free speech ? global clampdown is the reality

NO COMMENT !   Does this need one ??


New Laws Around the Globe Don’t Curb Inequity, They Undercut Social Protests and Gag Free Speech

This ordinance expanded the mayor’s power to police protest and was nicknamed “sit down and shut up.”  Chicago has also required demonstrators to obtain $1 million insurance coverage to “indemnify the city against any additional or uncovered third party claims against the city arising out of or caused by the parade and agree to reimburse the city” for damages caused by demonstrations.  Fines ranged from $200-$1,000 and/or ten days in jail.  Local CANG8 (Coalition Against NATO/G8 War & Poverty Agenda) and Occupy Chicago were then able to organize a mass campaign around civil liberties.

“The move by Emanuel to restrict protest has to be seen within the context of the repression of dissent,” Baker said.  “The attacks on Arabs and Muslims over the past decade, the violent repression of the protest at the RNC in 2008, the raids and grand jury repression that my wife and I and 22 other anti-war activists have lived through, and more recently the attacks by local police and the FBI on the Occupy Movement and the anti-NATO protest here in Chicago.”  In preparation for NATO’s summit, Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy described training 13,000 police officers for “mass arrests.”

Even mocking America’s decadent and hypocritical leadership, a political pastime since the Constitutional Convention, is now under assault.  While presidential puppets, ludicrous masks, and punchy political art have been a useful agent for translating popular contempt, in 2000 at the Republican national Convention, police raided a trolley barn in Philadelphia and arrested 75 puppet makers.  And this month, in preparation for the Tampa Republican National Convention, the police department has gone further by essentially getting the police department to declare  puppets illegal in the event zone near downtown.


http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/09/11/unlawful-dissent/