Caitlin Johnstone — Take Chances

A gentle call to action — before it is too late.

Caitlin Johnstone — Rogue Journalist
Take Chances
Caitlin Johnstone

Truthdig — Veterans Bust Through Barricades to Visit Shut Memorials

Veterans in the nation’s capital aren’t letting a little government shutdown get in the way of their visit to war memorials.

The Washington Postreports that elderly vets, along with a few grandstanding members of Congress, pushed past barricades at the World War II and Korean War memorials.

Truthdig
Veterans Bust Through Barricades to Visit Shut Memorials

OccupyWallStreet — Anonymous Call to Action: #Nov5th 2013 — the Lion Sleeps No More

Greetings world. We are anonymous. We are the people.
Governments of the world: take this message as your last will and testament. The game is officially over. Social media has given birth to something new. Now it's time to set the record straight. This video is intended as that spark that gets delivered straight into the hearts and minds of the world. This video is an idea – a shared idea – so listen very carefully and make sure you are sitting down.

On the 5th of November 2013, Anonymous call for a day of global civil disobedience. This time we target all government facilities across the globe.Calling all free thinkers: the time for civil disobedience is now.

OccupyWallStreet News
Anonymous Call to Action: #Nov5th 2013 — the Lion Sleeps No More

Peter Beaumont — Global protest grows as citizens lose faith in politics and the state

The myriad protests from Istanbul to São Paulo have one thing in common - growing dissent among the young, educated and better-off protesting against the very system that once enriched them. And therein lies the danger for governments....

If the "new protest" can be summed up, it is not in specifics of the complaints but in a wider idea about organisation encapsulated on a banner spotted in Brazil last week: "We are the social network." ...

So what's going on? An examination of the global Edelman Trust Barometer reveals a loose correlation between the ranking of a country on the trust scale and the likelihood of protests. The trust barometer is a measure of public confidence in institutions compiled by the US firm Edelman, the world's largest privately owned PR company.

In 2011, at the time the Occupy movement was being born in Zuccoti Park on Wall Street, the UK and the US were both firmly placed at the bottom of the "distrusters" while Brazil topped the "trusters". By this year Brazil had dropped 30 points on the table, while Spain and Turkey, which have both seen protests this year, were both in the distrusted category.

And as usual the pundits speculating about this global phenomenon are clueless.

The Guardian | The Observer (UK)
Global protest grows as citizens lose faith in politics and the state
Peter Beaumont | The Observer

Jeffery Brown — One Million Protesters Fill Brazil's Streets to Vent Anti-Government Grievances

Latin American Summer.

PBS NewsHour

One Million Protesters Fill Brazil's Streets to Vent Anti-Government Grievances

Jeffery Brown

AFP — Mainstream media accused of belittling Brazilian protests

Brazilians marching against corruption and the cost of the 2014 World Cup are also angry at the media, including the influential Globo network, accused of belittling their movement....

Widespread disillusionment with mainstream media has led many young protesters to turn to Facebook, Twitter, YouTube or Instagram for news. 

The Raw Story
Mainstream media accused of belittling Brazilian protests
Agence France-Presse

The protest in Brazil is turning into "a big deal," and it's not getting the coverage it deserves in the US media either.

David Edwards — Kansas official ready to use ’2nd Amendment’ against ‘illegal alien’ rally

Kansas official ready to use ’2nd Amendment’ against ‘illegal alien’ rally (via Raw Story )

Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach said he was prepared to use deadly force over the weekend after hundreds “illegal aliens” paid a visit to his home to rally for immigration reform. According to Sunflower Community Action, about 300 activists traveled to Kobach’s home after holding a prayer…

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Fascism Watch: Police to consider protesters in Istanbul’s Taksim Square terror organization members: Minister

Everyone who enters Istanbul’s Taksim Square, the heart of nearly 20-day-long protests against the government, will be considered a member or a supporter of a terrorist organization, Turkey’sEuropean Union minister said in a televised interview late last night....

“From now on the state will unfortunately have to consider everyone who remains there a supporter or member of a terror organization,” he said. “Our prime minister has already assured [activists] about their aim with the protests. The protests from now on will play into the hands of some separatist organizations that want to break the peace and prioritize vandalism and terrorism.”

Hurriyet Daily News (Turkey)
Police to consider protesters in Istanbul’s Taksim Square terror organization members: Minister

(h/t Lambert Strether at Naked Capitalism)

Soft fascism become now become hard fascism in Turkey. The true colors are coming out for all to see. Following the leadership of the US?

