Not just anybody can read GNN’s re-posted headlines and recycled flame wars. If you’re reading this blog, you’re special, and not just special ed. special either. You’re a secret member of a vanity / virtually unknown / anti-community / troll club, which I think may qualify as a society of some sort, meaning SECRET SOCIETY!!! Shit, when I think of secret societies, I think of George Bush laying naked in a coffin confessing how he killed the most popular student in third grade because he made Georgie feel dumb while other secret society skull and bones guys giggle.

I think of the dramatic speech by JFK, which proceeded his own murder, “The very word “secrecy” is repugnant in a free and open society; and we are as a people inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths and secret proceedings. We decided long ago that the dangers of excessive and unwarranted concealment of pertinent facts far outweighed the dangers which are cited to justify it.”

Then, I think, Fuck, this secret society shit is pretty hard-core bad-ass, but my secret society is so fucking retarded and dysfunctional. One solution that comes to mind is that the GNN Secret Society would be way cooler if we had a secret handshake. All the the cool secret societies have one, and if we had like the coolest secret handshake, then the masons and the Illuminati and those other guys, they’d treat us as equals, or at least cooler than the people they’re planning on exterminating.

So, I’m thinking a secret handshake needs to be really subtle, but at the same time in your face undeniable. Most of the best moves have been taken, but then it hit me. When you encounter another guerrilla inline (opposite of “online”, an example of the secret guerrilla speak we need to be creating) give him or her a hearty, totally natural handshake, but with your left hand make a clinched fist. Get it? It’s straight from a logo or some other GNN graphic thing I once saw in a thread. Of course, if you’re not one of the anarchist, militant-type guerrillas, you could make a peace sign with your left hand. If you have some other agenda than war or peace, you could make a neutral sign, like totally flatten your left hand.

That way any secret inline encounter with another guerrilla could always be denied as a harmless rock, paper, scissors game, and whoever lost the “handshake” would be obligated to buy the other guerrilla as much booze as he or she could drink.

Another key concept for putting GNN in the same league with other secret societies is a secret leader. We need some grand wizard or powerful potentate title. Then we’ve got to decide how we choose which one of us should bear this title, for how long, etc. etc. The title is a no brainer, “The Great Guerrilla”. Selecting a secret leader is of course impossible. We are by design a leaderless secret society. Some might suggest that whoever has posted the last cool comment on an ant-Anthony thread is The Great Guerrilla. In this way, all GNN Secret Society members could taste the sublime ecstasy of Great Guerrilla-hood and bashing Anthony, but I don’t know. I think “The Great Guerrilla” should be a purely metaphysical, metaphorical character for attributing what we believe are our own best ideas.

For example, I might say, fellow guerrillas, let us never fail to make the secret handshake that The Great Guerrilla gave us or his wise admonitions to call Anthony a douche bag while doing so. And another guerrilla might say, but do not forget, if Anthony had not banned The Great Guerrilla, he would be among us today.

We should have other secret society titles, like the secret troll that we all curse. He could be “The Bad Monkey”. He’s the type of guy we all agree Anthony had every right to ban, but we came to miss because he was more cool and fun than Anthony. Whenever you want to say something really offensive and hurtful to another guerrilla, you should say it as a quote of The Bad Monkey. For example, The Bad Monkey once told me that Stephen throws a Frisbee like a girl.

Anyway, now that we’re a secret society, I can now reveal to you all that The Great Guerrilla has promised to buy a sock puppet and return to this site, bitch slap Anthony and Stephen, and re-open GNN to the world with a World of Warcraft, 2nd Life, kick-ass chat room, if you act NOW and vote this blog to THE TOP BLOG!

Written By tingbudong

He’s an ugly bastards who you would expect to see hanging around children’s playgrounds in a mack telling kiddies he has puppies in his car.

The first foreign minister of the EU is, Catherine Ashton (Baroness).

Wow! What an ugly fucking whore.

1. I’m so glad the war criminal, Tony Blair, did not get the job as EU president. The dirty evil jew cunt has been jetting round the EU frantically for weeks trying to get the job, but he’s just not Nazi enough for the jews.

2. Herman_Van_Rompuy is a sock-puppet of the jews. The dirty jews control politics in Europe. One of the most significant reasons this shit-faced freak got the job was because he is strongly opposed to Turkey (Muslim country) joining the EU.

3. I’m pretty sure the hideously ugly cunt, Catherine Ashton, is a dirty jew. She has all the features of a dirty jew, and has no talent or abilities. She took over the EU job as European Commissioner for Trade from the dirty filthy child-killing jew, Peter Mandelson, and has now been elevated to foreign minister of the EU.

Things are grim in Europe politically. There is a massive disconnect between decent people, and politicians and the media. Decent European people see jews as dirty subhuman child-killing filth, who should be brought to account for their crimes against humanity and executed, and definitely should not be allowed to hold any public office or run any business. Whereas the jew controlled media is a propaganda machine to cover the crimes of evil corrupt child-killing jews, and politicians are scum who give away wealth and human rights to the dirty jews.

A revolution is brewing in Europe with the goal of killing all the politicians that are sock-puppets of the jews, and burning all the evil child-killing jews.

Written By floopin

Buenaventura Durruti was born on July 14th 1896 in Leon, a mountainous area in central northern Spain. More prosperous than the south, but far less industrialised than Catalonia, it was not, and never has been, an anarchist stronghold like Catalonia or Andalusia. Buenaventura was one of nine brothers (one was killed in the October 1934 uprising in the Asturias, another died fighting the Fascists on the Madrid front and all the others were murdered by the Fascists) . His father was a railway worker in the yard at Leon who described himself as a libertarian socialist.

Durruti had black, straight hair, brown eyes, and was rather stocky and very strong. He did not, however, care for the rough games at school. He left school at fourteen and went to work as a trainee mechanic, like his father, in the railway yard in the city of Leon. He was still working in the yard in 1917 when the ‘socialist’ controlled Union General de Trabajadores (UGT) called an official strike of the Northern Railway Workers. Durruti took an active and prominent part in the strike which, after the government had refused to accept the terms agreed between the employers and the Union, became a general strike throughout the area. The general strike, which began on August 10th, was crushed in three days. The Spanish Government brought in the Army, which behaved with extreme barbarity. They killed 70 and wounded over 500 workers. Moreover, the authorities also jailed 2,000 of the strikers. The Army had, in the words of one observer, ‘saved the nation’. Durruti managed to escape, but had to flee abroad to France. The brutality of the Spanish State had a profound and lasting effect on the young Durruti.

From the fall of 1917 until the beginning of 1920, Durruti worked in Paris as a mechanic. He then decided to return to Spain and arrived at San Sebastian just across the border. Here, he was introduced to the local anarchist group. Shortly after Buenasca, the then President of the recently-formed anarchist-controlled Confederacion Nacional del Trabajo (CNT), persuaded him to go to Barcelona where the anarchist movement, as well as the syndicalists, was being brutally suppressed and most of its members jailed or executed. For some time there had been considerable unrest in Barcelona and throughout Catalonia.

The Terror

In February 1919, the workers of a large electrical factory known as the Canadiense went on strike in support of seven of their workmates who had been dismissed for political reasons, and for an increase in wages for certain categories of workers in the plant. The strike was well organised, this being an important test case for the CNT. The English manager was prepared to compromise — particularly as wages at the factory were below average; but on advice from the local Captain-general, he changed his mind and refused to discuss the stoppage with the Union. Moreover, the Captain-general jailed the officials of the CNT and declared martial law, although as Gerald Brenan noted, the strike was perfectly peaceful and ‘legal’. Following the refusal of the Barcelona authorities to release the organisers, a general strike throughout the Barcelona area began. It lasted a fortnight and involved over 100,000 workers. The outcome was inconclusive. “However”, remarks Brenan, “the military arrested many thousands of workmen and in the usual Spanish style, gave sentences of imprisonment amounting to seventeen hundred years — sentences which of course would not be carried out”.

