So while the creativity, flair and visibility of the occupation movement has been crucial to spreading the struggle, a lot of patient and systematic organizing is necessary, too--as any Egyptian or Greek activist will tell you.
Welcome to OCCUPY TOGETHER, an unofficial hub for all of the events springing up across the country in solidarity with Occupy Wall St. As we have followed the news on facebook, twitter, and the various live feeds across the internet, we felt compelled to build a site that would help spread the word as more protests organize across the country. We hope to provide people with information about events that are organizing, ongoing, and building across the U.S. as we, the 99%, take action against the greed and corruption of the 1%.
Occupy Wall Street educates the newly arrived in a philosophy of consensus building and creative solutions to problems that consider not just two, but three or more possible creative solutions.
Occupy Wall Street is determined to stay as long as necessary to achieve tangible objectives of recognition, substantial growth and future prospects before ending the current protest action.
Hundreds continue to camp out in a park in Manhattan’s Financial District for the "Occupy Wall Street" protest. The encampment got a boost this week when one of New York City’s largest unions, the Transit Workers Union, announced its backing. In this report, Democracy Now! producer Mike Burke gets a tour of the private park, open to the public, that people have occupied, and and speaks with demonstrators, including a woman who was pepper sprayed by New York City Police Department Deputy Inspector Anthony Bologna last Saturday. Special thanks to Hany Massoud.One occupier said:
I’m definitely not scared. It gives me more reason to want to be out there now, to participate in every march, and every general assembly. I want to be more active. I want to be more a part of it because people out there have seen what happened and they want us to keep going, and I’m going to keep going. I see no ending for me in the future. I’m going to keep fighting.
A Call to Action - Oct. 6, 2011 and onward
October 2011 is the 10th anniversary of the invasion of Afghanistan and the beginning of the 2012 federal austerity budget. It is time to light the spark that sets off a true democratic, nonviolent transition to a world in which people are freed to create just and sustainable solutions.
We have the power to be the media, to spread the word and tell vast networks of people the truth. Media is being democratized and we can speed that process by recognizing we are the media. When you come to Freedom Plaza in October one of your roles will be to be the media.(Note: there is one error in the article referring to a meeting at Bus Boys and Poets in Washington, DC: the meeting was held on September 13th not October 13th.)
What this tells us is that we are not actually having a debate about economics. Our free-market advocates aren’t actually operating from a model of how the economy works; they’re operating from some combination of knee-jerk defense of the haves against the rest and mystical faith [my emphasis] that self-interest always leads to the common good.But, why not also explain the marketeer's (capitalist's) resistance to account for all the devastating costs to workers that their capitalism causes: unemployment, devastation to the communities because many jobs have been outsourced to cheap and oppressed labor areas of the world leaving behind these effects: poverty, poor health care, poor education, high crime rates, divorce, etc?
I think that when it comes to Israel and ‘Jewish power’ every humanist, including myself, has a conflict to handle. I would formulate it as such: ‘how can I tell the truth about Israel, the Lobby, and Zionism and still maintain my position as a humanist’. It took me very many years to learn to differentiate between the wheat and chaff. I learned to distinguish between Jews (the people), Judaism (the religion) and Jewishness (the ideology).
CADTM: In most cases, the ruling class has no interest in seeing an authentic audit carried out under the auspices of civil society. In other cases, it may resign itself to the idea in order to circumvent the problem.And "go even further" is exactly what is needed. Reforms that will only save the system, a system that produces these economic crises and a number of other crises such as war, must no longer be tolerated.
Eric Toussaint: That is quite true. The case I mentioned earlier corresponds to a situation where strong popular mobilization brings left-wing forces into government who will adopt policies in the interests of the people or go even further.
There are no excuses left. Either you join the revolt taking place on Wall Street and in the financial districts of other cities across the country or you stand on the wrong side of history. Either you obstruct, in the only form left to us, which is civil disobedience, the plundering by the criminal class on Wall Street and accelerated destruction of the ecosystem that sustains the human species, or become the passive enabler of a monstrous evil. Either you taste, feel and smell the intoxication of freedom and revolt or sink into the miasma of despair and apathy. Either you are a rebel or a slave.Very few people can express this better than Chris Hedges!
