Brent Betterly, Brian Church and Jared Chase, via The Huffington Post.

The old trope of the bomb-throwing anarchist is back in the news, with a round-up in Ohio on May 1 and the three would-be NATO protesters arrested on Wednesday who are now charged with conspiracy to commit terrorism. While the impression that appears in the media is one of remnants of the Occupy movement verging toward violence, the driving forces behind these plots are the very agencies claiming to have foiled them.

The five activists arrested in Cleveland, Ohio, are facing multiple charges for conspiring and attempting to destroy the Brecksville-Northfield High Level Bridge on May Day to protest corporate rule. According to the FBI press statement released shortly after the May 1 arrests, FBI Special Agent in Charge Stephen D. Anthony said “the individuals charged in this plot were intent on using violence to express their ideological views.” But that is only one side of the story.

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Original headline about Operation Spectrum.

On May 21, 1987, 16 Singaporeans were arrested and detained in a crackdown called Operation Spectrum. About a month later, four of the original 16 were released, and another six arrested. They were branded as Marxist conspirators out to “subvert Singapore’s political and social order using communist united front tactics” and detained without trial. Most of the detainees were lawyers, community workers or entrepreneurs. As the 25th anniversary of the crackdown approaches, activists are using the opportunity to raise questions anew about the repression of dissent in the country.

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Image from "Advice for avoiding Stop and Frisk" blog post at Raid My Words.

On Saturday, May 12, several hundred people rallied in front of the New York City Police Department headquarters to protest the NYPD’s “Stop and Frisk” program, considered by many to be a prime example of modern-day, institutional racism. But with approximately 40,000 officers and a nearly $5 billion annual budget, the NYPD is the largest police force in the U.S. and, some say, the most powerful on earth. So how does one try to change an ongoing policy enforced by such an entrenched institution? According to some activists at the rally, the way to begin is twofold: by educating people about their rights during police searches and by mounting a community effort to do surveillance on the NYPD.

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Guatemalan women marching in Antigua. Photo by the author.

May Day events in the city of Antigua Guatemala — the regional capital of Sacatepéquez — are traditionally lighthearted and festive. People from Guatemala City, especially the mestizo population, travel to the colonial city to enjoy its historical atmosphere, eat delicious food and enjoy the landscape at the base of the Hunahpú volcano. But on May 1 this year, visitors encountered a very different scene: a march of both commemoration and protest for International Workers’ Day. Never before in recent memory have Antigua’s workers, peasants and unions organized a May Day march like this to demand economic rights and an end to the increasing militarization of the country’s security policy.

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Huey Newton and Bobby Steale, via Wikimedia.

The Black Panther Party was an African-American radical organization founded in Oakland, California, in 1966. Originally it was called the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, and even though it emerged in the North, it was responding to the same anger and frustration as the Deacons for Defense felt when watching black people get punished for standing up for themselves in the South.

The Panthers’ immediate goal was to protect black neighborhoods from police brutality. The group evolved from black nationalism to a broader revolutionary socialism. It rapidly expanded to many cities, still mainly in the North, and became influential. It differed from the Deacons for Defense in that it didn’t think of itself as a security force for the civil rights movement. Instead, it offered an outright alternative to the civil rights movement, with goals that included “land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice and peace.” Its best-known programs were its armed citizens’ patrols to monitor the police, and Free Breakfast for School Children. Other programs included free medical clinics, drug and alcohol rehabilitation, and an experimental school to develop new methods for educating African-American children.

Not nearly enough notice has been taken of the Panthers’ effort, as a revolutionary organization, to include alternative institutions in their program. Many in the Occupy movement have made the same move. Both are in alignment with a framework that emphasizes “prefigurative work,” which builds skills and creates new ways for organizing life in a future society.

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Woman at a 15M movement protest at the French consulate in Valencia, Spain. By Marc Sardon, via Flickr.

The 15M movement in Spain has faced repression from the very beginning: 24 young people were arrested and beaten by police in the demonstrations organized by Democracia Real Ya on May 15 last year, which is a large part of why several dozen people decided to camp that night in Sol square, turning the demonstration into an encampment. That first night, the Legal Committee of Sol was created by lawyers and laypeople; similar groups emerged in other camps around the country in order to give legal support to the movement. This has never been an easy job, but it has only been getting harder.

Since May 15, the Legal Committee of Sol has given support to more than a hundred arrestees. There have been another hundred arrested in Barcelona and many more in the rest of the country. Activists have been charged with undermining authority (facing one to three years in jail), disobedience and resistance (six months to one year), and disorderly conduct (six months to three years). Most of all, though, 15M protesters are being punished though economic means. There are nearly 70 people with fines in Madrid, according to the Legal Committee of Sol, and in Barcelona, there have been more than 200 people fined, together amounting to more than €40,000.

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The "Raging Bull" in New York's Financial District being barricaded on the first day of Occupy Wall Street. By David Shankbone, via Flickr.

On March 24, after yet another wave of violence against the Occupy movement, Occupy Wall Street and allies staged a march through Lower Manhattan, targeting both New York City Police Commissioner Ray Kelly specifically and the police in general. We demanded the resignation of Ray Kelly because of his involvement with a sustained campaign of violence against Occupy, surveillance of Muslim communities and widespread corruption. But it is our belief that any coherent analysis of poverty in this country must also critique the institution of the police as a whole. Regardless of your position on police officers as individuals, the existence of an armed paramilitary organization at the disposal of the state — and therefore the corporations and wealthy elites the state is beholden to — should be incompatible with any work related to economic or social justice. The often-stated idea that “the police are the 99 percent too” is an erasure of the open war that the state has waged against the poor and people of color in this country for hundreds of years.