The state’s terror against the workers, the CNT and the anarchist movement had begun in earnest. Driven to desperation by the extreme repression, anarchists such as Durruti and his friend Francisco Ascaso, a bakery worker from Catalonia, met violence with violence, assassination with assassination. Between 1919 and 1922, almost every well-known anarchist or syndicalist was either murdered by pistoleros hired by the employers’ federation, or were shot ‘trying to escape’ from jail — the so-called ley de fugas. Indeed, says Hugh Thomas in his book The Spanish Civil War, “a new civil govenor, Martinez Anido, and a police chief, Arlegui, fought the anarchists with every weapon they could, including the foundation of a rival, government-favoured Union, the Sindicato Libre, and a special constabulary, the Somaten”. One of the most respected anarchists in the country, the CNT President Salvator Sequi, was shot down in the street by a police gunman.

The maim instrument in bringing about the repression and terror was the govemment of Dato which began in 1920. Ascaso and Durruti decided to assassinate him. He was indeed killed in Madrid in 1921 by, it has been said, anarchists — but not by Ascaso or Durruti. However, a far more sinister figure was near at hand — Cardinal Soldevila of Saragossa. Mention has already been made of the Sindicato Libre, or ‘yellow Unions’ as the anarchists called them. These yellow Unions were mainly financed and supported by this so-called Man of God. Moreover, Soldevila was extremely wealthy, deriving his fortune from various hotels, casinos and lesser gambling houses. In fact, he was one of the largest shareholders in the biggest gaming establishments. He hated both the anarchists and the CNT and supported their suppression. In 1923, Ascaso and Durruti decided to kill him. And they were successful. In the words of H Rudiger: “Ascaso and Durruti made an end of this so-called Holy Man, who in the name of one who had driven the money-changers from the temple, did not hesitate to act as one himself, and to use his ill-gotten wealth to crush the efforts of the workers for more humane social conditions “.

Durruti did not take this action lightly. Moreover, as George Woodcock has observed, the basic doctrines of anarchism deny retribution and punishment; they are unanarchistic. But, he says, they were typical of Spain at the time. No anarchist favours violence for violence’s sake; but anarchists such as Ascaso and Durruti could see no alternative at that time — except passive acceptance of dictatorship, repression and state violence. And no anarchist would accept that!

The dictatorship of Primo de Rivera, which began in 1923, saw the virtual eclipse of militant anarchist activity in Spain. Anarchist newspapers were banned and all prominent anarchists were either in jail or exile or had been shot. Both Ascaso and Durruti had to flee the country.

Durruti Abroad

Ascaso and Durruti went first to Argentina, here they were received with tremendous enthusiasm by large numbers of workers. However, almost immediately, the police began to hound them. They were driven out of the Argentine. The Spanish authorities had obviously warned all South and Central American Governments in advance. Throughout Latin America, Ascaso and Durruti were given no peace. Often starving, they were hounded from Chile, then Uruguay and Mexico. The Argentine Government condemned them to death as anarchist agitators. Indeed, even the Stalinist hack, Ilya Ehrenburg, later remarked with pride that four capitalist States had condemned Durruti to death.

Whilst Durruti was in South America, numbers of anarchist militants gathered in France and, according to Thomas, directed occasional forays across the border into Spain. In this activity they were, of course, supported by French anarchists. Ascaso and Durruti, therefore, decided to make their way to France, particularly as Durruti knew Paris well. They settled in Paris and Durruti opened a bookshop. And it was there that he first met Nestor Makhno .

Some months later in 1924, the notorious arch-reactionary King Alfonso XIII of Spain visited Paris. Ascaso and Durruti attempted to assassinate him, but were unsuccessful. They were caught and arrested. Both were jailed for a year. On their release, Argentina demanded their extradition so that the sentence of death that awaited them could be carried out. However, the French anarchist movement inaugurated a tremendous libertarian campaign on their behalf, and succeeded in frustrating the Argentine authorities. Finally on June l9th 1925, they were released from jail in France, but had to leave the country within two weeks. Belgium and Luxemburg refused them political asaylum; so they went to Germany, which at the time was governed by a Social Democrat (Labour) Government. But the Social Democrats also refused them entry.

Ascaso and Durruti then returned to France illegally. Again, they lived under cover in Paris. But they were not happy living on the charity and solidarity of their French comrades. They wanted to work and earn their own living. So they decided to make their way to Lyon. They both found jobs at Lyon, but were soon discovered by the police — and were sentenced to six months in jail. After that they lived, again illegally, for a time in Belgium. In 1927, Durruti made his way to Berlin to the home of the well known German anarchist, Augustin Souchy. But the Germans would not let him stay. At last, however, the Belgian Government had a change of heart. The Belgian police granted both Ascaso and Durruti permits to stay there.

During all this time of wandering from country to country, Durruti took part in various anarchist activities, and kept in touch with a number of his comrades in Spain itself. During this period, moreover, the Soviet authorities, sensing Durruti’s potential influence in Spain at a later date, offered him and Ascaso refuge in the USSR. But they refused to entertain the idea of going to Russia. Makhno, if no one else, would have warned them against accepting Communist ‘hospitality’.

Fall of the Monarchy

In July 1927 at a secret meeting in Valencia, anarchist delegates from all over Spain came together to form the Federacion Anarquista Iberica (the FAI) in order to co-ordinate the efforts and activities of all the various groups and federations of anarchists throughout Spain.

With the fall of the Spanish monarchy in April 1931, Ascaso and Durruti returned to Spain. On arrival they found that certain ‘leaders’ of the CNT had become increasingly reformist during the period of the Dictatorship, whilst the FAI and most of the rank-and-file members and activists of the CNT remained true to their anarchist principles. In May, a motley collection of liberal-republicans, radicals and ‘socialists’ were returned to Parliament (the Cortes) in what has been described as the fairest election in Spain’s history. Angel Pestana, a leading reformist, argued that the CNT should support the Republican Government. Durruti opposed him. And Durruti, the FAI and the majority of the CNT were soon proved correct.

A Congress of the CNT met in Madrid in July, its object being to reorganise the movement and prepare for future battles. Almost immediately, there was a strike of building workers in Barcelona; many of the strikers were gunned down by the Guardia de Asalto. Then, the telephone operators struck at the Central Telephone Exchange and were locked out of the building. A week later a strike in Seville led to troops killing 30 strikers and wounding 300. Three workers were also shot dead by the military in San Sebastian. So much for the ‘liberal’, ‘radical’, republican Government of Azana! “The Government “, observed Brenan in The Spanish Labyrinth, “showed that they had no hesitation in employing all the means that they had so much condemned when practised by the reactionary governments of the past”. Of course! The ‘socialist’ controlled UGT, though not supporting the workers in their struggles against the employers and the State, were becoming less influential, whilst the newly-organised CNT were becoming stronger all the time. Indeed, the workers just had to fight back as their standard of living — always very low by European standards — had fallen considerably, and unemployment was increasing. During this period a number of FAI activists, including Ascaso and Durruti, made raids on banks in order to get money for the workers and the movement. Durruti is particularly remembered for his celebrated assault on the Bank of Spain at Gijon. He never kept a centimo for himself. He was now married and his wife was expecting.

In January 1932, the Catalan FAI Federation, which had now adopted Communismo Libertarie (Libertarian Communism), together with the new neo-Trotskyist Left Communist Party of Maurine, Nin and Andrade, organised an insurrection throughout Catalonia. The Army soon suppressed the uprising and about 120 prominent anarchists and Left Communists were arrested and deported to Spanish Guinea without trial. Ascaso and Durruti were among them. Durruti’s baby was just two months old. For three months the Government kept him in prison in Guinea, but after considerable agitation for his and his comrades’ release, they were set free. He returned to Spain on April 15th.

After his return to Spain, things were somewhat quieter for Durruti. It appears that he tried to settle down; but between 1933 and 1935, the two ‘black years’ as they were called, the reactionary republican Government of Lerroux-Robles made Durruti the object of continual persecution. He was continually hounded by the police. For some while, he worked in a factory in Barcelona and joined the Textile Workers’ Syndicate. He spoke at public meetings and took part in organisational work on behalf of the union and the anarchist movement generally. But again and again he was taken into custody by the police and held without any charges being made against him.

