Tar Sands Resistance Escalates in Massachusetts
Learning From Missteps: the Eviction of Occupy LA
I’ve been thinking a lot about Occupy, lately. Perhaps it’s the slow, plodding force of a familiar New England winter allowing me to reflect on that period with some degree of clarity for the first time. Something that keeps coming up in my head as a moment where I let myself down, and have hopefully learned from, is my involvement in the eviction of Occupy LA. On the surface, the raid defense would seem to have gone the way local organizers hoped for. Among the most pacifist camps I visited, there seemed to be little desire in the occupiers to actively resist the initial raid, as had happened to varying degrees of success in many of the other large East & West Coast encampments. Instead, their overriding concerns seemed to be “nonviolence” and a high number of arrests.
With 292 arrests, and little of the police brutality witnessed time and time again at similar raids, the eviction could easily be seen as a success that met the needs of local organizers. Conversely, as a visitor to the city, who took a very prominent role in the action, I feel like I failed. I overstepped my bounds and missed out on several opportunities for skill sharing with other organizers. Worse, it was my many privileges that allowed me to have the hand I did in shaping the course of that action.
I arrived in Los Angeles for the first time in my life only days before the raid. Arriving shortly after sunrise, I picked up a copy of the L.A. Times. The front page story was the Mayor’s announcement that an eviction of the camp was imminent. I remember my traveling partner and I, hungry for confrontation, thinking we had arrived at the perfect time.
Upon arriving at the camp a couple hours later, we found the iconic “info table” that existed in just about every town and city across the United States during that time. We asked when the next direct action group meeting was, only to be informed that they hadn’t been meeting too much, lately.
“Well, is anyone working on what to do about this imminent raid?” we inquired.
“OH yeah! There are meetings about that every day on the south side steps at 3pm!”
Relieved, we spent several hours checking out the occupation. It was probably the most physically impressive I saw in my travels that Fall and Winter. Estimated to have over 500 tents, they had completely surrounded City Hall on all sides. Their general assembly took place on the main steps of the building every afternoon. The place had a friendly, easy-going atmosphere, with a constant pervasive aroma of high-quality marijuana, to a degree that made it unique among Occupy encampments. Folks had established dozens of “tribes” (side note: I’m uncomfortable with the use of this term, for obvious concerns about cultural appropriation, but this is what they were called in the camp), where new members had to be consented upon by the “tribe”, allowing many diverse groups of folks with diverse methods of resistance and reasons for being in the park to feel comfortable. Unlike other occupations that adopted similar setups, it felt as though the “tribes” were in solidarity with one another, and disdain between groups seemed minimal.
We showed up to our meeting a tad early, and were met by an engaged, talkative person and his dog. We talked for almost an hour about life in the park, and the state of Occupy LA itself. One of the most important things I learned during that conversation was that the LAPD had been using Occupy as an opportunity to “reform” their image. Throughout the existence of the encampment, they often tolerated acts of civil disobedience, and folks were having a tough time incurring the arrests they felt were needed to gain media attention. This led to the desire for a high number of arrests as their overriding concern for eviction.
After talking for nearly an hour, and realizing the meeting should have started long ago, our gracious host informed us that he had had trouble convincing folks to come to these meetings, and that we shouldn’t expect more people to come. This is about when I started to screw up. Shocked, we took matters into our own hands. We scheduled several direct action trainings, with perhaps a more confrontational tone than that particular occupation was accustomed to.
In the course of those trainings, we met two more direct action trainers, who we had mutual friends with from the Alter-Globalization movement. All 4 of us were anarchists, experienced with direct action and active resistance, and quickly became friends and comrades. We began leading trainings on protecting one’s self from police chemical weapons, and more advanced resistance tactics like hard-locks, barricades, etc. Along with giving standard civil disobedience trainings, and helping facilitate the raid meetings, the 4 of us quickly became the face of Occupy LA’s defense for the imminent attack by police. This was despite the fact that my partner and I were not from LA, and the other two folks were only peripherally involved prior to now.
When the direct action team came back from its hiatus a day or two later, they began offering “nonviolence” and mediation trainings. Rather than engage them, to try to combine our trainings, or offer the camp a joint talk on the importance of diversity of tactics, my response was to snicker as I walked by the trainings. We continued to work in our group of 4 anarchists, and with the raid defense committee. There were only 4-5 days from the time we arrived in Los Angeles to prepare for the raid, and more often than not, one of the 4 of us would facilitate these meetings. In fact, when friends from New York tuned in to Livestream to watch the general assembly the night before the raid, they saw familiar faces presenting the raid defense plan. It was my partner and I, fresh off a bus from Texas, giving the speech.
