truthout.org
Wednesday 01 October 2008
by: Robert Schwartz, Labor Notes

An overlooked order by the Labor Board’s lead lawyer this summer dealt a serious blow to the rights of U.S. workers to protest government policies.

    On May Day 2006, hundreds of thousands of immigrant workers walked off their jobs to protest restrictive immigration legislation. Some were fired, and brought complaints to the board. Ronald Meisburg, the National Labor Relations Board general counsel, responded by posting a directive on “political advocacy” this July that enables bosses to immediately fire employees who participate in work stoppages of a political nature.

The directive, as yet apparently unnoticed by both unions and labor lawyers, cannot be appealed. Read the rest of this entry »

 Salon.com
Glenn Greenwald

Sunday Aug. 31, 2008 11:46 EDT

As the police attacks on protesters in Minnesota continue — see this video of the police swarming a bus transporting members of Earth Justice, seizing the bus and leaving the group members stranded on the side of the highway — it appears increasingly clear that it is the Federal Government that is directing this intimidation campaign. Minnesota Public Radio reported yesterday that “the searches were led by the Ramsey County Sheriff’s office. Deputies coordinated searches with the Minneapolis and St. Paul police departments and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”

Today’s Star Tribune added that the raids were specifically “aided by informants planted in protest groups.” Back in May, Marcy Wheeler presciently noted that the Minneapolis Joint Terrorist Task Force — an inter-agency group of federal, state and local law enforcement led by the FBI — was actively recruiting Minneapolis residents to serve as plants, to infiltrate “vegan groups” and other left-wing activist groups and report back to the Task Force about what they were doing. There seems to be little doubt that it was this domestic spying by the Federal Government that led to the excessive and truly despicable home assaults by the police yesterday.
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Paul Joseph Watson | PrisonPlanet.com

Hundreds of police, firefighters, paramedics and utility workers have been trained and recently dispatched as “Terrorism Liaison Officers” in Colorado, Arizona and California to watch for “suspicious activity” which is later fed into a secret government database.

According to a Denver Post report, “It’s a tactic intended to feed better data into terrorism early-warning systems and uncover intelligence that could help fight anti-U.S. forces. But the vague nature of the TLOs’ mission, and their focus on reporting both legal and illegal activity, has generated objections from privacy advocates and civil libertarians.

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Pain compliance device used to disperse crowd as military-industrial complex tools up to deal with dissenters

Paul Joseph Watson | PrisonPlanet.com 

The Pentagon proudly displayed what it has in store for anti-war protesters last night during a CBS 60 minutes feature which depicted the use of the army’s “Active Denial System” against peace demonstrators at Moody Air Force Base in Georgia.

The Active Denial System is a giant raygun that directs a sizzling hot beam at its target, causing instant pain and forcing the subject(s) to disperse.

Similar to the Taser, the machine acts as a form of pain compliance or torture. It was designed in secret for 10 years before being unveiled in 2001.

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