Category: politics

Brian Willson served in the Vietnam War. On September 1, 1987, he took part in a nonviolent political action outside the Concord Naval Weapons Station in California. He sat down on the train tracks along with two other veterans to try to stop a U.S. government munitions train sending weapons to Central America during the time of the Contra wars. The train didn’t stop. Willson suffered 19 broken bones, a fractured skull and lost both of his legs. Brian’s incredibly brilliant interview here.

For years, my generation—Generation Y, the Millenial Generation—has been charged with detachment. Because of us, adult writers coined the term “Facebook activism, ” and they lectured us that clicking “Like” buttons and signing electronic petitions could never effect real change. Now some of my cohort has leapt from the virtual to the real world: they’ve taken to the streets, their numbers are swelling, and they refuse to leave. They deserve a little more faith. More here.

The Oakland Commune matters not because it could have lasted any longer than it did and not because of how many cops it took to tear it down. It matters because for as long as it was there it was evidence that the impossible resides in the heart of our cities, amongst those who already live together on the streets, amongst those willing to live with them. It isn’t that this is “Round One” of a longer fight. It isn’t that those who lived and worked there all day and all night “will be back.” It isn’t that this is “just the beginning.” It isn’t just the beginning because it’s been going on for a long time, because the history of struggle is the history of capitalism. Because the history of capitalism, in its unfolding, in the movement of its contradiction with itself, is the coming into being of communism. If we won’t be back in Oscar Grant Plaza, if the Oakland Commune won’t be there as it was for two weeks, that is because we are everywhere, and the substance of history articulates itself unceasingly across the movement of what it creates. That is not an abstraction; it’s a letter of solidarity from Cairo, arriving the afternoon before the tents are torn down: “An entire generation across the globe has grown up realizing, rationally and emotionally, that we have no future in the current order of things….So we stand with you not just in your attempts to bring down the old but to experiment with the new.” Our true loves are everywhere, a friend replies. We won’t be back because we’re not going anywhere.

For a long time we have dreamed the end of capitalism. The twenty-first century is the time in which that dream will come true. We are waking up, and we are learning again, among one another, how to use our tired bodies. This is what it feels like to wake in a tent on the grass of Oscar Grant Plaza. Comrades in Baltimore write, “this occupation is inevitable, but we have to make it.” Nothing of that dialectic can be displaced by the police.

“The revolution” does not exist. It is not a horizon to be struggled toward, and no movement in the history of struggles has “failed.” The real movement is the movement of bodies, working on what exists. If the occupation is inevitable, it is because it is what is happening everywhere, now. If we have to make it, it is because our bodies are the material collective that it is. If it is repressed, its inevitability remains. The twenty-first century is the time of that inevitability, because the limit it surges against, repression, is also the dynamic of its movement: in its death throes, the openly repressive forces of capital are the manifestation of its own weakness, returning people to the destitution from which they revolt. “This occupation is inevitable, but we have to make it,” because in a time of mass debt, of mass foreclosures, of ruthless austerity, of sprawling slums, there will be no alternative to the material necessity of taking what we need and using it amongst ourselves.

None of this makes a difference this morning, while the enemy guards its ruins and our comrades are in jail. But if we knew this morning would come, we also know that the clocks have already stopped, that the real movement continues, and that time is on our side.

More here.

watch videos of the oakland police department’s brutality and the wounding of scott olsen, a marine veteran who survived two tours in iraq, by the oakland PD here.

The other thing that’s very important is chaos. As a movement that goes up against the most powerful force, if you act like an organization, like an institution, you lose. If you have one head, they know what to cut off. You have to be like water, to be everywhere, to be unpredictable. We work like an open code. Everybody should act their part. Everybody should act like a leader. (Stav Shaffir, Occupy Tel Aviv)

beautiful.
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Occupy Wall Street received a surprise visit Monday from several leading Egyptian activists, including 26-year-old Asmaa Mahfouz. She is one of the founders of the April 6 Youth Movement, which is the group credited with helping to organize the January 25 protests that eventually toppled the regime of former president Hosni Mubarak. Prior to the protest in January, Mahfouz recorded a YouTube video urging people to fill Tahrir Square. Democracy Now!’s Amy Goodman spoke to her at Occupy Wall Street. “Many of U.S. residents were in solidarity with us,” Mahfouz said. “I am here to be in solidarity and support the Wall Street Occupy protesters, to say to them, ’the power to the people,’ and to keep it on and on, and they will succeed in the end.” More here.

