James Wagner

protesters raise hands and shout cheers as police bus believed to be carrying arrested protesters leaves a temporary detention center yesterday, heading for another holding tank downtown

They’ve suspended habeas corpus, so this must be war.
I’m not just talking about the familiar smokescreen created by the “class war!” accusations Republicans lay on Democrats when they try to point out that the GOP is already fast at work at the singleminded task of piling up more and more power and plunder for themselves at the expense of the poor and the middle class. This is more like full civil war, brought to us by an immensely greedy protofascist hierarchy manipulating the stupidity of the pawns they so easily frighten, and demonizing those with the intelligence and the courage to resist. (actually, we’re going to need more of both those things, especially to avoid serious violence; we’re barely holding on right now)
War will always invite the suspension of liberty, and in the U.S. the assault usually begins with the elimination of the protections of habeas corpus.
This week in New York peaceful protesters, their legal observers, outside reporters, photographers, along with food delivery people, tourists and innocent bystanders were caught up by the web (we call it “freedom fencing,” and it’s bright orange) laid by an increasingly autocratic regime’s 50,000-strong augmented force of uniformed guards.
Many of the brave or merely unluckly people who were trapped, and immediately and effectively branded “enemies of the state,” languished, some of them still languishing, within filthy chain-link cages that were topped with razor wire, the “cells” improvised inside an abandoned bus garage on a Hudson River pier. (with hyperbole which may be counterproductive, many have been referring to it as “Guantanamo-on-the-Hudson”) Even their names go unreported to anyone outside, and while they are held they are without access to legal cousel, family, friends, even essential medications.
What’s it like inside? In fact, what’s it like in Manhattan this week? Here’s one of the best accounts I’ve read, by theoria posted on Daily Kos. I would add: If you haven’t gone through it yourself or at least been a witness to what’s going on here this week, you’ll find it hard to believe what you’ll read, but it should make your skin crawl nevertheless.
Apparently some or all of these detainees may now have been moved to the prison known during two centuries as “The Tombs,” a notorious criminal detention center located Downtown, closer to the courts. Not surprisingly, it’s almost impossible to get information anywhere. Did I say it’s like war? Some 1800 people have been arrested since last weekend and Newsday reports that from 500 to 700 remain in custody at this time, but the facts are hard to pin down.
Their mothers and families have been gathering at the downtown site, 100 Centre Street. We’re very lucky we still have independent judges not appointed for their subserviance to authoritarianism who can still make it hard for self-appointed guardians of [their own idea of] political and moral decency to throw away the keys altogether.
Many of those swept up by the police in the last week were taken in actions even the NYPD describes as “pre-emptive arrest,” (sound vaguely familiar?) a plan they hoped would ensure a protest-free environment for our Republican Mayor’s guests.
The liberties being defended by the protesters are now being further destroyed by the office of the Manhattan District Attorney’s outrageous violation of guidelines which require that no one be held beyond 24 hours before they are arraigned for a serious crime and that the rest must be released with desk appearance tickets. In fact there is every indication at this time that the police will not be releasing many of the people they have rounded up until the Convention is over and its celebrants have been spirited away to wherever it is they came from. Pre-emptive arrest followed by pre-emptive detainment.
Habeas corpus has been suspended indefinitely, and once again it’s in the name of security. Too many Americans have absolutely no problem with that. Any moment I expect to hear it officially justified in the name of the War on Terrorism.
But this city has received absolutely no credible warnings about terrorist plans that we have been told about, although it has had at least a year and a half worth of public announements that ordinary people were planning to come to New York for peaceful protest directed against, among other things, the monstrous and moronic policy that makes violence our only defense against violence. The terrorists stayed at home; we got busted, and our liberties were confiscated as well. If the police are massed in Herald Square, Harlem, Chelsea, the East Village and elsewhere this week, it’s not to tangle with Al Queda. The enemy is obviously us.
What cowardice has let it go this far?

Democracy Now! put this excerpt of its radio report on its site this morning:

Hundreds of people yesterday protested the conditions under which those arrested are being held before going to court saying the site was contaminated with oil and asbestos. Pier 57 is a three-story, block-long pier that has been converted to a holding pen.
Yesterday morning we received a call from one of the protesters being held at Pier 57 who had smuggled a phone inside. Detainees passed the phone to each other and described the conditions of the holding facility. Democracy Now! producer Mike Burke took the call and spoke with the detained protesters.
New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has denied the city was operating what some called “Guantanamo-on-the-Hudson.” And defended the use of the of the pier garage saying “It’s not supposed to be Club Med.”
Last night, a judge ordered protesters who had been held for 24-hours released with desk appearance tickets if they were not charged with serious crimes. Before midnight, some protesters started emerging from 100 Centre St. around the block from our firehouse studio. Some 200 supporters greeted them with cheers and offered food and medical treatment. Despite the judge’s orders, a large number of protesters remain imprisoned.

for NUMBERS TO CALL, to help the prisoners, see this link
Barry just added a comment below, directing us to a short account from 100 Centre Street accompanied by some awesome pictures, again via Daily Kos. Don’t miss it.

outside 100 Central Booking this afternoon

[image at the top is from Yahoo! News, AP photo of Bebete Matthews; second image from theoria, via Daily Kos]

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.