...disemboweling every last social service program funded by the taxpayers, from education to Social Security, because they want that money themselves. Let the sick die. Let the poor go hungry. Let families be tossed in the street. Let the unemployed rot. Let children in the inner city or rural wastelands learn nothing and live in misery and fear. Let the students finish school with no jobs and no prospects of jobs. Let the prison system, the largest in the industrial world, expand to swallow up all potential dissenters. Let torture continue. Let teachers, police, firefighters, postal employees and social workers join the ranks of the unemployed. Let the roads, bridges, dams, levees, power grids, rail lines, subways, bus services, schools and libraries crumble or close. Let the rising temperatures of the planet, the freak weather patterns, the hurricanes, the droughts, the flooding, the tornadoes, the melting polar ice caps, the poisoned water systems, the polluted air increase until the species dies.People all across our country are saying, "I'm mad as hell, and I ain't gonna take it anymore!" See this website for coverage of many courageous people doing just that. No, you will not see these many protests covered on mainstream corporate media. They don't want you to know about it. (They prefer to cover Tea Party events.) They want you to continue to feel helpless and cynical. But, it's really happening. For example, in San Francisco:
There could be no better proof of the revolution – care of the internet – occurring in the accessibility of information and informed commentary than the reaction of our mainstream, corporate media.Read this article to find out how, in the age of the internet, liberal media act as thought police for the ruling class. The author focuses on the UK's Guardian coverage of dissident writers as an illustration.
For the first time, Western publics – or at least those who can afford a computer – have a way to bypass the gatekeepers of our democracies. Data our leaders once kept tightly under wraps can now be easily searched for, as can the analyses of those not paid to turn a blind eye to the constant and compelling evidence of Western hypocrisy. Wikileaks, in particular, has rapidly eroded the traditional hierarchical systems of information dissemination.
From an authoritarian perspective, that's the genius of America's political culture. It not only finds way to obliterate the most basic individual liberties designed to safeguard citizens from consummate abuses of power (such as extinguishing the lives of citizens without due process). It actually gets its citizens to stand up and clap and even celebrate the destruction of those safeguards.
When legalisms take center stage in a situation like this, think of magicians. Their skill is to focus your attention on the space where nothing that matters is happening -- the wrong hand, the wrong face, the wrong part of the stage -- while they perform their “magic” elsewhere. Similarly, pay attention to the law right now and you’re likely to miss the plot line of our world.US government public relations offices (President, Sec. of State, etc.) are hard at work concocting new justifications for their war crimes in order to continue keeping the consent of its citizens for its never ending "war on terror".
It’s true that, at the moment, articles are pouring out focused on how to define the limits of future drone warfare. My advice: skip the law, skip the definitions, skip the arguments, and focus your attention on the drones and the people developing them instead.
The establishment by the Bush and Obama administrations of a parallel system of secret military courts, where the Bill of Rights and other democratic protections do not apply, and where the death penalty can be imposed, is a dire warning of things to come.
An essay exploring the real origins of the Iraq War, written before the war started.It is important to keep in mind that this plan could never have been implemented if the 9/11 tragedy had not occurred. Either it was one of the most fortuitous events in ruling class history or it was at least a partially engineered event by the perpetrators of this plan.
In an effort to show the diversity of people involved in the occupation, we will be running a series of interviews highlighting some their stories. For our first installment, The Indypendent spoke with Melissa Kleckner, 31, who lives in Hoboken, New Jersey and is studying social work at Hunter College-CUNY.
...the elephant in the room is the amount of money paid to bankers over the last five years. For banks that have filings with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, the sum stands at an astounding $2.2 trillion. Extrapolating over the coming decade, the numbers would approach $5 trillion,....***********************
...banks take risks, get paid for the upside, and then transfer the downside to shareholders, taxpayers, and even retirees. In order to rescue the banking system, the Federal Reserve, for example, put interest rates at artificially low levels; as was disclosed recently, it also has provided secret loans of $1.2 trillion to banks. The main effect so far has been to help bankers generate bonuses (rather than attract borrowers) by hiding exposures.************************
The largest, most sophisticated banks have become expert at remaining one step ahead of regulators – constantly creating complex financial products and derivatives that skirt the letter of the rules. In these circumstances, more complicated regulations merely mean more billable hours for lawyers, more income for regulators switching sides, and more profits for derivatives traders.The authors seem bewildered by the contradictions of these bailouts and investors who continue to invest in the large banks:
Why does any investment manager buy the stocks of banks that pay out very large portions of their earnings to their employees?
