G20

Below is a statement that you are being asked to sign.   We believe it is urgent to get as many signatures on a call for a public inquiry We believe it is possible to shift the terms to debate, and to shine a spotlight on the abusive police practices during the G8/G20. But we need your help to do that.

 Please sign on and circulate the call widely to friends, colleagues, allies and networks who might be willing to sign.  

Email TheTorontoCall@gmail.com  and with your name, affiliation and which category you prefer to be placed in (trade unionists, faculty, students, community activists, legal workers, teachers, cultural workers, arrested and detained)

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The police response to the protests against the G8/G20 in Toronto was the largest mass arrest in Canadian history, surpassing the 1993 Clayoquot Sound logging blockade.

It constituted the most far-reaching single assault on political
rights in the Canadian state since the War Measures Act of 1970.

For people sitting at home and watching TV news last night, Toronto was burning.  The same police car on Queen St W. burned and blew up over and over again.  The same image of a young man very violently smashing Starbucks windows appeared over and over again.  Windows smashed all along Yonge St.  None of us had ever seen Toronto like this.  It was shocking. 

Lucas Oleniuk, Toronto Star

This morning police raided a Toronto home and arrested four organizers.  No doubt this is an example of preventative detention yet another tactic in the arsenal of repression known as the Miami protocol that has turned our city into a police state. 

Last Friday I walked along the security fence and felt like I was in a concentration camp and that was before thousands of police officers occupied our city.  That's how it feels now, a city under occupation.  No-one has rights now.  Two friends from Vancouver were having a snooze in the park at 9 am in Kensington Market and woke up surrounded by 10 cops searching their bags.  When they asked what the cops thought they were doing, the reply was "you are sleeping in the park.  That's illegal."  At 9 am?

This is an excellent argument against the fire bombing of an RBC branch in Ottawa in protest of the RBC 's financing of the Olympics and the Tar Sands, and one of the best critiques of "diversity of tactics" that I have seen.  Originally published The Bullet, published by Socialist Project

As I suspected my post on violence had a lot of reaction, see below.  Also thanks to Michelle Langlois for posting it on babble, where it produced an excellent discussion.  Below is a great article on the G20

There was a pause, and an eerie silence, just before he did it. A green scarf masking his face, the man held a large piece of scaffolding above his head and, surrounded by photographers, eyeballed the unprotected window of the Royal Bank of Scotland's branch on Threadneedle Street.

In that split second, one voice amid thousands in the crowd broke the silence. "Don't do it," she screamed. He did.