Category: War

union members on the barricades this afternoon

Thousands of labor union members overwhelmed the “Free Speech Zone” below Madison Square Garden this afternoon, crowding into pens running down to 23rd Street. It was clear they wanted nothing to do with George W. Bush or the Republican Party, even if he and it were the occasion of an extraordinary rally called for the middle of a work week only days before Labor Day itself.
I walked over to see and hear (feel) what it was like. I can share a few images here in this small gallery. They weren’t captured easily however, since in the midst of that great crowd I almost lost it. My eyes repeatedly watered with an emotion I can’t quite account for, unless it has something to do with the long, painful history of labor and its movement, a history always rejected by much of America and now almost completely lost even to many of its fortunate heirs. Bush is restoring our memory.

just another evening in Chelsea this week

The media has generally been reporting that, except for the immediate blocks abutting Madison Square Garden, the heavy security blanket covering New York in the last week or two rests lightly on the city’s neighborhoods. If asked, residents of Chelsea would describe it otherwise. The words, “martial law” come to mind.
I know it may seem that I’m preoccupied with the police presence in my neighborhood this week, I’d like to think that the current state of Chelsea actually represents New York City as a whole (as is pretty much the case usually) more than most people want to admit, but especially as a really frightening foretaste of what may well be in store permanently for our polity, including that of the entire nation.
For the visuals, see this gallery of half a dozen images taken within the last 24 hours.

It was disturbingly quiet early this afternoon on 8th Avenue. It’s Republican week in New York, and while the broad northbound artery is usually one of the busiest in the city, at least 11 blocks of it are totally closed to vehicle traffic from late last Friday night until midnight this Thursday.
Even pedestrians are unable to go above 30th Street unless they live or work in those blocks and are carrying photo identification. The only solution is a long detour to 9th Avenue on the west or 6th on the east, and then a resumption of the route north.
The avenue belonged to the police. I had only gone out to pick up something for lunch, but I counted 61 officers between 23rd and 24th Streets (even before I saw a few dozen more headed up toward midtown on bicycles). I don’t think one of them managed to look anything but bored. It’s a terrible indictment of an entire class of civil servants, but I don’t believe cities are their thing.
Now I was drawn north, probably by the magnet of the empty street and the site of the temporary cross-avenue pedestrian press bridge visible way up on 33rd Street.
The designated block-long pen of the designated protest area, or “Free Speech Zone,” looked almost empty; inside the total enclosure of the police barricade there were probably less than a hundred Postal Service workers harangueing their Republican targets insulated within Madison Square Garden two blocks north:

It’s probably not a surprise that there are so few protesters in the “approved” area today, since August 31 has been designated a day of non-violent civil disobedience and direct action. That sort of thing doesn’t work very well if the venue is more or less sponsored by the target.
[Note: see links on the previous post to check for news on today’s protests]
“WELCOME.” I turned back at 30th Street, one block below the southern extremity of the Garden. This image shows the increasingly forbidding barricades and walls* found as you go north (if anyone not authorized actually could go north these days):

Past a few virtually empty shops running down from the southwest corner on this deserted avenue and only about eight feet from the metal barricades of the pen shown in the first photograph, I spotted this entrepreneurial tavern owner’s sign, “Happy Hour, 12 – 6.” Somebody wasn’t going to miss a business opportunity even in the midst of this blockade; I hope our publican is able to attract a larger trade during the remainder of the Convention. The suited gentleman with the cigar, perched on a stool in front of the door, was only part of the small crowd bemused by the energy of the people in the blue t-shirts:


* On The Daily Show tonight Rob Corddry referred to the barriers as “concrete liberty hurdles” and Ed Helms later explained, “Not even the appearance of martial law will stop [the Republican delegates].”