When raid day finally came, the eviction plan, carefully crafted by the raid committee to meet the needs of local organizers, went off well. The direct action team’s main contributions were to hand out pink “nonviolence mediators” t-shirts to their selected marshals and peace police, and to incite fear about “anarchists from Oakland” coming to LA, itching for a riot. The riot, and the “anarchists from Oakland” did not materialize. Everyone seemed satisfied about the outcome. Except for me.
I doubt anyone learned much of anything from working with me on that action. I didn’t take the time to really work with local organizers, building their skills and helping them confidently take the key roles in the forthcoming action. The fact that I stood in front of their general assembly, and explained the action plan, having only been in the camp for 3-4 days, and the first time in Los Angeles in my life, is an embarrassment. I didn’t work with the local direct action team at all, and we certainly didn’t learn much about our different perspectives on resistance. Perhaps working together, we could have found way to mediate our differences, have a transformative experience together, and avoid employing marshalls and peace police to monitor our comrades.
When being a travelling, out of town organizer, or really being in any situation where you’re not a core organizer of a project but have a lot of skills to contribute, our goal shouldn’t just be success. Our goal needs to be facilitating the sharing of skills, discussion of ideas & perspectives, and bringing up new organizing talent. I’m reminded of how in moments of duress, such as making a snap decision in the middle of an action, well-intentioned activists and agitators put anti-oppression work to the side in order to achieve the desired goal. As long as we achieve a perceived success, the way we got there becomes less important; which is an inherently flawed and oppressive way to organize, and is exactly how capitalism, the state, patriarchy, and every other oppressive structure teaches us to behave. Those structures reward success, by any means, and as such are breeding grounds for socialized oppression. If our interest is truly in building a new society right now, in between the dying gasps of the old world, our methods of organizing and relations with one another must reflect that world we’re trying to give birth to. Anything short of this is counter-revolutionary, regardless of the perceived outcome.
Some reflections on police crackdowns, DIY ethos and community-building in Boston.
(^^Yeah, I miss doing this every night^^)
On and off for the last 4 years, I’ve lived in Allston, a neighborhood in Boston known for decades as a meeting place for artists, musicians, punks and other counter-culture types. In my years here, I’ve seen the DIY music community both flourish and falter.
In recent months, our community has come under assault by the Boston police. Many long-standing collectives and show spaces have either been evicted, shut down as venues or are now too afraid to book and organize shows in their living spaces. While the actions of the state against artists, musicians and organizers are inexcusable, it is also predictable. The state fears and despises anything it can’t control, and whether politicized or not, the DIY music culture has deep roots in anti-capitalist ethos. Art, especially free underground art, is resistance, and if the state has an excuse to shut us down, it will. And we certainly gave them a litany of excuses to do exactly that.
I’m sure many people will have different perspectives on what happened here, and just as many constructive thoughts on how to move forward. I look forward to hearing all of them and working productively to rebuild what the state has temporarily squelched. As a way to contribute to this conversation, I’d like to throw out a couple shortcomings I’ve seen in my years as an organizer and participant in this community, which may have helped lead to this series of events.
To start, there has been this slow but steady drive away from more underground shows, spread by word of mouth and always free/donation based, and towards a model that mirrors the capitalist society that DIY music venues originally started in resistance to. Many of our community’s most talented organizers seem to be trying to dramatically grow the underground music community, without considering the effect that may have on what “underground” even means for many of us. Just before the crackdown, I found myself struggling to find shows and venues that made me feel safe, comfortable and empowered to be myself, as a pretty queer person who often likes to mosh in a dress and is usually broke as fuck. It seemed that every show now had a $5-$10 “donation” enforced by cis-dude doormen who were typically quite aggressive if someone didn’t have enough money. The “Boston Phoenix” was now listing addresses and phone numbers for prominent DIY venues on the internet, with many promoters and organizers doing little to stop them. The “Boston Counter-Cultural Compass” had fittingly become simply the “Boston Compass”, as its popularity boomed to go along with a 15,000 copy monthly distribution.
