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| 144 views | ggdrafts.blogspot.ca
What do you guys think?
A well-known Washington lobbying firm with links to the financial industry has proposed an $850,000 plan to take on Occupy Wall Street and politicians who might express sympathy for the protests
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| 141 views | www.accelerated-degree.com
food for thought
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| 109 views | www.businessinsider.com
As the events that led to Oakland protester Scott Olsen's head injury continue to unfold and investigations begin, we thought it important to offer some perspective.
This comment is from a former Marine with special operations in crowd control.
He points out that shooting canisters such as those that likely hit Scott Olsen is prohibited under rules of engagements in Iraq and Afghanistan. Regardless of any political position on the Occupy protests, these are some Interesting insights:
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| 134 views | thinkprogress.org
Chaibi, who spent five years in prison for his opposition to dictator Ben Ali, said that in Tunisia “individual freedoms and human rights are enshrined principles” and that atheists and homosexuals are a reality in Tunisia and “have a right to exist.” According to Chaibi, in the case of homosexuals there is also “a matter of dignity, because society sees them as undervalued.”
Given that Tunisia has a history of stigmatizing and punishing people who are gay, this would be quite a bold step. Chaibi also said that women will not be forced to wear veils and people will be allowed to drink alcohol, promising a coalition government approach that values freedom.
Occupy Albany protesters in New York’s capital city received an unexpected ally over the week: The state and local authorities.“We don’t have those resources, and these people were not causing trouble,” a state official said. “The bottom line is the police know policing, not the governor and not the mayor.”
As far as major protests go, the United States experienced a period of relative quiet from 1980 until 2011. For 30 years after Ronald Reagan broke the PATCO strike, “class war” in America was largely one sided. America’s working class took hit after hit without much in the way of a response. Here are 11 of those uprisings that Occupy Wall Street protesters and everyone else seeking social change would do well to study. Each of these movements won lasting social change. Their failures and limitations provide lessons about what not to do, while their successes offer a guide to future action.
What are the Occupy Wall Street protesters angry about? The same things we’re all angry about. The only difference is the protestors turned their anger into public action. Occupy Wall Street lit the embers and the sparks are flying. Whether it turns into a genuine populist prairie fire depends on all of us
Witnesses said a silver car had been circling before the attack, its occupants shouting things like "Get a job" and "You communist." They believe someone from that car threw the device, according to a statement from Occupy Maine.
The demonstrators are protesting what they describe
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| 177 views | www.newscientist.com
The idea that a few bankers control a large chunk of the global economy might not seem like news to New York's Occupy Wall Street movement and protesters elsewhere (see photo). But the study, by a trio of complex systems theorists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, is the first to go beyond ideology to empirically identify such a network of power. It combines the mathematics long used to model natural systems with comprehensive corporate data to map ownership among the world's transnational corporations (TNCs).
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| 309 views | www.nytimes.com
As more than a few observers have noted, the Occupy Wall Street chant, “We Are the 99 Percent” — a shot across the bow of the wealthiest 1 percent of the country, which includes the financial predators and confidence gamers who crashed the global economy with impunity — seems synonymous with the Tea Party’s “Take Back America” ethos.
Those similarities, though, mask profound differences. The two movements both loathe the elite, but their goals, and the passions that drive them forward, could not be more at odds.
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| 186 views | www.crimethinc.com
Starting with the occupation of a park next to Wall Street on September 17, a new movement is spreading across the country in which people gather in public spaces in protest against social inequalities. We’ll present a full analysis of this phenomenon here shortly; in the meantime, here’s an open letter to the occupation movement, engaging with some of the issues that have arisen thus far. Please forward this widely and print out versions to distribute at the “Occupy” events!
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| 211 views | www.projectcensored.org
For the second year (2010) in a row, more US soldiers killed themselves (468) than died in combat (462). “If you… know the one thing that causes people to commit suicide, please let us know,” General Peter Chiarelli told the Army Times, “because we don’t know.” Suicide is a tragic but predictable human reaction to being asked to kill – and watch your friends be killed – for a war based on lies. Perhaps being forced to bag the mangled flesh of fellow soldiers could be another reason why some are committing suicide.
After spending over a decade promoting President Bush, the PATRIOT Act, and the Iraq War, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation appears to be up to the same tricks, this time with an hour-long promotional video about Bush’s leadership during the 9/11 attacks. Although News Corp. is perhaps best known for its Bush cheerleading through its Fox News subsidiary, the Bush documentary is airing on another News Corp. company with a better brand image, National Geographic.
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| 95 views | toronto.mediacoop.ca
On August 25th, independent journalist, blogger, and activist Dan Kellar was arrested for a blog post he made two days earlier in which he named and provided a photo of a man he claimed to be an undercover police officer involved in infiltrating G20 protest groups and encouraged readers to "spit in his footsteps and scoff at his existence".
