“According to the foremost historians of American labor violence, the U.S. has had the ‘bloodiest and most violent labor history of any industrial nation in the world.’ An admittedly grossly underestimated tabulation of the number of casualties in labor disputes indicates over seven hundred deaths and thousands of serious injuries, almost all of which occurred in the 1873-1937 period” [Goldstein, Robert Justin. (1978). Political Repression in Modern America, From 1870 to the Present. Cambridge: Schenkman Publishing Co., Inc., p. 3; Graham, Hugh Davis, and Ted Robert Gurr, Eds. (1969). Violence in America: Historical and Comparative Perspectives. New York: Bantam Books, p. 380].

In 1878 Congress passed the Posse Comitatus Act (18 USCS Sec. 1385) making it illegal for the government to deploy its military against “civil disturbances.”  Since the passage of this law, and despite its provisions, there have been at least 114 instances of use of U.S. military against its own citizens participating in “unrest,” 1878–1994 (Sweeney, A Handbook of American Military History, pp. 102-269). However, in recent years the Posse Comitatus Act has been eroded even further by (1) amendments and secret executive decrees that enable the president to use the military to restore order if enforcement of the law by civil authorities is not able to “quell civil disturbances”; and (2) the alarming extreme militarization of domestic police departments all around the country [Churchill, Ward. (2003). Perversions of Justice: Indigenous peoples and AngloAmerican Law. San Francisco: City Lights, pp. 363, 398]. Furthermore, use of “noncombat” employment of military personnel have intervened under the aegis of the ”War on Drugs” and war on so-called immigrants.

NOTE:  When the figure of 136 domestic US military interventions, or the higher figure of 216 (56 military interventions into racial or civil unrest (Sweeney) plus 160 into labor unrest (Graham and Gurr) is added to 560 identifiable overt foreign military interventions, 1798 – 2008, the total of US overt military interventions, foreign and domestic, is 665 (or 776) US Military interventions. Since the date of the first domestic intervention was 1794 (Whiskey Rebellion), and first foreign intervention was 1798 (Dominican Republic), and these figures cover the period of 1794-2008, a period of 214 years, a US military offensive operation, domestic and foreign, has been conducted an average of anywhere from 3.2– 3.6 times per year to preserve the American Way Of Life.

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SEE Attachment: “The Politics of Fear – Living in a Terrorama Society”

Sam Adams, Mayor/Commissioner, samadams@ci.portland.or.us

Nick Fish, Commissioner, nick@ci.portland.or.us

Amanda Fritz, Commissioner, Amanda@ci.portland.or.us

Randy Leonard, Commissioner, randy@ci.portland.or.us

Dan Saltzman, Commissioner, dan@ci.portland.or.us

Portland City Hall, 1221 SW 4^th Avenue, Portland, Oregon 97204

From the first Red Scare during World War I, to the present, our national history is replete in its obsession with national security at the expense of liberties of its citizenry. In the process, lawful political activity and free speech are regularly thwarted. The obsession itself virtually always lacks sufficient oversight, no matter the rhetoric to the contrary, with law enforcement efforts quickly becoming stage managed using informants and concocted propaganda.

The politics of labeling, whether one is called a “communist” or a “terrorist,” have virtually always masked realities of systemic injustices and egregious class inequities. While the Red Scare was prosecuting “radicals” and “Bolsheviks,” the KKK, with as many as 25 percent of the adult male population of the country, was regularly murdering and lynching African Americans with impunity. Terrorists? Not even suggested.

As distance between a democratic base and its law enforcement mechanisms are increased, accountability of police behavior inevitably decreases, no matter the amount of training. The empirical pattern of abuse is so well documented that accountability structures are paramount.

I have been a direct victim of being labeled a “domestic terrorist suspect” on the whims of the FBI simply for expressing my vigorous nonviolent dissent to Reagan’s policies of terror against the impoverished in Central America. And under President Obama, the lack of protections of civil liberties has actually increased. It takes little for the FBI and other law enforcement agencies to collect information on lawful political and religious activities using the most spurious grounds.

Joining the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force only complicates accountable law enforcement.

