Just got an email from the tireless videographers and civil liberties activists at I-Witness Video, indicating that video activism has won a significant victory against the NYPD, a police force known for its acts of impunity at political demonstrations and in communities of color. I'll let the email speak for itself:

Do you remember seeing a YouTube video this summer of an NYPD officer brutally tackling a bicyclist in Times Square? The bicyclist was charged with assaulting a police officer, among other things. But the video showed the opposite — Officer Patrick Pogan singling out bicyclist Chris Long for a sickeningly hard tackle that threw Long into the air and onto a crowded sidewalk.

In the days following this incident, teams of video activists — including the Glass Bead Collective and the TIMES UP Video Collective, with assistance from I-Witness Video — worked to publicize the YouTube video of this event. People have viewed the video on YouTube over 1.6 million times.

Today, in a stunning turn of events, rookie police officer Patrick Pogan was indicted by a Manhattan grand jury. The charges have not yet been made public, but are said to include the crime of filing a false report and assault.

This indictment is a signal event for video activists. Despite the abundance of video showing that police officers have fabricated charges against people arrested at demonstrations, in New York City at least, we have never before achieved an indictment of a police officer for lying in a sworn statement.

Look for the indictment to be handed down on Tuesday, December 16. [Editor's note: there's a New York Times article on the startling indictment here.]

Eileen Clancy
I-Witness Video

For those of you keeping an ear to the movement ground, here are two new calls that have just started circulating online. The first is a call for submissions to an upcoming conference, and the second is a call to action against the U.S. war machine. Put together, they point to new developments in the strategic thinking of anti-authoritarian movement, and a growing inclination toward militancy and direct action.

The first call began circulating on listservs and websites a week-ish ago, and encourages people to submit proposals for a gathering in Baltimore called The City From Below. A conference "geared towards discussion and participation," The City From Below will draw together activists and researches from across the region to share knowledge and strategies for urban social movement. I think it's a great moment for such a conference, and just what we need 'round these parts.

As the gathering's website says, the city is a place "where theory meets practice, where the neighborhood organizes against global capitalism, where unequal divisions based on race and class can be mapped out block by block and contested, where the micropolitics of gender and sexual orientation are subject to metropolitan rearticulation, where every corner is a potential site of resistance and every vacant lot a commons to be reclaimed, and, most importantly, a place where all our diverse struggles and strategies have a chance of coming together into something greater." I couldn't have said it better myself.

With the low-intensity war called gentrification suddenly sputtering in NYC, it's time to begin strategizing and hitting back! Kudos to folks from Red Emma's bookstore, the Indypendent Reader, campbaltimore and the Campaign for a Better Baltimore for picking up on the vibe and organizing around it. Proposals for The City From Below are due by January 30th at the latest.

The second call appeared online last week, and also pertains to a March 2009 event. In this case, a group of anarchist and anti-authoritarian organizers in the Midwest are calling on movement groups to participate in a summit-style protest on the 6th anniversary of the beginning of the Iraq War. And get this: their target is the largest small arms manufacturing plant in the world.

Located in Western Missouri, the Lake City Army Ammunition Plant produces about 90% of the small arms ammo used by the U.S. military on a given day. It's a sprawling facility encompassing 458 buildings spread over 3,935 acres, with a workforce of nearly 16,500 people from the surrounding area. Organizers want to confront this artery of empire using horizontal organizing structures like those deployed at the Democratic and Republican National Convention protests this fall. (Their call is one of several that have begun using the Unconventional Action networks to coordinate new actions--in this case, "stopping the war at the point of production.")

While the Midwest organizers are aiming big, they're also keeping their feet planted in reality. Their communique cautions, "no one should have delusions of grandeur or the intention to “shut it down”. However, if enough pressure is applied, and shipments are disrupted over a long enough period of time—there may be success in permanently stopping production." That's good advice, drawn from counter-recruitment and port mobilization campaigns that have made real, and realistic, impacts on the U.S. war machine.

