared human rights violators responsible for murdering 
Jesuit priests, raping and murdering four American nuns, assassinating 
Archbishop Oscar Romero and slaughtering more than 900 peasants in El Mozote, 
El Salvador. Hundreds of thousands of Central and South Americans were 
tortured, murdered, raped, and "disappeared" by the graduates of the School of
the Americas, a name that will be despised by working people through the ages.

The 10,000 demonstrators came to Fort Benning to participate in a mass act of 
nonviolent civil disobedience. More than 2,100 were arrested during the 
spirited protest that included a mock funeral procession honoring the Jesuits 
murdered in El Salvador, giant puppets, costumes, music and other street 
theater. Actor Martin Sheen, musician Bruck Cockburn, and folk singer Pete 
Seeger were among the crowd of protesters, which included veterans, clergy, 
students, and working folk of all ages.

Over the past 10 years, 170 people have been imprisoned for acts of civil 
disobedience committed at similar protests against the Fort Benning terrorist 
training school. But this year's turnout of 10,000 takes on a special 
significance given the eruption of US militarism from Iraq to Afghanistan to 
Colombia.

This year's demonstrators were not only protesting the Fort Benning military 
institute; they were also saying no to Washington's invasion and occupation of
Iraq, its support of Israel's savage apartheid-style occupation of Palestine, 
and the acceleration of the US war drive against the international working 
class.

Something else happened this weekend at Fort Benning that says a lot about the
diseased mentality gripping the US capitalist rulers and their military 
command structure. In a pathetic attempt to demoralize their political 
opposition, Fort Benning military authorities blasted music at extremely high 
decibels toward the demonstrators who were outside the base. This is the same 
twisted type of psychological warfare that Pentagon geniuses employed against 
Panama's president Manuel Noriega when the US invaded that country in 1989. 

It's also the same sick tactic that Washington used in Waco, Texas, before 
Delta Force soldiers and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms burned 84 
men, women and children to death on orders of Bill Clinton, Wesley Clark, and 
Janet Reno, whose only concern was for the children.