What is At Stake Here At the RNC (Or What Was At Stake Here)

What Is At Stake Here? (Or What Was at Stake There?)

Laura Flanders of GRITtv posed this question to a panel, which addressed the police violence during the RNC in a live broadcast on September 4th, after McCain had delivered his acceptance speech. (*Currently, the episode has not aired or is not posted online for linking to.)

Rosa Clemente, the vice presidential candidate for the Green Party in this 2008 election, was part of the panel and had also just finished addressing a crowd at the Nader Super Rally in Minneapolis. Her address to the crowd focused on the police violence that had happened all week, violence which had greatly affected her while she was on the ground organizing with the Poor People’s Campaign for Economic Human Rights.

What is at stake here shall be considered after I address what was at stake.

What was at stake was whether or not the progressive forces that organize in the streets of America had a strategy for organizing that can effectively diminish police, press, and government efforts to marginalize protests.

The week proved that repression and suppression through raids, unreasonable searches and seizure, and violations of civil liberties like freedom of speech and freedom to assemble peacefully could successfully deter Americans from speaking out against their government. Repression and suppression could keep the number of people who participated in protests low and make sure the Republican Party’s convention would not be overshadowed.

And since Hurricane Gustav significantly affected the first day of the convention, it is worth asking what effect (if any) this had on decisions by the city to give police the right to engage in violence when engaging in so-called crowd control so protests would not detract from the convention.

What was at stake was whether or not those in the streets would find the moral clarity to make the actions less about standing up to the police and more about recognizing how the PATRIOT Act, the Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Act, and other anti-terrorism bills (especially the state anti-terrorism bill in Minnesota 2002) have created and allowed for the police state protesters lived under from the last week of August when raids occurred to the end of the Republican National Convention.

Leaders of groups in St. Paul needed to formulate a response to all the police violence that would have included a rally & march to the Xcel Energy Center on Friday or Saturday and would have set the record straight for the people in the Twin Cities, America, and the world. Or, group leaders needed a Day of Resistance organized in the way a Day of Resistance was organized on March 20th to mark the fifth anniversary of the Iraq War.

Now, what is at stake is how leaders and groups present at the DNC and RNC go home and take their experiences and use them to formulate a way forward that challenges a system which grants 50 million dollars to a city for security that has no problem with restraining free speech and peaceful assembly violently.

City Council members in the Twin Cities are speaking out against the suppression and repression that happened to people during the RNC. But, they must realize an overwhelming majority of officials in the state supported the Minnesota Anti-Terrorism Bill of 2002, which gave the state power to charge the RNC 8 (or 9) with “furtherance of terrorism” charges so that the penalty could be increased by fifty percent.

John Conyers, the man who has dragged his feet relentlessly on the impeachment of Cheney and Bush, pledges an investigation. But, does he realize that votes for PATRIOT Act and its expansions and also votes that have kept the “war on terror” going have created the system of repression and suppression journalists, protesters, and innocent civilians faced in St. Paul?

For the record, Obama and McCain have not responded to the police violence in St. Paul during the RNC. One might be able to understand why Obama and McCain said nothing about the police state in Denver, but the police state in St. Paul cannot be ignored.

Bob Barr, the Libertarian Party presidential candidate said on Democracy Now!, “the preemptive use of police force to try and identify those that might be demonstrating, might be pushing a particular point of view, and using the powers of the government to stop them in advance, sort of this notion of preemptive war applied to preemptive law enforcement” disturbed him while in St. Paul for Ron Paul’s Rally for the Republic.

Cynthia McKinney, the Green Party presidential candidate, did not issue a public statement on the police state in St. Paul, but her vice-presidential pick, Rosa Clemente, has been telling press and protesters/activists what she thinks of the police violence bluntly especially since she was at the scene of police concussion grenading protesters on Tuesday night. (I will post the speech that all protesters and activists should have heard delivered to them in St. Paul when the video is posted by the Nader/Gonzalez campaign or somebody else.)

Nader/Gonzalez issued this statement on the police state in St. Paul. In a press release given to press who attended the Open the Debates Super Rally on Thursday, Sept. 4th titled, “Ralph Nader and Matt Gonzalez Speak Out Against Excessive Use of Force,” the perennial presidential candidate Ralph Nader and the fire breathing Matt Gonzalez responded to the “massive police overreaction to totally peaceful protest:

 1  |  2  |  3  |  4  |  5  |  6