The above are indicative of a shift away from anti-capitalist ethos, and towards a model that replicates the capitalist value system. Instead of being free and open to weirdos expressing themselves without preconditions, we became concerned about attendance, about money and about popularity. The same five or six bands were being booked to every show because they would draw a large audience, most of whom would be capable of paying to see their favorite bands. Instead of encouraging vulnerability and experimentation, most of my favorite spaces were now seemingly concerned with blowing up the scene, in some quest to get Boston recognized for the incredible wealth of previously unknown talent. Our own media sources mirrored this sea-change as our underground papers didn’t seem to actually appeal to counter-culture types anymore. In following this quest, we lost the magic that allowed us to grow and thrive together. We lost the vulnerability to fail and to fuck up. And we lost the ability to remain anonymous.
In trying to figure out how the value system of capitalism had infected a culture and community that only a few short years ago had apolitically but powerfully resisted it, I kept coming to the same conclusion. Our other major shortcoming as a community was our failure to truly be a community. Both among ourselves and with our physical neighbors who existed outside of our everyday experiences. In the vast majority of situations that I’m aware of with punk houses and collectives in Boston that actively book DIY shows, there is little to no communication or coordination with our physical neighbors. These people, in many cases houses with young children or elderly folks, were thought of as “norms” to be avoided and ignored. Rather than inviting them over to get to know us, our goal was typically to ignore them and attempt to avoid culpability for our noisy artistic and social endeavors. Few houses tried to communicate with their neighbors and establish agreements for appropriate times and volumes for jamming and for late-night shows. Those houses that I know of that did build relationships with their neighbors are by and large the ones that have avoided the recent crackdowns and are still operating somewhat normally.
In many ways, our failure to be in communion with our neighbors is mirrored by our failure to be in communion with one another. In fact, one could say that our community lacks the basic prerequisites for actually being a community. We don’t usually share resources and abundance with one another and we don’t meet in person regularly (or ever) to discuss community problems or issues. And we definitely don’t hold each other accountable effectively for misdoings, which has served more than perhaps anything else to divide us.
In the last year or two, there have been several cases of sexual assault in the counter-culture community in Boston, and many more cases of rape-sympathizing and apologist behavior. Instead of responding to this behavior as a community, holding perpetrators and their sympathizers accountable and (if deemed appropriate by survivors) offering them a path to learn, heal and rejoin the community, we have handled these incidents in isolation. There have been a couple cases of failed accountability processes and many more cases of public call outs/shaming and then everyone lining up on their sides of a “dispute”. But I personally know of no effective accountability processes dealing with sexual assault in this community for several years. Instead, people hear a story, choose sides and stick to them, dividing us into small cliques and groupings, and further limiting the spaces and parts of the community where we feel safe and comfortable. The issue is compounded when those perpetrating the negative behaviors are prominent activists or organizers, and the scene fears losing their skills and hard work if they are held accountable for their actions. So instead, we pick sides and either choose to stay away from the perpetrators entirely or ignore their misdeeds and continue to associate with them.
Community building work is really, really hard. It’s time consuming and exhausting. But our failure to effectively be in a community with our neighbors led in large part to the police crackdown. And our failure to be in a real community with one another led all these houses to face the threats made to us by the state in isolation, rather than as one unified group that might have been able to figure out how to mount an effective resistance.
Despite these issues and our mistakes, we have a truly powerful and inspiring counter-culture community here in Boston, and I personally owe more than I could ever express in words to those of you that are a part of it. It was in your loud basements that I learned how to feel free to express myself. It was over long conversations across your cluttered coffee tables in kitchens filled with dumpstered food that I was truly radicalized. It was your projects and endeavors that taught me how to become an effective organizer for resistance against capitalism, patriarchy, the state and everything else that sucks. I look forward to our next blossoming, and it is with the words above that I offer my humble suggestions and critiques to move forward effectively. I’m sure many of you have your own ideas, and I look forward to our conversations about how to rebuild better than ever. I also look forward to discussing all this in person and bringing our community together and stronger than ever in a time of adversity. Until then, I’ll just listen to this Fat History Month LP and daydream about that epic New Year’s show two winters ago.
Labor Militancy Inspires Generations: the Bread and Roses Strike
Labor Day typically passes without much note, serving as a symbolic holiday conceived of to keep American workers from aligning their struggle with workers across the world, who celebrate International Worker’s Day on May 1st. On Labor Day this year, however, workers in one Massachusetts industrial city had reason to be elated. In Lawrence, MA, they celebrated, with great pride, the centennial of the famous two-month long Bread and Roses mill strike. In this economically-depressed mill city, the militant history and legacy of the American labor movement is far from dead. Rather than a forgotten relic of a time long since passed, labor’s powerful tool of direct action, the strike, serves as the most celebrated part of the city’s culture.