During this period Spain was in a state of near-chaos and in October 1934 there were risings in Barcelona, Madrid and the Asturias. These risings were mainly led by Catalan nationalists, supported by ‘socialists’ and the numerically-weak Communist Party. Except in the Asturias, they were not well organised. The CNT and FAI stood aloof, except in the Asturias. Here the anarchists, ‘socialists’, Stalinists and the neo-Trotskyists worked together. Moreover, many of the workers attacked their old enemy, the Catholic Church, and convents and some churches were burned down; a few nuns said they had been raped and the Bishop’s Palace and much of the University of Oviedo was destroyed. Several unpopular priests were shot. However, the Government called on General Franco to put the rising down. There then followed a terrible retribution. The army killed 1,300 workers, mostly miners, and wounded 3,000. During October and November of 1934 the Government jailed over 30,000 workers for political offences alone, the majority of these from the Asturias. In 1934, moreover, a typical Fascist Party began to take form and become active. It was called the Falange, and was made up largely of young, dissatisfied sons of the rich. Its funds came from businessmen and from the aristocracy.

Such was the state of Spain before the rising of the generals in 1936, the revolution and the subsequent civil war. In the middle of July, Durruti entered hospital for a hernia operation.

Revolution and Civil War

In February 1936 a Popular Front (the Stalinists, Harry Gannes and Theodore Repard, in their book Spain in Revolt call it a ‘People’s Front’) Government of various sorts of Republicans and ‘socialists’ came to power. There were no Communists in the Government or Communist sympathisers; indeed, the Stalinists only won 14 seats out of a total of 470, and their membership was probably under 3,000 or about a tenth of that of the FAI. Whatever else it was, the militarist-Falangist uprising was not an attack on Stalinism.

On July 11th, a group of Falangists seized the broadcasting station at Valencia and issued a proclamation stating: “This is Radio Valencia! The Spanish Falange has seized the broadcasting station by force of arms; tomorrow the same will happen at broadcasting stations throughout Spain!” This was only a beginning. At five o’clock in the afternoon of July 17th, General Franco assumed command of the Moors and Legionaires of Spanish Morocco, and issued a manifesto to the Army and the nation to join him in establishing an Authoritarian State in Spain. In the next three days, all of the fifty Army garrisons, with the support of the Falange, the majority of the landlords, aristocracy, big bourgeoisie and, of course, the Catholic Church (itself a wealthy institution), declared for Fascism. War had been declared on the peasants and workers of Spain. And they took up the challenge.

In Barcelona the militarist rising took place on July l9th. Hearing of the uprising, Durruti — whose wound was still open — immediately left the hospital and joined the workers on the barricades. During the evening of the 18th both anarchists and ‘Trotskyists’ raided rifles and dynamite. They also commandeered as many vehicles as they could lay hands on. On July 20th both Ascaso and Durruti took part in an anarchist assault on the Ataranzaras Barracks. The pro-Fascist forces, after considerable and prolonged firing, surrendered at half-past one in the afternoon; but not before Durruti’s friend and comrade Ascaso had been killed. Following the assault on the barracks the anarchist workers attacked the Fascist-held Hotel Colon. The siege lasted thirty-six hours, during which every one of the windows had concealed a rifle or machine gun and had been raining bullets on hundreds of almost unarmed workers in the surrounding streets. Durruti was among the first few to enter the building. By the evening of the 20th, the rising in Barcelona had been completely crushed. But not elsewhere in Spain.

The following day, President Companys was visited by Garcia Oliva and Durruti. “These formidable men of violence”, says Hugh Thomas, “sat before Companys with their rifles between their knees, their clothes still dusty from the fight, their hearts heavy at the death of Ascaso”. Companys then made a very skillful, typical politician’s speech, admitting that the CNT and the anarchists had never been “accorded their proper treatment”, but that the anarchists were now “masters of the city”. He appealed to them to accept him as leader of the Catalan Government. Garcia Oliver fell for the ‘soft-soap’. He became the world’s first (and, it is hoped, last) anarchist Minister; of Justice! However, Durruti had far more important things to do.

The Catalan workers set up an ‘Anti-Fascist Militia’s Committee’, comprising representatives of the CNT, the FAI, the UGI, the neo-Trotskyists and a number of republican groups. This committee, according to Thomas, was the real ‘government’ of Barcelona, and indeed the whole of Catalonia. It was, says Thomas, dominated by its anarchist representatives -Oliver, Durruti and Ascaso’s brother, Joaquin.

A week later, the committee delegated Durruti to organise an Anti-Fascist Militia. He formed the now-famous ‘Durruti Column’.

Aragon and Anarchism

On July 23rd two columns set out from Barcelona to liberate Saragossa on the Aragon front. The first column was composed almost entirely of anarchist militiamen, and was over 1,000 strong. Its number soon increased to between 8 ,000 and 10 ,000 . It was by far the largest and strongest unit on the anti-Fascist side. They were all volunteers and mostly anarchists, anarchist sympathisers and members of the CNT.

By the beginning of August, Durruti’s column was within sight of Saragossa. But a certain Colonel Villalba, Commander of the Barbastro garrison and now in ‘official’ but rather vague command of the republican forces on the Aragon front, persuaded Durruti to halt his column for fear of being cut off from the other columns. Durruti agreed; but later continued his attack on the city. During the assault the cathedral was burnt to the ground. Durruti never made any secret of his aims. Indeed, he is alleged to have remarked to a Russian reporter just before the assault on the city:

“It is possible that only a hundred of us will survive, but with that hundred we shall enter Saragossa, beat Fascism and proclaim libertarian communism. I will be the first to enter. We shall proclaim the free commune. We shall subordinate ourselves neither to Madrid nor Barcelona, neither to Azana nor Companys…. We shall show you Bolsheviks how to make a revolution.”

Saragossa was captured and Aragon freed from Fascist control. Moreover, in the words of Hewetson, Durruti “laid the foundations of the great advance into Aragon, which established the front and safeguarded the revolutionary peasant collectives on which the food supply of Catalonia depended”. And Souchy observed that “Wherever his column advanced, they socialised, they collectivised, they prepared everything for free socialism”. Felix Morrow in his ‘Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Spain’, noted that “At least three-fourths of the land was tilled by collectives. Peasants desiring to work the land individually were permitted to do so, provided they employed no hired labour…. Agricultural production increased in the region from thirty to fifty per cent over the previous year, as a result of collective labour. Enormous surpluses were voluntarily turned over to the government, free of charge, for use at the front”. “Altogether”, writes Thomas, “there were 450 collectives”.

Morrow says that many workers from abroad saw Aragon and praised it. Not only that but anarchism, Communismo Libertarie, was also more efficient!

Of the situation, Thomas (not always an impartial writer) comments:

“It was the presence of Durruti and the other powerful CNT-FAI columns in Aragon which made possible the establishment in that region at least of a purely Anarchist authority (sic!). This was a most disturbing event from the point of view of the Central Government, the Catalan Government, the Communists, and indeed all groups apart from the CNT and FAI themselves. But there was nothing that they could do about it . . .” The anarchists and peasants “set up a regional ‘Council of Defence’, composed entirely of CNT members and presided over by Joaquin Ascaso, brother of Durruti’s famous companion killed in July. This had its seat at Fraga, and from thence exercised supreme power over the whole of Aragon. Deriving power directly from the collectives, this was now the sole real revolutionary power in Spain.”

In September, after the liberation of Aragon from Franco’s forces, Durruti was interviewed by Pierre van Paasen of the Toronto Star. In this interview he gives his views on Fascism, government and social revolution despite the fact that his remarks have only been reported in English-and were never actually written down by him in his native Spanish-they are worth repeating here.

“For us”, said Durruti, “it is a matter of crushing Fascism once and for all. Yes; and in spite of the Government”.

“No government in the world fights Fascism to the death. When the bourgeoisie sees power slipping from its grasp, it has recourse to Fascism to maintain itself. The Liberal Government of Spain could have rendered the Fascist elements powerless long ago. Instead it compromised and dallied. Even now at this moment, there are men in this Government who want to go easy on the rebels.”

And here Durruti laughed. “You can never tell, you know, the present Government might yet need these rebellious forces to crush the workers’ movement . . .”

“We know what we want. To us it means nothing that there is a Soviet Union somewhere in the world, for the sake of whose peace and tranquillity the workers of Germany and China were sacrificed to Fascist barbarians by Stalin. We want revolution here in Spain, right now, not maybe after the next European war. We are giving Hitler and Mussolini far more worry with our revolution than the whole Red Army of Russia. We are setting an example to the German and Italian working class on how to deal with Fascism.”

