Posted on 06/15/2004 3:46:04 PM PDT by ssaftler
NEW YORK - Passing up road trips, beach vacations and barbecues, thousands of anti-Bush demonstrators are heading to summer school to learn how to stage successful sit-ins and what to do if pepper spray burns their eyes. Welcome to Convention Protesting 101.
Before the GOP convention begins Aug. 30, veteran activists will train protesters in street tactics, legal issues, public relations and first aid. Their aim: creating a force of demonstrators to carry out safe and organized protests.
"When you're protesting in New York City," said John Sellers, the director of a California-based group that trains activists, "you're definitely in the big leagues."
As city officials weigh which protest groups will get permits for official events, activists are quietly learning how to block doorways or street intersections and when to use passive body language — such as sitting down — to disarm police officers trying to make an arrest.
Trainers say they aren't urging protesters to break the law. But arrests are inevitable, and protesters are also offering legal training.
"The Republicans would love to have images coming out of New York City that make them look like the reasonable ones, like they're about responsibility and law and order and creating a safe society, and that the left was unreasonable and violent," Sellers said. "If we don't recognize that, then we're not being very strategic."
The instruction includes skills for responding to rogue protesters intent on causing lawlessness. Veterans expect thousands of untrained demonstrators to swarm city streets.
Sellers' group, the Ruckus Society, founded in 1995, will hold at least one weekend training camp this summer. Using many of the same principles, local activists are already gathering in churches, homes and public places throughout the city to teach classes, which will increase in frequency as the four-day convention approaches.
(Excerpt) Read more at story.news.yahoo.com ...
Oh for heaven's sake. This should be fun. The button downs meet the bozos. Bwahahaha. Can't wait actually.
Two words: Riker's Island
thanks for the ping.
I am a Delegate to the Convention. So I guess I'm going to have to figure out a legal means of self defense.
I have one of those Kit-Kat eye poker outers, but that seems unusually violent for a Grandmother. Perhaps I'll pack a part of my antique hatpin collection. They're nice and long and will work nicely for self defense.
Be careful out there.
I PINGED my entire list for all to see.
They are going to be surprised, when their ass is handed to them.........in BOSTON.
I clicked on the full article and was shocked by the rest of the information. This will hit home with the Washington State posters, you need to call it to their attention.
I meant to address my post to you. Your article is most informative and shocking. Please post it on a separate thread and ping the Washington State posters.
Thanks.
The Ruckus Society was founded in late 1995 by two giants of the radical environmentalist movement: Mike Roselle and Howard “Twilly” Cannon. Roselle was a founder of Earth First! (of 1980s tree-spiking fame), the group which spun off the domestic terrorist Earth Liberation Front in 1992. He also co-founded the radical Rainforest Action Network. Cannon built his extremist credentials as a front-line activist and ship’s captain with Greenpeace’s French and Russian anti-nuclear campaigns.
Ruckus is turning into a violent version of Forrest Gump, grooming the footsoldiers of the “protest industry” for every major newsworthy protest event since its founding. Activists descending on San Diego for the 2001 “biodevastation” demonstrations (railing against life-saving food technology) looked to Ruckus leaders for planning, logistics, media attention, and physical tactics. The same can be said for the massive and violent protests against Philadelphia’s 2000 Republican Convention, and the aggressive anti-World Bank demonstrations in Washington, DC, during that same year. In these two latter cases (as with Seattle), serious damage was done to private and public property alike. In Philadelphia alone, 23 police cars were damaged and 15 officers were injured.
Whether the target du jour is biotech foods, the World Bank, the World Trade Organization, or globalization in general, the organization recruits, trains, transports, and houses the army of militants needed to earn media coverage and make life difficult for the rest of us. Some observers have even claimed that Ruckus paid protesters to show up in Seattle. Joseph Bast, president of the Heartland Institute, wrote that one protester there told a colleague, “Sorry, I’ve got to go. If I don’t get to the finish line of the march I don’t get paid.”
Ruckus itself has no problem getting paid, reaping six-figure grant awards from the likes of Ted Turner and the “caring capitalists” at Ben & Jerry’s. When the multinational corporation Unilever bought the ice cream maker in 2000, it agreed to continue Ben & Jerry’s bizarre flavor of philanthropy for the foreseeable future. The Turner foundation has also contributed heavily to Ruckus, including over $150,000 in grants made via The Ecology Center, Inc., a Montana group where Ruckus’ first slate of officers met in the mid-1990s.
Ruckus’s primary contributions to the activist agenda are its “action camps”: weeklong boot camps for leftist protesters, usually held a few weeks prior to a major organized demonstration. A few hundred young Ruckus recruits typically attend each camp, where they are trained in the finer points of “police confrontation strategies,” “street blockades,” “urban climbing & rappelling,” “using the media to your advantage,” and “learning to lock your head to something” (among other things). Predictably, food served at the activist camps is vegetarian all the way. One 1998 camp chef told The Washington Post that “people here have some serious views on food, but that’s to be expected.” A participant in the same event adamantly insisted to a CNN camera crew: “Absolutely no meat whatsoever; no meat products, by-products, whatsoever.”
If you’ve heard of Ruckus Society at all, it was probably in relation to the 1999 World Trade Organization protests in Seattle. Americans watched in horror as organized hoodlums ran roughshod over the city’s commercial district, smashing windows, setting fires, overturning vehicles, ransacking a Starbucks coffee shop and a McDonald’s restaurant, and generally putting lives at risk. It’s no coincidence that the Ruckus Society staffers were in the middle of the melee, giving on-the-record quotes to national media figures. Nor was it an accident that Ruckus director John Sellers represented the protesters when the terms of their arrest were being negotiated with Seattle police. The Ruckus Society is generally credited with organizing the whole Seattle spectacle in the first place. When the dust had settled, Sellers smugly told USA Today, “We kicked the WTO’s butt all over the Northwest.”
Did you write that post on Ruckus yourself? I am asking because I am planning to write a letter to the editor of our local paper, The Bellingham Herald, and I may use some of your post. Please ping the Washington State group on this.
I thought that you were saying no to pinging the WA State group, until I clicked on the link. Thanks.
In 1996 he sailed with the Rainbow warrior to halt drift net fishing. He has traveled extensively throughout North America coordinating direct actions for Rainforest Action Network, Adbusters, Earth First!, Project Underground, Code Pink, the International Rivers Network, Students for a Free Tibet, the United Steel Workers of America and many others. John played a central role in Ruckus's efforts during the WTO summit in Seattle 1999.
Law-enforcement officials held him on one million dollars' bail at the 2000 Philadelphia Democratic convention.
He has been permanently banned from Canada. . . but enjoys sneaking in whenever possible.
That's saying something for Philadelphia, but of course that was the Democrat convention. Uh,oh, no it wasn't the Republican convention was in Philadelphia. Now it makes sense. New York better be prepared.
Maybe the NYPD could protest them? A chant of "More soap, less stink".
Philadelphia in 2000 was the Republicans. The Dems were in LA where they could have their little fundraiser at the playboy mansion.
If this weren't so serious, it would be funny. Imagine having to teach dem protestors to act ignorant or evil.
Darth Sidious: "Wipe them out! All of them!"
You saw this, right?
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