Free Speech In Miami
It appears that tacked onto the recent $87 billion Iraqi funding installment was a secretive rider allocating some $8m to the Miami police force to “disperse” protestors during an economic summit there. Apparently the police were amazingly well equipped, and itching to try out their new toys. Some of the “nonlethal” munitions they deployed include tear gas, pepper spray, pepper projectiles, rubber bullets, projectile batons, glue bombs and, making their debut on US streets, incapacitating taser projectiles. They also paraded some spanking new police tanks.
Sam Lender, 82, and about 40 other members of Local 1199 – all retired health care workers – were greeted downtown by some 2,500 police officers carrying machine guns and carrying giant plastic shields. “This does not look like the United States of America,” said Lender, who lives in Delray Beach. “It makes me sick.”
Of course, the whole idea of the “Free Trade Area of the Americas” is a Bad Idea for most people because it promises complete freedom for capital with almost no freedom for labour. It also avoids addressing income and regulatory disparities, ensuring that the poorest will stay poor while the richest will see their environmental standards dragged down to the gutter. They could learn a lot from the European Union…
The EU has spent hundreds of billions of dollars in grants to narrow gaps between richer and poorer member countries and regions, the bulk of it since the 1980s. The largest recipients were the so-called “poor four” — Ireland, Greece, Spain and Portugal. To varying degrees, all have made progress. Since 1982, Ireland has become one of the wealthiest European countries, while Spain and Portugal have increased their gross domestic product per capita levels from 73 to 81 percent and 61 to 72 percent of the EU average, respectively. Greece fell behind in the 1980s, but gained ground over the past decade … Through EU-level regulations, for example, Irish women won a long battle for equal pay legislation and Austrian activists got a parental leave policy. New Eastern European members now must adopt EU environmental, human rights and workplace standards. While the EU is willing to pay for training, infrastructure and other needs to help countries comply, at the end of the day EU regulations are binding.
There is an obvious and growing democratic defecit growing throughout the developed nations, exacerbated by the increasing demands for political and social gains by the nascent middle classes of the developing nations (now emerging from an atypical couple of centuries of economic and climatic turmoil from which the European Powers and the US greatly benefitted). There are obvious parallels with other such transitory periods of progress in history, such as the passing of the ancient regime in pre-Revolutionary France. Then, as now, the State abrogated increasingly draconian powers of policing and crowd control to itself in a reflexive attempt to safeguard “stability” from both its internal and external enemies.
Earlier here.