Over at Alternet, I have a new piece about Obama’s schizophrenic relationship to protest. Over the years, he has repeatedly pointed to Gandhi as an inspiration. And during Obama’s presidential campaign, he used the perhaps apocryphal story of FDR’s constructive relationship with the grassroots, to urge his supporters who wanted their progressive goals met to go out there and “make me do it.”

Nevertheless, on the eve of the G-20 summit last week, President Barack Obama told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that even during his days as a community organizer in Chicago he was never a big fan of mass protests.

With the clear intention of discouraging those who might join the looming demonstrations against the G-20, Obama explained that he was always a believer that “focusing on concrete, local, immediate issues that have an impact on people’s lives is what really makes a difference; and that having protests about abstractions [such] as global capitalism or something, generally is not really going to make much of a difference.”

I go on to argue that these comments were really disingenuous on Obama’s part for many reasons.

It would not have taken an incredible investigative feat to discover that the protesters descending upon Pittsburgh were doing so for very “concrete” reasons that touch their daily lives in very real ways.

They came to advocate for greater assistance for everyday people during these tough economic times, for more serious government action on global warming ahead of the U.N. climate talks in Copenhagen, Denmark, and for an end to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that have already taken such a staggering human and financial toll.

In fact, as a general rule of thumb, most people — whether they are diehard activists or not — don’t normally travel great distances to face ominous riot police firing rubber bullets, pepper spray and deafening sound cannons, unless they have been deeply, personally affected by the issues being protested.

Also, given the surge of right wing protests in recent months, Obama unfortunately missed an important opportunity to encourgage pressure from the left to help forward a more progressive legislative agenda.

There are a lot of debates about whether violent video games contribute to causing violence in the world. They do. To remedy that, some have tried to develop nonviolent video games, notably A Force More Powerful, which we have but have yet to try out fully because Jasmine‘s PC is so phenomenally slow. Violence in video games is so dangerous, in part, because it misrepresents violence in reality; there is no cost and no real effect.

Now, artist Zach Gage has created Lose/Lose, a simple arcade game that takes a small step toward changing that. When an object in the game gets destroyed, so does an actual file on your computer. Here’s his statement:

Lose/Lose is a video-game with real life consequences. Each alien in the game is created based on a random file on the players computer. If the player kills the alien, the file it is based on is deleted. If the players ship is destroyed, the application itself is deleted.

Although touching aliens will cause the player to lose the game, and killing aliens awards points, the aliens will never actually fire at the player. This calls into question the player’s mission, which is never explicitly stated, only hinted at through classic game mechanics. Is the player supposed to be an aggressor? Or merely an observer, traversing through a dangerous land?

Why do we assume that because we are given a weapon an awarded for using it, that doing so is right?

By way of exploring what it means to kill in a video-game, Lose/Lose broaches bigger questions. As technology grows, our understanding of it diminishes, yet, at the same time, it becomes increasingly important in our lives. At what point does our virtual data become as important to us as physical possessions? If we have reached that point already, what real objects do we value less than our data? What implications does trusting something so important to something we understand so poorly have?

Following Lose/Lose, maybe it’s time for a new rule: violent video games must have violent consequences. I cringe, though, at the thought that people would probably play them anyway, just as they continue to get into real fights.

At the very least, it is time for a real warning on video game packages. Not just the current system of labels which even seem to make a violent game look more enticing, but truly substantive warnings, as on cigarettes. The research exists to support it. Still, that’s pretty pedantic. Do grown-ups really need to be told that they shouldn’t fantasize for hours about going on killing sprees? We should know better.

(h/t Joel Dietz)

Correction: A previous version of this post stated that the game only deletes files internal to itself. Zach Gage wrote in to clarify that, indeed, the game can delete any file on a user’s computer.

• More than 100 D.C. teenagers from four public high schools walked out of class Monday because they’re angry about impending teacher layoffs recently announced by D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee.

