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Archives by Tag 'Occupy movement'
Frankfurt, Germany.
It almost seemed as if the City of Frankfurt, Hessian Police and, after all, any court up to the Federal Constitutional Court (in German: Bundesverfassungsgericht, BverfG) went paranoid and hysterical all together and at once. What seem...
Less than six months before the November presidential elections in an exceptionally distressed United States the narrow, unpleasant parameters of political possibility are emerging. Two alternatives confront the American people, both to the right of center.
1. If P...
While it may be premature to speculate on the legacy left by the various social upheavals that have occurred since early-2011, the electoral tide sweeping across Europe offers additional evidence that something fundamental is happening. In Greece and France, vote...
Tens of thousands of students took to the streets of Montreal again on Saturday, in defiance of the Quebec government’s Bill 78, which aimed to legally curtail their rights to protest. As has become increasingly common, the students were greeted by police responses of t...
A new trove of heavily redacted documents provided by the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed by the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund (PCJF) on behalf of filmmaker Michael Moore and the National Lawye...
The citizens of Spain have taken to the streets and squares in great numbers to demand their rights. Estimates vary enormously. Spain’s right-wing government claims that 22,000 people came out in Barcelona in the demonstrations on 12th May while the organiser...
This week, thousands are descending on North Carolina for the Bank of America shareholders’ meeting. The protest comes on the heels of the successful Wells Fargo shareholder event in San Francisco, where thousands of protesters shut down the conference, and the U....
The Occupy movement has been an extremely exciting development. Unprecedented, in fact. There’s never been anything like it that I can think of. If the bonds and associations it has established can be sustained through a long, dark period ahead — because victory...
Disturbing news from Occupy circles about NYPD practices these days — I mean, in addition to all those other NYPD practices we were already disturbed about.
David Graeber, a prominent anarchist involved with Occupy since its beginning, recounts seeing a woman...
A recent article by Chris Hedges is once again causing heated arguments among activists in the Occupy Wall Street movement. “Black Bloc: The Cancer in Occupy,” was published in his syndicated ...
Chen Guangchen, the Chinese human activist, got four separate articles in the New York Times for May 5.
Jane Perlez and Michael Wines reported from Beijing on the deal that would get Chen and his family visas to the US, for him to take up a fellowship at NYU.
...
Last Tuesday, Mayday, 2012, tens of thousands from Occupy Wall Street and a coalition of unions and immigrant rights groups marched in New York, Oakland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago and other major cities to protest economic inequality and to celebrate other possi...
The concept is somewhat egotistical. But if you believe that what you have to offer is valuable, the published self-interview is an attention getter.
Recently, Michael Lewis, author of ...
May Day 2012 was a day when Occupy made clear to enemies, critics and co-opters alike that the Occupy movement is far from dead. All across the country rallies, marches, and direct actions put the 1% on notice for what will undoubtedly be a hot Spring and Summer. Be...
Many people might be surprised to learn that the May Day celebrations that occurred around the world yesterday were born more than a century ago out of a struggle by American workers for the eight-hour day.
The late nineteenth century was a particularly hard and br...
Dedicated to the students, young and old, of Southeastern Michigan and Northwestern Ohio
Dracula
On May Day sometime in the 1890s, an ordinary Englishman boarded a train in Mun...
Despite a generation of sensitivity trainings and multicultural studies, an astonishing number of people still feel emboldened to express their misbegotten bigotry in very public arenas. Cops and vigilantes alike are caught on tape throwing down racial slurs before they...
Several months before the 2008 general election, I stood with two other antiwar demonstrators outside of the town hall of a small town in Massachusetts. One of the other two demonstrators had demonstrated for peace there each Saturday at noon since just prior to the incep...
As the Occupy movement around the country begins to get more involved in immigrant struggles, or around the struggles of people of color more generally, complicated questions of race and risk, tactics and differential legal consequences for people of color are arising. ...
With hindsight gained by googling “MoveOn” and “co-opt” after the fact, I can’t claim that nobody tried to warn me. Many websites with left and even liberal politics had said in so many words, “Be wary of this organization called The 99% Spring. It is a Trojan...
In an earlier installment, I noted that eight ...
Noam Chomsky has seen a lot of social movements. He cut his teeth on the civil rights and anti-war movements of the 1960s and 1970s. He participated in the anti-intervention struggles of the 1980s as well as in the World Social Forums that began in the 1990s. Now in...
“Bankers – pillars of society who are going to hell if there is a God and He has been accurately quoted.”
~John Ralston Saul
First, I’d like to thank reader R who provided a Saul quote so relevant to our predicament that ...
As the Occupy movement begins to come into full bloom across the country this Spring – with plans for massive days of action and demonstrations on May 1st, new campaigns for transit justice on both coasts, continued organizing against foreclosures and police ...
Over the past several years, but now with more intensity, domestic security measures are being mooted, planned, and carried out with a purposefulness that appears to take as a given that what is good for the 1% is good for the rest of us. Moreover, they appear to be devel...