“I do not expect any help for a libertarian revolution from any Government in the world. . . . We expect no help, not even from our own Government, in the last analysis.”

“But”, interjected van Paasen, “You will be sitting on a pile of ruins.”

Durruti answered: “We have always lived in slums and holes in the wall. We will know how to accommodate ourselves for a time. For, you must not forget, we can also build. It is we the workers who built these palaces and cities here in Spain and in America and everywhere. We, the workers, can build others to take their place. And better ones! We are not in the least afraid of ruins. We are going to inherit the earth; there is not the slightest doubt about that. The bourgeoisie might blast and ruin its own world before it leaves the stage of history. We carry a new world here, in our hearts. That world is growing this minute.”

Madrid — the End

At the beginning of November 1936, Franco’s four armies, made up mostly of Moroccans and Legionaires, converged on Madrid. The battle began on November 8th. It was basically a struggle between a well-equipped army supported by German and Italian bombers on one side, and an ill-armed mass of urban workers on the other. There were many women fighting on the republican side. Moreover, in Madrid the Communists were relatively stronger and better organised; they were also supported by various International Brigades.

The battle continued unabated. Franco said that he would rather destroy Madrid completely than leave it to the Marxists. German Nazi troops of the Condor Legion planned to set the city on fire, quarter by quarter. From November 16th onwards Madrid was bombed by German planes day and night. In three nights alone over 1,000 people were killed by the bombs. Furthermore, Madrid was cut off from the rest of Spain.

In this situation of desperate crisis, Durruti decided to move 4,000 members of his Column from Aragon across the country to help relieve Madrid. His arrival had a tremendous effect on the besieged workers of the city. It saved Madrid, at least for a while. But on November 20th, just as he was getting out of a car, a stray bullet hit him in the back of the head, and he died immediately. On November 22nd his body was brought back to Barcelona, accompanied by a number of his closest comrades. It lay in state until the following morning. Thousands filed past the open coffin. Karrill describes the funeral thus:

“It had been arranged for 10 o’clock, but hours before it was impossible to enter the Via Layetana . . . from all directions groups with banners and wreaths arrived. All Barcelona was out to pay their last tribute to their hero. Many groups carried banners with inscriptions. The words ‘We shall avenge him’ were repeated over and over again. Immense masses of people streamed into the square outside the house of the Regional Committee, when Durruti’s comrades carried the coffin out on their shoulders. Armed militiamen accompanied them. The band played the anarchist ‘hymn’: ‘Sons of the People’. And tens of thousands raised their fists in salute.” Many important dignitaries were, of course, present, including the ‘anarchist’ Minister of Justice, Garcia Oliver, and the Russian Consul who said he was deeply moved ( ! ) . Over 500,000 people attended Durruti’s funeral. Thousands of banners and black and black and red flags flew in Barcelona that day.”

What sort of a man was Durruti?

Brenan says that both Ascaso and Durruti were fanatics who, through their feats of daring, made themselves the heroes of the Catalan proletariat; they were the ‘saints of the anarchist cause’, showing the way by their example. Thomas says that, for some, Durruti was a ‘thug’, a ‘killer’ and a ‘hooligan’;for others he was the indomitable hero, with a fine “imperious head eclipsing all others, who laughed like a child and wept before human tragedy”. George Woodcock calls him “the celebrated guerrilla leader” and an idealist. Vernon Richards also refers to him as a guerrilla ‘leader’, but not the kind to ‘direct’ the masses.

Frederica Montseny said that Durruti was a kind man, with a “Herculean body, the eyes of a child in a half-savage face”. He was a man of the people who did not impose himself on others. Liberto Callejas has spoken of his idealism, of his perseverance and his firmness. “Above all, Durruti was a proletarian anarchist”, who moulded himself on the teachings of the anarchist Anselmo Lorenzo. Durruti, he said, was a propagandist who preferred simple words. He insisted on clearness. When he spoke on a platform, his audience well understood what he said. And like Makhno, Durruti was often gay. Emma Goldman, when she met him during the fighting, said that she found him “a veritable beehive of activity”.

Durruti’s Column, like Makhno’s partisan army, was completely plebian in character. One of his comrades wrote of the Column: “The Column is neither militarily or bureaucratically organised. It has grown organically. It is a social revolutionary movement. We represent a union of oppressed proletarians, fighting for freedom for all. The Column is the work of Durruti, who determined its spirit and defended its libertarian principles until his last breath. The foundation of the Column is voluntary self-discipline. And the end of its activity is nothing else than libertarian communism”. Moreover, Durruti also ate and slept with everyone else; and when there was a shortage of anything, such as mattresses or shoes, he went without the same as everybody else.

Written By Dilated_Rebel

The Arrest and Torture of Syed Hashmi

—An interview with Jeanne Theoharis

By Angola 3 News

Jeanne Theoharis is the author of an April, 2009 article in The Nation, entitled “Guantanamo At Home,” which focuses on the arrest, prosecution, and imprisonment of US citizen Syed Hashmi in a New York City prison with Guantanamo-like conditions. Theoharis holds the endowed chair in women’s studies and is an associate professor of political science at Brooklyn College, CUNY.

Syed Hashmi’s trial will begin in New York City on December 1. The website www.freefahad.com explains: “Syed Hashmi, known to his family and friends as Fahad, was born in Karachi, Pakistan in 1980, the second child of Syed Anwar Hashmi and Arifa Hashmi. Fahad immigrated with his family to America when he was three years old. His father said ‘We knew there would be many opportunities for us here in the United States. We came here to find the American dream.’ The large Hashmi family settled in Flushing, New York and soon developed deep roots throughout the tri-state area. Fahad graduated from Robert F. Wagner High School in 1998 and attended SUNY Stony Brook University. He transferred to Brooklyn College, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in political science in 2003. A devout Muslim, through the years Fahad established a reputation as an activist and advocate. In 2003, Fahad enrolled in London Metropolitan University in England to pursue a master’s degree in international relations, which he received in 2006. On June 6, 2006, Fahad was arrested in London Heathrow airport by British police based on an American indictment charging him with material support of Al Qaida. He was subsequently held in Belmarsh Prison, Britain’s most notorious jail.” For more information on the Hashmi case, also visit: www.educatorsforcivilliberties.org.

Angola 3 News: Can you please give us background on the arrest and prosecution of Syed Hashmi? For example, what are the charges against him? What is their evidence?

Jeanne Theoharis: In June 2006, Hashmi, who is a US citizen, was arrested by the British police at Heathrow Airport (he was about to travel to Pakistan, where he has family) on a warrant issued by the US government. In May 2007, he was extradited to the United States, the first US citizen to be extradited under terrorism laws passed after 9/11. Since then, he has since been held in solitary confinement at Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC).

The US government alleges that early in 2004, a man by the name of Junaid Babar, also a Pakistani-born US citizen, stayed with Hashmi at his London apartment for two weeks. According to the government, Babar stored luggage containing raincoats, ponchos, and waterproof socks in Hashmi’s apartment and then Babar delivered these materials to the third-ranking member of Al Qaida in South Waziristan, Pakistan. In addition, Hashmi allegedly allowed Babar to use his cell phone to call other conspirators in terrorist plots.

The government has claimed that Babar’s testimony is the “centerpiece” of its case. Babar, who has pleaded guilty to five counts of material support for Al Qaida, faces up to seventy years in prison. While awaiting sentence, he has agreed to serve as a government witness in terrorism trials in Britain and Canada as well as in Hashmi’s trial. Under a plea agreement reported in the media, Babar will receive a reduced sentence in return for his cooperation.

A3N: What can you tell us about Hashmi as a person, especially your personal experience of knowing him when he was a student of yours?

JH: Fahad was a student of mine at Brooklyn College in 2002. An outspoken Muslim student activist, Fahad wrote his senior seminar paper with me on the treatment of Muslim groups within the United States and the violations of civil rights and liberties that many groups were facing. Needless to say, this feels particularly chilling—and no longer academic—as we have now witnessed his own rights being violated.

A3N: Since his arrest, what have the conditions of his incarceration been?

