it’s kind of funny that in this day and age we’re supposed to respond negatively to seeing thousands of policemen imprisoned, prisoners jailed over unfairly harsh sentencing laws released, and the rich being publicly executed. I can’t be the only one who applauded when Bane stormed Gotham’s Bastille, or when the rich were being lined up for sentencing. I am sure the scene at the Gotham stock exchange was conceived as something that was supposed to make the audience uncomfortable by sympathizing with Bane’s actions – but I didn’t feel uncomfortable at all.
Activism
Your Happening World (22)
What happens in Austin, Texas when you babysit your black grandchild as a white grandfather. Hint: not a happy story.
NHS “reform: “Cameron’s put his political credibility on the line, not for ideological or populaist reasons, but to ensure McKinely’s bottom line”. Do read the linked Daily Mail article to show how even a reliable rightwing newspaper is opposed to this tomfoolery.
Why is birth control the Catholic Church’s last stand?
“That no anarchist ever taught us to play Smear the Queer is entirely besides the point.”
“The actual circumstances of the raid on the Sun’s hacks may be up for debate. I think they’re pretty standard for today’s exciting world of high profile send a message coppering, but that may be because I’m a bit too used to living in the kind of authoritarian pro-business society that the Sun has always campaigned for. This is also why I’m a bit baffled by the people who seem to think that we’ll ‘lose something’ when it goes. ‘What will remain’ is the problem.
Student labourers lured under false pretences? Just Hershey
So you’re a foreign student wanting to come to the United States through a summer visa programme, to both work and travel, get a bit of cultural exchange going? Sounds perfect doesn’t it, until you realise it means you spent your summer packing chocolates in boxes, for less money than it cost you to get there. Well, some of the students fooled this way aren’t taking it anymore:
PALMYRA, Pa. — Hundreds of foreign students, waving their fists and shouting defiantly in many languages, walked off their jobs on Wednesday at a plant here that packs Hershey’s chocolates, saying a summer program that was supposed to be a cultural exchange had instead turned them into underpaid labor.
The students, from countries including China, Nigeria, Romania and Ukraine, came to the United States through a long-established State Department summer visa program that allows them to work for two months and then travel. They said they were expecting to practice their English, make some money and learn what life is like in the United States.
In a way, they did. About 400 foreign students were put to work lifting heavy boxes and packing Reese’s candies, Kit-Kats and Almond Joys on a fast-moving production line, many of them on a night shift. After paycheck deductions for fees associated with the program and for their rent, students said at a rally in front of the huge packing plant that many of them were not earning nearly enough to recover what they had spent in their home countries to obtain their visas.
[…]
Ms. Ozer and other students said they were paid $8.35 an hour. After fees are deducted from her paychecks as well as $400 a month for rent, she said, she often takes home less than $200 a week. “We are supposed to be here for cultural exchange and education, but we are just cheap laborers,†Ms. Ozer said.
Added exploitation bonus: the cheap labour Hershey (and I’m sure other companies too) get through this programme means they don’t need to hire expensive American workers whom you can’t nickel and dime with dodgy fees…
(Via Avedon.)
Politicised punishment
The Flying Rodent expands on the same Blood & Treasure post I commented on below and argues:
Similarly, judges frown upon people being assaulted in the Houses of Parliament and attacks on policemen, not least because they also frown upon attacks on judges, but also because the H’es of P and the cops are symbols of democracy and good order. For obvious reasons, those who make the law want citizens to think twice before getting into boxing matches with the constabulary.
Now, you might think this is unfair. You might think it’s scandalous and symptomatic of whatever societal ills, but the one thing it isn’t is politicised. Get caught committing these types of offences, and it’s Wormwood Scrubs for you. If anything, half of these folk could’ve been given far worse sentences and they wouldn’t have had many grounds for complaint.
With which I disagree much more than I did with Jamie’s post. Not so much the idea that if you engage in civil disobedience you should be prepared for jail time, but the idea that the laws under which you are convicted are not politicised. If you punish an attack on a cop more than the same attack on a citizen because the former is a symbol of “democracy and good order”, how is that not a political decision? That’s the state arguing that crimes against its representatives are more harmful than crimes against ordinary people so should be punished harsher. Which is a view of the state that’s political, small c conservative.
Furthermore, consider Otis Ferry. Remember him? The twatty son of popular rock star Bryan Ferry, who invaded parliament back in 2004 to intimidate MPs into voting against the hunting ban? He got a 450 pound fine for his offence, but Jonnie Marbles got six weeks. Same offence, well, minus one pie, different punishment.
Activists need to own their activism
Jamie says, activists need to own their bullshit:
There’s certainly a case that the sentences that he and others have got are on the harsh side. There have also been cases, as in the Fortnum occupation, where demonstrators were hauled up on highly dubious and somewhat draconian charges that were later dropped. But there’s an odd note of naivety in the discussion about these things, almost a kind of reverse Baader-Meinhof syndrome. The RAF believed that selective acts of terrorism would cause the state to drop its democratic façade and reveal the true violence of its nature. Certain protestors these days seem to believe that the state and associated power holders are bad people doing bad things, but also that unstructured and sometimes potentially dangerous acts of random activism will cause them to reveal their true cuddly nature. In this, there’s a strong air of acting up to get daddy’s attention and then being surprised when you don’t like the kind of attention daddy gives you.
Very much agree with this, though it still galls to see a hapless idiot like marbles having to go to prison for pulling a stupid prank, when fsckers like Murdoch pere and fils are largely left alone. More seriously, civil disobedience does not necessarily include having to accept the punishment the state decideds to hand out for your activism. Punishing Rosa Parks for sitting in the wrong in the bus was legal but wrong. Not that Marbles was a Rosa Parks.