This is how you actually “resist"
(Via https://www.reddit.com/r/LateStageCapitalism/comments/749t22/this_is_how_you_actually_resist/)
5th October 2017
Notes: 12
Unlike a public square, which tends to operate as a successful political space to the degree that it’s an effective public one, the airport is a hospitable host for protest precisely because of how poorly it works in terms of civic design on a typical day.
The narrow sidewalks; the pedestrian bridges leading to and from parking structures; the little islands of pavement where we wait for shuttle buses; the bi-level ring roads that encircle every airport: These were the stages on which the protests were most effective on their own terms, both in clogging traffic and producing media-ready images of an angry, loud and unnerved public.
At overtaxed airports like LAX, those spaces are bottlenecks on the best of days. It was precisely that quality, as vessels of public space easily stoppered, that demonstrators exploited.
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Reblogged From iamdanw
Freeways delimit the use of space and are infrastructural markers of inequality in the city…The tactic of freeway takeovers is channeled towards a source of corporate and state power – the arteries of the global commodity chain. The participants of the takeovers express a disregard towards the interests of commerce, capital, and the state. This disavowal of capital is synonymous with the interest of racialized communities in refusing to accept the “mutual interests” they are expected to share with commerce and the state. These takeovers are not just haphazard but strategic.
– “Freeway Takeovers: The Re-Emergence of the Collective through Urban Disruption.”
(Photo: Noah Berger, Associated Press)
#Realtalk
Pentagon bracing for public dissent over climate and energy shocks
“unilateral changes to US military laws formally granted the Pentagon extraordinary powers to intervene in a domestic "emergency” or “civil disturbance”:
“Federal military commanders have the authority, in extraordinary emergency circumstances where prior authorization by the President is impossible and duly constituted local authorities are unable to control the situation, to engage temporarily in activities that are necessary to quell large-scale, unexpected civil disturbances.”
Other documents show that the “extraordinary emergencies” the Pentagon is worried about include a range of environmental and related disasters.
In 2006, the US National Security Strategy warned that:
“Environmental destruction, whether caused by human behavior or cataclysmic mega-disasters such as floods, hurricanes, earthquakes, or tsunamis. Problems of this scope may overwhelm the capacity of local authorities to respond, and may even overtax national militaries, requiring a larger international response.”
Two years later, the Department of Defense’s (DoD) Army Modernisation Strategy described the arrival of a new “era of persistent conflict” due to competition for “depleting natural resources and overseas markets” fuelling “future resource wars over water, food and energy.” The report predicted a resurgence of:
“… anti-government and radical ideologies that potentially threaten government stability.”