JH: Under special administrative measures (SAMs) imposed in October 2007 by the former Attorney General, Hashmi must be held in solitary confinement and may not communicate with anyone inside the prison other than prison officials. Family visits are limited to one person every other week for one and a half hours and cannot involve physical contact. While his correspondence to members of Congress and other government officials is not restricted, he may write only one letter (of no more than three pieces of paper) per week to one family member. He may not communicate, either directly or through his attorneys, with the news media. He may read only designated portions of newspapers – and not until thirty days after their publication – and his access to other reading material is restricted. He may not listen to or watch news-oriented radio stations and television channels. He may not participate in group prayer. He is subject to 24-hour electronic monitoring inside and outside his cell – including when he showers or relieves himself – and 23-hour lockdown. He has no access to fresh air and must take his one hour of daily recreation – when it is given – inside a cage.

As the expert testimony supplied by Hashmi’s attorneys in a pre-trial motion of December 2008 attests, the conditions of Hashmi’s detention may have severe physical and mental consequences and impair his mental state and ability to testify on his own behalf.

While former Acting Attorney General Keisler claimed that these measures are necessary because “there is substantial risk that [Hashmi’s] communications or contacts with persons could result in death or serious bodily injury to persons,” Hashmi was held with other prisoners in a British jail for eleven months without incident. The SAMs were renewed by Attorney General Mukasey in November 2008 and upheld by Judge Loretta Preska in January 2009, citing Hashmi’s “proclivity for violence.” There has been no change to the SAMs under the Obama Administration. They were renewed again by Attorney General Holder in early November 2009. Yet, Hashmi is not being charged and has never been charged with committing an actual act of violence.

Currently, according to research by the New York Times in February 2009, there are six people in the United States being held on pre-trial terrorism SAMs; three (including Hashmi) are under the jurisdiction of the Southern District of New York, which has long served as a stepping stone to national political office.

A3N: Looking particularly at the harsh solitary confinement imposed on Hashmi, how is this officially justified? Do you think the stated reason is the actual motivation, or do you think there are other reasons for the solitary confinement and other harsh restrictions?

JH: My colleagues and I have begun to come to the conclusion that the use of prolonged solitary confinement is a tactic to ensure convictions. Such conditions weaken people mentally and the toll of sensory deprivation and isolation simultaneously makes people more eager to take a plea or not able to fully assist their counsel. Most experts agree it is torture (see Atul Gawande’s “Hellhole” in The New Yorker). While our public discussions have tended to see torture as a tactic to get information, in cases like Hashmi’s, torture is being used to help secure convictions.

A3N: How are the prion conditions for Hashmi in NYC different from those in Guantanamo?

JH: There are key similarities of prolonged isolation and sensory deprivation between Hashmi’s treatment at MCC in lower Manhattan and what we have heard of the conditions at Guantanamo. However, there has been much less attention to these inhumane conditions within the United States.

The focus on prisons like Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, and Baghram stems, in part, from a larger post-civil rights paradigm that assumes the judicial process is now fair in the United States and relatively incorruptible and thus it was necessary to go outside of the US courts to do the extreme bad things.

Rather, what made Guantanamo possible stemmed from domestic legal practices, many already in place and many others expanded after 9/11, which have continued almost unabated under the Obama Administration.

A3N: With Hashmi’s trial beginning on December 1, what are activists currently doing to support him?

JH: Theaters Against War began holding weekly vigils in October to draw attention to the inhumane conditions of confinement and the due process violations Hashmi and others are facing within the federal courts. Artists and actors such as Wallace Shawn, Kathleen Chalfant, Bill Irwin, Jan Maxwell, Betty Shamieh, and Christine Moore have performed at the vigils.

A3N: Any closing thoughts?

JH: Three central Constitutional issues have become clear in the treatment of Hashmi and others within the federal system: the inhumane conditions of confinement, the abridgement of due process rights , and the lack of 1st Amendment protections.

If these are not addressed, then moving the Guantanamo detainees into the federal system does little to return America to the rule of law, of which we are rightfully proud. I am reminded of that quote by former Chief Justice Earl Warren in 1967, ““It would indeed be ironic if, in the name of national defense, we would sanction the subversion of…those liberties…which [make] the defense of the nation worthwhile.”

—Angola 3 News is a new project of the International Coalition to Free the Angola 3. Our website is www.angola3news.com where we provide the latest news about the Angola 3. We are also creating our own media projects, which spotlight the issues central to the story of the Angola 3, like racism, repression, prisons, human rights, solitary confinement as torture, and more. Our online video series has now released interviews with Black Panther artist Emory Douglas titled “The Black Panther Party and Revolutionary Art,” author J. Patrick O’Connor titled “Kevin Cooper: Will California Execute An Innocent Man,” author Dan Berger titled “Political Prisoners in the United States,” and Colonel Nyati Bolt titled “The Assassination of George Jackson.”

Written By angola3news

Hey there GNN.

In an effort to move towards an open and unmoderated news wire to serve the GNN refugee community, several anonymous co-conspirators have created and experimental website at guerrillanews.wordpress.com.

At the moment there is nothing on the site and I don’t even know if people can just join and start posting, but if you see that you can, and would like to, please do. (I now see that it says we can have “unlimited private users” for $29.97/year. I am sure we can come up with 30 users every year who have one dollar they can throw towards such a project. Users could also be encouraged to make larger donations to pay for services. Anyone?)

I’m not exactly sure if it is open to join at the moment. Please try and report your success or failure here (thank you). If you are a WordPress.com user I think you can just email the email address you are registered under to us at guerrillanews@riseup.net and we can add you manually, or you can create a free WordPress user account and then do so.

Update: You need a free WordPress account, then just send us your email address that you’re account is registered under. We will add you as a contributor but please let us know if you are interested in serving the role of editor or administrator. (I’m not really sure exactly what the difference is between “Contributor” and the fourth role, “Author”.)

Also, if you have experience with WordPress or similar platforms, please contact us if you are interested in joining the development and administration team and gaining access to the site layout functions. And even if you don’t have experience, let us know if you would like to be part of the co-administration collective, which I hope to eventually extract myself from completely, handing it over entirely to a team of ex-GNNers and perhaps others to run horizontally and democratically (despite what the haters and nay-sayers think and say).

We should be able to set this up so anyone can join and post. It will be open to all and unmoderated.

Though I am currently empowered as the administrator I am fully willing to divest myself of this and hand it over to the community to co-administrate horizontally. I will not be doing any active moderation. I am also pretty unfamiliar with wordpress, other than posting over at subMedia, so right now I am just playing with the many tools and features, so nothing is said and done yet as far as layout and everything goes. This is an early notice and the site is definitely in the embryonic development phase, so stay tuned and get involved!

GUN (aka the Guerrilla Underground) has also, thanks to many of you, been an amazing success. We have nearly one hundred users, many of which are among the best and brightest that GNN has to offer (you knwo who you are), and we are growing daily. Amazingly, thus far moderation has not been necessary, which I credit to the very existence of a moderation policy and declaration of the space itself as moderated. I would like to thank everyone who has joined and contributed thus far, and would like to encourage more of you to do so. We now have two unmoderated spaces: the open forum and the chat.

Hopefully these two projects, Guerrilla News and GUN, can serve as points of departure, rather than destinations, for the community-driven creation of a true alternative to GNN.

Written By ShiftShapers

This page has all the information presently available.

Written By Eerik

Written By BestUserNameEvar

They are old things, from another century. The lines are swelling in front of soup kitchens. The number of thefts in supermarkets is constantly growing. Foreclosure proceedings pile up. And while those on the bottom try not to die of hunger, those on top prepare for the worst, for the feared social explosion. “Zero tolerance” is guaranteed for anyone who breaks the law; new structures of detention are being prepared for natives and immigrants; soldiers and “volunteers” patrol neighborhoods that are under video surveillance. The old and new poor have to know: dying of privation or suicide, these are the only choices permitted to them.

They are old things, from another century. Today, more and more people are reaching out to grab wealth from the places where it exists in abundance. Some even have a dream in their heart, like the two anarchists, Christos and Alfredo, who were arrested in Greece on October 1 for a bank robbery. Christos robbed the bank at gunpoint. They claim that Alfredo aided him, taking the money on delivery. Now the two anarchists, one Greek and one Italian, are behind bars. Prison is the fate promised to anyone who isn’t resigned to dying in misery, the fate promised to the enemies of all exploitation and authority.

