FBI’s 5-Step Process to Criminalize First Amendment Activity as “Terrorism”

Face it. The people who exploit the working class citizens of this country have all the money and have bought our elected officials. The ruler's children and our politician's children work on Wall St., as Chelsea Clinton does selling hedge funds, and their parents make bail outs designed to save their asses.

The politicians do not have money for SINGLE PAYER MEDICAL CARE, medicare and social security which they want to privatize for Wall St., but they have trillions to bail out their campaign contributors and their relatives on Wall St. (and their political supporters in Kenya).

Our leaders and their funders want to deep bow to the Saudi prince while saying they are not in Afghanistan for women's rights (and making a point to only nod to a female queen).

These oligarchs will defend the pharmaceuticals and the university researchers who torture animals for profit while using the opportunity to curtail all of our protests. They want to be ready for the coming revolution of the working class. So they are starting with the threat to the big money university welfare class.

I won't go into the money wasting stupidity of these useless, cruel and duplicative experiments on animals, dogs, cats, primates, which are funded by our tax money. I will just say that all that working class citizens have is their numbers and their right to protest under the first amendment. These rights have been under threat for years and have been restricted until legitimate protests are allowed only far away from the source of the oppression.

Now it is the animal rights people whose protest are being declared criminal. Next it will be the few unions the rich have not bought off or that have not been corrupted. Who do they say is at fault in the GM failure?? The executives who have been looting the company while producing gas guzzlers for the Saudis' profit? No, the Union is to blame for their "extravagant" pensions.

Are our politicians offering to cut their really extravagant pensions for the good of the country? No . Of course not. But they use the tactics below to demonize the workers in unions. And all because they want cheap labor to increase those executive's salaries. We wouldn't have all this trouble if we could legitimize all those illegal immigrants and hire them. They will not ask for pensions.

Then it will be the closed border people and those who want to reduce the millions who are in-sourced into this country to take the jobs citizens want. It is happening with the e-verify movement and in the whole foods and crafts movement. You must begin to understand the tactics used to destroy rebellions. You saw it used against Hillary Clinton.

At the same time the ruling class's phony movements are legitimized. What started as a protest against bail outs, called tea parties, has morphed into a protest against tax hikes on the rich making more than $200,00.00 a year. They are not protesting property tax hikes or sales tax or use tax hikes which do hurt the working class. No they are protesting federal tax hikes on income and profits over $200,000.00 a year. This evolution of the tea party protests process has obviously been organized by people making over that amount every year. . They duped middle class and working class people into thinking they were protesting Wall St/bank bail-outs but now their media calls it a tax protest. This process of distortion is called co-optation.

As much as the ruling class attempt to destroy legitimate reform movements, they also create false movements which represent the interests of their class rather than the interests of the people they lure in with lies and deceitful tactics. They also pay organizers. Remember Harriet and Louise or whatever their names were? The TV creations who told you about the horrors of universal single payer health care?

We must learn to stand together and expose these tactics. Remember mass media is not your friend. have you noticed all the TV dramas where animal rights people kill innocent researchers although this never happened anywhere. Abortion doctors have been actually killed but we do not see too many dramas about the terrorists who kill those doctors.

It is a class based media that serves the interest of the ruling class, its' owners foreign and domestic, its' shareholders and its' advertisers. This is just as true of NPR as it is of FOX. They are just two sides of the ruling class coin. STAND TOGETHER. AN ATTACK ON ONE IS AN ATTACK ON ALL OF US.

FROM: Green Is the New Red
Feb 24th, 2009 by Will Potter

The recent FBI arrests of animal rights activists as “terrorists” for chalking sidewalks, protesting and making fliers marks a drastic turning point in the Green Scare, and in the history of this country. The government and corporations are clearly hoping to set a legal precedent for the sweeping power of the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act. But these arrests are much more than a test case, or an isolated incident of ambitious prosecution.

These arrests are part of a 5-step process the FBI and other government agencies are using to overtly label First Amendment activity as “terrorism.”

The process has worked something like this:

Label. The first step was to label illegal direct action by groups like the Animal Liberation Front and Earth Liberation Front as “terrorism.” The FBI, corporations, industry groups and politicians began doing this in the 1980s, through media campaigns, think tank reports and legislation like the Animal Enterprise Protection Act.

Guilt by association. Next, these groups expanded their smear campaign to anyone who ideological supports direct action and economic sabotage. They began labeling the above-ground supporters of those movements as “terrorists.” A turning point was the conviction of the SHAC 7 for running a controversial website that vocally supported a wide range of tactics.

More guilty by association. This is now. The guilt by association is spreading from those who vocally support direct action (and, like the SHAC 7, perhaps even publish anonymous communiques) to those who are merely lawfully protesting as part of the same campaign. In the SHAC 7 case, the government argued that the defendants were “conspiring” to promote illegal activity by running a website. In these recent arrests, the government is arguing that the First Amendment activity itself is “terrorism” because it’s part of a campaign that involves illegal tactics.

Expand the net. With the latest arrests, the government is still trying to play up the fact that illegal actions have happened recently in California, including bombings that have been recklessly attributed to animal rights activists. The next step is to completely drop that pretext. In other words, the next step is to go after people who are using their First Amendment rights and are not engaging in home protests, chalking sidewalks or wearing masks. This is the same expansion of the net that happened during the Red Scare: targeting writers, speakers, journalists, and public figures. I feel strange writing this but, in many ways, the next step is to go after people like me.

Repeat. This process will be repeated for different organizations and different types of people (activists, non-profit leaders, writers) and it will be repeated for other social movements. The government is not establishing these legal and legislative precedents simply to abandon them once the animal rights “radicals” are imprisoned. The legal latticework will be used against the next social movement, and the next, and the next. This has happened in every era of government repression throughout history: once those in power discover tools for silencing one opposition group, they never stop there.

In analyzing a process like this, it should be very clear that I don’t mean to imply, in any way, that this process is inevitable. The FBI is formulaic in how it cracks down on protest movements—we can see the patterns throughout U.S. history. The responses of activists and everyday people, though, need not follow any formula. The future is fluid. We have the power to intervene in this process—through education, community building, media outreach, lobbying, and the courts—and we must do so immediately, swiftly, and forcefully.

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