In 1912, following a new Massachusetts state law which reduced the legal working week for women and children from 56 to 54 hours per week, workers feared that their paychecks would not be adjusted to compensate for the difference. When pay day came around, the fears proved to be justified, they received a corresponding pay cut, equal to about 32¢, or several loaves of bread, from which the strike received its famous name. For the hungry, abused and exhausted workforce, who were already barely surviving on an average of $8.76 a week, this was enough to spark a strike. Legend holds that one worker in one mill bellowed out across the hall “short pay, all out!” and the entire workforce of her mill dumped into the streets. Estimates range from 10,000 to as high as 25,000 workers who walked off the job that day, the majority of whom were women, children and immigrants.
The Bread and Roses strike was directed by America’s most radical labor union, the Industrial Workers of the World or IWW, who had been organizing in Lawrence for about 5 years. Despite membership in the IWW representing less than 1% of the total workforce of the mills in Lawrence in 1912, a combination of organizing savvy and shows of solidarity across the United States allowed the IWW to take the leading role in organizing and directing the strike. They encouraged workers to self-organize along ethnic backgrounds, and to elect representatives for the strike committee from each ethnic group. Many of their best organizers stayed in Lawrence to work on the strike, including Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, “Big Bill” Haywood, Joseph Ettor and Arturo Giovannitti. The presence of these leaders of labor was critical in gaining massive national and international attention to the reasonable demands of the striking workers.
Following two months of police brutality, a Massachusetts state militia occupation of the city and being forced to send all their children out of Lawrence to keep them safe, the strikers had won all of their demands. It represented the biggest victory of the IWW to date, and one of American labor’s greatest successes in history. And it is a victory the people of Lawrence have never forgotten.
The Bread and Roses Festival has been going strong since 1985, 28 straight years of celebrating the strike on Labor Day. The Heritage State Park visitor center features an exhibit on the strike and several more on worker’s history in Lawrence. Their movie theatre in the visitor center is organized into two categories, films about the strike, and “other”. The city is today, as it was in 1912, mostly an immigrant population. Their economy has been beaten down by decades of union-busting, outsourcing and “free trade” by both parties, but their radical history and pride provides the people of the city with great inspiration and hope.
The 100-year anniversary of one of American labor’s greatest triumphs was rung in by a march across downtown that stretched several city-blocks long, and had hundreds of attendees. The march route concluded in the Campagnone Common, where a few hundred more folks were waiting for a celebration of resistance to capitalist exploitation and self-organization of workers. It was there that the people of Lawrence unveiled a new monument in their largest park, dedicated to the striking workers and their families. Speakers ranging from local elected officials to anti-capitalist IWW organizers roused the crowd of hundreds, populated with families, workers, immigrants and even uniformed police, listening attentively and with pride.
The radical, anti-capitalist New England performance group, Bread and Puppet, put on a circus-themed show in the center of the common. There were three stages of music and live entertainment all day, dozens of booths from unions, social justice organizations, Occupy outlets and more. The IWW, beaming with pride from their leading role in the strike, had set up two different booths with literature, t-shirts and political discourse.
To the people of Lawrence, the strike was not just a moment in their city’s history or a bump on the road. The strike is their greatest source of pride, and this 100-year long imprint in the mind of a city should make labor leaders reconsider their strategic decisions in the last 30 years.
The modern American labor movement has much to learn from the people and history of Lawrence, Massachusetts. Spending the last several decades tying their interests to a Democratic party that has relentlessly betrayed them has made labor weaker in this country than at any other point in the last century. It is when labor takes direct action on behalf of their members, and on behalf of the dignity of all workers, that they inspire generations. The next time labor has the overwhelming support of the American people and workers the world over, in a conflict with the capitalist class, as they once did and squandered in Madison, Wisconsin, they should be careful to remember Lawrence, Massachusetts.
My Year on the Margins of Capitalism (part 1)
After 14 months of unemployment, I recently took a seasonal job in Boston. This transition has caused me to reflect deeply on my experiences in this time in which I was an “unproductive” member of capitalist society. In this year, I experienced perhaps more personal growth and evolution than in my entire prior life. Despite capitalism judging myself and my comrades as social sycophants, we doubtlessly contributed more to society than most of us ever had before. This experience has prompted me to think that perhaps what our society needs most in order to sustain itself is a radical redefinition of “work”.