They are old things, from another century. A shattered economy, skyrocketing unemployment, the deterioration of living conditions, a war among the poor fomented by the powerful henchmen, racism speeding up from a mere creep to a gallop, a planet threatened by technological development, States alternating the carrot of democracy with the stick of totalitarianism…

In this sudden return to the past, there is still something missing: the offended dignity that drives desperation away, transforming it into action; the freedom that stops being the right to obey authority and goes back to being the challenge to every form of power; the desire to live that isn’t satisfied with what exists and mounts an assault to snatch what has never been.

IT’S AN OLD THING, FROM ANOTHER CENTURY: INSURRECTION

^{This is the text from a new poster made in solidarity with Alfredo M.Bonanno and Christos Stratigopoulos. You can find the text and poster in many different languages here.}

Written By ShiftShapers

It’s expected to be $14 trilly by the end of this fiscal year, and might reach $25 trilly by the time Obnog booted out of the White Crib and has to go back to his crack den.

Written By floopin

Written By WesleyWes

if you have a friend that is un-registered and wants in to the asylum or are in need of expressing a different personae, or just want to hide, yet participate, because youre an ass-hole, or even if you want to advertise fake passports or cell-phone scams,

boy, have you come to the right place! we have sock-puppets in all shapes and sizes and can provide for any ideological orientation! CHEAP!!!

you wont find this in the store, and if you act within the next day or so, we’ll throw in a second sock-puppet and an honorary membership in the gay niggers association absolutely free!

but hurry, time is limited and they are going fast

Written By remarcus

Written By FloydAnderson

Written By soulcarver

My original GNN avatar.

It was actually an old McLaughlin’s XXXX Coffee trade card.

Written By Namaste_Rich

WARNING: Drug Cartel Exposed Creating, Releasing, Injecting, Infecting and
Depopulating Planet with Pandemic H1N1/H5N1 Viruses and Vaccines

Los Angeles , CA —World leading drug-industry investigators have uncovered stunning documents proving an international drug ring, operating from New York City, is behind the H1N1 swine flu fright and vaccination preparations.

Dr. Leonard G. Horowitz, America ‘s leading consumer health expert, and Sherri Kane, an investigative journalist, have released shocking proof in legal affidavits that leaders of a private global biotechnology “trust” are behind everything you ever heard about pandemic flu, including its origin and alleged prevention via vaccinations. Their documents, being sent by attorneys to the FBI this week, evidence powerful industrialists are operating a crime ring within the “Partnership for New York City “ (PNYC), and are behind the pandemic’s creation, media persuasions, vaccination preparations, and health official promotions seen everywhere from supermarkets to health clinics.

“David Rockefeller’s trust, that engages several powerful partners on Wall
Street, including media moguls Ruppert Murdock, Morton Zuckerman, Thomas Glocer, and former Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Jerry Speyer, are implicated in advancing global genocide,” Dr. Horowitz wrote to FBI directors.

“This ‘partnership’ controls biotechnology research and development globally. Health commerce internationally is also controlled virtually entirely by this trust that exercises near complete control over mainstream media to
promote/propagandize its products and services for the drug cartel’s organized crime. This trust, in essence, makes or breaks medical and natural healing markets, primarily through the mass media companies and propaganda it wields for social engineering and market building,” Dr. Horowitz wrote.

Among the most stunning revelations from the Horowitz-Kane research are those linking Larry Silverstein of Silverstein Properties, Inc., and the 9-11
terrorist attacks, to the drug cartel’s geopolitical, economic, and population
reduction activities. Mr. Silverstein, leaser of the World Trade Center who
authorized to have Building-7 “pulled,” meaning detonated, is a chief suspect in the “9-11 truth” investigation. Silverstein is currently landlord and co-partner in the biotechnology trust founded by David Rockefeller and implicated by these new discoveries.

“If these people can get away with killing more than 3,000 people in 8 seconds on 9-11, they are completely capable of murdering millions, even billions, of people worldwide this flu season,” Dr. Horowitz commented. “I pray these revelations will save millions of lives and help activists call upon President Barack Obama to demand legitimate inquiries into these genocidal atrocities.”

Given the unprecedented nature and urgency of these findings, Dr. Horowitz has posted his affidavit for public review on FLUscam.com, praying other activist will spread the information in order to prompt governments worldwide to cease mass vaccination preparations to avoid becoming accessories to the crime of genocide.

“The last time I contacted the FBI I warned them about the impending anthrax attacks one week before the first mailings were announced in the press,” Dr. Horowitz recalled. “It took them 6 months to respond. When they did, they made me a suspect in the mailings. This time I am warning the Justice Department a month before the deadliest genocide in history. I’m praying they’ll take kindly to my appeal for a PNYC investigation, and Court-ordered injunction, to stop the vaccinations for public protection.”

http://www.drlenhorowitz.com/HOME.html
http://www.drlenhorowitz.com/Affidavit.html

Written By nicholasdee

I.

The nonhuman animal advocacy movement is at a crucial crossroads where truly it is now do or die. In the early 1980s, a new animal rights movement glowed bright with potential; in just a few years, however, the light faded to black as corruption, opportunism, and bureaucracy snuffed out the promise of genuine change. As they evolved, it became increasingly obvious that People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) and other groups emulated the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) to become corporate behemoths and mainstream machines. Increasingly co-opted and compromised, animal rights groups frequently worked with, rather than against, the exploitation industries in order to regulate, not eliminate, the ongoing nonhuman animal holocaust.

In the last decade, for instance, PETA pressured McDonalds, Burger King, and KFC to increase cage size and adopt “less cruel and more profitable” slaughter methods,[1] while HSUS aggressively campaigned for “humane meat” and “cage-free eggs.” These groups ultimately serve corporate exploiters’ interests and champion capitalist principles generally. But whereas PETA began as a grassroots organization in 1980, and continues to defend the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) and to promote veganism, HSUS has been a bureaucratic welfare group since its inception in 1954, it consistently denounces the ALF, and has always capitulated to carnivorous culture as it barely gives support even for vegetarianism.

Lest anyone in either the industry or advocacy camps had any doubts, HSUS President and CEO Wayne Pacelle put them to rest in a sycophantic July 2009 interview on Agritalk radio. Pacelle virtually apologized for being vegan in his private life and assured the flesh, vivisection, hunting, zoo, and circus industries that they had nothing to fear from HSUS, as his goal is to promote “decency and mercy toward animals” and not to close their operations.[2]

II.

In direct response to the wretched reformism and opportunism of bureaucratic “welfarism,” a new movement emerged to reconstruct nonhuman animal advocacy unequivocally as a struggle for animal rights, not “welfare”; for the total abolition of nonhuman animal slavery rather than its regulation; and for veganism, not “humane” animal-derived products of any kind. To a significant degree, the new vegan abolitionist movement has been shaped and defined by the work of Gary Francione, professor of law at Rutgers University. Beginning in the mid-1990s, Francione exposed the duplicity of “new welfarists” who use the term “animal rights” but pursue “welfarist” policies. These policies, Francione argues, are incoherent and dilute the meaning of rights; “welfarism” in any form, he insists, works to the benefit of industries and thus increases, rather than decreases, the demand for animal-derived products; it only aggravates, rather than alleviates, speciesism and the plight of nonhuman animals in horrific systems of exploitation.

Francione tapped and mobilized growing dissatisfaction with corporate reformism and sparked a growing vegan abolitionist movement. More accurately, he revived a vegan movement first created by Donald Watson in 1944, and was sustained by vegan societies such as in the UK and US. These societies maintained Watson’s broad and political vision of veganism not merely as a diet but rather as an ethical and political commitment to the abolition of nonhuman animal exploitation and, indeed, to all systems of oppression.[3] Francione wedded the pacifist ideals of ancient Jainism, Watson’s vegan viewpoint, and the philosophy of animal rights first systematically developed in 1983 by Tom Regan, merging these influences in a new matrix of pacifist vegan abolitionism.