Sincerely,

S. Brian Willson, J.D., LL.D (Hon.)

Here are the lyrics.

When you’re weary, feeling small, When tears are in your eyes, I will dry them all;

I’m on your side. When times get rough And  friends just can’t be found, Like a bridge over troubled water I will lay me down. Like a bridge over troubled water I will lay me down.

When you’re down and out, When you’re on the street, When evening falls so hard I will comfort you. I’ll take your part.

When darkness comes And pain is all around, Like a bridge over troubled water I will lay me down. Like a bridge over troubled water I will lay me down.

Sail on silvergirl, Sail on by. Your time has come to shine. All your dreams are on their way. See how they shine.

If you need a friend I’m sailing right behind. Like a bridge over troubled water I will ease your mind. Like a bridge over troubled water I will ease your mind.

S. Brian Willson

The magnitude of the US policy of full spectrum dominance, and the extraordinary level of deceit that seeks to mask its egregious nature, is beyond the pale. With no genuine people’s process available to address this grotesque militarism while our domestic society heads toward collapse, the popular business must now be resistance and more resistance as we relocalize our lives into thousands of locally sufficient economies networked with one another.

Our country’s current exaggerated militarism and plunder is but the latest in a long pattern of aggression since our founding, itself based on a gargantuan genocide. Examination of the empirical record reveals at least 560 overt military interventions in scores of countries and territories since 1798. Since the end of WWII, 390 of these overt aggressions have occurred mostly in what we call “The Third World”, along with thousands of covert interventions in more than 100 countries (bombing 28 of them). Additionally, US warships have sailed thousands of times into foreign ports since the post-Civil war days. Today, the US military, in contingents of 100 or more, are dispatched to at least 150 countries at over 1,000 installations. US military planes fly in virtually every airspace; US ships sail in virtually every seaspace.

This is astounding but represents a nation that with but 4.6 percent of the world’s population insists on continued insatiable consumption of anywhere from a quarter to a third of the world’s resources. This systematic theft can only occur by force or its threat, but is always rationalized in noble sounding rhetoric, repeated over and over.

This incredible barbarism is so pervasive it is the equivalent of what philosopher Hannah Arendt described as the banality of evil. The political process, and many of her citizens, barely question its absurdity and diabolical nature, even if it is noticed.

Thus our task, as veterans and citizens, is to reclaim our genuine and evolutionary universal humanity from the pathology of the nation state. Resistance, through various forms of creative and bold nonviolence, no matter the risks involved, especially at the local level everywhere, is now our obligation knowing our survival with dignity is at stake.

Veterans who choose to become truth tellers are among our most important resources in the United States.

S. Brian Willson

USAF, 1966-1970, Viet Nam 1969. Trained lawyer. Activist.

The FBI and Martin Luther King, Jr.

In December 1963, four months after the large civil rights march on Wash, DC, a nine-hr conference was held at FBI HQ to discuss ways to “neutralize” Martin Luther King, Jr. A prepared list of 21 proposals was discussed – “using” ministers, “disgruntled” acquaintances, “aggressive” newsmen, “colored” agents, Dr. King’s housekeeper, & a suggestion to use King’s wife or “placing a good looking female plant in King’s office” to develop info for use “at an opportune time in a counterintelligence move to discredit him” w/o embarrassment to the Bureau. [Pepper, W. F. (2003). "An Act of State: The Execution of Martin Luther King." London: Verso, p. 11].

The reason King Finally had to be completely neutralized:

After King’s radical speech on April 4, 1967 against the Viet Nam War, that included a call for a revolution away from capitalism toward a socially just society, he began discussing strategies to address the widening gap between rich & poor, i.e., taking the class problem head-on. By November 1967, his plan for a Poor People’s Campaign was taking shape. This included a permanent tent city of as many as 500,000 people to be called “Resurrection City” encamped on Wash., DC’s mall starting May 1968, to remain until the government re-directed all its money devoted to the barbaric war to a new socially just society at home. The plan was based on need to “disrupt” cities to create a crisis without destroying life or property. King wanted to create an action that did “not count on government good will,” that would be a “force that interrupts its functioning.” The plan was to be “dislocative and even disruptive” because “pressureless persuasion does not move the power structure.” He had concluded that the “old style” kind of march on Washington “isn’t sufficiently crisis-packed.” King’s words were simply becoming too threatening to maintenance of the status quo: “There must be a radical reordering of our national priorities…We’re not going to Washington to beg. I hope we are beyond that stage. We are going to Washington to demand what is ours.” [Pepper, W. F. (2003). "An Act of State: The Execution of Martin Luther King." London: Verso, p. 7; Garrow, D. J. (1988). "Bearing the Cross." NY: Vintage, pp. 574-624].

