“Copenhagen police ended up preemptively arresting nearly a thousand people Saturday. Another 230 protesters were preemptively arrested on Sunday during a demonstration to block the city’s ports.” –Democracy Now, Dec.14,2009
http://i3.democracynow.org/2009/12/14/using_controversial_law_danish_police_preemptively
Thank you en dank je wel to Jan Lundberg, my long-distance Dutch mentor, for keeping me in the loop over the years with his missives on Culture Change. Jan is founder of the Sustainable Energy Institute (formerly Fossil Fuels Policy Action), a nonprofit organization. Today I received the following article and photographs:
Cop-enhagen: Preemptive Mass Arrests in Context of History of Danes’Movement
By David Rovics
“The signs up all over the airport and various places elsewhere in town are calling it Hopenhagen, but everybody I know is calling it Cop-enhagen, which seems far more appropriate.

The international media have been giving this lots of coverage, and rightly so. Of course much of the media is unable to walk and chew gum at the same time, so other things, such as the reason the protests are happening in the first place, can get lost.
Inside the Bella Center lots of stuff is going on. Namely the U.S., Australia and others leading the way in making sure nothing meaningful takes place there, while many other delegates and activists within try to make the best of it, or at least make the effort to thoroughly expose the bankruptcy of the position taken by the rich countries.
The center itself is divided into floors where the big decisions are being made, and then the rest of the place for the little people, the delegates from unimportant countries like Tuvalu, representatives of small NGOs and other riffraff.
Many of the folks involved with the process inside are dividing their time between the meetings and events outside in the streets and at the alternative conference going on elsewhere in town.
Copenhagen is a beautiful city. The architecture in the heart of the city is understated but exudes the wealth of a place that was once the capital of a fairly sizeable empire. Of course, though the Danish empire brought
some riches home to Copenhagen, the wealth of modern Denmark is far greater, that being the product not so much of empire but of the Danish labor movement and Danish social democracy.”
To read the rest of this article and see photographs, click here:
http://www.culturechange.org/go.html?575
Source:
Culture Change. Mailing address: P.O. Box 4347, Arcata , California 95518 USA, Telephone 1-215-243-3144 (and fax).
About Culture Change:
http://www.culturechange.org/cms/index.php?option=com_frontpage&Itemid=1
Culture Change was founded by Sustainable Energy Institute (formerly Fossil Fuels Policy Action), a nonprofit organization.
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Copenhagen Climate Summit:http://www.democracynow.org/tags/copenhagen_climate_summit
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