Monbiot - Ecoterrorism - The Non-Existent Threat On Which We Spend Millions - Guardian

[hatrack]

This is what the head of a police unit set up to monitor domestic extremism said in 2009: "I've never said – and we don't see – that any environmentalist is going to or has committed any violent acts." That chimes with my experience. Two years ago I searched all the literature I could lay hands on, and couldn't find a single proven instance of a planned attempt in the UK to harm people in the cause of defending the environment. (That's in sharp contrast to animal rights campaigning, where there has been plenty of violence.) No one has yet produced a factual challenge to that conclusion. Yet every year a shadowy body spends most of its £5m budget on countering a non-existent threat that officers call eco-terrorism.

The National Public Order Intelligence Unit (NPOIU) employed the undercover officer Mark Kennedy, who was embedded and bedded for seven years among peaceful green activists. Kennedy claims that it has supervised 15 other undercover agents on the same mission. But what is the mission? Sorry, can't tell you. NPOIU is run by the Association of Chief Police Officers. As Simon Jenkins pointed out last week , Acpo is not a police force but a private limited company, beyond democratic scrutiny, not subject to freedom of information laws. While it receives much of its funding from the government, it is not accountable to the public. It looks to me like a state-sanctioned private militia, fighting public protest on behalf of corporations.

Until it was forced to back down by bad publicity, one of the other units that Acpo runs published a list of domestic extremists, to help its officers identify dangerous elements. Dr Peter Harbour, a 70-year-old retired physicist and university lecturer, found his name on the list. Apart from the occasional speeding ticket, he has never been tried or convicted of an offence. So why was he on the database? Because he had peacefully marched, demonstrated and petitioned against a proposal by RWE npower, which owned Didcot power station, to drain the beautiful lake beside his village and fill it with pulverised fly ash. He had broken no law, damaged no property, issued no threats. Dr Harbour wrote to the unit, asking for his name to be removed from its blacklist. It refused.

NPOIU, the unit for which Kennedy worked, runs a similar list of extremists – which means people who have attended a protest or a public meeting. Surveillance officers are given spotter cards so that they can follow people on the database and monitor their movements. Vehicles which have been used by protesters are tracked all over the country by number-plate recognition cameras. One man, who has never been convicted of an offence, has been stopped 25 times because his car appears on the list. There is no obvious connection between the kind of people in these files and criminality: they're distinguished only by the fact that they have taken an interest in politics. You might expect that this would mark them out as good citizens. But this policing appears to have nothing to do with the public good. If the claims that Kennedy also functioned as an agent provocateur are true, it has nothing to do with upholding the law. Acpo appears to be persecuting peaceful citizens who are trying to protect the places and values they cherish from destructive companies.

Twenty of the activists whose plans Kennedy betrayed to his handlers were convicted on the desperate charge of conspiracy to commit aggravated trespass. This means they had decided to step on to property belonging to the power company E.ON. The prosecutors couldn't find anything more serious to throw at them. Aggravated trespass is a crime invented by the previous Conservative government, to prosecute protesters who weren't otherwise breaking the law. The judge who passed sentence described these dangerous criminals as "decent" people with "the highest possible motives" (they were campaigning to prevent climate breakdown). The case against another six was dropped when the police realised they would have to release documents about Kennedy's activities, and tanked the trial.

EDIT

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jan/17/eco-terrorism-policing-environmental-activists

[GliderGuider]

1. Monbiot wakes up to the purpose of power hierarchies and the institutions that guard them

At the tip of the pyramid are the corporations, the true holders of power.

Below them are the political institutions that legitimize all the others. Because of its unique ability to make laws and its access to legalized violence to defend them, politics is the primary self-defense mechanism of the power pyramid.

Legal institutions and the police enforce the norms of the hierarchy, including the preferential defense of property rights over human rights, and form the tip of the spear that keeps the power-holders safe from the powerless.

Educational institutions teach successive generations how the system works. It gives those at the tip of the pyramid the tools to manipulate it, while training everyone involved to see the pyramid of hierarchy as the only possible way the world can work.

Communications media enlist people in the power/growth/ownership paradigm through advertising, messages embedded in the story lines of entertainment, and the selective editing and presentation style of news programs. People who are programmed by this constant messaging come to regard any values that challenge the existing structure as incomprehensible, self-evidently absurd, dangerous or even insane.

The whole interlocked edifice acts as a pump that moves power (transfigured into wealth) away from the powerless and to the powerful - who just happen to own the corporations at the tip of the pyramid.

[Nederland]

2. What is the solution?

How can we reduce the power of corporations? Stop buying their products?

[GliderGuider]

4. There isn't an overarching "solution", but there are things we can do

Become aware of the propaganda in the schools and media, work to repeal corporate personhood, reduce our personal consumption to essentials and make sure those are as local as possible, opt out of as much of the general social (i.e. corporate) belief-set as we can. We need to do everything we can think of to reduce the control that corporate culture has over our minds and bodies.

[joshcryer]

3. Half of this crap is probably psyops, just to keep these government agencies paid.

They find some idiots who want to talk smack and do direct action and then arrest those idiots when they do it. In the US there was even a chick who wanted to fuck peoples lives up and she, as a federal agent, provided everyone with everything they needed to do some direct action. Now some people are spending 20+ years in prison because of what she did. All because she was a chick and they wanted to impress her.

On the scheme of things there exist no legitimate Crake.