For analysis, see also : Dani Rodrick, Turkey’s Protests Send a Strong Message, But Will Not Bring Democracy

Anti government protest, Sofia Bulgaria 14.06.2013

From a friend on FB:

Big protest down the street near where I'm staying in [Sophia] Bulgaria. People are protesting the endless corruption on all levels of society. Reminds me of when I took to the streets to try and end the Vietnam War in America. Very exciting time. Even now, I can hear the passionate chanting of huge crowds not far away. It's time for a change here and the people are empowering themselves at last!

Anti government protest, Sofia Bulgaria 14.06.2013

Al Jazeera — Turkey angry at US comments on protests

Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu has contacted US Secretary of State John Kerry to object to recent statements from Washington expressing concern over Turkey's handling of mass anti-government protests, a foreign ministry diplomat said....

Kerry on Monday said he was concerned by reports of excessive use of force by Turkish police to quell the biggest protests since Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's decade in power, urging all sides to "avoid any provocations or violence."
Davutoglu assured Kerry an investigation was under way into the police response, the ministry source said.

The diplomat added that the foreign minister told Kerry the protests were not "extraordinary", comparing them to the Occupy Wall Street movement that sprang up in the United States in 2011.

Al Jazeera
Turkey angry at US comments on protests

Talk about rank hypocrisy. 

At least Turkey is promising to conduct an inquiry into police actions. In the US, where operations were coordinated by the Department of Homeland Security (read "secret police"), not so much. This would be laughable if it were not so pathetic.

Sara Gates — Firefighters Clash With Riot Police In Spain During Austerity Protest (PHOTOS)

The Huffington Post
Firefighters Clash With Riot Police In Spain During Austerity Protest (PHOTOS)
Sara Gates

Doesn't take much imagination to see where this is headed.

Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers — Progressive Activism Is Bubbling Up Across the Country -- Here's What's Happening That the Corporate Media Can't Be Bothered to Report

Mike Lux, who authored a history of the movements of the 1960s, wrote this week that when he researched his book he “was struck by the fact that so many big things happened so close together.” Comparing that moment to today he writes, “We are living in such a moment in history right now, that organizers and activists are sparking off each other and inspiring each other, that there is something building out there that will bring bigger change down the road.”

AlterNet
Progressive Activism Is Bubbling Up Across the Country -- Here's What's Happening That the Corporate Media Can't Be Bothered to Report
Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers

Now if they can get the economics right....

Aaron Swartz — Guerilla Open Access

Guerilla Open Access

Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves. The world’s entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations. Want to read the papers featuring the most famous results of the sciences? You’ll need to send enormous amounts to publishers like Reed Elsevier.

There are those struggling to change this. The Open Access Movement has fought valiantly to ensure that scientists do not sign their copyrights away but instead ensure their work is published on the Internet, under terms that allow anyone to access it. But even under the best scenarios, their work will only apply to things published in the future. Everything up until now will have been lost.

That is too high a price to pay. Forcing academics to pay money to read the work of their colleagues? Scanning entire libraries but only allowing the folks at Google to read them? Providing scientific articles to those at elite universities in the First World, but not to children in the Global South? It’s outrageous and unacceptable. 

“I agree,” many say, “but what can we do? The companies hold the copyrights, they make enormous amounts of money by charging for access, and it’s perfectly legal — there’s nothing we can do to stop them.” But there is something we can, something that’s already being done: we can fight back. 

Those with access to these resources — students, librarians, scientists — you have been given a privilege. You get to feed at this banquet of knowledge while the rest of the world is locked out. But you need not — indeed, morally, you cannot — keep this privilege for yourselves. You have a duty to share it with the world. And you have: trading passwords with colleagues, filling download requests for friends.

Meanwhile, those who have been locked out are not standing idly by. You have been sneaking through holes and climbing over fences, liberating the information locked up by the publishers and sharing them with your friends.

But all of this action goes on in the dark, hidden underground. It’s called stealing or piracy, as if sharing a wealth of knowledge were the moral equivalent of plundering a ship and murdering its crew. But sharing isn’t immoral — it’s a moral imperative. Only those blinded by greed would refuse to let a friend make a copy.

Large corporations, of course, are blinded by greed. The laws under which they operate require it — their shareholders would revolt at anything less. And the politicians they have bought off back them, passing laws giving them the exclusive power to decide who can make copies. 

There is no justice in following unjust laws. It’s time to come into the light and, in the grand tradition of civil disobedience, declare our opposition to this private theft of public culture.