the man and his homilies r a horror. this is an excellent analysis of how dangerous and deranged his propaganda can be.
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Friedman’s postulation that “green is the new red, white, and blue, oh yes it is, baby” is meanwhile only subsequently amended to reflect the geographical circumstances: “And it’s the new red and white in Turkey”. No relevant amendment is available, however, when it comes to Friedman’s declaration of political identification not as a Democrat or a Republican but rather as a believer in billionaire investor Warren Buffett’s theory that “everything I got in life was because I was born in this country, America, at this time, with these opportunities and these institutions”. Given that what Friedman got in life includes marrying into one of the 100 richest families in the US, owning a house valued in 2006 at $9.3m, and accruing $75,000 per speaking appearance, non-billionaires and foreign audiences might be excused for failure to sympathise completely with Friedman’s stated aim to pass on a similar climate of opportunity to his own children.
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As author and current congressional candidate Norman Solomon has pointed out:

“It’s reasonable to ask whether Friedman – perhaps the richest journalist in the United States – might be less zealously evangelical for ‘globalisation’ if he hadn’t been so wealthy for the last quarter of a century. Meanwhile, it’s worth noting that the corporate forces avidly promoting his analysis of economic options are reaping massive profits from the systems of trade and commerce that he champions”.

A simple example of the incestuous relationship fostered by Friedman’s incessant bleating in favour of free-market capitalism and neoliberalism is his receipt of the first annual £30,000 Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award for The World Is Flat, itself written under the guidance of CEOs and other corporate officials.
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This feel-good sycophantism vis-a-vis the US war machine, which Friedman incidentally nominates for a Nobel Peace Prize in 2009 alongside Barack Obama, is compounded by Friedman’s signature portrayal of the armed forces as a bastion of multiethnic teamwork and a pioneer in the realm of racial and gender equality. The cheery cohesion of the military is of course cast into doubt by such phenomena as widespread rape among soldiers and a 2010 army report according to which approximately 18 veterans are committing suicide per day. Friedman’s ecstasy over the possibility of a “Pentagon-led green revolution” via the introduction of aviation biofuel made from pressed mustard seeds meanwhile fails to alter the fact that the US Defense Department presently holds the distinction of being the worst polluter on the planet.

As for Friedman’s explanation of the 2005 execution by US Marines of 24 unarmed Iraqi civilians in Haditha (“occupations that drag on inevitably lead to Hadithas”), this does not stop him from haughtily asserting two years later with regard to the “melting pot” that is the US military: “We don’t deserve such good people – neither do Iraqis if they continue to hate each other more than they love their own kids”.
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More here.

And what about those Washington think-tank donkeys mumbling that this was the Arab Spring’s “Ceausescu moment”? If only the Romanian dictator had improved his country’s standard of living – in terms of free healthcare, free education, incentives for the newlywed, etc – by a fraction of what Gaddafi did in Libya. Plus Ceausescu was not deposed by NATO “humanitarian” bombing which devastated Libya’s infrastructure back to the Stone Age (Shock and Awe in slow motion, anyone?).
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So congratulations to the “international community” – which as everyone knows is composed of Washington, a few washed-up NATO members, and the democratic Persian Gulf powerhouses of Qatar and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). This community, at least, loved the outcome. The European Union (EU) hailed “the end of an era of despotism” – when up to virtually Thursday they were caressing the helm of Gaddafi’s gowns; now they are falling over themselves in editorials about the 42-year reign of a “buffoon”.

Gaddafi would have been a most inconvenient guest of the International Criminal Court in The Hague, as he would have relished recalling all the hand-kissing, the warm embraces and the juicy deals the West was begging to clinch after he was promoted from “Mad Dog” (Ronald Reagan) to “our bastard”. He would also relish detailing all the shady backgrounds of those opportunists now posing as “revolutionaries” and “democrats”.