On March 3, 1968, one month before King’s April 4 assassination, a memo by J. Edgar Hoover identified an FBI “Counter-Intelligence Program” directed against “Black Nationalist Hate-Groups:”

1. “Prevent the coalition of black nationalist groups…[which] might be the first step toward a real ‘Mau Mau’ in America, the beginning of a true black revolution.”

2. “Prevent the rise of a ‘messiah’ who could unify and electrify the militant black nationalist movement…King could be a very real contender for this position should he abandon his supposed ‘obedience’ to ‘white liberal doctrines’ (nonviolence) and embrace black nationalism…” [Trager, J. (1992). "The People’s Chronology." NY: Henry Holt and Co., p. 1015].

Neutralization in Viet Nam

In Viet Nam at the same time in 1968, the US was carrying out a separate program called PHOENIX to “neutralize” as many as 3,000 Vietnamese community leaders/month, using CIA-trained assassination squads, some known as Provincial Reconnaissance Units (PRU). [Sheehan, N. (1988). "A Bright Shining Lie." NY: Random House, p. 732]. As many as 87,000 Vietnamese were neutralized – imprisoned, tortured, murdered, or converted. [Prados, J. (1996). "President's Secret Wars." Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, p. 309].

US ORIGINS In Genocide/Extermination:

But this policy of eliminating people, whether in the form of genocide of whole peoples, or of key individuals who possessed followers, when they are perceived in the way of White Man’s “progress” – prosperity for the few through expansion at any cost – has been the guiding cultural ethos of USAmerica since our origins.

Starting in 1600s:

The British arrived in Jamestown, VA in 1607. A policy of intentional extermination of the native population began almost immediately. “Hundreds of Indians were killed in skirmish after skirmish. Other hundreds were killed in successful plots of mass poisoning. They were hunted down by dogs, ‘blood-Hounds to draw after them, and Mastives to seize them.’ Their canoes and fishing weirs were smashed, their villages and agricultural fields burned to the ground. Indian peace offers were accepted by the English only until their prisoners were returned; then, having lulled the natives into false security, the colonists returned to the attack. It was the colonists’ expressed desire that the Indians be exterminated, rooted ‘out from being longer a people upon the face of the Earth.’ In a single raid the settlers destroyed corn sufficient to feed four thousand people for a year. Starvation and the massacre of non-combatants was becoming the preferred British approach to dealing with the natives.” [Stannard, D. E. (1992). "American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World." NY: Oxford University Press, p. 106].

Long before Thomas Jefferson’s desire to “exterminate” the Indians,  and George Washington had said that Indians were “wolves and beasts” who deserved nothing from the whites but total ruin, the MASSACHUSETTS BAY COLONY in 1630 made it illegal to “shoot off a gun in any unnecessary occasion, or at any game EXCEPT an Indian or a wolf.” [Stannard, D. E. (1992). "American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World." NY: Oxford University Press, pp. 240-41].

“Founding Fathers”

In 1812, Thomas Jefferson, now a senior sage out of office, concluded that White Americans were “obliged” to drive the “backward” Indians” with the beasts of the forests into the Stony Mountains”; in 1813 Jefferson stated that the American government had no other choice before it than “to pursue [the Indians] to extermination, or drive them to new seats beyond our reach.” In other words, the Native Americans are to be given the choice “to be extirpated from the earth” or to remove themselves out of the White Americans way. Thus, to the majority of White Americans the choice for Indians was one of expulsion or extermination.  [Stannard, D. E. (1992). "American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World." NY: Oxford University Press, p. 120].

