I Am The People, I Am Not The Pig

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I watch this video again taken last year at Occupy L.A. just before the police came in and busted up the camp.



Tony Velloza:



There's obviously something wrong, otherwise millions of people wouldn't show up in cities around the world in such a short time. I believe a camping ordinance does *not* supersede the U.S. Constitution at any time. Now these same companies that I defended, they're infringing on my right to pursue happiness at home? That's not right. If they're all united against us, there's no one we can turn to. Peaceful protest is the last thing we've got. Don't believe what you hear, because media's a dangerous thing. and media's owned by the corporations who are instituting this B.S. (The police), they should take their forces, go down to Wall Street, go down to the financial district. That's the people who are really guilty, not a bunch of peaceful protesters exercising their First Amendment rights. -Tony Velloza, Iraq Veteran, Occupy L.A.


THE LAND OF THE FREE

Whose freedom? Where's the freedom?

If you're a veteran like Tony Velloza, or a peaceful, law-abiding person like ME, or any of these other people----or a Hollywood writer like Family Guy's Patrick Meighan----is it right for the police, whose taxes we pay, to treat us like this:

I was arrested at about 1 a.m. Wednesday morning with 291 other people at Occupy LA. I was sitting in City Hall Park with a pillow, a blanket, and a copy of Thich Nhat Hanh’s “Being Peace” when 1,400 heavily-armed LAPD officers in paramilitary SWAT gear streamed in. I was in a group of about 50 peaceful protestors who sat Indian-style, arms interlocked, around a tent (the symbolic image of the Occupy movement). The LAPD officers encircled us, weapons drawn, while we chanted “We Are Peaceful” and “We Are Nonviolent” and “Join Us.”

As we sat there, encircled, a separate team of LAPD officers used knives to slice open every personal tent in the park. They forcibly removed anyone sleeping inside, and then yanked out and destroyed any personal property inside those tents, scattering the contents across the park. They then did the same with the communal property of the Occupy LA movement. For example, I watched as the LAPD destroyed a pop-up canopy tent that, until that moment, had been serving as Occupy LA’s First Aid and Wellness tent, in which volunteer health professionals gave free medical care to absolutely anyone who requested it.

As it happens, my family had personally contributed that exact canopy tent to Occupy LA, at a cost of several hundred of my family’s dollars. As I watched, the LAPD sliced that canopy tent to shreds, broke the telescoping poles into pieces and scattered the detritus across the park. Note that these were the objects described in subsequent mainstream press reports as “30 tons of garbage” that was “abandoned” by Occupy LA: personal property forcibly stolen from us, destroyed in front of our eyes and then left for maintenance workers to dispose of while we were sent to prison.

When the LAPD finally began arresting those of us interlocked around the symbolic tent, we were all ordered by the LAPD to unlink from each other (in order to facilitate the arrests). Each seated, nonviolent protester beside me who refused to cooperate by unlinking his arms had the following done to him: an LAPD officer would forcibly extend the protestor’s legs, grab his left foot, twist it all the way around and then stomp his boot on the insole, pinning the protestor’s left foot to the pavement, twisted backwards. Then the LAPD officer would grab the protestor’s right foot and twist it all the way the other direction until the non-violent protestor, in incredible agony, would shriek in pain and unlink from his neighbor.

It was horrible to watch, and apparently designed to terrorize the rest of us. At least I was sufficiently terrorized. I unlinked my arms voluntarily and informed the LAPD officers that I would go peacefully and cooperatively. I stood as instructed, and then I had my arms wrenched behind my back, and an officer hyperextended my wrists into my inner arms. It was super violent, it hurt really really bad, and he was doing it on purpose. When I involuntarily recoiled from the pain, the LAPD officer threw me face-first to the pavement. He had my hands behind my back, so I landed right on my face. The officer dropped with his knee on my back and ground my face into the pavement. It really, really hurt and my face started bleeding and I was very scared. I begged for mercy and I promised that I was honestly not resisting and would not resist.

My hands were then zipcuffed very tightly behind my back, where they turned blue. I am now suffering nerve damage in my right thumb and palm.

I was put on a paddywagon with other nonviolent protestors and taken to a parking garage in Parker Center. They forced us to kneel (and sit--SEE UPDATE) on the hard pavement of that parking garage for seven straight hours with our hands still tightly zipcuffed behind our backs. Some began to pass out. One man rolled to the ground and vomited for a long, long time before falling unconscious. The LAPD officers watched and did nothing.

At 9 a.m. we were finally taken from the pavement into the station to be processed. The charge was sitting in the park after the police said not to. It’s a misdemeanor. Almost always, for a misdemeanor, the police just give you a ticket and let you go. It costs you a couple hundred dollars. Apparently, that’s what happened with most every other misdemeanor arrest in LA that day.