...Why do portfolio and pension-fund managers hope to receive impunity from their investors? Isn’t it obvious to investors that they are voluntarily transferring their clients’ funds to the pockets of bankers? Aren’t fund managers violating both fiduciary responsibilities and moral rules? Are they missing the only opportunity we have to discipline the banks and force them to compete for responsible risk-taking?They don't understand why the alter of the market at which all capitalists worship is skewed to serve a narrow ruling class of financiers. The latter have concentrated so much wealth and power in their hands that they are now able to control the market, the economy, and the government (which they essentially own) to serve their appetite for more wealth and more power. Now, it is no longer just workers who are getting screwed as in earlier stages of capitalism, but the middle class is also, and they don't like it.
The implications of social network unionism are only just starting to dawn on many of us. All of a sudden, workers have the ability to build their own free, open networks, with or without the involvement of their union. They have begun to do so already, and we can expect a cumulative curve. Networks are popping up within workplaces, across organizations, and within occupations, industries, sectors and even across borders (especially in transnationals). These groups do not distinguish between members and non-members, or between full-time and part-time employees.
The crisis is far from over. Even if we only consider the financial aspects, we must be aware that private banks have continued to play an extremely dangerous game which profits them as long as nothing goes wrong, but which is prejudicial to the majority of the population. The amount of bad assets on their balance-sheets is enormous. ...The risks are colossal and the policies adopted by the ECB, the EC and the member States of the EU will not solve anything – indeed quite the contrary.
Instead of one to two thousand people a day joining in the occupation there needs to be tens of thousands of people protesting the fat cats driving Bentleys and drinking thousand-dollar bottles of champagne with money they looted from the financial crisis and then from the bailouts while Americans literally die on the streets.Real democracy can be a messy affair, but there is no shortcut to it. The only alternative is what we have witnessed during the past 10,000 years (which is less than 2% of human existence)--class rule by priesthoods, warrior castes, landed aristocracies, and now capitalists.
On October 15th people from all over the world will take to the streets and squares. From America to Asia, from Africa to Europe, people are rising up to claim their rights and demand a true democracy. Now it is time for all of us to join in a global non violent protest.
The ruling powers work for the benefit of just a few, ignoring the will of the vast majority and the human and environmental price we all have to pay. This intolerable situation must end.
United in one voice, we will let politicians, and the financial elites they serve, know it is up to us, the people, to decide our future.
We are not goods in the hands of politicians and bankers who do not represent us.
On October 15th, we will meet on the streets to initiate the global change we want. We will peacefully demonstrate, talk and organize until we make it happen.
It’s time for us to unite. It’s time for them to listen.
The key of 15 Oct should not be just mobilizing people, and doing some actions simultaneously, but being conscious that the world is acting together, and therefore starting to build a network between all of us, for deciding all together, because that’s the only possible way, what the world should be. We know that the powers are global, that we live in a globalized world, and therefore our answer should be global too.
Voting in America is a bad joke. Maybe local elections are legit, but Federal elections are a set-up sham to put in the best person that can provide corporate income. A corporation is not a person and does not deserve person-hood. If you examine the corporate model of any large corporation, most could be diagnosed as sociopaths, with interest not in community or the people working for them (except those at the top), with no other interest but the bottom line. That is no way to run a country. Some of these despicable psychopathic Defense Industries would love to have a big war with Russia or China? WTF?
Today China is the world's second largest importer of oil after the United States and the gap is rapidly closing.
...right up until the AIG disaster and the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the IMF, the US Federal Reserve and the ECB repeatedly claimed that CDSs were a new product that offered excellent guarantees against risks (see the box on CDSs). Since then, their discourse has changed, but nothing, absolutely nothing, has been done to regulate the CDS market. Meanwhile, in view of the size of the phenomenon, CDSs constitute a huge time-bomb hanging over the international finance system. The fact is that CDS should be outlawed.