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| 67 views | www.thestar.com
A U.S. diplomatic cable made public by WikiLeaks suggests that U.S. troops executed at least 10 Iraqi civilians, including a woman in her 70s and a 5-month-old infant, then called in an airstrike to destroy the evidence, during a controversial 2006 incident in the central Iraqi town of Ishaqi. Autopsies performed in the Iraqi city of Tikrit showed that all the dead had been handcuffed and shot in the head. Among the dead were four women and five children. The children were all 5 years old or younger.
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| 60 views | anarchismtoday.org
ZEIT Campus interviews a luminary, Noam Chomsky, linguist, political activist and one of the most quoted scholars of the world
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| 166 views | english.aljazeera.net
Mexican Muslim Communist...the tea party's wet nightmare come true.
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| 168 views | boingboing.net
Why do lower middle-class and working class Americans support tax breaks for the rich? New research suggests it might not be about aspirations—i.e., "Maybe I could be rich someday." Instead, says the Economist, people are more concerned with how social programs and wealth distribution might help people worse off than them become better off than them.
In other words: Nobody wants to be on the bottom and national economics looks a lot like a junior high locker room.
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| 226 views | futurismic.com
Of course, these riots are have nothing to do with poverty or deprivation. After all, they could all have decent jobs if only they just tried harder, right? </sarcasm>
For the past several months, students, teachers, and their supporters in Chile have been staging chaotic demonstrations against their government. Their goal is to transform the country's education system. In particular, they're seeking a referendum to significantly increase the funding and quality of public schools. Students have engaged in multiple forms of protest, from hunger strikes and sit-ins to marches and pillow fights. Smaller groups of protesters have engaged riot police directly, hurling stones and firebombs. Chilean authorities have responded by banning demonstrations, pushing protesters back with water cannons, and offering education proposals that have been rejected. Students in the tens of thousands -- with popular backing across Chile -- continue to march without official permission, and public sentiment against president Sebastian Piñera continues to grow. Collected here are some scenes from the streets of Chile over the past few months.
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| 154 views | blogs.telegraph.co.uk
Watched from the perspective of a Los Angeles resident, the riot in Tottenham looks a little tame. Los Angeles has a horrendous history of urban insurrection that amplifies many of the themes of Saturday night’s violence. It is a city beset with unemployment, poverty, broken families and the crippling legacy of racism. Yet while its many problems have remained constant, the response of the rest of the nation to Los Angeles’ periodic outbursts of disorder has changed dramatically over time. The hardening of American attitudes toward race riots might offer a hint of how the British public will respond to the events in Tottenham: with moral sanction, not tea and sympathy.
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| 84 views | beyondresistance.wordpress.com
‘There’s no excuse for violence.’ It’s a familiar refrain. Even people who spend their lives campaigning against injustice are susceptible to blindly repeating it at the first whiff of a riot’s rising smoke.
But stop to think for a moment before you condemn what’s happened in Tottenham.
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| 169 views | www.alternet.org
Traditionally, young people have energized democratic movements. So it is a major coup for the ruling elite to have created societal institutions that have subdued young Americans and broken their spirit of resistance to domination.
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| 99 views | gawker.com
Republican media strategist Roger Ailes launched Fox News Channel in 1996, ostensibly as a "fair and balanced" counterpoint to what he regarded as the liberal establishment media. But according to a remarkable document buried deep within the Richard Nixon Presidential Library, the intellectual forerunner for Fox News was a nakedly partisan 1970 plot by Ailes and other Nixon aides to circumvent the "prejudices of network news" and deliver "pro-administration" stories to heartland television viewers.
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| 148 views | informant.kalwnews.org
It’s commonly known that American law enforcement keeps close tabs on the Anarchist movement, and has done so for years. A report from the Missouri Information Analysis Center, one of dozens of fusion centers that collect and disseminate information to local law enforcement agencies, breaks down several strains of Anarchism and associated groups. However, the 2008 DHS Threat Assessment does acknowledge that Anarchists are known for property damage, and rarely carry out actions that may result in a loss of life. Right wing groups such as citizen militias and white supremacists are classified as extremists capable of lethal violence, albeit on a limited scale.
A woman was arrested for videotaping police from her front yard in Rochester, New York.
Emily Good, 28, was recording a traffic stop where police had a man handcuffed on May 12th. The video was uploaded to Blip TV today.
The cop who arrested her has been identified as Mario Masic, according to the Rochester Indy Media.
A man named Mario Masic who happens to be a police officer in western New York also runs a business called Harvest Moon Malamutes.
You can friend him on Facebook here. Or you can email him through his business email address at harvestmoonmalamutes@live.com.
The video, which has since gone viral, shows Masic hassling Good with absurd notions after he notices her recording.