• Residents living in the Somali police ground at Hamar Jajab district in Mogadishu staged a mass demonstration on Sunday against a statement from the Somali Police department which told them to evacuate the grounds as soon as possible or their makeshifts houses will be destroyed with bulldozers.

• About 4,000 workers at South Africa’s DRDGOLD marched at Blyvoor mine on Tuesday to protest wages, and with a strike entering its third week, they called on the government to revoke the company’s  license.

• Zimbabwe police on Friday opened fire on hundreds of striking workers in the southwestern mining town of Zvishavane, injuring four workers including a councillor from Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai’s MDC party.

• Workers at Al-Aqsa University in Gaza City, The Khoudhouri College in Tulkarem, Aroub College in Hebron and the Palestinian Technical Institute in Ramallah held a sit-in strike Tuesday, in protest of a failure of the government to respond to requests for improved working conditions.

• Police arrested 14 anti-gambling activists who yesterday morning blocked the gate at the SugarHouse Casino construction site on the Delaware River waterfront in Fishtown.

• Hundreds of students shouting anti-government slogans took to the streets of Tehran and other cities Monday in another sign that Iran’s opposition is still active, despite arrests and allegations of state torture and rape.

There seems to have been pretty good coverage of the G-20 protests last week, at least in the alternative press. If you want to read up I would suggest checking out the reports posted on Common Dreams.

In the meantime, I thought it’d be good to share a few of the more extreme and bizarre videos of the police crackdown from the summit.

First, and probably the most widely viewed, is the footage of the kidnapping of a protester by men wearing camo. This is really frightening, and reminds me of something you might see under a dictatorship, but not here. Check it out:

While some questioned its authenticity – probably because it seems so crazy – officials with G-20 security released the following statement regarding the event:

Military members supporting the G20 Summit work with local law enforcement authorities but do not have the authority to make arrests. The individuals involved in the 9/24/09 arrest which has appeared online are law enforcement officers from a multi-agency tactical response team assigned to the security operations for the G20. It is not unusual for tactical team members to wear camouflaged fatigues.  The type of fatigues the officers wear designates their unit affiliation.

Prior to the arrest, the officers observed this subject vandalizing a local business.  Due to the hostile nature of the crowd, officer safety and the safety of the person under arrest, the subject was immediately removed from the area.

The protester in the video is reportedly still locked up.

This next video is of the Long Range Acoustic Device (LRAD) being used against protesters. If you don’t know about this latest non-lethal technology, it generates a narrow beam of intense sound that can be physically painful and even permanently damage hearing.

Read the rest of this article »

In the West African country of Guinea at least 157 people were killed and 1,200 wounded at a protest yesterday, according to the Guinean Organization for Defense of Human Rights. Security forces reeking of alcohol opened fire on 50,000 people who had gathered at the capital’s main soccer stadium for a rally against junta leader Captain Moussa “Dadis” Camara, who took power in a military coup last December. According to the AFP:

Protestors carried placards reading “No to Dadis” and “Down with the army in power.”

The junta banned the demonstration, but several political parties, trade unions and civic organisations vowed that the event would go ahead.

In the middle of the morning, riot police charged the protestors.

People then scattered in panic as the presidential guard shot into the massive crowd with live ammunition. The AP reports that:

Eyewitnesses told New York-based Human Rights Watch that security forces stripped female protesters and raped them in the streets. The rights group, citing eyewitness reports, said soldiers on Monday also stabbed protesters with knives and bayonets.

Not surprisingly, Camara claims that the military was acting out of his control, but the people aren’t buying it. “The killing of all these innocent protesters can only mean doom for his political ambition,” said one local, referring to Camara’s plan to run in elections set for January.

Unfortunately, the demonstrators were not able to maintain their nonviolent discipline, which inevitably made it easier for the regime and the security forces to justify the violent crack down. Again from the AFP:

Witnesses said that opposition leaders who tried to reach the stadium were halted by police close to Conakry’s university, where clashes erupted by the end of the morning between riot police and several thousand demonstrators.