Protesters at Liberty Plaza speaking to The Indypendent this afternoon noted a substantial increase in attendance at their general assembly meetings, a direct democratic process that has become central to the protest community’s evolution and self-government. Their one demand has become an evolving series of inter-connected resolutions that they are still refining but generally focus on freeing the American political system from the corrupting grip of Big Finance.
Particularly shocking...was the fact that the bankers weren't aiming for higher winnings than their comparison group. Instead they were more interested in achieving a competitive advantage. Instead of taking a sober and businesslike approach to reaching the highest profit, "it was most important to the traders to get more than their opponents," Noll explained. "And they spent a lot of energy trying to damage their opponents."Take a look at this stock trader and financial analyst for this type of personality disorder that even shocked the BBC staff:
As we assess some of the key components of today’s Global Financial, Currency and Banking Model in this article, readers will hopefully get a better understanding as to why we are all in such a crisis, and that it will tend to get much worse in the months and years to come.
Physical and psychological abuse is built into many of these programs by design. According to several different experts on the subject, the exhaustion and pressure that is induced by sleep deprivation, hunger, fatigue and emotional manipulation, "unfreezes" the psychological framework. Through this orchestrated crisis, a new identity is instilled by manipulating the environment and the emotions of the subject to an extreme degree until the "changed" mind of the subject has undergone "re-freezing."
Egypt’s lessons acutely demonstrate that liberated squares must become liberated workplaces, neighborhoods, and eventually cities. This is exactly Liberty Plaza’s aim—not to be a self-contained, pre-figurative mini-society, but a decisive tipping point in the belly of the economic beast that can collaborate with this widening network to transform global society altogether.Nathan Schneider's report from the same source describes the escalation of police violence on Saturday against the demonstrators and the typical coverage in mainstream media.
Around 3 p.m., near Fifth Avenue and 12th Street, the police attacked. Unrolling plastic orange barriers, they isolated a crowd of marchers, along with the reporters following them, and began mass arrests for blocking traffic. This was a brutal process. Caught on cameras were scenes of one protester being dragged by her hair, others being slammed into the pavement, and a group of women, netted and helpless, being downed by pepper spray. In total, police say they arrested 80 people. With not enough room for them in vans, many were taken away in regular city buses.While the above report focused on the dramatic events on Saturday, Chaz Valenza from OpEd News reports on a more benign day Sunday when participants were doing house keeping chores, reviewing past events, and discussing more legal hassles.
...Warren's message is a potent one, expressing progressive values in terms that are almost intoxicating to the base of the Democratic Party, hungry as they are for someone to take up the cause of the American middle class, workers and families who are being unbearably squeezed and yet asked to give even more - even as the wealthy fatuously declare themselves to be "job creators" and therefore absolved of any duty to pay their fair share.Elizabeth Warren does, indeed, speak reason to madness, but nonetheless, her voice will continue to be marginalized within the Democratic party. Why? Because the ruling class has abandoned the middle class and all of America except for the industrial-financial-military complex which serves the Empire as enforcer and a huge profit center. Her policies are only progressive in the sense of a national capitalist orientation. But, national capitalism has grown up into global capitalism and the elites who control this new system, and profit from it, view national boundaries as barriers to their profit extracting enterprises.
Money has value because of skilled people, resources, and infrastructure, working together in a supportive social and legal framework. Money is the indispensable lubricant that lets them “run.” It is not tangible wealth in itself, but a power to obtain wealth. Money is an abstract social power based in law; and whatever government accepts in payment of taxes will be money. Money’s value is not created by the private corporations that now control it.This Institute is focused on bringing the issuance of money under complete government control:
...the money issuing power should never be alienated from democratically elected government and placed ambiguously into private hands as it is in America in the Federal Reserve System today.I see this as a worthy objective, but there are several problems I see with this limited objective. First, bringing the issuance of money under full government control does not in the least provide for a genuine "democratically elected government." A privately owned and controlled economy cannot provide for a meaningful democracy.
