If corporations with a history of property theft, and property, human and ecologic destruction came through my neighborhood, I hope my neighbors would join me in protest too.
When a protest destroys stuff, the police inflict violence on the protesters.
When a pipeline spill destroys people's stuff, do the police then inflict a proportionate amount of violence on the pipeline's owners?
If a broken window's worth a tazing, an arrest, two nights in jail, a single court date, and a short or suspended sentence, how many thousands of years of prison should, say, the Exxon-Valdez spill have been worth?
They primarily protect property. But a pipeline through a neighborhood would mean my land would be seized by eminent domain. So the authorities would protect the pipeline company, who had property in the dispute.
The authorities show up to help pipeline companies break treaties. Some now ex-property owner like myself wouldn't even be a speed bump.
The rules governing Eminent domain is in our constitution. Part of living in a democracy means you have to a accept the rule of law and democratically elected governments. If you want to change this then change the law.
If any land is seized the owners will be compensated.
ah yes, cops warning companies about protesters that effectively siege buildings by blocking roads in and out so workers can't safely leave and disrupt critical infrastructure is fascism. (◔_◔)
lol, I might be mistaken ...are you pro protesters basically holding the workers of these companies captive against their will? because thats what this does...
so kidnap their workers and illegaly hold them captive so they can't go home after work. wat!... no wonder we(dems) always lose elections .... insane takes like this.
You haven't shown any evidence of _anyone_ having that goal or effect, and it's antithetical to how protests typically work. The protesters would be more than happy for the workers to leave and if anything be unable to come _back_.
Why do you keep harping on the idea of workers being trapped? There's no evidence of any workers being attacked, nor is there any indication protesters aimed to hold them hostage. A strike or blockade is designed to prevent the inflow of labor and resources, if workers left and didn't return the protesters would have been pleased.
You keep arguing as if protesters were intent on preventing workers from returning to their families or suchlike.
> A strike or blockade is designed to prevent the inflow of labor and resources, if workers left and didn't return the protesters would have been pleased
That might be the intent on paper but It's basically impossible to only block a gate going one way.
>There's no evidence of any workers being attacked
Maybe in this exact case. But these type of responses is based on patterns of behavior of a political wing of the left that think political violence is ok.
> That might be the intent on paper but It's basically impossible to only block a gate going one way.
You sound like you've never participated in an organized protest before. My union did exactly that: our membership included parking enforcement, so we denied entry to the parking lot. Blocking egress is illegal, so we'd open to let people out.
Of course, you can't really stop people who are willing to kill for their parking space. But the rest can be stopped with a throng of people blocking all ways but back.
Police:
in exploiter states, a system of special bodies of supervision and coercion, as well as domestic punitive troops that protect the existing social system by means of direct and overt suppression. [...] As one of the chief instruments of the state, the police in an exploiter society is always separated from and inimical to the people. [...] In modern capitalist states the police are used primarily in the struggle against the revolutionary and working-class movement — against democratic progressive forces.
- The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, 3rd Edition (1970-1979)
Hmmm, I think I've read things about the US police — especially in the second part of 2020 — that were eerily close to this definition.
Why are you believing Fascist propaganda? Yes, Mussolini said that a Fascist corporation was a collective owned by the state with employees having most of the control. In reality that's not what he intended.
In practice the state did not have economic control over the corporations. In the example of Nazi Germany, the cooperation of large industrialists was necessary for accession to power, and the state was too incompetent to achieve even basic control over the economy, so it was privatised and the leaders of corporations instead were integrated into the social Darwinist structure of society that the Nazis loved so much. Which turned out to work pretty well with unbounded free markets.
It's not propaganda to quote what the meaning of the phrase was. He didnt say, "fascism is the police giving businesses information", he said the /opposite/. The quote is expressed in a language which is here grossly misinterpreted.
The idea that any *dictatorial* state of ww2 era had "unbounded free markets" is pretty insane, and reveals that it is your agenda to associate modern political movemnets you dislike with a totalised military state of the 1940s; in which every citizen was consripted into the military.
I dont know why anyone today things a totalised military state has anything to do with modern politics; it doesnt.
Free markets unbounded by the government in every way cannot exist. That's because the state is necessary to the scale of markets. The closest approximation is states where winners in the market are winners in politics, and fascism historically approximated that quite well.