I find both of these calls daring and strategic, and I think they raise the bar for social movement in the U.S. The City From Below aims at building movements that can grapple with the complexities of contemporary urban life, while the Disrupt Lake City action aims to reinvigorate an impotent, moralistic and largely symbolic antiwar movement with horizontal direct action tested recently in the streets. Put together, these calls indicate that anarchists and anti-authoritarians are generating new strategies and tactics to confront the acknowledged and unacknowledged wars pervading our society. Get ready, y'all: it's gonna be a busy spring.

If you were anywhere near Union Square, Columbus Circle, Grand Central Station or Penn Station today, you probably saw folks distributing a rare, 14-page special edition of the New York Times. Thousands of people grabbed copies of these papers from heartfelt newsies this morning, and were surprised by their main headline: IRAQ WAR ENDS!

That's right, these NYTs claimed the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had ended, with "Troops to Return Immediately." Other stories in today's pape: "Court Indicts Bush on High Treason Charge," "All Public Universities To Be Free," "USA Patriot Act Repealed," and "Nation Sets its Sites on Building a Sane Economy." And what's more, the paper was dated from July 4th, 2009--what the h-e-double-hockey-stick is going on around here?

The papers, it turns out, were fanciful forgeries, distributed in multiple locations throughout Manhattan by thousands of curious volunteers who didn't know what they were doing until the morning-of. Rumor has it the action had been planned for over a year by the Yes Men, a group of guerilla theater-ists and culture jammers known for their ingenious nose-thumbing at the corporate status quo. (In 2004, the Yes Men posed as Dow Chemical spokespeople and took full responsibility for the Bhopal disaster that killed thousands in India; they've also posed as satirical World Trade Organization members urging corporations to buy votes from citizens and enslave the Third World. Nice touch.)

Just a few days after actions at the DNC in Denver drew to a close, much larger protests exploded in St. Paul outside the Republican National Convention. Thousands of demonstrators, a much larger proportion of them explicitly anarchist or anti-authoritarian, converged in Minnesota from September 1st--4th to throw a wrench in the GOP political machine. The results were truly incendiary.

Groups across the country mobilized to St. Paul for a range of reasons. Some saw eight years of neoconservative corruption and a gutted Constitution, and figured the RNC was a threat to democracy. Others figured the U.S. system as a whole was irredeemable, but found the RNC a succulent target for protest and disruption. Groups came opposing imperialist wars, spiraling climate change, pervasive racism and poverty. And though little accurate information about their actions made it through the corporate media blockade, all of these forces combined carried out the most robust and militant demonstrations in the U.S. in years.

The State Vs. Civil Society, Round One

But before demonstrators could hit the streets in St. Paul, they would have to survive a rush of state repression. As activists trickled into town and started unrolling their sleeping bags the weekend before the RNC, state and federal officials executed a dizzying series of raids against anyone connected to the protests. The preemptive sweeps tried to take out the nervous system of the mobilization by shutting down gathering spaces, food providers and media observers for the demonstrations.

My friends are abuzz this week following the Democratic and Republican National Conventions, where each U.S. ruling party took its turn in the media spotlight. Across the country, people are examining differences in rhetoric between Obama-Biden and McCain-Palin that point to the policies of their would-be administrations, and there's lots to talk about. But I want to leave speculation on the campaign machine to the plethora of electoral bloggers out there. It turns out, developments that were just as interesting as those inside the DNC and RNC took place in the streets outside each convention.

If you were following events on TV, you might not have known that the streets outside both conventions saw the most creative, militant, and brutally repressed street demonstrations in recent memory. While major TV networks remained embedded in the convention halls in Denver and St. Paul, independent media and activist websites covered the street battles taking place outside, where masked protesters blockaded roads, threw spontaneous dance parties, and skirmished with police wielding pepper spray, tear gas and concussion grenades.

Denver

Three weeks ago, the Democratic party responded to progressive rumblings in U.S. civil society with their most inventive rhetoric in years, and declared Barack Obama their presidential candidate on a platform of change. But just as the Democrats were reinventing themselves, several thousand lefty protesters converged at the DNC on behalf of a variety of causes, following months of preparation and a national consulta to develop plans of action.