Instead of being a document drawn up by patriotic men for the protection of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, the [US] Constitution was the work of consolidated economic groups--...property interests....But, I agree completely with the Institute's objective of bringing the issuance of our money under complete government control, but we must not stop there. We must bring the whole economy under genuine democratic control.
Around 56 million years ago a mysterious surge of carbon into the atmosphere sent global temperatures soaring. In a geologic eyeblink life was forever changed. ...Today the evolutionary consequences of that distant carbon spike are all around us; in fact they include us. Now we ourselves are repeating the experiment.
Humankind will slip next week into ecological debt, having gobbled up in less then nine months more natural resources than the planet can replenish in a year, researchers said Tuesday.Isn't it interesting that we have to go to an obscure Australian online newspaper to find the results of this research whose origin was from a French news service? Then, I find that the research was done by the Global Footprint Network. Guess where that is located? Oakland, California! Isn't the Internet wonderful? Anyway, check out their report.
It’s official. The Europeans have lost it completely concerning the sovereign debt crisis and what to do about it. Herr Schäuble, in charge of the EU kommandantur [headquarters], is now hinting that the agreement about a second Greek bailout, reached on July 21st, may not go ahead as planned. Greece is already being put through the hoop by the creditors over the first bailout, agreed in 2010, since the Papandreou regime has disastrously failed in everything it promised to do, while the country is disintegrating thanks to a catastrophic depression caused directly by the Troika-imposed insane austerity that turned, not unexpectedly, into a poisoned chalice which is killing millions of Greek families.
It is clear...that the Chilean student movement has become a major development for the left not only in Chile, but in Latin America as a whole. The students are presenting one of the leading neoliberal administrations in the region with a major political challenge. Crucially, they have managed to do so by building their own power outside of pre-established political institutions. Importantly, the movement has done so without simply avoiding the state, but rather through direct confrontation with it, and with a demand for its transformation and democratization. At a time when the electoral road to social transformation in the region appears blocked, this development holds much potential.In highly class stratified societies, it is often much easier to see how ruling classes function to keep their power, wealth, and privileges. The writers of this article touch on many of these methods: placate the dissenters by advocacy of ineffective reforms and change of personnel, use of co-optation, infiltration, agent provocateurs, intimidation in the forms of cuts to education, threats of state violence, and finally, direct police violence.
The fact that it wasn’t hard to find someone in Tahrir who would express disillusionment with A6Y is indicative of the larger challenge that he and colleagues face today: after the political sphere is broken open by uprising, how do you maintain and build upon support among the highly-wired crowd while simultaneously recruiting offline Egyptians?
Social incompetence and an individualistic mentality are acquired in the competitive educational system. Collective action, as opposed to personal status climbing, becomes more difficult as a consequence. Cynicism is learned from doing meaningless assignments and busy work. This serves to negate any serious political thought. As long as the worker does not take himself seriously and is cynical about his world, it does not matter much what his politics are.This article, although very important, only skims the surface of how the capitalist ruling class has taken control of education in the US, particularly higher education. But then, there are references to source materials where one can learn more. Although not addressed in the article, I am particularly interested in the phenomenon of "endowed professorships", also known as "endowed chairs" where foundations sponsor professors in our institutions of higher learning.
The senior executive of the Middle East’s most recognizable news television network has resigned following revelations that he met with American intelligence officials and complied with their requests to alter the content of news reports.
To top off the challenges of the past year, I spent hundreds of hours working to protect my self, my family and community from the onslaught of two private military companies using assault weapons and detonating explosives at an illegal weapons range near our homes. It was stressful, frightening, costly, unpaid work, unavoidable and unrewarding. It was hell. The local police were involved. These guys worked for Blackwater, and they routinely kill people in Iraq and Afghanistan. This was really, really hard on my family and I and there's been a lot of harassment and retaliation and it's not over.
..the U.S. is fulfilling President Obama's pledge that it will "not stand idly by" in the face of a tyrant's oppression of his own people, as the U.S. is actively feeding that regime new weapons; that, by definition, is not "standing idly by."