Scalping Bounties

Extermination was officially promoted by a “scalp bounty” on dead Indians. “Indeed, in many areas it [Indian-killing] became an outright business.”

Thomas Jefferson, writing to his Secretary of War in 1807, instructed that any native resistance to U.S. expansion into their territories should be overcome militarily, with the object that the Indians be “exterminated, or driven beyond the Mississippi.” This was sound policy, he claimed, because “in war, they [Indians] will kill some of us; we shall destroy all of them.” [Churchill, W. (1997). "A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas, 1492 to the Present." San Francisco: City Light Books, pp. 150, 181-182].

Washington’s Orders to Sullivan:

Continental Army Supreme General George Washington’s orders to General Sullivan in 1779 during the Revolutionary War made it clear he wanted the Iroquois threat completely eliminated:

Orders of George Washington to General John Sullivan, at Head-Quarters May 31, 1779:

“The Expedition you are appointed to command is to be directed against the hostile tribes of the Six Nations of Indians, with their associates and adherents. The immediate objects are the total destruction and devastation of their settlements, and the capture of as many prisoners of every age and sex as possible. It will be essential to ruin their crops now in the ground and prevent their planting more.

I would recommend, that some post in the center of the Indian Country, should be occupied with all expedition, with a sufficient quantity of provisions whence parties should be detached to lay waste all the settlements around, with instructions to do it in the most effectual manner, that the country may not be merely overrun, but destroyed.

But you will not by any means listen to any overture of peace before the total ruinment of their settlements is effected. Our future security will be in their inability to injure us and in the terror with which the severity of the chastisement they receive will inspire them.”

[Writings of George Washington. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, XV, pp. 189-93; Drinnon, R. (1980). Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating and Empire-Building. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, p. 331].

US Historical Operating Principles (several of which are explicit in George Washington’s orders):

1. Total War, civilians and combatants alike considered legitimate targets

2. Preventing/Not Wanting Peace

3. Preventive and Pre-emptive War

4. Terror

5. Torture

6. Revenge

The political-economic market system we have grown up with and support with our tax dollars and voting patterns is a significant contributor to the problem.

Part of the revolutionary antidote, if it occurs, will be in radically changed choices each of us makes as to how we travel, what we eat, what we consume or don’t consume, etc. Take travel, for example. Air and private auto travel not only emit massive amounts of carbon molecules, accumulating as particles of mass destruction in our biosphere, they also consume inordinate amount of petroleum for each passenger mile traveled. 

If we are not committed to taking radical leaps in our own consciousness that manifests in corresponding radical changes in our lifestyles, then we choose complicity in business as usual, i.e., continuing to live as we have been conditioned and to which we are now addicted – comfortable materialism. It is absolutely and totally unsustainable. We now have an evolutionary opportunity for a leap in consciousness to integrate ourselves into a cosmological reality of living in mutual respect with all other life. So, we are the antidote, not the government or the market. As we become conscious, each daily choice we make from eating, traveling, and consuming, or not, is a revolutionary act.

“Behold my brothers, the Spring has come; the earth has received the embraces of the sun and we shall soon see the results of that love!

Every seed is awakened and so has all animal life. It is through this mysterious power that we too have our being, and we therefore yield to our neighbors, even our animal neighbors, the same right as ourselves, to inhabit this land. 

Yet, hear me, people, we have now to deal with another race – small and feeble when our fathers first met them but now great and overbearing. Strangely enough they have a mind to till the soil and the love of possession is a disease with them. These people have made many rules that the rich may break but the poor may not. They take their tithes from the poor and weak to support the rich and those who rule.

They claim this mother of ours, the earth, for their own and fence their neighbors away; they deface her with their buildings and their refuse. The nation is like a spring freshet that overruns its banks and destroys all that are in its path. 

We cannot dwell side by side. Only seven years ago we made a treaty by which we were assured that the buffalo country should be left to us forever. Now they threaten to take that away from us. My brothers, shall we submit or shall we say to them: “First kill me before you take possession of my Fatherland…”

Our love of possession is our disease.