As for the concept of international law, it lies in a drain as filthy as the one Gaddafi was holed up in. Iraqi dictator Saddam at least got a fake trial in a kangaroo court before meeting the executioner. Osama bin Laden was simply snuffed out, assassination-style, after a territorial invasion of Pakistan. Gaddafi went one up, snuffed out with a mix of air war and assassination.
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More here.

The Nakba destroyed the fabric of relations that existed between Jews and Palestinians before 1948. In recognizing and materializing the right of return lies the possibility for Jews and Palestinians to live in this country together. Zochrot carries out different projects to advance understanding of Nakba and its legacy. This website is one of those projects. More here.

“Tunisians showed the world how to make a peaceful revolution without icons, without ideology, and now we are going to show the world how we can build a real democracy.” More here.

David Remnick on President Obama’s foreign-policy successes: “If a Republican had been responsible for the foreign-policy markers of the past three years, the Party would be commissioning statues.” — so foreign policy success = killing people? then yeah, obama’s the bomb.

One-seventieth of a teaspoon can pollute a 20-acre lake to the point where its fish are unsafe to eat. Thousands of tons a year settle in the world’s oceans, where they bioaccumulate in carnivorous fish. Forty percent of human mercury exposure comes from a single source—Pacific tuna.
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U.S. coal-fired power plants pump more than 48 tons of mercury into the air each year. Roughly a third of our emissions settle within our borders, poisoning lakes and waterways. The rest cycles through the atmosphere, with much of it eventually winding up in the world’s oceans.
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The symptoms of mercury toxicity are fairly well established. They include lack of balance and coordination, trouble concentrating, loss of fine motor skills, tremors, muscle weakness, memory problems, slurred speech, an awkward gait, hearing loss, hair loss, insomnia, tingling in the limbs, and loss of peripheral vision. Long-term exposure may also increase the risk of cardiovascular and autoimmune diseases and reduce the concentration and mobility of sperm.
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Nancy Lanphear is a behavioral developmental pediatrician who works at a clinic in Vancouver for children with disabilities like autism or attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder. Several years ago, a mother came into her clinic with a four-and-a-half-year-old girl who had cerebral palsy as well as speech and motor delays. But what attracted Lanphear’s attention was that the child was drooling.

“I’m looking at this four-year-old and saying, ‘This is mercury,'” Lanphear recalls, hypersalivation being a classic sign of mercury poisoning. The child’s chart showed that a heavy metals screening at age two had found high mercury levels in both mother and child, as well as in the child’s grandfather. The mother recalled being encouraged by her physician to eat fish during her pregnancy; she ate tuna or other seafood two to four times a week, sure that she was helping her baby’s development.
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More here.

A spokesman for the Pakistan Army said it had not been informed about the number of American troops on the border but it was reported that American and Afghan troops had established curfews in eastern Khost province, conducted house to house searches, established checkpoints and occupied hilltops close to Ghulam Khan on the Pakistan side of the border. More here.

World-renown scholar Noam Chomsky gave a talk in NYC last night discussing the prisoner-exchange between Israel and Hamas and the U.S. assassination of Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen. His analysis centered round the notion of who are “people” and who are “unpeople.”
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“I think [Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit] should have been released a long time ago. But there’s something missing from this whole story. There’s no pictures of Palestinian women, and no discussion, in fact, in the story of—what about the Palestinian prisoners being released? Where do they come from?” Chomsky says. “There’s a lot to say about that. So, for example, we don’t know—at least I don’t read it in the Times—whether the release includes the elected Palestinian officials who were kidnapped and imprisoned by Israel in 2007 when the United States, the European Union and Israel decided to dissolve the only freely elected legislature in the Arab world.”
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Chomsky also discusses the recent U.S. assassination of U.S.-born cleric Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen. “Almost all of the critics, of whom there weren’t many, criticized the action or qualified it because of the fact that Awlaki was an American citizen,” Chomksy says. “That is, he was a person, unlike suspects who are intentionally murdered or collateral damage, meaning we treat them kind of like the ants we step on when we walk down the street. They’re not American citizens, so they’re unpeople, and therefore they can be freely murdered.”

More here.