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British Police Arrest Protesters Before Protest
Robert Mackey, The Lede (blog), New York Times
Undeterred by the criticism leveled at the police in London for their handling of the recent protests against the Group of 20 summit meeting, the police in another part of England announced on Monday that they had “arrested 114 men and women from across the U.K.” before a protest at a coal-fired power plant could get under way.

According to a statement from Nottinghamshire Police, the arrests were made “on suspicion of conspiracy to commit aggravated trespass and criminal damage.” Police also said that they had discovered “specialist equipment” with which the protesters could have “posed a serious threat to the safe running of the site.” It is not yet clear what sort of action might have been planned, but the Guardian reports that people who have taken part in protests in the past “speculated that the demonstrators could have been planning to chain themselves to the conveyor belts taking coal into the power plant in an attempt to stop the turbines when fuel ran out.”
(13 April 2009)
Related:
Police arrest 114 for suspected power plant raid (Reuters)
Police raid dozens of homes as climate change activists arrested (Guardian)
G20 protest videos: Growing catalogue of evidence against police (Guardian)

How do environmentalists spot a mole?
John Vidal, Guardian
Environment groups know they are being spied on and the arrest of 114 activists this week looks like more of the same
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... This week it was almost certain that the 114 people arrested outside Nottingham were also shopped by an informer. Nearly a week before the action, police warned all power companies in the Midlands and the north that a major action against a coal-fired power station was likely and told them to increase security.

The police were also confident enough of their source to practically strip Nottingham of police and commit forward intelligence teams, get maps of the school and mobilise a helicopter. The operation involved some very senior officers. According to one person arrested, "this was not an ordinary police operation. We were set up. They knew where we were going and the resources used were immense."

Arresting officers openly said that they had known about the action for a week and that the operation was "intelligence-led". This could mean that the police relied on covert surveillance such as mobile-phone tapping, computer-hacking and vehicle tracking, but this is unlikely to have provided the authorities with reliable enough information. Much more likely, they used a traditional mole.

Environment groups know they are being effective when they are being spied on or infiltrated by the state or by corporations.

... Police surveillance of environmental activists has intensified since the demise of the animal rights movement and parallels the rise of climate change as an international issue with vast sums of money at stake.
(17 April 2009)

Kettling: another special relationship
Charles Shaw, openDemocracy
Britons are not alone in facing the kind of ‘kettling' practices deployed during the G-20 Summit. Over in America it's also been in use for some time.
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Since London and New York share so much affinity, it will probably come as no surprise to Britons that "kettling"- the practice by police of cordoning off city blocks at both ends and containing protestors for hours before arresting them for all intents and purposes, had its US debut five years ago during the 2004 Republican National Convention. It was there that I and over 1000 other people were mass-arrested and interned in a makeshift prison camp set up on Pier 57, a filthy and hazardous decommissioned bus depot on the West Side Highway that came to be known as "Guantanamo on the Hudson."

... The policy of mass arresting and detaining protestors was deliberate and premeditated, as revealed in NYPD documents released in 2007 under court order. The intention was to disrupt, discourage, and ultimately, disperse the protest presence from the streets by creating a climate of fear. Under the broadly defined rubric of ‘domestic terrorism', using the Patriot Act, an elevated terror alert, and a ‘temporary state of emergency' as legal justification, virtually anyone could be construed as a lawbreaker. As a result of this zealotry, the arrests did not discriminate: media, legal observers, and innocent bystanders alike were all caught up in the sweeps.
(16 April 2009)

Rush Builds A Revolution (socialism?)
Harold Meyerson, Washington Post
According to a Rasmussen poll released last week, 37 percent of Americans under age 30 prefer capitalism, 33 percent prefer socialism and 30 percent are undecided. Among all Americans, 53 percent prefer capitalism, 20 percent prefer socialism and 27 percent are undecided.

How's that again?

If you comb the annals of Americans' ideological preferences, you won't find figures like these. At socialism's apogee, presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs got 6 percent of the vote in the 1912 election. After that, it was pretty much all downhill -- until last week, anyway

... Today, America is home to no substantial socialist organizations, and virtually no public figures champion socialism's cause.

... So where do these numbers come from? Rasmussen didn't provide any data that clarify causality, but I think it's safe to infer that the havoc that Wall Street has wreaked upon the world over the past year and its reliance on American taxpayers to bail it out haven't exactly helped capitalism's cause.

But there's more to these numbers. For one thing, they signal that the link between socialism and anti-Americanism has been weakened and, among the young, all but destroyed. The end of Soviet communism has meant that the United States no longer has a major adversary that professes to be socialist.

... Moreover, those Americans opting for socialism are doing so when socialists themselves aren't calling for, and don't believe in, the kind of revolutionary transformations -- the abolition of wage labor, say -- for which their forebears routinely campaigned in the days of Debs and the Depression. Today, the world's socialist and social democratic parties basically champion a more social form of capitalism, with tighter regulations on capital, more power for labor and an expanded public sector to do what the private sector cannot (such as providing universal access to health care).

... The data on the young are particularly telling. Twenty-somethings are more open to socialism -- or social capitalism -- than 30-somethings not only because they never lived through the Soviet threat but because the economy, during the years in which deregulatory policy and Wall Street financialization were at their height, hasn't worked very well for them.

... The young may now disdain Wall Street -- but what do they know of socialism, past and present? Who even speaks of socialism in America today? The answer, of course, is the demagogic right. According to Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck and their ilk, Obama is taking America down the Socialist Road. As Benjamin Sarlin has noted on the Web site the Daily Beast, the talkmeisters of the right have linked a doctrine that never commanded much support in America to a president whose approval rating hovers around 60 percent and much higher than that among the young.

Rush and his boys are doing what Gene Debs and his comrades never really could. In tandem with Wall Street, they are building socialism in America.
(15 April 2009)