Police reinforcements were rushed to the area, where the protestors were armed with stones and the police with tear gas.

In Conakry’s working-class Belle-vue district, demonstrators set a police station and a police car ablaze, according to residents.

• More than 40 musicians took part in a flash mob protest at the Oakland Whole Foods on Friday to protest CEO John Mackey’s recent comment that health care is not a human right. They gathered in the back of the store and began performing a take off of Toni Basil’s 1982 pop hit “Hey Mickey”, only changing the lyrics to address Mackey.

• A group referring to itself as the “Greenwash Guerrillas” dropped a banner that read “UN: Cap + Trade is a Dead End” over Manhattan’s 42nd street bridge on Friday, which halted a caravan of police-escorted limousines and SUVs carrying UN delegates. The group then dropped leaflets onto the stalled traffic articulating their demands

• Following vocal public protests and Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick’s threat to have state employees launch a boycott, Hyatt Hotels has agreed to offer new jobs with health coverage and the same pay to the nearly 100 housekeepers it laid off at three Boston hotels.

• The Pennsylvania Association of Staff Nurses and Allied Professionals held a rally outside Temple University Hospital Monday to protest what they are describing as the health system’s “bad faith approach” to contract negotiations.

• Around 20 demonstrators in Edinburgh, Scotland blocked garbage trucks being used by private contractors for the third time since last week to protest the use of nonunion workers by the city.

• More than 1,000 hotel workers and their supporters rallied in San Francisco on Friday to campaign for a fair contract. Over 100 were arrested while participating in a nonviolent sit-in.

There’s a great Q&A with NASA climate scientist Dr. James Hansen in the latest issue of Earth Island Journal in which he addresses his involvement in recent nonviolent direct actions against the coal industry. Some have criticized him heartily for this decision. The New York Times ran a piece back in July questioning whether Hansen still matters because of his recent activities. But the following explanation for his turn toward activism shows he has a far better grasp on the reality of change than his opponents or even his colleagues in Obama’s cabinet—Science Adviser John Holdren and Energy Secretary Steven Chu—for that matter.

I want to turn to your recent role in some big civil disobedience climate protests: the Capitol climate protest in DC last March, and the protest this past June in West Virginia against mountaintop removal coal mining, where you were arrested for the first time. How did somebody who has worked inside the system for so many years get to a place where you decided that you not only had to be out in a protest but that you were going to get arrested?

I prefer the phrase “civil resistance” rather than “civil disobedience” for reasons that Gandhi gives.

When I give a talk on this, I show that the three options for getting the actions that are obviously needed are through the democratic process, influencing the elections of the administration and Congress; secondly, the courts; and then thirdly, civil resistance.

The first at the top of the list, the democratic process: Well, we’re trying that and you have to continue [trying]. It’s very disappointing that the democratic process ends up with the same old politics, which is exactly what Waxman-Markey is. It does not do the job and it is selling short young people and future generations. And that has gotten to be very frustrating to many people, including me.

And so, you look at these other things, the courts and civil resistance. The courts: In my talks, I draw attention to the fact that it has long been a basic tenet in our democracy that the current generation is using nature and the property that we have inherited from our parents in what Thomas Jefferson described in his letter to James Madison as “in usufruct.” Meaning that it’s in trust, it’s property that belongs to future generations, and we’re obligated to deliver it in equally good condition as we received it from our preceding generations. Jefferson was thinking especially about the quality of the land and that you can’t degrade the land with agricultural practices that just use up the nutrients and leave nothing for future generations. So that, I think, may provide a basis for the courts coming to the assistance of young people and future generations. But I don’t know how well that will work out.

So then we arrive at [civil resistance]: I think the point is – just as Gandhi did – to try to draw attention to what is just and what is unjust. It is kind of a last resort, but the problem is we are running out of time. That is what science has made very clear. It is very hard for people to understand this because the magnitude of global warming is so small in comparison to weather fluctuations, and yet what has become clear in the last few years is that it doesn’t take a very large global change in order to have enormous implications in the long run.

