Sunday, September 30, 2012
Assange v Obama
Friday, September 28, 2012
In Business to Deliver
Climate Connections reports on TransCanada and police misconduct toward Keystone Pipeline Tar Sands protestors, two of whom were handcuffed to heavy machinery in order to render them helpless to defend themselves while police used pepper spray, choke holds and tasers on them with TransCanada employees egging them on.
Wednesday, September 26, 2012
People v Mafia
As Nicholas Mirzoeff reports, in Spain, the people are demanding the dismissal of the entire government for betraying the country. Since the disaster that led to austerity measures was the result of premeditated fraud, they claim Spain is no longer a democracy, but a Mafia.
Sunday, September 23, 2012
Counter Narrative
In The Beloved Community After the Disaster of Capitalism, Nicholas Mirzoeff discusses the importance of how one perceives humanity in how one responds to crisis. If one's philosophy is that people naturally try to help each other, but only through learning to be fearful are they manipulated into being misanthropic, then by rejecting official indoctrination and media propaganda that encourages fear, hate and revenge, we are building a beloved community. These lessons, in fact, were what came out of the Civil Rights Movement. The Students Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) proved through their work in the Mississippi Delta.
If #Occupy can emulate SNCC, then all bets are off. While media will always emphasize or fabricate social disruption as something that must be controlled or crushed by police violence, we can produce our own counter-narrative about political conflict. Indeed, as I've written elsewhere, that is already being done.
While neoliberals promote inhumanity as justification for their brutality, we have the power of moral sanction. All we need to do is use it.
If #Occupy can emulate SNCC, then all bets are off. While media will always emphasize or fabricate social disruption as something that must be controlled or crushed by police violence, we can produce our own counter-narrative about political conflict. Indeed, as I've written elsewhere, that is already being done.
While neoliberals promote inhumanity as justification for their brutality, we have the power of moral sanction. All we need to do is use it.
Friday, September 21, 2012
Tragedy Farce Distraction
Tragedy, farce and distraction is how Anne Petermann describes the Rio Earth Summit. As she notes, sustainable development as promoted by corporations and their pet NGOs in Rio was about sustaining corporate profits--not the planet or peoples that inhabit it.
The green economy promoted by the carbon cabal at Rio, she observes, is really about privatizing the planet; once privatized, all natural resources on earth will be owned or controlled by Wall Street. As landlords of the planet, they can then begin evicting Indigenous peoples en masse.
In their role as corporate sycophants, NGOs like the International Union for Conservation of Nature help to domesticate public opinion. As Indigenous peoples fight for their lives in this all-out campaign by the UN and transnational corporations to take their resources and territories, one has to wonder if the colossal failure of UN member states to address climate change wasn't intended from the outset. If true, then the consequence could very well be the greatest crime against humanity in the history of the world.
The green economy promoted by the carbon cabal at Rio, she observes, is really about privatizing the planet; once privatized, all natural resources on earth will be owned or controlled by Wall Street. As landlords of the planet, they can then begin evicting Indigenous peoples en masse.
In their role as corporate sycophants, NGOs like the International Union for Conservation of Nature help to domesticate public opinion. As Indigenous peoples fight for their lives in this all-out campaign by the UN and transnational corporations to take their resources and territories, one has to wonder if the colossal failure of UN member states to address climate change wasn't intended from the outset. If true, then the consequence could very well be the greatest crime against humanity in the history of the world.
Thursday, September 20, 2012
Ousting Hugo
The loss of the United States banana republics due to the democratic resurgence in Latin America has peeved Washington for some time, but the successful US-backed coup in Honduras and violent disturbances by US-backed thugs in Colombia evidently give Hillary hope. As Lee Brown writes in Upside Down World, the State Department has its eyes firmly set on helping stage a coup in Venezuela should democratic elections there fail to oust US arch rival Hugo Chavez.