We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world. We need to take stuff that's out of copyright and add it to the archive. We need to buy secret databases and put them on the Web. We need to download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing networks. We need to fight for Guerilla Open Access.

With enough of us, around the world, we’ll not just send a strong message opposing the privatization of knowledge — we’ll make it a thing of the past. Will you join us? 

Aaron Swartz
July 2008, Eremo, Italy

Yves Smith — Banks Deeply Involved in FBI-Coordinated Suppression of “Terrorist” Occupy Wall Street

The peculiar part of this overreaction is it says that banks and government officials see peaceful protests as a threat to their hold on power. It’s odd that they see their position as precarious, unless they have convinced themselves of their vulnerability as an excuse for clamping down even harder on the rest of us.

Naked Capitalism
Banks Deeply Involved in FBI-Coordinated Suppression of “Terrorist” Occupy Wall Street
Yves Smith

The same can be said of the hugely disproportional reaction of the US Establishment to 9/11, which continues into the present, depriving US citizens of civil liberties and constitutionally guaranteed rights in the name of an amorphous and ill-defined "Global War on Terror."

This also brings up the disproportional reaction to possession and trafficking of illegal drugs under the rubric, "War on Drugs" that has resulted in a disproportional swelling of the US prison population and the expansion of a privately owned and operated prison industry at government expense.

This is exactly what the Founding Fathers drafted the US Constitution and Bill of Rights to prevent being repeated in America.

And no, I don't buy the Rothbardian-Libertarian argument that this is all the predictable result of "Keynesianism" and that all we need to do to fix this morass is privatize the monetary system and get government out of the way.

Meanwhile, the TBTF (to big to fail) bankers are now found to be TBTJ (to big to jail).

This is a constitutional crisis rocking the very foundations of the nation and threatening the Great Experiment with failure. The nation needs the leadership of a constitutional lawyer. Oh, wait!

Dave Lindorff — FBI Ignored Deadly Threat to Occupiers

Commenting on this peculiar lack of action by the FBI and other national anti-terrorist organizations, Partnership for Civil Justice executive director Maya Verheyden-Hilliard says, “The documents we’ve obtained show that the FBI was acting as a private intelligence and protective agency for Wall Street and the banks against people who are engaged in First Amendment-protected free speech activities. Yet here you had a real terrorist threat, which, if the FBI were serious about combating and preventing terrorism it would have acted upon, and it did nothing!”.... 

In reality, the only violence at the hundreds of Occupy movement actions during late 2011 and early 2012 across the US, from New York to Boston to Los Angeles to Seattle, was perpetrated by heavily armed police. Occupy activists were the victims, not the perpetrators of this violence and criminal behavior.

Now it turns out that when some as yet unidentified group or organization — possibly even one affiliated with banking interests for all we know — actually plotted to assassinate Occupy activists and leaders, those same intelligence and national, state and local police agencies, instead of protecting the public, turned their backs and did nothing about it.

Perhaps the very “loose coalition” nature of the Occupy Movement, which has consciously avoided having or following leaders, in the end saved it from attack, as the plotters with their sniper rifles never were able to ascertain who their targets should be.

Counterpunch
FBI Ignored Deadly Threat to Occupiers
Dave Lindorff
(h/t Kevin Fathi via email)

Zero Hedge — Spain Proposes Law Prohibiting Recording And Capturing Of Local Cops In Action

If a recently proposed law by the director general of Spanish police, Ignacio Cosidó, is actually enacted, it is likely that live (or replayed) webcasts, photos and any electronic recordings such as those seen recently from the Madrid anti-sovereignty riots may be a thing of the past. But not because they no longer exist: simply because very soon it may be illegal to actually record said events. El Pais reports that "authorities are studying the possibility that the next update to the Public Security Law could include an article prohibiting the recording, processing or circulation on the internet of police officers performing their duties, if doing so would endanger them or the operation in which they were engaged." These are the same riot cops who typically wear gas masks, and full riot attire and shields precisely to preserve their identity. But facts matter little when the liquidity tide is going out and all the Ponzi schemes are exposed to have been swimming naked. For now, Spain will be happy to little by little strip its citizens first of their rights to free expression, then all other rights, as it slowly but surely sells the country into Troika slavery.

Zero Hedge
Spain Proposes Law Prohibiting Recording And Capturing Of Local Cops In Action
Posted by Tyler Durden

Spain turning Fascist?