Francione typically speaks as if he invented veganism, and sycophantic followers such as Roger Yates claim that a bona fide “animal rights movement” only began in 2006 with the ascendant influence of Francione’s work.[4] But Francione mostly returned to Watson’s original teachings, albeit often in diluted form that retains the ethical vision linking food choices to moral commitments to oppressed nonhuman animals, but without a consistent political commitment to working against all forms of oppression and exploitation. Abolitionist approaches toward speciesism began within the nineteenth century feminist-antivivisectionists, were deepened in Watson and emerging vegan societies, informed the hunt saboteur movements in the UK from the 1960s to the present, and were advanced in historically momentous ways in 1976 when Ronnie Lee founded the Animal Liberation Front.

While Francione advanced a forceful critique of “welfarism” and took animal rights philosophy to a new level, he has nonetheless proved to be bereft of political vision and incapable of forging a genuine resistance movement that can evolve beyond the marginalized position currently embraced by less than one percent of the human population. In Francione’s religious, tepid, and apolitical rendering, vegan abolitionism remains an elitist, white, Eurocentric consumerist lifestyle easily co-opted by capitalism and dominant ideologies. Moreover, Francione has spawned a cult-like following – “Franciombes” – who parrot his fundamentalist, rigid, bellicose, and Manichean positions; with slavish devotion to their Master and his hostile manner, Franciombes defame his critics in a style more suited to Machiavelli than Jains.

III.

The Guru and his disciples come together in a dance of doctrine and dogma. Like Christian fundamentalists, Francione and his followers believe they possess the Truth while all others struggle in error. As Francione argues there is literally “no alternative,” only chaos and ruin, except for their approach based on obedience to law, peaceful education, and focus on individuals and consumption habits over institutions and productive imperatives stemming from global capitalism. For them, the world is black and white, answers are cut and dry, and complexity is reduced to the Procrustean bed of either/or, rather than enlivened through the dialectical logic of both/and.

According to the pacifist party line, militant direct action (MDA) tactics such as economic sabotage are ALWAYS wrong and NEVER effective. Excusing themselves from the work of analyzing the complexities and unique specific situations, Franciombes fashion a handy a priori “truth” and apply it mechanically to every action that has happened or will happen. Their ignorance of history is matched only by their mental rigidity. For over three decades, in dozens of countries throughout the world, in countless thousands of actions, liberators and saboteurs have freed hundreds of thousands of captive nonhuman animals; permanently shut down numerous breeders, “fur farmers,” and vivisectors; and convinced countless numbers of individuals to find gainful employment in careers other than nonhuman animal exploitation, while inspiring people worldwide to join the animal liberation movement.

In all this, Franciombes see no value or gain and, despite operations closed forever, they can only repeat the baseless claim that all damaged property is rebuilt and all liberated nonhuman animals are “replaced.” This may happen in some cases, but in light of the many operations shut down for good, this clearly is a false claim; even when animals are replaced and property rebuilt and restored, rising insurance costs are enough to weaken and jeopardize the viability of small and moderate operations at least. Whereas dogmatic pacifists hide under the cover of ignorance and denial, corporate exploiters themselves have testified to the effectiveness of ALF actions.[5]

By vilifying sabotage tactics as “violent,” and by conflating attacks on property with assaults on people, Franciombes adopt the reactionary discourse and position of the FBI and the corporate-state-media complex. They needlessly and divisively pit education in opposition to illegal tactics (even open rescues), as if the two tactics were irreconcilably opposed rather than complimentary aspects of a revolutionary process.

Despite some talk of capitalism, commonalities of oppression, and alliance politics, Francione ultimately pushes a simplistic, single-issue “go vegan” approach pitched to a white, affluent, privileged, Western audience, with no intent to engage people of color, working class families, the poor, or China and India – the world’s most populous nations now in rapid transition from maintaining traditional plant-based diets to embracing Western diets rooted in consuming “animal products” including flesh, milk, and eggs.

Francione thereby reinforces the dismal elitist, classist, and racist stigmas attached to activists for nonhuman animals since the beginning of “animal protectionism” in the early nineteenth century, and he further isolates veganism and animal rights from progressive movements and the social mainstream. Unable to articulate a structural theory of oppression, exploitation, and ideological hegemony, and mired in Western dualisms and the construction of false oppositions such as between production/consumption, individual/social, and psychological/institutional, Francione exculpates the logic and global machinery of capitalism to lay the entire burden of blame and responsibility on individual consumers.

Certainly, humans do have agency and need to take responsibility for transforming their personal lives, such as by engaging the ecological and ethical imperative to go vegan. But politically and pedagogically it is also crucial for citizens to recognize the formidable power of the structural forces in their lives and the ways in which sedimented economic and political institutions pose profound obstacles to teaching, learning, and progressive ethical and social change. Psychological and ethical change is a necessary but not a sufficient condition of the large-scale social transformations needed for creating viable democratic and ecological cultures.

Internalizing the capitalist ideology of liberal individualism, this pseudo-abolitionist offers nothing but the most banal and tepid reformism which is no more effective in changing the overall social relations of domination than “welfarism” is in breaking the chains of speciesist oppression. Rather than advancing on Watson’s formulation, Francione offers a regressive and hollow version of a rich ethical political ideal opposed to all forms of exploitation and hierarchy.

IV.

Franciombes eliminate complexity and ambiguity from the social-political picture, and reek of arrogance, dogma, and condescension. They cling to the religious conviction that any approach to veganism, animal rights, or abolitionism other than what Francione has set in stone is false, reactionary, and “welfarist.” They promiscuously deploy the phrase “new welfarist” to discredit others in the movement, much as McCarthyites hurled the epithet of “communist” and post-9/11 patriots terrorize with the discourse of “terrorism” to discredit their opponents as irrational extremists.

Indeed, in McCarthyist fashion, upon receiving alleged death threats from supporters of confrontational or illegal direct action, Francione made reckless accusations and named names of anyone (including avowed pacifists) remotely connected to such a devious terrorist plot. Moreover, Francione routinely brands his opponents as “mad” or “insane,” as if disagreement with his divine teachings were evidence of psychological impairment and oblivious to the normalizing and ableist implications of crude dichotomies of sane/insane and rational/irrational.

Unable to grasp the root causes of hierarchical domination and ecological crisis, blaming individuals over institutions, Francione is hardly positioned to grasp the nature of the problems afflicting other animals and the planet let alone to offer potential solutions and viable tactics. And thus we get nothing beyond the hopelessly vague, liberal pseudo-panacea of “vegan education.” Apparently limited to blogging and podcasting to the choir, Francione & followers are bereft of politics, and, in fact, they lack even the most rudimentary elements of a theory and practice of education – more than a small problem for an approach seeking change through vegan education. Their outlook is utterly delusional in the conviction that veganism is the main vehicle and catalyst for individual enlightenment and, thereby, for social change. These pugilistic pacifists cling to a Christian-like faith that somehow, someday their insular polemics and feeble “education” efforts will transform the heart and soul of humanity and, thereby, change society as a whole. Oblivious to the threshold we are about to cross, they promote slow, incremental change amidst rapid, systemic ecological breakdown.

Incredibly, as global ecological and social crises rapidly mount, Francione ignores the most crucial events of the day – human overpopulation, species extinction crisis, deforestation, global climate change, and the destructive growth imperatives inherent in the capitalist economy. The chaos theory model Franciombes use to buttress their collective hallucination of a “vegan revolution” is far more applicable to the exponential growth of flesh consumption in China and India. For every person who becomes vegan, a thousand flesh-eaters arise in these rapidly industrializing societies and elsewhere such as Brazil and South Africa. The Franciombe concern over “replacement” of liberated nonhuman animals seems to elude them as it applies to their own single-issue approach, which fails to realize that for every vegan convert they celebrate, armies of necrovores are continuously born and raised.

Francione’s approach is complacent, detached from reality, and irrelevant to the massive and complex struggle necessary to forestall biological meltdown and ecological catastrophe. Pacifist lifestyle veganism is another dead-end and groundless hope, totally inadequate to the unprecedented challenge of a planet in crisis. If once progressive, Francione’s approach is now clearly reactionary. It is a pseudo-abolitionist movement, bourgeois lifestyle veganism; it is a one-dimensional, single-issue, Eurocentric, white, elitist, consumerist, capitalist construct that vegans and abolitionists need to shed quickly.