Sunday, September 16, 2012
Fortified Free Trade
When the U.S. Government bailed out General Motors in 2008 and 2009, GM was on the ropes in North America, but in South America -- specifically in Colombia -- GM was making money hand over fist. After all, that was the reason for President Clinton's push for the North American Free Trade Agreement and the subsequent agreements in Latin America: to outsource labor to countries where labor was plentiful and protections were few.
Today, fortified with $50 billion from the U.S. Treasury, General Motors is doing well, but its workers are not. As reported by Austin Robles, Colombian GM workers are hurting from workplace injuries, and GM -- along with corrupt Colombian officials -- has been busy falsifying employee medical records in order to deny them coverage for disabling conditions caused by the work they do.
This, of course, is globalization. It's what the WTO protestors meant when they hung their banners from skyscraper cranes in Seattle bearing the arrows indicating democracy to the left, free trade to the right.
Today, fortified with $50 billion from the U.S. Treasury, General Motors is doing well, but its workers are not. As reported by Austin Robles, Colombian GM workers are hurting from workplace injuries, and GM -- along with corrupt Colombian officials -- has been busy falsifying employee medical records in order to deny them coverage for disabling conditions caused by the work they do.
This, of course, is globalization. It's what the WTO protestors meant when they hung their banners from skyscraper cranes in Seattle bearing the arrows indicating democracy to the left, free trade to the right.
Thursday, September 13, 2012
US v Durkan
Red-baiting political dissidents in the US is nothing new; in 2008, when the FBI raided peace activists in advance of the Republican and Democratic Party conventions -- in order to prevent Quakers and anarchists from protesting US foreign policy -- the people whose homes were ransacked while they were carted off in handcuffs had done nothing criminal. Today, in the aftermath of the 2012 national conventions farce, yet more innocent citizens are being harassed by FBI agents acting out their Orwellian fantasy.
In Seattle today, U.S. Attorney Jenny Anne Durkan is convening a grand jury to intimidate anarchist Leah-Lynne Plante into admitting some imagined crime against the state, while her friends who were with her when FBI thugs with assault weapons battered down her door are wondering just what it is about the U.S. Government that makes it see terrorists behind every peace button or black flag. As the National Lawyers Guild notes in this article, anarchism is the perfectly legal belief that society would be better off with no government, laws, police or any other authority.
When armed thugs break down your door for expressing this belief, it's not hard to imagine that others may soon come to the same conclusion.
In Seattle today, U.S. Attorney Jenny Anne Durkan is convening a grand jury to intimidate anarchist Leah-Lynne Plante into admitting some imagined crime against the state, while her friends who were with her when FBI thugs with assault weapons battered down her door are wondering just what it is about the U.S. Government that makes it see terrorists behind every peace button or black flag. As the National Lawyers Guild notes in this article, anarchism is the perfectly legal belief that society would be better off with no government, laws, police or any other authority.
When armed thugs break down your door for expressing this belief, it's not hard to imagine that others may soon come to the same conclusion.
Sunday, September 09, 2012
Abolishing Prostitution
Writing at Women's Media Center, Kathleen Barry reports on the long struggle to abolish prostitution. As legal reform proves successful, Europe now takes the lead in abolishing this crime against humanity, and perhaps pressuring the United Nations to follow suit.
Saturday, September 08, 2012
Climate of Fear
American Friends Service Committee and the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee have joined suit against the U.S. Department of Treasury for violating the free speech rights of Muhammad Salah, a U.S. citizen. Due to Treasury's designation of Salah as a terrorist -- even though he has not been charged with any crime -- Salah and his wife have been unable to provide for themselves or their children. Indeed, for the last 17 years, it has been a crime for anyone to assist Salah with food, housing or medicine. Remarkably, it is even a crime for the plaintiffs to discuss with Salah his predicament.