"Totalised military state" is a meaningless sentence, and Fascism existed before and after "every citizen was conscripted into the military". If you think that the defining feature of Fascism is militarism and conscription, you simply misunderstand what fascism is. There is much, much more to fascism than Nazi Germany within a 4 year time period. War is the logical tendency of Fascism, but it is not it's defining feature.
Yes, it's very important to modern politics. If you don't understand what fascism is in its essence, you miss that. I'd suggest a lecture of Ur Fascism if you want an idea of the essence of Fascism, though there are competing views that you could defend as well, none of which are resumed by militarism.
"fascism" is a term co-opted by literary professors and psycho-analysts from political science to accuse people of a fashist "psychology" which somehow leads to nazism.
It is pseudo-scientific mumbojumbo. Fascism was the italian response to the mass death of WW1 which confronted european socieites with a choice: either turn all of society into an offense military capbaility; or turn it into a defensive one.
The demoncracies chose the latter, the dictatorships chose the former. And hence didnt merely "conscript" people, they militarised all of society. This is what "totalised" means: that there is nothing outside of the state. This was the only way to respond to WW1 offesively: the whole country had to become a war machine, as world-wars required whole-country organization and militarization.
> The closest approximation is states where winners in the market are winners in politics, and fascism historically approximated that quite well.
Dear me. This is just pseudoscientific literary professors with no understanding of political science repeating slurs.
A free market capitalist system is a state system because its fundamental unit is the collective known as "a business" whose legal integrity is provided by state guarentees.
But the whole point of that system is to entirely divorce the political mechanisms of the state from the economic mechanisms of the market. The state guarentees the integrity of private collectives and private individuals from the state.
You cannot have a free market system in which "winners in the markets" are "winners in politics". You're describing the opposite of a free market system; something much more akin to the commnuism of the USSR. This is exactly the opposite of the intensions of capitalism, in which autonomy is granted to private collectives to enable them to take risks on their on behalf, benefit from their success, and pursure their own economic interests. Where this is subsubmed by the state, the entire purpose of the system is removed.
This would be like saying, "the only true socialism is where the state is a business". Incoherent.
I think this is a misquote because nobody used the word "corporation" to refer solely to big companies in those times. I didn't study Mussolini deeply but I assume he means it in the sense "collectives of small family businesses where the collective is owned, proportionally, by said families".
I'm sure there's a better definition, but iirc "corporation" as a synonym for "enormous faceless public investor-controlled megacompany" is a pretty recent definition.
The correct response to these sorts of actions by law enforcement is for individuals to collaborate in a legal manner to collect intelligence on law enforcement and share it on the internet.
If we must live in a world with surveillance than the burden of surveillance must be carried by all.
I'm trying to figure out what sort of intelligence would be collectable that isn't already.
Do you mean officer movements in-field? That's often done by protesters (I remember seeing examples of it during both the BLM protests and the WTO protests; police movements tracked by monitoring police scanners and updated in realtime to chatrooms and Twitter).
Do you mean who they are personally? As public servants, that's generally a matter of public record.
Do you mean camera recording of specific encounters? That's become best practice.
The likely consequence of which will be even more laws like Florida Statutes §119.071(4)(d)(2):
"2.a The home addresses, telephone numbers, dates of birth, and photographs of active or former sworn law enforcement personnel or of active or former civilian personnel employed by a law enforcement agency, including correctional and correctional probation officers, personnel of the Department of Children and Families whose duties include the investigation of abuse, neglect, exploitation, fraud, theft, or other criminal activities, personnel of the Department of Health whose duties are to support the investigation of child abuse or neglect, and personnel of the Department of Revenue or local governments whose responsibilities include revenue collection and enforcement or child support enforcement; the names, home addresses, telephone numbers, photographs, dates of birth, and places of employment of the spouses and children of such personnel; and the names and locations of schools and day care facilities attended by the children of such personnel are exempt from s. 119.07(1) and s. 24(a), Art. I of the State Constitution."
Well as soon as a bunch of officers and politicians realize someone followed their every movement and we know where they buy their groceries, where they go to church, who their friends are, who their children are and what elementary school they attend, the route their 8 year old walks home after school and any other creepy but legal information one could easily obtain by surveillance in public. I don’t condone this type of action. But I also don’t believe we should be tracked across everything we do so perhaps doing something like this could send a message.
That might be the sort of message that, while it seems poignant and clever to thinking people, will be lost on the masses and actually end up backfiring and making things worse
The protesters in this case were destroying company property on company land over a pipeline that was routed around a native American reservation.