Last May, after having saved about $5,000 following months of penny-pinching at a previous job, I began my journey as an ex-worker. I almost immediately moved from my previous house into a long-standing free-form collective in the Boston neighborhood of Allston. The house had been around for about 5 years, serving as a place for free-spirits of various shades to express themselves and grow together. The house has gone through several evolutionary phases in its years, and when I lived there it’s roughly 16 members were about evenly mixed between radical activists and musicians in the DIY/punk music community. There were many different types of individuals living in the house at the time, all loosely bound together by a distaste for work, as defined by capitalism, and an interest in living as cheaply and efficiently as possible. Personal exploration and growth, and work as YOU defined it were the overarching ethos, if there were any at all. During this time I focused on continuing to book and organize shows and events, culminating in helping organize the second year of the Allston DIY Fest.
The festival, which has just celebrated its third year, is an open, non-hierarchical project organized by the vibrant punk, anarchist and DIY music communities in Allston. The year I helped organize it, the festival featured about 25 bands, split between an acoustic and an electric bike-generator powered stage. There were two streams of a dozen workshops, running concurrently all day. We had an enormous really, REALLY free market, Boston Food Not Bombs served lunch, and tables from local radical groups and collectives like the Lucy Parsons Center, Black & Pink and the Boston Anarchist Bookfair. This project was my first experience with having the freedom to devote myself entirely to projects of my choosing, without having “work” or school in the way. I found myself energized and highly motivated living this lifestyle, and dedicated anywhere from 6-12 hours a day, 7 days a week, to this project for 2 months. I was proud of the experience, but I craved more. I liked community building and creating spaces for radicals to meet and network with one another, but I yearned for more direct confrontation with the state & capitalism.
My partner, Ray, was an incredibly hard-working organizer for DIY Fest herself, as well as the co-creator of a bi-weekly events calendar zine in Boston that served as a guide to anarchist events and DIY shows, also quit her job that summer. Our plan was to travel the country, and to find ourselves as activists. Both of us had always worked as wage-slaves to support our other interests and pursuits, and were eager to dedicate ourselves fully to our true passions. After just two weeks on the road, we headed back up North a tad to go to the Occupy Wall Street day of action on September 17th, 2011.
We originally hesitated to go, fearing the day would be “a bunch of liberal horseshit”. Surely enough, it certainly was just that…at first. I remember Wall Street being completely barricaded, all of us hanging out aimlessly in Bowling Green park, “Tedward Hotpants” trying to randomly start a GA, and forcing several women with smoke allergies out of the assembly space because he adamantly refused to stop burning obscene amounts of sage, despite their repeated pleas. Anti-capitalist, anarchist and anti-police chants or statements were met with extreme disdain from most attendees, and with physical violence by some. I was absolutely repulsed by the crowd of about 2,000, and considered leaving multiple times.
Our spirits boosted by the presence of some circle A buddies from Boston, we decided to stick it out, and headed to Zuccotti Park for the day’s actual General Assembly. This is when the action really took shape, and showed its true character. A group of local activists, overwhelmingly anarchists, had planned for a real occupation in the Financial District, and had prepared consensus-based protocols for effective use of a General Assembly tool in an occupied space. During the first GA, we broke into small groups and discussed our dissatisfactions with the system as it stood, and our ideas for change. We talked about why we were there, and what we thought needed to be done. I met several rad anarchists in my breakout, some of whom I now consider among my best friends in the world. I was now fully committed to the action. After scouring nearby dumpsters for bedding (cardboard boxes) and food, about 150, maybe 200 of us slept there.
When we woke up, the real work started. We had made it a night. We renamed the park Liberty Square, and modified our GA charter to require at least a 9/10 majority to make any decision under modified consensus. Most of us who were there on the first night immediately began working 12-16 hour days, every day. We kept the space clean, began practicing mutual aid with fixtures like the People’s Kitchen, the Black & Red medical collective, and the People’s library, and began directly confronting the state and capitalism with 3 daily marches out of our occupied park, our temporary autonomous zone. Myself, along with a dozen or so of the most amazing activists I have ever had the pleasure of meeting and working alongside, started the Direct Action Working Group.
Sleep was nearly impossible. We were bedding on concrete, there were nightly NYPD incursions into the park to deprive us of sleep, and we were unable to set up tents, which meant we were all awake whenever it was raining during the night. Despite these conditions, we all worked harder than I ever thought was possible when I was working for the profit of a boss under capitalism. After a few weeks, there were hundreds, if not thousands of activists from all over the country living in the park, working to sustain and grow the occupation movement we had unexpectedly unleashed on the world, spending every waking second working, and every moment of restless sleep dreaming of what had to be done the next day. It struck me how remarkably hard a human being is willing to push themselves when they are working for something that they believe in, rather than being coerced into wage-slavery as a necessity of capitalist society.