Keeping in mind Salah is a U.S. citizen living in Illinois, the facts of his case are astounding. Without notice of charges or evidence or an opportunity to respond, Salah's assets were blocked indefinitely. He has never been served with a warrant, charged with criminal wrongdoing, or afforded a hearing. Since 1995, he has been unable to work, study, or engage in civic or religious activities that require spending money.
Under U.S. law, a law found unconstitutional by a U.S. District Court, this arbitrary punishment absent a crime can continue forever. In fact, Salah may never have the opportunity to plead his case before a judge and jury, as the current status of free speech in the US is subject to the whims of the administration in power.
Keeping in mind Salah is a U.S. citizen living in Illinois, the facts of his case are astounding. Without notice of charges or evidence or an opportunity to respond, Salah's assets were blocked indefinitely. He has never been served with a warrant, charged with criminal wrongdoing, or afforded a hearing. Since 1995, he has been unable to work, study, or engage in civic or religious activities that require spending money.
Under U.S. law, a law found unconstitutional by a U.S. District Court, this arbitrary punishment absent a crime can continue forever. In fact, Salah may never have the opportunity to plead his case before a judge and jury, as the current status of free speech in the US is subject to the whims of the administration in power.
Friday, September 07, 2012
Sweatshop States
It turns out there was a logic to the U.S. coup in Honduras: maquiladoras in the form of city-states. What better way to advance the U.S. neoliberal agenda in Latin America than militarized sweatshop states exempt from national and international law? Barack and Hillary must be proud of their junior achievers.
Thursday, September 06, 2012
Mobilize or Perish
So what it comes down to is either civil society mobilizes against Indigenous genocide, as it did against slavery and apartheid, or Indigenous peoples will perish. The neoliberal options of becoming
either a caricature or a corpse, of course, are not an accident, but
rather a logical consequence of EU, US, and UN policies against
collective ownership. With the accelerated theft of Indigenous
properties, instigated by the IMF and World Bank, the UN Declaration on
the Rights of Indigenous Peoples is becoming a tragic farce. Were it not
so, we could expect UN peacekeepers to defend Indigenous communities,
rather than stand aside while organized violence by NATO, police, and paramilitaries wipe them out.
By mobilize I mean both resources and the networks that need resources to function. People often mistakenly think mobilizing means organizing large demonstrations or spectacular events, but in my experience effectiveness depends more on strategic use of resources and networks of committed individuals engaged in research, education and communication–much as we’ve done at Public Good Project. As people shed the illusion of institutional protection through philanthropic foundations and large NGOs — that largely consist of public relations marketing and little else — they might come to realize that contributing regular donations to networks is a better way. When they begin doing that in large enough numbers, researchers, analysts, activists and independent journalists will have the means to sustain the human rights movement, including that of Indigenous peoples.
By mobilize I mean both resources and the networks that need resources to function. People often mistakenly think mobilizing means organizing large demonstrations or spectacular events, but in my experience effectiveness depends more on strategic use of resources and networks of committed individuals engaged in research, education and communication–much as we’ve done at Public Good Project. As people shed the illusion of institutional protection through philanthropic foundations and large NGOs — that largely consist of public relations marketing and little else — they might come to realize that contributing regular donations to networks is a better way. When they begin doing that in large enough numbers, researchers, analysts, activists and independent journalists will have the means to sustain the human rights movement, including that of Indigenous peoples.
Wednesday, September 05, 2012
Engage Strategically
Camila Vallejo, student leader in the pro-democracy movement in Chile, discusses the need for young people to engage the political process strategically, including the hard work of organizing within political parties committed to social justice. As young people in the US face the electoral choice between false promises and real threats, Vallejo offers an alternative to pious posturing and despair. If students like Vallejo can keep socialism alive under a right-wing regime in Chile, young people in the US ought to be able to create something more hopeful than the current choice between white collar and white power.