It would be weird if the police DIDN'T warn companies/individuals about protesters planning on destroying property at other locations.
That's the police's job - to prevent crime. If the protesters were smashing cars in your neighborhood, I suspect you'd want the police to warn the residents there as well.
- Police share information on protestors with pipeline company.
- NSA, after lying under oath to say that it doesn’t, conducts mass surveillance of Americans, and then shortly after that bungles security of its own hacking tools, so they end up in the hands of, well, just about anyone.
- Large trusted organizations from credit agencies to banks to phone companies leak millions of private records.
- US government deliberately — yes, deliberately! — turns over personal identifying information about people associated with the US *TO THE TALIBAN* because, what… the Taliban are “the authorities” now and thus utterly and completely trusted with this information.
And with this backdrop, the US government wants keys to unlock our encryption, and claims it will keep them secure and safe. What’s the worst that can happen… well I don’t know, it’s not like they would turn our information over to the Taliban, right? Oh, wait…
Please remember what they did here next time they say the keys will be held in escrow only to be accessed by trusted authorities.
"In one case, the official passed along intelligence to Enbridge’s security chief for Line 3: a list of people who attended an anti-pipeline organizing meeting."
Aside from clandestine attendance for the purposes of intelligence gathering, there were more than a few things that needed to be done to accurately identify and produce the list of people who attended.
59 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 128 ms ] threadIf protesters with a history of property destruction were scheduled to come through my neighborhood, I hope the police would warn me too.
The pipeline was specifically routed AROUND native land, and was indeed even placed exactly on top of an existing 40 year old pipeline.
When a pipeline spill destroys people's stuff, do the police then inflict a proportionate amount of violence on the pipeline's owners?
If a broken window's worth a tazing, an arrest, two nights in jail, a single court date, and a short or suspended sentence, how many thousands of years of prison should, say, the Exxon-Valdez spill have been worth?
Also, there are plenty of fines and enforcement actions on spills.
Police would inflict violence on corporations if corporations break the law. ...which is why they don't. Protesters should try that simple trick.
Wouldn't you want the authorities to protect you against that danger?
The authorities show up to help pipeline companies break treaties. Some now ex-property owner like myself wouldn't even be a speed bump.
If any land is seized the owners will be compensated.
Eminent domain being used against you is like winning the lottery for most.
I would hope it's effective!
I'm confident they're self aware of their position, but trolling or otherwise, I don't think they intend to argue faithfully.
You keep arguing as if protesters were intent on preventing workers from returning to their families or suchlike.
That might be the intent on paper but It's basically impossible to only block a gate going one way.
>There's no evidence of any workers being attacked
Maybe in this exact case. But these type of responses is based on patterns of behavior of a political wing of the left that think political violence is ok.
You sound like you've never participated in an organized protest before. My union did exactly that: our membership included parking enforcement, so we denied entry to the parking lot. Blocking egress is illegal, so we'd open to let people out.
Of course, you can't really stop people who are willing to kill for their parking space. But the rest can be stopped with a throng of people blocking all ways but back.
"Corporate" means body, and isnt used in its modern sense. Fascism is, as you'll see, exactly the opposite of what you're suggesting.
A fascist corporation is a collective owned by the state.
When legal protest doesn't work, it's sometimes necessary to resort to civil disobedience. That's messy and gray.
In practice the state did not have economic control over the corporations. In the example of Nazi Germany, the cooperation of large industrialists was necessary for accession to power, and the state was too incompetent to achieve even basic control over the economy, so it was privatised and the leaders of corporations instead were integrated into the social Darwinist structure of society that the Nazis loved so much. Which turned out to work pretty well with unbounded free markets.
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-supermanagerial-reic...
The idea that any *dictatorial* state of ww2 era had "unbounded free markets" is pretty insane, and reveals that it is your agenda to associate modern political movemnets you dislike with a totalised military state of the 1940s; in which every citizen was consripted into the military.
I dont know why anyone today things a totalised military state has anything to do with modern politics; it doesnt.
"Totalised military state" is a meaningless sentence, and Fascism existed before and after "every citizen was conscripted into the military". If you think that the defining feature of Fascism is militarism and conscription, you simply misunderstand what fascism is. There is much, much more to fascism than Nazi Germany within a 4 year time period. War is the logical tendency of Fascism, but it is not it's defining feature.
Yes, it's very important to modern politics. If you don't understand what fascism is in its essence, you miss that. I'd suggest a lecture of Ur Fascism if you want an idea of the essence of Fascism, though there are competing views that you could defend as well, none of which are resumed by militarism.
