Tag: protests

Welcome to Utah, Where Pipeline Protests Could Now Get You at Least Five Years in Prison

In Utah, protests that hinder the functioning of fossil fuel infrastructure could now lead to at least five years in prison. The new rules make Utah the 19th state in the country to pass legislation with stiffer penalties for protesting at so-called critical infrastructure sites, which include oil and gas facilities, power plants, and railroads. The new laws proliferated in the aftermath of the Standing Rock protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline in 2017.

Utah’s Legislature passed two separate bills containing stricter penalties for tampering with or damaging critical infrastructure earlier this month. House Bill 370 makes intentionally “inhibiting or impeding the operation of a critical infrastructure facility” a first-degree felony, which is punishable by five years to life in prison. A separate bill allows law enforcement to charge a person who “interferes with or interrupts critical infrastructure” with a third-degree felony, punishable by up to five years in prison. Both bills were signed into law by the governor this month. 

Of the two bills, First Amendment and criminal justice advocates are particularly concerned about HB 370 due to its breadth, the severity of penalties, and its potential to curb environmental protests. The bill contains a long list of facilities that are considered critical infrastructure including grain mills, trucking terminals, and transmission facilities used by federally licensed radio or television stations. It applies both to facilities that are operational and those under construction. 

Since the bill doesn’t define activities that may be considered “inhibiting or impeding” operations at a facility, environmental protesters may inadvertently find themselves in the crosshairs of the legislation, according to environmental and civil liberties advocates. Protesters engaging in direct action often chain themselves to equipment, block roadways, or otherwise disrupt operations at fossil fuel construction sites. Under the new legislation, such activities could result in a first-degree felony charge.

“This bill could be used to prohibit pipeline protests like we saw with the Dakota [Access] Pipeline project,” said Mark Moffat, an attorney with the Utah Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, referring to the 2017 protests at Standing Rock in North Dakota. “It elevates what would be basically a form of vandalism or criminal mischief under the laws of the state of Utah to a first-degree felony.”

A first-degree felony is typically reserved for violent crimes like murder and sexual assault. Moffat said that the state’s sentencing guidelines are indeterminate, which means the amount of time someone spends in prison is at the discretion of the Board of Pardons.

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Police Use “Less Lethal” Weapons to Crush Social Movements Across the World

This week, the City of Philadelphia agreed to a $9.25 million settlement with protesters who were brutalized with tear gas and pepper spray during demonstrations following the murder of George Floyd in late May 2020.

Such accountability for police who crush protests with crowd-control weapons is rare both in the United States and across the world. The settlement comes as researchers report that police in dozens of countries have routinely injured and even killed demonstrators with crowd-control weapons since 2015 as governments cracked down on protests.

Injuries from crowd-control weapons are increasing and widespread both in authoritarian nations such as Iran and China as well as “democratic” countries that supposedly tolerate dissent and public assemblies, according to a new report from Physicians for Human Rights and the International Network of Civil Liberties Organizations (INCLO). The report, “Lethal in Disguise: How Crowd-Control Weapons Impact Health and Human Rights,” found that more than 121,000 people globally were injured or killed by so-called less lethal crowd-control weapons such as chemical irritants, “flash bang” grenades and rubber bullets since 2015, although many other injuries likely went unreported.

From the uprisings in Iraq and Chile in 2019, to mass movements against regimes in Iran, Myanmar and Peru, clashes between police forces and social movements challenging government corruption and demanding basic rights are now a worldwide public health concern, according to the report. So far this month, crowd-control weapons were reportedly used against protesters in Bangladesh, Ethiopia, France, Georgia, Greece, Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Lebanon, Italy, Kenya, Mozambique, Pakistan, Peru, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Turkey, and the U.S.

“The repression of demonstrations remains as global as protest itself,” said INCLO Program Coordinator Lucila Santos in a statement. “In addition to the growing violent use of crowd-control weapons, since 2016 we have seen new technologies deployed by governments with next to no accountability or oversight whatsoever.”

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Team Biden’s charging 1,000 more with Jan. 6 crimes to perpetuate a fake political emergency

The Biden administration is planning to charge another thousand Trump supporters with crimes related to the Jan. 6 Capitol clash.

This will perpetuate an atmosphere of political emergency that justifies President Joe Biden’s war on domestic extremism.

But a change in federal judges has turned the Jan. 6 trials into a kangaroo court and makes a mockery of sending nonviolent Trump supporters to prison for threatening American democracy.

More than a thousand people have already been charged with Jan. 6 offenses.

That is equal to almost half of the total number of protesters who entered the Capitol that day.

A corrupt numbers game is at the heart of the Biden propaganda-prosecution campaign.

The more people indicted for Jan. 6, the easier it becomes for the Biden reelection campaign to portray the president as the savior against right-wing tyranny.

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Geofence Surveillance: First, They Spied on Protesters. Then Churches. You’re Next.