Unity, planning and discipline are also interconnected. When the police make arrests at Liberty Plaza, it tends to divide the protesters. Some want to fall back, some want to fight back. Instead, with more discipline, these incidents could unite them and sharpen their focus. Too often, the protesters are letting themselves forget who their real opponent is—all that Wall Street represents in American culture and politics—by focusing so much on anger against the underpaid, working-class police force deployed around them.
The mega mall, the biggest in Europe, is built in the midst of grey tower blocks not far from where the recent riots occurred, its “designer” products, made mostly with cheap, regimented labour, beckon the indebted. That it stands on a site where London workers made trains – thousands of locomotives, carriages and goods wagons – in what was once called manufacturing is of melancholy interest. The mega mall’s jobs produce nothing and are mostly low-paid. It is an emblem of extreme times.I don't see that the article has much to do with wars as the title suggests, unless he is thinking in the context of class wars.
Nine-eleven's ten-year anniversary is sparking retrospectives ranging from lives lost to a War on Terror launched. But media accounts have omitted an important political casualty: the short-lived "anti-globalization" movement, perhaps the largest American social movement since the civil rights and Vietnam War era.If 9/11 was not at least partially engineered by ruling class political operatives, it should go down in history as the most fortuitous event in the 300 year reign of capitalism. But, with the current economic collapse of capitalist economies, its beneficial effects for the defense of capitalism may be coming to an end.
The general assemblies, who began their meetings in circles, sitting on the concrete, broke down discussions into three general areas — problems, solutions and strategies. Most discussions began with an open session for assembly participants to vocalize what they viewed as the biggest challenges the country faces in freeing itself from the power of finance. While much discussion focused on the corruption and collusion between Wall Street and Washington, many assembly members also noted that general apathy was also a problem of education.This event is hopefully the embryo of a future plant that represents the control of the people over the most vital activity of their lives: how and what they produce to sustain their lives and families, and how they distribute the wealth they create.
The second part of the general assemblies focused on developing general solutions for the problems just identified. Regulation, transparency and again education became the hot talking points for this session. By the third session, assemblies were working on exchanging strategies for local, national and international action.
Yesterday was another rough day for those here in Liberty Plaza, but much better than Tuesday when the police harassment was a definite attempt to nip Occupy Wall Street in the bud.Meanwhile, the protests are spreading to other cities: Seattle, San Francisco, and other cities in the US. and making news across the globe. However, the numbers involved in these protests are still fairly small; but, who knows, they could easily escalate as the economy continues to deteriorate and impact Americans.
Who hasn’t received one -- or 100 -- of those “Nigerian” letters offering you, in florid prose, millions of potential dollars and with nary a catch in sight? But who knew that the highest officials in Washington have been receiving them as well -- and from our war zones rather than Africa.
New Economics Foundation policy director Andrew Simms put it like this.
"For years we have been told that there is no alternative to an economy that
wrecks the environment and worsens inequality. We've been told that we live
in a time of prosperity, when really we're no happier than we were thirty
years ago. We've been told that crashes, bubbles and recessions are all
part of the 'natural cycle' of economies. But faced with potentially
irreversible climate change and corrosive inequality, these are dangerous
fairy tales. The Great Transition shows we have a chance of a better
reality."
Many mental health professionals have concluded that the official version of 9/11 is false, and that those who believe the official version suffer from defense mechanisms.The author provides links to many mental health professionals who see a whole society of Americans trying to deal with the conflict between the official propaganda regarding 9/11 and evidence from scientists and engineers that contradicts the propaganda. Currently most people do not believe the official version, and this has caused many Americans a lot of problems. He ends up with this 15:08m excellent video featuring interviews with more mental health professionals relating their experiences with their patients regarding the 9/11 experience:
What matters are the "facts on the ground" of Israel as the supreme dominatrix of US foreign policy as well as the US Congress being Israel's bitch. What matters is Obama trying to entice Muslims with flowery rhetoric in Istanbul and Cairo just to meekly submit, and when the going gets tough, to feel the dominatrix whip.However, the article is mostly about the Empire's new weapon, the killer drones, AKA the Reaper, and the increasing use of these weapons to enforce the Empire's interests.