It is pseudo-scientific mumbojumbo. Fascism was the italian response to the mass death of WW1 which confronted european socieites with a choice: either turn all of society into an offense military capbaility; or turn it into a defensive one.
The demoncracies chose the latter, the dictatorships chose the former. And hence didnt merely "conscript" people, they militarised all of society. This is what "totalised" means: that there is nothing outside of the state. This was the only way to respond to WW1 offesively: the whole country had to become a war machine, as world-wars required whole-country organization and militarization.
> The closest approximation is states where winners in the market are winners in politics, and fascism historically approximated that quite well.
Dear me. This is just pseudoscientific literary professors with no understanding of political science repeating slurs.
A free market capitalist system is a state system because its fundamental unit is the collective known as "a business" whose legal integrity is provided by state guarentees.
But the whole point of that system is to entirely divorce the political mechanisms of the state from the economic mechanisms of the market. The state guarentees the integrity of private collectives and private individuals from the state.
You cannot have a free market system in which "winners in the markets" are "winners in politics". You're describing the opposite of a free market system; something much more akin to the commnuism of the USSR. This is exactly the opposite of the intensions of capitalism, in which autonomy is granted to private collectives to enable them to take risks on their on behalf, benefit from their success, and pursure their own economic interests. Where this is subsubmed by the state, the entire purpose of the system is removed.
This would be like saying, "the only true socialism is where the state is a business". Incoherent.
awful: causing dread
https://www.etymonline.com/word/awe?ref=etymonline_crossrefe...
Words are weird. Adults understand context, limits of reductionism.
I'm sure there's a better definition, but iirc "corporation" as a synonym for "enormous faceless public investor-controlled megacompany" is a pretty recent definition.
If we must live in a world with surveillance than the burden of surveillance must be carried by all.
Do you mean officer movements in-field? That's often done by protesters (I remember seeing examples of it during both the BLM protests and the WTO protests; police movements tracked by monitoring police scanners and updated in realtime to chatrooms and Twitter).
Do you mean who they are personally? As public servants, that's generally a matter of public record.
Do you mean camera recording of specific encounters? That's become best practice.
I think what you're describing is what we do now.
"2.a The home addresses, telephone numbers, dates of birth, and photographs of active or former sworn law enforcement personnel or of active or former civilian personnel employed by a law enforcement agency, including correctional and correctional probation officers, personnel of the Department of Children and Families whose duties include the investigation of abuse, neglect, exploitation, fraud, theft, or other criminal activities, personnel of the Department of Health whose duties are to support the investigation of child abuse or neglect, and personnel of the Department of Revenue or local governments whose responsibilities include revenue collection and enforcement or child support enforcement; the names, home addresses, telephone numbers, photographs, dates of birth, and places of employment of the spouses and children of such personnel; and the names and locations of schools and day care facilities attended by the children of such personnel are exempt from s. 119.07(1) and s. 24(a), Art. I of the State Constitution."
The protesters in this case were destroying company property on company land over a pipeline that was routed around a native American reservation.
It would be weird if the police DIDN'T warn companies/individuals about protesters planning on destroying property at other locations.
That's the police's job - to prevent crime. If the protesters were smashing cars in your neighborhood, I suspect you'd want the police to warn the residents there as well.
My point: Shifty, illegal, underhanded things are just wrong. Do it all above board.
- Police share information on protestors with pipeline company.
- NSA, after lying under oath to say that it doesn’t, conducts mass surveillance of Americans, and then shortly after that bungles security of its own hacking tools, so they end up in the hands of, well, just about anyone.
- Large trusted organizations from credit agencies to banks to phone companies leak millions of private records.
- US government deliberately — yes, deliberately! — turns over personal identifying information about people associated with the US *TO THE TALIBAN* because, what… the Taliban are “the authorities” now and thus utterly and completely trusted with this information.
And with this backdrop, the US government wants keys to unlock our encryption, and claims it will keep them secure and safe. What’s the worst that can happen… well I don’t know, it’s not like they would turn our information over to the Taliban, right? Oh, wait…
Please remember what they did here next time they say the keys will be held in escrow only to be accessed by trusted authorities.
Also: Apple, are you seeing this?
Aside from clandestine attendance for the purposes of intelligence gathering, there were more than a few things that needed to be done to accurately identify and produce the list of people who attended.