Sunday, September 02, 2012
Beyond the Blog
When I first encountered the writing of Stephanie Hendrick and Therese Ornberg,
they were both doctoral candidates at Umea University in Sweden. Since
then, they have both gone on to teaching careers, Stephanie at Umea, and Therese at Linkoping.
In her dissertation Beyond the Blog, Stephanie Fayth Hendrick discussed academic blogging as both written scholarship and a communal endeavor. As a means of non-institutionalized knowledge production at the interface of the institutional and the public, scholarly blogging for public intellectuals, she notes, exposes otherwise inaccessible catalogues of ideas and the conversations that construct vital new social knowledge.
In her dissertation Beyond the Blog, Stephanie Fayth Hendrick discussed academic blogging as both written scholarship and a communal endeavor. As a means of non-institutionalized knowledge production at the interface of the institutional and the public, scholarly blogging for public intellectuals, she notes, exposes otherwise inaccessible catalogues of ideas and the conversations that construct vital new social knowledge.
In Making Sense Digitally, Therese Ornberg Berglund explores achieving coherence in conversation
via digitally-supported interaction, and examines the communicative
affordances of multimodal discourse, particularly as applies to
self-organizing in social situations experienced in multiple dimensions
simultaneously.
Saturday, September 01, 2012
Standing in the Way
In this film about geomilitary mapping in Mexico, we learn about the
academic/non-profit front of the U.S. Army project to militarize
indigenous territories as a means of privatizing communally owned land.
As a process of gathering cultural intelligence to be used by the
neoliberal axis in taking these lands, mapping as a form of spying feeds
into the U.S. Army Foreign Military Studies Office program for
supporting the U.S.-Mexico Merida Initiative, a military/market strategy
for eliminating indigenous autonomy.
As we see in reports from Oaxaca, mapping culture is a way of mapping resistance by those Wall Street and the Pentagon see as standing in the way: the indigenous peoples of Mexico. While mapping by indigenous communities for their own purposes can be an important part of cultural survival and revitalization, in the hands of their enemies, this knowledge is a devastating weapon.
As we see in reports from Oaxaca, mapping culture is a way of mapping resistance by those Wall Street and the Pentagon see as standing in the way: the indigenous peoples of Mexico. While mapping by indigenous communities for their own purposes can be an important part of cultural survival and revitalization, in the hands of their enemies, this knowledge is a devastating weapon.
It doesn’t work, of course, but it feeds into their sense of pseudo-revolutionary identity, and it is relatively risk free since it poses no threat to the powers that be. This ineffectiveness is apparently fine since these people aren’t the ones fighting for their lives, as are most Indigenous peoples. For them, playacting is an unaffordable luxury.
Since global conflicts between Indigenous societies and institutions that do the bidding of markets are life and death struggles — not good faith negotiations — those who approach these conflicts for what they are are more likely to succeed. While pressuring institutions to enforce and live by international humanitarian law is good, it is far from enough, given the zero sum game of the Fourth World war.
Our networks and efforts are no secret, but as long as liberals are politically illiterate and organizationally infantile, they will continue doing what the philanthropic sector and other institutions (like most unions) tell them to. As liberals see their privileges and security crumble, they might start looking for answers elsewhere. When they do, networks like ours are ready to educate them so they can organize more effectively.
One hopeful sign is independent media like Real News and Intercontinental Cry, as is popularly accessible analysis as exemplified by Wrong Kind of Green, where the non-profit industrial complex is rightly and roundly criticized.
The Fourth World solidarity required of First World civil society comprises first and foremost a commitment to democratizing states. As we saw in Northern Ireland and South Africa, this involves research, education, organizing and action of civil society networks in the form of both political parties and self-defense.
First World affinities of the Fourth World liberation movement, in North America especially, would contribute more to the cause of social justice by democratizing First World elections and governance than they could ever accomplish by simply protesting or waving signs. That involves a lot more work, of course, but it's what needs to be done if they want to pay more than lip service to Indigenous solidarity.