"Julien Febvre” is a Greek writer, musician, artist and filmmaker, student of politics and sociology in Birkbeck University of London. He has studied Arts and Pedagogy in Griffith College, (Dublin, Ireland) and Musicology in Kingston University of London. He has been influenced by the Greek philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis, the Situationist Movement, anarchism and Libertarian Socialism.I consider this article to be most reflective of my "imaginary", world view, "weltanschauung" (German), or ideological position. Such an exposition of this ideology is rarely found in American English articles. Unfortunately, this article should have been proofread to eliminate several errors and to conform to ordinary English usage. (Also, I think it is useful to keep in mind that he is writing this to a British audience following the riots in London and other cities in August, and I think that he is responding to the coverage of these events by British mainstream media.)
To those myopic conservatives who claim that a society without state violence or capitalism is inevitable, we would respond that oppression, exploitation, war, consumerism, pollution, is the reality they are defending.I think he meant to write:
Precisely because of this knowledge [the meaning of "autonomy"], they can set their own laws and institutions and despise them whenever they deem it is necessary, without recognizing any totems and taboos.I think he meant to write:
Such like for a Jewish of the Bible the question “is the law right and fair” has no answer because “the law is given by God, consequently everybody who despises it, is a sinner, a heathen or an unbeliever, hence everybody has to obey this law or will receive eternal punishment”.I think he meant to write:
Direct democracy is not a purport but a mean, an ability to understand how we, ourselves, are able to create laws. In direct democracy, all decisions are taken directly by ourselves (whether through popular assemblies, or other entities).I think he meant to write:
The news is about sensationalism, death and carnage laced with preconceived ideas. Barack Obama proposes his jobs bill, which was filled with perks and play pretties for the Republican side of the aisle, only to meet resistance from his own side. Obama counters that criticism with a new set of proposals to tax the wealthy, but if Obama had been in any way serious he would have proposed these things three years ago. Obama is only stunting for the camera, emoting passionate sounds bites for public consumption.
The police strategy was simple: get that video feed stopped. Make a show of force. Scare the crap out of these whiners and poop this little party.Also, check out this coverage.
The police tactics are now turning to petty harassment and intimidation to discourage others from physically coming to join the protest.The local authorities of the ruling class are clearly handling this demonstration with great care. They know full well that if they crack down too hard on the protests, that this will likely only add fuel to the fire. So far, this strategy along with keeping the protests out of mainstream news seems to be working. But, if the activists in New York can sustain their protests, things can very well change.
What the members of the Troika are doing can be compared to the odious behaviour of someone who, while claiming to help a person in a difficult predicament, would actually make it worse and benefit from it. We can also consider that it is a criminal act planned collectively by the IMF, the ECB, the EC, and the governments that are supporting their action. Associating in order to plan and carry out a criminal act increases the responsibility of the aggressors.I don't know if you can follow all the financial tricks that European banks use to enrich themselves, but it is clear to Eric Toussaint that the European Union and its institutions were designed for the welfare of the private banks and their owners, the capitalist ruling classes, and not for the benefit of the vast majority. Surprise, surprise!
...verbal bromides, including the standard Orwellian line that the cuts are aimed at “strengthening Medicare and Medicaid over time,” are intended to cloak the actual consequences of the measures—the reduction or elimination of care for millions of people.
It's a story that should take your breath away: the destabilization of what, in the George W Bush years, used to be called "the arc of instability". It involves at least 97 countries, across the bulk of the global south, much of it coinciding with the oil heartlands of the planet. A startling number of these nations are now in turmoil, and in every single one of them - from Afghanistan and Algeria to Yemen and Zambia - Washington is militarily involved, overtly or covertly, in outright war or what passes for peace.This thesis illustrates how the US governmental system functions to create the illusion of democracy while serving powerful people behind the scenes whose rule is imposed on the world regardless of who is "elected" from those candidates that are allowed to run for office. (Read an excellent exposé in a book entitled, The Secret Team by (ret. Colonel) L. Fletcher Prouty
...President Barack Obama is in the process of trumping his predecessor.