AS I WENT WALKING TODAY


I was hoping for a leisurely stroll to the Greenmarket in Union Square this afternoon, but seconds after I left the front door of the building I realized this wasn’t going to be the usual hunter/gathering experience.
Late this morning the guys returning one of our heavy air conditioners from the repair shop called from their truck to tell us the police weren’t allowing them to stop their van in front of our building. Eventually they found a parking place four blocks away and managed to wheel the unit here on a handtruck.
As I found when I stepped into 23rd Street myself later in the day, what they had described was only part of the story. Dozens of police scooters were lined up on the sidewalk only yards from our front door (only by some weird coincidence, I’m sure, exactly in front of the national headquarters of the Communist Party). Just as I had registered the presence of this unusual sidewalk furniture, with the roar of much larger engines a formation of eight motorcyle cops swept down the street toward 8th Avenue.
Then I noticed for the first time the flashing lights visible on all kinds of stationary or moving police and rescue vehicles, all within sight of where I stood.
The street itself was lined with traffic cones where normally vehicles would be parked on both sides, and the center two lanes were also deliniated by lines of cones. Vehicles were prohibited in that area. Regular traffic, including the large articulated buses, was barely crawling along in a single lane in each direction on what had been designed as a six-lane crosstown thoroughfare.
When I walked down 7th Avenue, where “stopping” was also proscribed for the entire week, according to the posted signs, I saw a number of delivery guys sweating in the heat while they hauled goods by hand or handtruck from wherever they had been able to park their vehicles.
At every single intersection I passed as I headed downtown I spotted between four and six city cops. I feigned naivety and asked one open-faced patrolman the question I knew from experience would not get a real answer: Is there some event going on today? He said no, but volunteered, “this is just a security lock zone.”
Ok.
20th Street, the residential street occupied by the headquarters of the Police Department’s 10th Precinct, the building itself only about the size of two townhouses and hardly the only feature of the block, was closed to traffic altogether. There were checkpoints at either end of the block.
As I started to step across 19th street a large unmarked black Chevrolet rushed by, its siren doing the familiar New York police or ambulance vehicle “pop pop” employed for anything less than an emergency mission.
When I got to Union Square at first I couldn’t see the usual mass of farmers’ trucks and stands, there were so many emergency vehicles ringing the Park. I scolded myself for not checking online to see whether the Monday market had been cancelled for our Republican emergency, but then I realized everything was there as usual inside the ring of “security.” The entire Park area was swarming with police; there were easily more than a hundred in plain sight.
I hurried through my shopping, taking no pleasure in the business, and, anxious to avoid more depressing encounters with armed aliens, made the unusual decision to return home by Subway rather than on foot.
Big mistake. At first I was too bummed out by what I had been seeing in the street to notice the police presence underground. I was also sweating from the heat and humidity and concerned with avoiding what looked like an imminent thunderstorm, But when I transferred from the L at 8th Avenue I was shocked to see police everywhere. Since I had the time while I waited for the E train, I was able to see that there was precisely one cop on the platform for every two cars, and that these guards seemd to be charged with, among other duties, ducking their heads into each car while the doors remained open in the station. The pattern was repeated at the station on 23rd Street, where I was delighted to be able to exit for home.

It’s now late in the evening, six hours after I wrote the paragraphs above. I still haven’t run across any terrorists (at least of the private variety), but I just got off the number 1 train at the 23rd Street station down the block from our apartment and I immediately counted 23 police at the street level of the intersection. When I got home our doorman told me that one of my neighbors had just told him there were 30, so it seems I’m not the only one noticing these pod people spread around the city.
I’m convinced that what we’re seeing is only the beginning. This kind of governmental response to imagined or real civil threats is both cynical and ineffective, the proper application of the adjectives depending on which alarmists and which planners they are attached to, but the thing will feed on itself; in a climate of fear fed by ignorance we’re already seeing that there is no effective way to object to increasing the government’s control over our daily lives and our liberties when it invokes the spectre of terror.
What are they protecting, our security or their own? How much longer do they expect us to believe this is all about our safety and not their power? I’m afraid that in the case of too many of us the answer may be “forever.”

For more on the neighborhood, look to the second half of this post on Bloggy.