“I know the capability that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return.”—Senator Frank Church on Meet The Press, 1975

If you give the government an inch, it will always take a mile.

This is how the slippery slope to all-out persecution starts.

Martin Niemöller’s warning about the widening net that ensnares us all, a warning issued in response to the threat posed by Nazi Germany’s fascist regime, still applies.

“First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out— because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.”

This particular slippery slope has to do with the government’s use of geofence technology, which uses cell phone location data to identify people who are in a particular area at any given time.

First, police began using geofence warrants to carry out dragnet sweeps of individuals near a crime scene.

Then the FBI used geofence warrants to identify individuals who were in the vicinity of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

It wasn’t long before government officials in California used cell phone and geofence data to track the number and movements of churchgoers on church grounds during the COVID-19 lockdowns.

If we’ve already reached the point where people praying and gathering on church grounds merits this level of government scrutiny and sanctions, we’re not too far from free-falling into a total surveillance state.

Dragnet geofence surveillance sweeps can and eventually will be used to target as a suspect every person in any given place at any given time and sweep them up into a never-ending virtual line-up in the hopes of matching a criminal to every crime.

There really can be no overstating the danger.

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10,000 Dutch Farmers Protest Govt’s Crippling Nitrogen Emissions Target In The Hague

Thousands of Dutch farmers protested on Saturday against the government’s policies to reduce nitrogen emissions, warning they will put farms out of business and affect food production.

Hundreds of tractors from across the Netherlands could be seen driving to the event in The Hague ahead of regional elections this week, and more than 10,000 farmers were in attendance, according to the Reuters news agency.

Protesters accused the Dutch government of forcing farmers off of privately owned land in order to appease Brussels, and carried banners reading “No farmers, no food” and “There is no nitrogen ‘problem.’”

Tens of thousands of people turned up for the Dutch farmers protest.

Stand for freedom. pic.twitter.com/lAUW1QuqhV

— PeterSweden (@PeterSweden7) March 11, 2023

“We are fighting against a corrupt and unjust government,” Eva Vlaardingerbroek, a prominent campaigner in defense of the farmers, told attendees. She spoke of a government that “drives our farmers from their land” and which has “turned on its own population.”

“For centuries, our farmers have produced food for millions of people worldwide. And instead of what those liars in The Hague claim, they have done so in a responsible and sustainable way.”

🇳🇱Our farmers are fighting against the worst kind of injustice: a government that has turned on its own people.

The government created a lie to rob our farmers of their land. But we won’t let it happen. Our #DutchFarmers are an example to the world.

My speech with 🇬🇧 subtitles. pic.twitter.com/QYiFbkR2zM

— Eva Vlaardingerbroek (@EvaVlaar) March 11, 2023

“But our cabinet doesn’t care about nature. They have simply created a lie to steal our farmers’ land,” she added.

Prime Minister Mark Rutte’s administration has vowed to take radical action to meet its ambitious target of halving the country’s nitrogen emissions by 2030, and has identified the country’s large agriculture sector as being the main culprit due to its large livestock count and use of fertilizers.

Last year, the government announced plans to reduce livestock numbers by a third, while farmers have also been told their land could be subject to compulsory buyouts.

Agricultural workers have staged several demonstrations against the government policy, blocking motorways and supermarket distribution centers in mass protests last year.

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Top Democrat On J6 Committee: We Actually Didn’t Review Any Of The Surveillance Video

After Fox News host Tucker Carlson aired Capitol surveillance footage this week exposing yet more falsehood from the House Select Committee on Jan. 6 and leaving Democrats and their media allies irate, the committee chair on Wednesday said the panel never actually analyzed the crucial footage.

On Monday’s edition of “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” Fox News aired the footage of the riot on Jan. 6, 2021, undermining the select committee’s narrative of a “deadly insurrection.” Given access to the video by Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, Carlson’s team reviewed over 40,000 hours of footage, which offered proof the committee manipulated audio and video to dramatize the riot for its made-for-TV hearings in an election year.

But in a Wednesday night statement to CNN, select committee Chairman Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., claimed the panel never analyzed the blockbuster footage Fox News aired this week.

“I’m not actually aware of any member of the committee who had access,” Thompson said. “We had a team of employees who kind of went through the video.”

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Capitol Cop Sicknick’s Family is ‘Outraged’ After J6 Security Footage Proves He Wasn’t Murdered

The family of Capitol cop Brian Sicknick says they are “outraged” and are calling for Tucker Carlson to be “silenced” after he aired J6 security footage from the US Capitol building that shows Officer Sicknick was unharmed by election integrity protestors before dying of a stroke the following day. Initially, The New York Times claimed in a now-retracted and proven false report that Sicknick had been beaten to death with a fire extinguisher. Uni-party politicians and their associated media outlets have continued to regurgitate the false claim in an effort to paint January 6th demonstrators as killers and insurrectionists.