After 6 weeks of living and organizing in Liberty Square, Ray and I decided to go on our original trip across the country. It was becoming really difficult for us to continue living in Liberty Square without sleep, and we wanted to see what had sprung up across the country. We visited over a dozen cities from New York to Oakland, and many Occupy encampments and General Assemblies.
It quickly became clear to me that what started in New York had truly become a national movement, and that tens of thousands of people were tirelessly organizing all over the country, just like we were in New York City. In the Fall of 2011, there was an Occupy encampment and assembly in just about every town and city in the country. In each of these temporary autonomous zones, people were dedicating days, weeks and months of their lives to facilitate assemblies, plan and implement direct actions, and create the mutual aid infrustatue for sharing of food, clothes, books and housing necessary to maintain an occupied park. They received no financial reward for this word, and because they weren’t working for a boss and receiving financial compensation, our society judged them to be lazy leeches.
Perhaps the most profound lesson I took away from our 2 ½ months on the road was being on the receiving end of life-changing mutual aid. Despite living very cheaply, well below our nation’s already absurdly low “poverty level”, we never went hungry or without somewhere to stay. This was because we were members of a community, and they took care of us wherever we went. That community is the global anarchist movement, recently expanded by the emergence of Occupy.
Thanks to the existence of Occupy encampments in every city, it was easier than ever to meet and connect with local anarchists. Across the entire country, strangers would open their homes to us, offer us meals and a place to stay. We never had to hitchhike because in just about every city, we were able to find anarchists who were headed the direction we needed to go, and they almost universally refused to accept our money for gas. We were given books, clothes, camping equipment and more. At first, this felt like charity, until we remembered how many dozens of travellers and touring bands we had each similarly cared for in our several years of living collectively in Boston. We had given to the community, and now, in a moment of need, the community was reflexively taking care of us. Mutual aid and the gift economy in practice. Before this trip, most of these concepts were purely theoretical for me, but now I realize, to borrow a line from a comrade’s album “There really is a movement, it’s not just in your head…you can find it in the cracks in the sidewalk.”
NOTE: So this got way longer than I thought, so I’m going to add more about May Day organizing and beyond in a few days.
URGENT: 20 Pro-Mountain Activists Held on $500,000 Combined Bail; Your Support is Needed
More information available at http://rampscampaign.org. You can donate to the Legal Fund at http://bit.ly/mj-legal
“The government has aided and abetted the coal industry in evading environmental and mine safety regulations. We are here today to demand that the government and coal industry end strip mining, repay their debt to Appalachia, and secure a just transition for this region.” — Dustin Steele of Matewan, West Virginia.
Following yesterday’s historic shutdown of the Hobet mine — Appalachia’s largest mountaintop removal site– Dustin and at least nineteen other Appalachians and allies are being held on $25,000 bail each — a combined $500,000.* Most are being charged with trespass and obstruction.
While we believe that these bail amounts are unconstitutionally excessive and may ultimately be reduced, we need to raise as much money as we possibly can to support those brave individuals who have put their bodies on the line to put a halt to the injustice of mountaintop removal mining. According to Dustin, he was taken into a room and beaten by law enforcement while in custody. Witnesses have reported that other protesters were brutalized by law enforcement while being taken into custody. We need to work to ensure that anyone who wants to get out of jail can do so as soon as possible.
Mountaintop removal is a crime against humanity that has left a legacy of poisoned air and water, high cancer rates, economic exploitation, and devastated communities and ecosystems throughout Appalachia. Corrupted legislators and regulators at the state and federal levels have failed to take action to stop these atrocities, leaving direct action as the last resort for conscientious residents aiming to save the land and people of Appalachia.
Please check www.rampscampaign.org for updates as we receive additional information about our friends in custody.
Stand with the Hobet 20 by donating to the Mountain Justice legal fund — click here.
Please share the following fundraising link via email, facebook, twitter, and other networks: http://bit.ly/mj-legal
To see more images from yesterday’s historic action, click here.
*We were able to verify bail amounts of $25,000 for seventeen of our arrested friends and assume it is the same for the remaining three.
New video of Marcellus Earth First! post-rondy action
Thanks for doing such an awesome job on this, Matteo!!