Whatever it was, Sunday’s massive protest (and even less so those which preceded it and those which are still to follow this week) was not a rally for John kerry or the Democratic Party
Sure, come November 2nd these angry New Yorkers, and their equally pissed-off friends who travelled from all over the country to be here during the Republican Convention, will vote for Kerry – unless they are registered in states in no danger of attaching their electors to George W. Bush – but right now and almost certainly going forward into the next administration, and even the one which will follow that one, they are and will continue to be voting with their feet and their bodies against the bankrupt policies of what Gore Vidal has called “. . . the one political party in the United States, the Property Party, with two right wings, Republican and Democrat.” Even if he should win this fall, Kerry should take little comfort in what is happening on the streets of New York right now; in the most fundamental way, it’s not at all about the man whom many of us call “Bush light.”
There were plenty of Kerry t-shirts out on the streets yesterday, but they were merely undershirts, covered with, heavily armored with, props and signage representing dramatic imagery and insistent demands which have almost nothing to do with Kerry or his campaign. Neither Kerry’s name nor his policy plans were the cry of the day. In fact, the ideas and practices condemned by this crowd’s signs and their chants are associated with the cautious Democratic standard-bearer almost as much as they are with the execrable Republican incumbent.
Should the junior senator from Massachusetts be promoted two months from now, he will find that the larger national constituency represented in microcosm by the anger and determination exhibited by hundreds of thousands taking to the streets up and down New York this week is not going to remain any quieter for Mr. Anybody-But-Bush than it would for his disastrous namesake.

escorting one of the coffins included in the “1000 Coffins Project”

Barry and I were out on the streets for over six hours today, and I don’t have the energy right now to do justice to a proper report. The 51 images in this gallery will have to suffice, at least for now.
Our own experience was of a very energized but ultimately very mellow crowd, but we’ve been listening to anoise.org since returning home around 6 o’clock, and all is not well out there in Republicanland. It seems that among the many people being swept up off the streets to avoid offending the sensibilities of Bloomberg’s Convention guests are a number of queers who staged a kiss-in in front of the Central Library [CORRECTION: it’s now reported that it happened at 46th and Broadway] and just about anyone not carrying red NYTimes goodybags as they emerged from matinees in the Times Square late this afternoon.
Don’t trust the mainstream media for information. They’re either totally ignoring what’s really going on in New York today or else their corporately-financed prattle simply mouths the words packaged by Police Department public information sources. Do some homework; you’ll be amazed at what you’ll find.

This is the image which accompanies the lead story on the CNN site at this moment. The headline on the front page? “New York stands guard.” I see it as, “Republican Guards hold up New York.” We are an occupied city tonight, as I listen to the sirens wailing up and down the avenues and helicopters scanning with high-powered searchlights as they whop, whop, whop overhead.
I’m punching this post into my blog as we’re listening to a remarkable webstream reporting tonight’s ongoing, historical Critical Mass through the streets of Manhattan, including live accounts by the cyclist participants. There are reports that scores of people have been arrested already – for bicycling while smiling. The police are funnelling them into police vans and buses, chasing away the public and prohibiting photographs.
In the end, 50,000 cops in one city are going to find something to keep them amused.
Bloomberg and Kelly are doing Bush’s work. Nothing could be more effective in radicalizing and provoking orderly protests than this outrageous over-reaction.

UPDATE: The Washington Post reports that nearly 250 bicyclists were arrested. This is insane!

protesting in the altogether

It’s AIDS, stupid!
ACT UP pulled off a classic action this afternoon across from Madison Square Garden, the site of the Republican National Convention, scheduled to open formally on Monday.
In the spirit and the extremity of these strange times, the boys and girls did it while entirely naked, and a beautiful sight they were.
Excerpt from the ACT UP New York/ACT UP Philladelphia press release:

A dozen activists stopped traffic in front of Madison Square Garden and
stripped naked, exposing the fact that when it comes to AIDS, “the emperor
Bush has no clothes.” Slogans were painted on their bodies that read “Drop
The Dept” and “Stop AIDS Now,” while [two other activists] held a banner
with the same message – another was dropped over one of the trailers parked
nearby.
We were protesting the Bush administration’s refusal to agree with the
proposal of other G7 nations to cancel 100% of the debt of poor nations –
money that could be used to fight AIDS.
While Bush has promised $15 billion over 5 years to fight Global AIDS, poor
nations pay that amount each year in debt payments. Cancelling the debt
would have significant impact on money spent toward health care and other
desperately needed social programs.
After blocking traffic for 15 minutes, the naked activists were arrested and
taken into custody.

[image from Bloggy, via NY1, may be supplemented later]
UPDATE: As I had anticipated earlier today, I now have a photo of at least partial images of the action’s neatly-lettered text messages, “DROP the DEBT” and “STOP AIDS:”


[second image from Health Global Access Project (GAP), via James Wentzy; there’s much more on their site]