With us Occupy LA protestors, however, they set bail at $5,000 and booked us into jail. Almost none of the protesters could afford to bail themselves out. I’m lucky and I could afford it, except the LAPD spent all day refusing to actually *accept* the bail they set. If you were an accused murderer or a rapist in LAPD custody that day, you could bail yourself right out and be back on the street, no problem. But if you were a nonviolent Occupy LA protestor with bail money in hand, you were held long into the following morning, with absolutely no access to a lawyer.


Meanwhile, back at the Ranch....

Source: Courthouse News, Wed, October 31, 2012

LOS ANGELES (CN) - A licensed medical marijuana provider sued the Justice Department and DEA, claiming that their illegal crusade threatens to cost thousands of patients their means to acquire the painkilling drug legally.
No Grey Sky and members of its dispensary co-op seek an injunction against the Department of Justice, Attorney General Eric Holder, and the Drug Enforcement Administration, whose agents raided the dispensary's downtown store this month.


So the "Drug War" goes on.

Norm Stamper, former Seattle Police Chief who also worked in San Diego for many years, wrote for Huffington Post last week:

In passing Initiative 502, the legalization of marijuana, 56 percent of Washington State voters defied the federal government. In every corner of our state we weighed and debated the issue, broke down the economic and human costs of marijuana prohibition, and, in the end, decided that regulating adult possession of the weed was a very smart thing for us to do.

We now respectfully invite the federal government to look at, indeed to study our decision and its implementation. But we also ask the feds to keep their hands off our new law.

For years, decades, federal officials have snubbed science, avoided honest conversation, refused to debate the issues. With the administration (and Congress) rejecting calls to examine the economic, moral, and social costs of marijuana prohibition, the smartest thing it can do now is to monitor our incubator baby, give it a chance to survive and become a model for how to end an obscenely expensive and failed drug war.

Colorado passed a similar law, with 54 percent of the vote. With these two convincing victories, the administration should, at a minimum, work with Congress to remove marijuana from its absurd "Schedule I" drug classification, recognize its medicinal (and industrial hemp) applications, and respect the states' right to regulate a plant known to be safer than alcohol and healthier than tobacco.

I join other members of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition in thanking the hundreds of campaign officials and volunteers in Washington and Colorado who worked tirelessly to make November 6, 2012 a day to remember.

This is how alcohol prohibition fell after 13 years. State by state by state...




What's really crazy, what's really, really really crazy, is that when it comes to drugs that "mess you up," alcohol is far and away more mind-altering than cannabis. There's just no question about it for anyone who's experienced both. That's why Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, cops, prosecutors, judges and other law enforcement workers---are trying to end the Drug War.

The other thing about marijuana is that it makes people want to communicate.

Oooh!!! Can't be having that, now, can we!!!!

Doesn't really fit in with totalitarian devil-state purposes.

In fact....if world leaders actually sat down together and actually smoked the peace pipe, god knows what good we could accomplish. The smokes (and I prefer the "legal" blends which are also being cracked down on) could really open up that conversation.

It is a spiritual issue.

Church and state, baby. Or, I should say, no church, only state. If my spiritual beliefs and human understanding is aided by smoking this weed, and I'm a taxpaying adult who does no harm to others, what is the justification for prosecuting...a person...for ...smoking..or selling smokes?

If the world is my church, and the weed is my incense, and I'm paying your salary, what right do YOU have, to prosecute me, jail me, lecture me?

I've been meaning to start a new blog for some time now, and it might be the time. Since I do not smoke the actual weed, (not often anyway) I have been considering putting up a review site dealing with the safe smoking of "Spice" or "Incense," as it is known. I have been a recreational Spice smoker since 2004. No, it's not good for your lungs, but you just don't use a pipe--use a water pipe or a vaporizer, and it is less harmful than, even, cigarettes.

It is very, very very good for certain things---namely, helping one to think, put things in perspective, and most importantly, after a day of seeing terrible things happening out there in the world through the computer, it really soothes the savage beast.

Not only that, but I am very grateful to Spice. I have a whole childhood of memories I can't really access---or, couldn't. And I did want to remember...but couldn't. I needed those memories to heal----and the smokes brought back the memories like nothing else (including therapy) ever has.

And it doesn't leave you physically pickled like alcohol.

I can't get my smokes now, and I don't want to drink.

Damn it all, law enforcement. Five one five Oh, someone call the Po Po---and tell them....well, tell them, first of all, about the nuclear meltdown in Simi Valley, since that's where retired men in blue go to live. They need to know.

And then tell them.....stop f'ing with my life, my rights, my people.

"You have to say....I am the people...I am not the pig." Fred Hampton



And then, there's Gaza, and a ranting taxi driver, to remind me that people everywhere face tyranny and pain---and that I am lucky for all I have, for what I have.

But I'd sure like some smokes.