Danny Weil — Chilean students have taken over schools and city streets in the largest protests the country has seen in decades for free education

In a lesson that should be learned here in the US, Chilean students have taken over schools and city streets in the largest protests the country has seen in decades. Chile suffered under the neo-liberal economics of Milton Friedman carried out by the brutal Chilean dictator Augustus Pinochet for close to two decades. Everything was privatized and if you wish to see how students in Chile, now facing the same austerity cuts that the neo-liberals are proposing to bail-out the one percent, are doing you can see the documentary below.

Read it at The Daily Censored (with video documentary)
Chilean students have taken over schools and city streets in the largest protests the country has seen in decades for free education
Danny Weil

David Graeber is having an impact in Europe

At the time of this Interview, Graebers book “Debt: The First 5000 Years” has just been translated to German and is Nr. 4 on the National Best Seller list. Three of his other books, including “Inside Occupy” have also been released in Germany this year. He held many public speaking events in Berlin on this trip, including one talk hosted by the Parliamentary leader of the Social Democratic Party, Frank-Walter Steinmeier. In his presentation, Graeber harshly critiqued Steinmeier for supporting banks in the current financial crisis, which Graeber said were the ones that created the crisis in the first place.

Read it at P2P (with video)
David Graeber on Police Repression Against Occupy and Other Social Movements
by Michel Bauwens

Richard Lagos — Chile in the Streets

Chile is South America’s most prosperous and, until now, one of its most stable countries. But Chileans are demanding new rights and refusing to accept the restrictions imposed by the country’s past dictatorship, thus making one of the region’s most prosperous countries a less harmonious one.

Read it at Project Syndicate
Chile in the Streets

by Richard Lagos | formerly President of Chile

But today’s Chileans have a broader view of the world, are more empowered through social networks, and are using the Internet as a platform to demand greater participation in public affairs. These are the citizens who are in the streets, who demand change and reject neo-liberalism, with its deregulation and failure to protect the vulnerable from abuses of power.

Anyone see a pattern here?

Occupy is dead. Long live Occupy!

Three years after the May 1968 uprising that swept the world, the great French philosopher Michel Foucault observed that a key strategy of power is to “appear inaccessible to events.” Power, Foucault argued with a nod towards 1968’s failed insurrection, acts to “dispel the shock of daily occurrences, to dissolve the event … to exclude the radical break introduced by events. 

Forty years later, in light of Occupy, Foucault’s observation still strikes home. Despite achieving the impossible at unprecedented speed – sparking a global awakening, triggering a thousand people’s assemblies worldwide, and giving birth to a visceral anti-corporate, pro-democracy spiritual insurrection – Occupy is now struggling through an existential moment. Our movement has been dealt a blow: our May 1 and follow-up events have been dissolved by power; the status quo has shown itself to be far more resilient than many of us expected. 

Now a passionate debate is emerging within our movement. On one side are those who cheer the death of Occupy in the hopes that it will transform into something unexpected and new. And on the other are patient organizers who counsel that all great movements take years to unfold.

Read the rest at Adbusters
Occupy's Spiritual Quest — The fork in the road ahead
Posted by Adbusters

What this will do is separate the revolutionaries from the evolutionaries both strategically and tactically, as well as over policy. Pretty much the same thing happened pretty early on in the Sixties, too.

The scene was very different in the Sixties, at the beginning of the protest movement, however. The Democrats held the presidency and solidly controlled both branches of Congress, and the courts were dominated by years of Democratic administrations, with the interruption of the Eisenhower moderate Republican years. Still, all hell broke loose at the 1968 Democratic Convention.

This time promises to be different. We are still it the early stages, and this has gone viral globally through social media and networking.

All the conditions that sparked Occupy and Indignados remain in place, and TPTB around the world are determined to press their hand. This promises to be another "long march." Expect the unexpected.

The protestors now realize just how asymmetrical this is and how determined TPTB are to crush social protest and political dissent. They will have to adapt.

However bad things get though, it will be nothing like what the anarchists faced in the lead up to the failed revolution of 1848 and the aftermath. However, they changed history in unexpected ways that are still unfolding.

This is shaping up just the beginning of the next awakening predicted by Strauss & Howe in The Fourth Turning (1997) and Ravi Batra (2007) in The Next Golden Age: The Coming Revolution Against Political Corruption and Economic Chaos. It's not going to happen overnight.

If this lasts through the decade at least, as I believe it will, the issues will be decided by an electorate that will be very different in demographic composition and culture. The chances that neoliberalism will survive are extremely slim. It's just a matter of time.

However, youth is impatient and will attempt to push its hand, so there are going to be rough spots, especially when the next financial and economic crisis hits and global warming obviously starts to bite.

This will be the predominant trend of the decade and it will have broad and deep consequences socially, politically, and economically.