Consider these recent news stories:

In Tampa, Florida a couple weeks ago, the FCC and a multi-jurisdictional SWAT team raided the home of a couple operating an unlicensed neighborhood radio station. The low watt station, so well established that it had worked for years with local police on a neighborhood block watch program, was destroyed, along with many of the couple's other possessions and their home, while their family was terrorized for hours by gun-toting commandos. The brutal arrests apparently were intended to send a "message" after the FCC recently lost a California court ruling on the constitutionality of its ban on micropower radio stations. (More details on this in an upcoming Media Watch column.)

On Thanksgiving Day, Native Americans gather annually in Plymouth, MA, to protest the town fathers' promulgation of the Thanksgiving myth and to highlight the genocidal history of the Pilgrims (and their descendants). This year, the peaceful contingent of elders, women, and children was met by cops literally lying in wait with riot gear and pepper spray; numerous protesters were injured and 25 arrested for the crime of "unlawful assembly." (On land stolen from them in the first place.)

Among many other APEC stories, a leader of student protests at the Univ. of British Columbia in Vancouver last month was arrested days before the conference by the RCMP and charged with assault on an officer. The charge came from a demonstration three weeks earlier in which the activist supposedly "assaulted" an officer by speaking too loudly into a megaphone, damaging the hearing of an onlooking cop. The RCMP insisted, as a condition of the student's release, that he sign an agreement pledging not to speak publicly or attend any (otherwise lawful) gatherings protesting APEC or the policies of its attending countries.

This fall's pepper spray torture of Headwaters protesters in the office of Rep. Frank Riggs (R-CA) was met by international outrage, particularly inflamed by the callousness demonstrated in the video made by Riggs' office of the event, and Riggs' outspoken endorsement of the torture. But it's only one of many such stories of police using pepper spray--at times, lethally--to punish, as well as control, nonviolent demonstrators. (See, for example, the description of an assault upon Eugene, Oregon protesters in Stump Talk, ETS! #41.)

Riggs' own congressional district also contains Pelican Bay, the most brutal of the California state gulags--prisons that have repeatedly been found by courts and international human rights groups to use torture and to target political prisoners. Such "supermax" prisons are all the rage, operating in dozens of states (including Washington) and federally. The U.S. incarcerates a far greater percentage of its citizens than any other country in the world, to widespread public approval; prison populations have tripled in less than a generation.

Locally, the Seattle Police Department remains militarized, racist, and unaccountable to the public. 40 years of public protest and shootings of unarmed black kids resulted this June in the naming of one civilian, attorney Jenny Durkan, as an observer to SPD's Firearms Review Board; she has no vote and no access to internal SPD documents. The PR scam of "community policing" puts a happy face on a force that, like most in big U.S. cities, is increasingly militarized and alienated from communities; and, like most, practices surveillance and harassment of citizens engaged in legal political activism. (See, for example, "Watching the Detectives," ETS! #32.) The once-controversial "Weed and Seed" program is now in 150 cities nationally. In Seattle, the "seed" money is being used, for example, to help the SPD take over the Black Community Festival as a showcase for cop propaganda; the far more plentiful "weed" money is being used for hi-tech commando weapons and 4 AM SWAT raids on suspected drug dealers. When Seattle's Weed & Seed grants run out next year, the "seeds" will be gone; the kill toys will stay.

Each of these issues, and dozens more, are by themselves the focus of citizen concern and outrage. But taken as a whole, they add up to a frightening pattern of a nation at war with itself and increasingly intolerant of political dissent. Such dissent, while allegedly protected by the Constitution, has in fact been a dicey proposition throughout U.S. history; cycles of repression in the last century include the labor wars of the late 1800s, the Palmer Raids in the '20s, and McCarthyism.

One of the legacies of that history of repression is the remarkably narrow (and conservative) spectrum of mainstream political opinion and debate in the U.S. today--less variety, even, than in countries like Cuba, Iran, China, Israel, etc., that we normally think of as repressive.

Today, at a time of rising inequity, when many Americans think there's something dreadfully wrong going on with their country, we need more debate, not less. Instead, we appear to be entering another cycle of repression, one whose capacity to inflict state-sponsored misery is made all the scarier by new technology. Isolated stories like the ones listed above demand a unified response--not just for the sake of the particular stories, but to assert the right of all of us to meaningful political debate in this country and in all the other countries where global capitalism carries guns. Here, with widespread political support for stripping the Bill of Rights in the name of "public safety," police state measures against political activists are a warning sign that we need more activists and more media coverage of activism. Speak now, before remaining silent is our only remaining right.

--Geov Parrish