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Photo by Timothy Kaldas from Tahrir Square, Cairo, on January 25, 2011.

There has been a lot of blame heaped on Obama for his rather cautious remarks about the Egyptian uprising. Nicholas Kristof is pleading with him in the Times today to do more. Secretary Clinton has certainly been driving me up the wall all this time with her ice-queen persona and creepy evasiveness in responding to direct questions; Biden has been characteristically uncouth. But Obama’s delicate middle path, though, seems to me quite appropriate. He has not insisted that Mubarak step down, but has made clear that violence against the protesters will not be tolerated. He has affirmed the democratic aspirations of the Egyptian people and made clear that a just transition of power should be imminent. His administration has even indicated that it is reevaluating its aid relationship with Egypt, as if to attach consequences to these demands. That’s about it, though. He hasn’t demanded that Mubarak step down.

As someone filled with hope and excitement by recent events in Egypt, I find myself wishing that my president would go further. I’ve heard Egyptians wishing he would too. But I think this is a wish worth resisting. American presidents aren’t the good guys here, and it’s a mistake to ask that one should pretend to be. Obama stands atop a government that has spent decades supporting undemocratic regimes in the name of its short-term interests, and the bizarre interests dictated by those policies will probably suffer with Mubarak’s departure. Like the Wikileaks incidents, these protests are a force of truth that stands firmly against the US government’s practices of deception. The Egyptians have caught American Empire with no clothes, and it’s beside the point to ask that we flex a bit to look good naked.

Really, what is at stake is a whole habit of thinking about how things get done in the world. For the last decade, when you wanted “regime change,” you called up the US. Our military provided it, while destabilizing a region, tanking the domestic economy, and inventing perverse new meanings for the word “victory” in the process. Now, say the Egyptian people, that era is over. Change comes from below, from the governed, and through largely-peaceful protest. This is how real democracies are born. And it’s a whole lot cheaper.

Speaking of which, it’s time to end the massive economic aid meant more to prop up Egypt’s military and its alliance with Israel than the well-being of its people. It’s time to start imagining a world in which the US is doing less, not more. Get used to it: we’re not the heroes here (though we did invent Facebook and Twitter). We’re a large part of why Mubarak managed to hold on to power as long as he did. In the future I hope that those kinds of policies change, and that I will be prouder of how my country carries itself in the world. But for now, victory is for the Egyptians, not for us.

I wrote a few days ago about the growing political momentum in the US Congress around finally cutting defense spending. It seems that this is well-founded in public opinion. The New York Times reports that, based on its recent poll about cutting government entitlements,

Nearly two-thirds of Americans choose higher payroll taxes for Medicare and Social Security over reduced benefits in either program. And asked to choose among cuts to Medicare, Social Security or the nation’s third-largest spending program — the military — a majority by a large margin said cut the Pentagon.

According to the poll data, 55% of respondents would be willing to cut defense spending, compared to 21% for Medicare and 13% for Social Security. Democrats are somewhat more likely to favor such cuts (66%), Republicans are somewhat less (42%), and independents are right at the average (55%).

To learn more, I turned to Miriam Pemberton, a research fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, who for years has been working to show the US government how to end its addiction to defense spending while reframing how we think about our security. She explained to me that this new momentum has been in the works well before the Tea Partyers showed up in Congress, and that because of it her work has been gaining traction:

The game changer has been bipartisan deficit reduction fever. Barney Frank was the visionary. Summer before last he pulled together what we wound up calling the Sustainable Defense Task Force to say what could be cut and why. The president’s deficit reduction commission adopted our $100 billion annual figure, and some of our recommendations.

However, she warns us to be suspicious about Defense Secretary Robert Gates’s language of military “cuts”:

Secretary Gates has tried to head off real cuts mostly by selling rearrangements of his own budget, and increases smaller than the ones he’d previously promised, as cuts.

The newly-empowered Republicans in Congress, Pemberton says, are divided. Committee chairs like Buck McKeon (Armed Services) and Paul Ryan (Budget) have been resisting actual cuts to military spending. “But,” she adds, “a lot of tea partiers, libertarians, and some in the Republican leadership are saying: everything on the deficit reduction table.”

In this way, the Tea Party could be a good thing for demilitarization. Pemberton is concerned, however, that talk of deficit reduction can be tricky business; what we need now isn’t just reduction but reinvestment. We need to make sure that the jobs lost by arms-makers can be picked up by a new green economy.

We’re still not having the right kind of conversation, even if we’re getting closer. Many in Congress hope that the Pentagon will somehow be able to do more with less. “Actually,” says Pemberton, where the military is concerned, “the real missing debate is about how to do less.”

In a recent TED talk, Nobel Laureate Jody Williams—who won the Peace prize in 1997 for her efforts to eradicate landmines—argues that “peace is defined by human (not national) security and that it must be achieved through sustainable development, environmental justice, and meeting people’s basic needs.” While that may not be a particularly novel idea to readers of this blog, Williams leacture is worth watching for the great women peacemakers she highlights to show who is leading the way toward this vision of peace.