Do you think, then, that more people should start getting involved in civil resistance, in particular when it comes to stopping coal and mountaintop removal mining?

Yeah. We have got to get Obama to pay attention to this because, as I say, I think he is our best hope. But so far, he seems to be forgetting his obligation to young people.

• Thousands of students, faculty members and other employees of the University of California system protested budget cuts Thursday across the state.

• In New York City tomorrow, the Mobilization for Health Care for All is launching a campaign of “Patients Not Profit” sit-ins at insurance company offices to demand an end to a system that profits by denying people care and puts insurance company bureaucrats between doctors and patients. Sign up to sit in and join the battle today at http://www.mobilizeforhealthcare.org.

• About a thousand G-20 protesters, mostly anarchist youth, took to the streets Thursday in a non-sanctioned march starting in Pittsburgh’s Arsenal Park. On Friday, a large protest sponsored by the Thomas Merton Center’s Antiwar Committee drew several thousand peaceful protesters. As of Saturday, authorities had reported 181 arrests during the two-day period, not including 14 Greenpeace activists.

• A labor dispute in the heart of San Francisco reached a new level Thursday night as hundreds of hotel workers took to the streets in protest with some engaging in civil disobedience.

• Around 400 executive pilots of Air India’s total pilot strength of 1,200 did not report for duty on Saturday, marking the start of an indefinite strike to protest against the airline management’s decision to cut incentive pay as a means of cutting costs.

• Around 1,500 climate activists in white suits protested Saturday in Copenhagen against the use of fossil fuels and marched to a coal-firing plant, which they planned to shut down by chaining themselves to conveyor belts.

• On Friday, hundreds of people from the town of Na’lin and international activists from Spain, Italy, Britain, Sweden and the United States participated in the weekly nonviolent march to the seperation wall erected by Israel. Eight people were injured by gas canisters shot directly into the crowds and three were arrested.

About 300 protesters attempted to march toward the Pittsburgh convention center where the G20 meeting was taking place yesterday afternoon, but were met with roaming squads of police officers carrying plastic shields and batons. The police fired a sound cannon that emitted shrill beeps, causing demonstrators to cover their ears and back up, then threw tear gas canisters that released clouds of white smoke and stun grenades that exploded with sharp flashes of light. It is believed this is the first time a sound canon has been used publicly. About 20 people were arrested.

• Four Greenpeace activists attached to a massive banner dangled from a Pittsburgh bridge Wednesday to protest the G20 meeting. The 80-by-30-foot sign took the style of a road sign, reading: “Danger: Climate Destruction Ahead. Reduce CO2 emissions now.”

• More than 350 transit workers took to the streets of midtown Manhattan Wednesday morning to protest the MTA’s refusal to accept a pact that would raise hourly pay rates by more than 11 percent over three years, which an arbitration panel awarded.

• Honduran police fired tear gas at a crowd of thousands on Wednesday, who were trying to reach the Brazilian embassy where ousted president Manuel Zelaya has taken refuge. Two anti-coup protesters were killed.

• More than 200 Black-owned newspapers are joining the NAACP economic boycott of South Carolina to protest the Confederate flag atop the State House and inside the House and Senate chambers.

• Dozens of people gathered in Hamburg, Germany for a flashmob protest of Chancellor Angela Merkel. They yelled an ironic “Yeahh” after every sentence she spoke. The video has become a viral sensation in Germany in the run up to Sunday’s election, with more than 280,000 views so far on YouTube.

• Members of the Westboro Baptist Church showed up in Fort Green, Brooklyn yesterday with signs that said “You’re Going to Hell,” while simultaneously dancing and shouting anti-gay slogans as they stood on the street corner. But they were quickly outnumbered by 200 students from Brooklyn Technical High School who came to counter protest their message of hate.

• About 200 union and hospitality workers in Chicago were arrested yesterday afternoon as they demonstrated their support for ongoing labor negotiations with major downtown hotels and to show solidarity with fired hotel workers in Boston.