Macroeconomic models take the present economic system as an indisputable given. Their studies, their conclusions, their thoughts remain uncritical; the predominant attitude of the profession is that there is no credible alternative to our system of capitalism. ...For American social science it is a scandal that it remains silent on so great an issue.” Orthodox economic thinking stops Americans short of seriously reconsidering the merits of maintaining a system that has privatized their sovereign economic power. Our economic liberty has been shackled to the privately owned Federal Reserve System.In departing from my usual policy of posting only current articles, I offer this one which is relatively timeless and insightful. I have great appreciation for this institute and the book they have published called, The Lost Science of Money by Stephen Zarlenga. It is a bit rough in the earlier chapters, but the author really hits his stride by chapter nine. He bases his observations on considerable research into this widely obscured subject.
...the Fed doesn't work for the American public - it works for Wall Street .It is clear that our economy is run by and for bankers, not by or for the benefit of its worker-citizens who produce real wealth in the forms of food, clothing, transportation, communications, housing, education, etc.
That's right. It's not the economy the Fed has on life support - it's the banks.
...we need to be aware that various EU treaties have to be abrogated, that the ECB statutes have to be radically changed, and that the EU has to be founded on other premises. Yet to achieve this, the balance of power has first to be changed through massive street mobilizations.I don't know if you can follow all the financial tricks that European banks use to enrich themselves, but it is clear to Eric Toussaint that the European Union and its institutions were designed for the welfare of the private banks and their owners, the capitalist ruling classes, and not for the benefit of the vast majority. Surprise, surprise!
...what does make it incredible, is the way that freak melting season 2007 has been equaled and even surpassed in some data sets [for 2011].See also this EarthSky report that provides data from NASA illustrated with great graphics while failing to mention the ominous implications.
Eric Toussaint: The ECB is entirely devoted to serving the bankers’ interests.I don't know if you can follow all the financial tricks that European banks use to enrich themselves, but it is clear to Eric Toussaint that the European Union and its institutions were designed for the welfare of the private banks and their owners, the capitalist ruling classes, and not for the benefit of the vast majority. Surprise, surprise!
CADTM: But how?
...WBG has, through an array of different policies, overseen a shift towards prioritising large-scale commercial agribusiness, achieved by attracting and promoting foreign agricultural investment. The Foreign Investment Advisory Service and the Remove Administrative Barriers to Investment program, both projects of the International Finance Corporation, the Bank's private sector arm, have "been working - often behind the scenes - to ensure that African countries reform their land laws and fiscal regimes to make them attractive to foreign investors". The Bank has financed legal reform mechanisms that are promoting rapid changes in land tenure laws, "driven by a desire to facilitate large-scale agricultural investment".
The Bank has also been funding investment promotion agencies in African countries that place private sector advisors in key governmental ministries, including presidential offices.
...what made me mourn, not only for the lost innocents in my community, but for the death of the Republic, was what began on Friday 9/9....
...those continuing reports on all the mainstream networks and their cable affiliates of "CREDIBLE but UNCONFIRMED" reports of some group of "terrorists" who were coming to somewhere in NYC in some truck or other vehicle loaded with explosives of an undetermined nature to be blown up somewhere in some crowd. One couldn't get away from these reports and they became incessant.
The seven-million strong American Muslim community was shocked to know that the FBI has been using anti-Muslim instructors and Islamophobic materials in counterterrorism training.You can be sure that the ruling class will continue to use every trick in their trickster's book to get American workers to fight against each other in order to divert attention away from them.
...Western European private banks used the money they received at very low rates from the ECB, the Bank of England, the US Federal Reserve and the US money market funds in order to increase their loans to countries such as Greece without taking risk into consideration. Private banks thus bear a heavy responsibility for the crushing debts of Greece. Greek private banks also loaned huge amounts to public authorities and to the private sector. They too have a significant responsibility in the present situation. Consequently the debts claimed from Greece by foreign and Greek banks as a result of their irresponsible policy should be considered illegitimate.I don't know if you can follow all the financial tricks that European banks use to enrich themselves, but it is clear to me that the European Union and its institutions were designed for the welfare of the private banks and their owners, the capitalist ruling classes, and not for the benefit of the vast majority.