Fire Witch Rising

For you Denverites looking for some salty, witty feminist analysis of contemporary Denver politics check out Fire Witch Rising. Fire Witch, perhaps someone I know, hopefully someone I will know, was kind enough to cross-post "The Fist of A Ghost." Her tag-line Come At Me With Crapitalist White Male Supremacy And I'll Burn You cracked me up. One of my favorite articles is entitled "Chestbeating Quaker Bigot Barks: 'Not in My Town,'" about Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper's posturing to keep Denver "safe from gangs." Happy to see their are more blog bullets flying at the city of Denver than state bullets hitting citizens, I regretfully acknowledge we have a long summer ahead. With the DNC coming, helicopters flying over the city, homeless people being harassed by cops, and fascists attacking undocumented workers, I am glad to know that the radical political, cultural, and social life of Denver will be holding Hickenlooper, the Denver Police Department, and the Democratic and Republican political parties accountable for their nonsense policies, their violence against civic life, and their grotesque exploitation of resources on militarizing our city for the upcoming convention.

Colorado Indymedia Prepares for DNC Coverage

Saturday, June 14th more than 20 media activists gathered together at the Five Points Media Center in the offices of Free Speech TV to learn how to be the media. Colorado Indymedia conducted the training in the hopes that grassroots activists could begin to document their own stories and struggles during the Democratic National Convention.

Preparing participants to use video, radio, photo, print, and web tools to document the protests and participation in the Democratic National Convention, trainers presented a wide variety of tools and techniques for grassroots journalism and production.

Participants included members of Coloradans for Immigrant Rights, Recreate 68, and Unconventional Action. Trainers came from Colorado Indymedia, Free Speech TV, KGNU, and Indymedia Newsreel.

I was happy to see so many people come together to learn about producing media and am looking forward to seeing the fruit of their work documenting struggle in the streets and the halls of the convention in the next few months.

Gangs: Please Get out of the Capitalists' Bed

Eager to find reasons to police poor people and people of color, city officials, most often in bed with or inseparable from developers, have many reasons to love gang violence. Its neither their run of the mill perverse love of structural oppression nor their glee that poor people are focusing their rage on each other rather than the ruling class that wets their whistle.

No, developers LOVE cops.

They love reasons to escalate police presence and justify it in the name of "crime," a codeword for poverty and color. Now, whether cops or developers intentionally escalate gang violence is debatable. Certainly, if cops and feds are snooping around and trying on the panties of Quakers and other non-violent anti-war activists, chances are they've also infiltrated and influence the habits of street gangs. As such, it would not be unthinkable that agent provocateurs actually spur rivalries between street gangs in order to justify an escalation of militarized policing.

In Denver, as we've seen the beginnings of Guiliani style "broken-windows policing" we have also seen the media focus on the rise of gang activity. As millions of dollars are being funneled into the city to bolster police presence in time for the Democratic National Convention, reports of high incidence of crime pave the way for the bullies in blue to enter our neighborhoods. Police arresting poor people is great for developers--they win contracts for building prisons in rural communities and condos in urban communities. As people of color and poor people suffer, the rich get richer.

This scam, of course, is called capitalism. It is what we want to destroy.

In destroying capitalism, we have to determine what our relationship with gangs will be. I choose to avoid relationships with the gangs in power: the police, the corporations, and most politicians; however, street gangs may be a different matter. Building power from below requires working with all of those who are being oppressed by the contemporary society. The anti-police attitude of many gang members and gang associates should be a natural bonding point as we engage in self-defense against the perpetual environmental, military, and economic attacks on our communities from the capitalist elite and their armed brutes.

Gangs destroying each other will only aid capitalist development and justifications of militaristic presence in our neighborhoods. Gangs attacking developers, police, and agents of gentrification might be an early sign of class resistance akin to militant attacks on coal companies, developers, and gentrifying tourists that occurred in the Appalachian mountains during the seventies.

Attacking developers, state terrorists (police), and agents of gentrification will only be useful if communities take as seriously, rather more seriously, the importance of creating local economies, vibrant cultural and educational institutions, and spaces for joy and liberation that are local and connected globally to other localisms.

To sum up: gangs should stop fighting each other and pick more ethical targets. Rather than picking on gangs, we should find some targets too. In the meantime, working with all members of our community, both within and out of prison, gangs, or even more dangerously the 9-5 workday, we should create an autonomous, effective, and uncompromising culture of liberation hellbent on replacing capitalism with an autonomous, egalitarian, just, and pleasurable form of existence.