NATO in Chicago - Let the Games Begin

On Wednesday night, on the south side of Chicago in the Bridgeport neighborhood, a house with Occupy activists was raided by the Chicago Police Department. Many see this as an intimidating, unlawful jab by the city to demonstrators before the NATO games officially begin on May 20. These games, by the way, will turn the city into a hyperbolic traffic nightmare (I burned my parking ticket in protest, then used it to light a blunt, as you can see), as 60-plus presidents and prime ministers from the most powerful countries in the world come to Chicago to review all the shit that's gone wrong since they last met in Portugal two years ago—namely the economy and the uprisings in the Middle East.

So back to these arrests. Here's what happens: At midnight, you, as the cops, bust down the door of a place housing people who have no warrants for their arrest, rough up at least eight of them, keep them handcuffed for hours, and unlawfully take them off to jail. When pressed to show a warrant, you whip out something lacking a judge's signature, and fabricate stories of finding molotov cocktails somewhere. And then you don't even admit you did it—Chicago Police Department Superintendent Garry McCarthy said yesterday afternoon that there had been "zero arrests as far as protest activity today." This little fiasco pre-emptively distracts political protestors as a unified whole so their planned activities for the summit are weakened. If a bunch of them are protesting over false arrests, that's fewer of them available to show up for the anti-NATO stuff, which makes the whole thing look better for the media, and more manageable for the cops. (And maybe, if the cops are lucky, it's so outrageous and frightening that a lot of people will drop out of protesting altogether.)

Speaking of the media-cop alignment, the cops keep publicly saying that the protesters will be a source of violence. This then gives police reason to amp up their presence. Not only have they been flying helicopters around the city at a super-low vertical around my neighborhood over the last month, if you watch that video you can see the guns in the hands of the men hanging outside them. Around town now you can see the extra weapons, the extra gear. You also see a lot of weird old dudes at these demonstrations lately that have new shoes (usually brown), new leather coats, camera bags not scraped, super-clean lenses on their cameras, zoom lenses, sunglasses, and pleated khakis. The level of snoopery has gone up 1,000%, according to official reports.

The building where the Occupy people are likely being held.

Today I start the day off marching with nurses who had their permit to do so reportedly revoked at the last minute by the city. These are nurses from California who have organized transportation from protesters from around the country, and they were given permission and then denied because the city thought it was getting too complicated, aka they realized a shit-ton of people were coming from all over the place to protest. Again, this is the kind of thing that creates a perfect storm, bureaucratically creating fake outrage to sidetrack people from the real one: That top agenda among the supposedly most powerful leaders on the whole planet isn't to promote peace and financial stability and ecological responsibility, it's to figure out how they're going to maintain status quo, keep countries at war, control oil, and make sure civil unrest doesn't get too upsetting. Here's to proving them wrong. I'll be checking back in on Monday with an update, provided I don't get arrested and then "disapear" in the system for, like, having a chipped front tooth.

Previously - Murders in K-Town

@beodd