The video footage revealed by Tucker Carlson on his Fox News program, Tucker Carlson Tonight, shows Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick, himself a Trump supporter, walking about the Capitol building and waving at demonstrators AFTER he was supposedly killed by “insurrectionists.”

The Democrats, together with the Sicknick family, who are calling for Tucker Carlson and other J6 truth-tellers to be “silenced” in the wake of the narrative disruption, have insisted for over two years, along with their corporate media allies, that Sicknick was murdered during the anti-fraud demonstrations. First, they claimed that he was killed after receiving a beating from a fire extinguisher. Then, after a medical examiner ruled that Sicknick died a stroke, they claimed that he died as a result of a fire extinguisher beating, which we now know never happened. 

Though their claims were patently false, the narrative surrounding Officer Sicknick’s death played a central role in the formation of Nancy Pelosi’s J6 Committee, and in the hunting down of American Citizens for exercising their 1st Amendment rights.

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The Empire Gives People The Illusion Of Fighting The Power Without Ever Endangering Real Power

The one-year anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has seen countless emotional news segments and heartstring-plucking articles, wall-to-wall social media posts, and public demonstrations decrying the evils of Vladimir Putin throughout the western world.

For what’s probably the first “anti-war” protest of most of their lives, American liberals gathered at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC over the weekend to bravely condemn the leader of a foreign government thousands of miles away. There they were joined by empire managers like the virulent warmonger Samantha Power, who spoke at the rally opposing Russian warmongering at the capital of the most warlike nation on the planet.

For the last year, mainstream westerners have been using this war to act out their fantasies of being courageous up-punching anti-imperialists, fighting powerful bloodthirsty tyrants in defense of the needful, all while living directly under the thumb of the most tyrannical regime in the world. They mindlessly regurgitate the propaganda of the most powerful empire that has ever existed, parrot the same lines that are already being said all day long by all the most powerful institutions in the western world, all in service of the hegemonic agendas of the largest and most murderous power structure on earth, while pretending to be standing in opposition to the powerful.

The way the war in Ukraine allows mainstream liberals to play-act as rebellious anti-imperialists is a good illustration of how the empire gives people the illusion of fighting the power without their ever opposing the empire.

We saw this same trend take place in the US throughout the Trump administration, where mainstream liberals branded themselves “The Resistance” like they were socialist revolutionaries or insurgents opposing Hitler in Nazi-occupied France. In reality Trump’s presidency had little actual impact on the comforts of their lives, because beneath all the narratives Trump was a fairly normal US president whose most heinous crimes were all of the customary variety we see in all US presidents — including his predecessor and his successor. Democrats just spent four years LARPing as brave revolutionaries, and then he left office and the game ended.

In exactly the same way, Trump’s presidency allowed right wingers to pretend they were part of a movement against the establishment, despite Trump never actually challenging the establishment in any meaningful way. They believed he was fighting the Deep State even after he imprisoned Assange. They believed he was “ending the wars” even as he ramped up aggressions against Russia which helped bring us to where we are today, killed tens of thousands of Venezuelans with starvation sanctions, vetoed attempts to save Yemen from U.S.-backed genocide, worked to foment civil war in Iran using starvation sanctions and CIA ops with the stated goal of effecting regime change, occupied Syrian oil fields with the goal of preventing Syria’s reconstruction, greatly increased the number of troops in the Middle East and elsewhere, greatly increased the number of bombs dropped per day from the previous administration killing record numbers of civilians, and reduced military accountability for those airstrikes. They believed he was draining the swamp after packing his cabinet with establishment swamp monsters.

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Undercover DC Police Officer Pushed Protesters Toward Capitol, Climbed Over Barricade: Court Filing

Three undercover Metropolitan Police Department officers joined the march of protesters up the northwest side of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021—including one who climbed over a barricade and pushed others toward the Capitol, and another who walked behind Ashli Babbitt and predicted that “someone will get shot,” according to newly disclosed court documents

New court motions filed by Jan. 6 defendant William Pope of Topeka, Kansas, also show MPD bicycle officers stopping four armed men in plainclothes on Jan. 6. The men turned out to be federal agents. Video included with Pope’s filings also shows uniformed MPD officers saying, “we were set up” to fail on Jan. 6.

Information in the court papers will rekindle the debate about the role that undercover officers and agents played in the riots of Jan. 6 and why the U.S. Department of Justice and federal judges have kept the evidence under seal and away from public view.

“This video clearly evidences undercover law enforcement officers urging the crowds to advance up the stairs and scaffolding towards the Capitol on January 6,” Pope wrote in one motion. “The government may claim that incidents like this did not happen, but the facts show they did.

“Since the government cannot be trusted to disclose these facts,” Pope wrote, “it becomes even more important that defense teams, including Pro Se defendants, be able to directly examine the evidence.”

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