Where Franciombes seek to trademark abolition and revile as mere “welfarism” any vision not their own, this group aims to blow the doors off their cultish theology in order to reinvigorate thinking, restore common sense, situate veganism in its broadest political context, and revitalize possibilities for revolutionary change. Our options are not confined to either the “welfarism” of HSUS or the pseudo-abolitionism and lifestyle veganism of Francione. There are other ways, such as history reveals and the future requires.

V.

We need a far richer and more radical concept of abolitionism that draws from and revitalizes the strength and power of the nineteenth century anti-human slavery movement that erupted in the US (and of course earlier in the UK). Unlike the pale imitation and caricature espoused by Franciombes, the version of abolitionism we champion is far more in tune with the radicalism, pluralism, and alliance politics (imperfect and impermanent as it was) of nineteenth-century abolitionism. But eschewing nostalgia and outmoded political models, this approach also draws from numerous other contemporary theories and political movements. We recognize the need for radical social change and we understand that the fight against speciesism, capitalism, the state, and hierarchy in all forms will be waged on many different fronts simultaneously. We seek to reinvigorate a movement sold-out by corporate opportunists and paralyzed by pacifists who sympathize with the latent “humanity” of oppressors and demonize the militant wing of animal liberation, a perverse inversion of loyalties and misguided sentiments manifested in the Stockholm Syndrome mindset evident in the mindset of fundamentalist pacifists who enjoin activists to respect the humanity of murderous oppressors as they demonize and vilify militant liberationists⁶

We cannot stop the speciesist and corporate war on nonhuman animals and the planet with blogging, leafleting, tabling, and recipe books alone. Capitalism is inherently destructive, and change will never come solely through education and persuasion, nor without a movement more powerful than the agents and institutions of omnicidal destruction. As radical pedagogy theorist Paulo Freire himself insisted – education can only be part of a much broader and multi-pronged movement of resistance, struggle, and change. Thus, like all priorl revolutions, human and nonhuman animals will not win liberation because oppressors suddenly see the light, but rather because enough people become enlightened and learn how to rock the structures of power, to shake them until new social arrangements emerge.

It is not only the content of Francione’s positions we challenge, but also the very form and method of his approach. We cannot progress in the struggle for liberation or hope to be politically relevant unless we abandon Francione’s dualistic, either/or logic for a dialectical both/and logic, one that abandons all bogus dichotomies and false separations. Thus, we need education and agitation, mainstream and militant tactics, peaceful resistance and confrontation and sabotage, and aboveground/legal and underground/illegal means of weakening speciesist capitalism.

We need more, not less, vegan education, of a kind that shatters the enclaves of white privilege in which Franciombes entomb abolitionism and reaches out to the poor, working classes, inner cities, less-industrialized nations, and, crucially, the emerging crisis flashpoints in the burgeoning population giants of China and India. And, despite one of his most persistent and vapid imposed false options, those who work underground to liberate nonhuman animals through raids can and do rescue other animals from “shelters.”

While we support the Animal Liberation Front and the Earth Liberation Front, and defend the importance of economic sabotage, we also recognize that property destruction is only a rear-guard and minor means of resistance that has to yield to a broad social movement. Still, it remains an important – sometimes seemingly the only – means of resistance against the capitalist property system, and merits support as we simultaneously work toward building political alliances on a global scale and in an unprecedentedly broad and inclusive way.

The pluralist and contextualist approach central to our position absorbs the partial value and validity of vegan abolitionism, but without the debilitating dogmatism and disabling rejection of effective tactics simply because they do not conform to an ancient code or utopian ideal that only serves to strengthen oppression and to reassure oppressors they have nothing to fear from an “opposition” movement.[7] It abandons single-issue fetishism and the complacency of class and racial privilege in favor of diversity, solidarity, and bridge-building with those most economically disadvantaged and politically marginalized. Only in this way, can the profound importance of veganism and animal rights be recognized and respected by a social majority; only in alliance with other struggles can its revolutionary potential be realized.

In the consumerist and privatized lifestyle form promoted by Franciombes, however, veganism is the opiate of the people, and Murray Bookchin’s polemic against apolitical “lifestyle anarchism” can be fruitfully applied to the vaporous lifestyle veganism championed by Franciombes and others.[8]

We endorse a form of abolition that (1) defends the use of high-pressure direct action tactics, along with illegal raids, rescues, and sabotage attacks; (2) views capitalism as an inherently irrational, exploitative, and destructive system, and sees the state as a corrupt tool whose function is to advance the economic and military interests of the corporate domination system and to repress opposition to its agenda; (3) has a broad, critical understanding of how different forms of oppression are interrelated, seeing human animal, nonhuman animal, and earth liberation as inseparable projects; and, thus, (4) promotes an anti-capitalist alliance politics with other rights, justice, and liberation movements who share the common goal of dismantling all systems of hierarchical domination and rebuilding societies through decentralization and democratization processes.[9]

VI.

We form this new group out of the need for a radical social approach to veganism and animal rights that transcends bourgeois liberalism; the need for a global Left that renounces speciesism and all other ancient and lingering prejudices and forms of oppression; the need for post-hierarchical worldviews and democratic and ecological societies; and the need for total liberation and revolutionary transformation.

Forget Francione …

We must link the liberation of other animals to human and Earth liberation, and build a revolutionary movement strong enough to vanquish capitalist hegemony and to remake society without the crushing loadstones of anthropocentrism, speciesism, patriarchy, racism, classism, statism, heterosexism, ableism, and every other pernicious form of hierarchical domination. Humanity may not succeed in this endeavor, but it is one that we must undertake. It is no longer the classical choice between “revolution or barbarism,” but now that of revolution or ecological collapse and mass extinction.

We have two goals. First, we aim to expose the fatal flaws in Francione’s approach, and provide a positive alternative to his apolitical, one-dimensional, and single issue form of abolitionism. This approach provides a greater openness, diversity, and flexibility of tactics in contrast to the dogmatic and artificially constrained options Francione leaves open for his extreme pacifist approach. Since this alternative model is richer, multidimensional, and far more political, it opens to an alliance politics with other progressive and radical causes and groups.

And as we promote alliance politics, it is crucial to find ways of building bridges and forming commonalities. And thus our second and quite modest goal is simply to open a space for new forms of thought and struggle that revolve around the ideal of total liberation and a new ethics and politics that transcend humanism – however broadly defined – and encompasses all sentient beings and the natural world. We must first and foremost forge channels of communication to link vegan and nonhuman animal liberation communities with human animal liberation and environmental communities, representing a politics for the 21st century. In this endeavor, we hope to make this site and possible others a rich storehouse of information and a valuable medium for discussion and debate.

We reach out to any and all people from any of these communities to contribute to this crucial endeavor. Clearly, this broad spectrum of thought and politics will not agree on all points, but it is more important to focus on similarities and shared concerns, such as arise from the devastating impact of capitalism on social, sentient, and natural worlds with mutual concerns of peace, justice, equality, democracy, rights, autonomy, and ecology.

Notes:

[1] For PETA’s approach, see “The Case for Controlled-Atmosphere Killing”.

[2] For a transcript of the interview, click here.

[3] For Watson’s seminal 1944 essay arguing for a broad ethical and political concept of veganism, see: ukveggie.com/vegan_news/vegan_news_1.pdf.

[4] Roger Yates, “Three Years Young”.

[5] Susan Paris, president of vivisection-industry front group Americans for Medical Progress, for example, admits the ALF has had a large impact on vivisectionists, writing, “Because of terrorist acts by animal activists like Coronado, crucial research projects have been delayed or scrapped. More and more of the scarce dollars available to research are spent on heightened security and higher insurance rates. Promising young scientists are rejecting careers in research. Top-notch researchers are getting out of the field.” Moreover, the August 1993 Report to Congress on Animal Enterprise Terrorism describes the effectiveness of ALF tactics:, “Where the direct, collateral, and indirect effects of incidents such as this are factored together, ALFs professed tactic of economic sabotage can be considered successful, and its objectives, at least towards the victimized facility, fulfilled.” Both quotations cited at animalliberationfront.com.

[6] For a vivid and grotesque example of the Stockholm Syndrome and the internalization of the capitalist superego, see Lee Hall’s scurrilous attack on MDA in her self-published screed, Capers in the Churchyard: Animal Rights Advocacy in the Age of Terror (2006). For critical dissection of the multitude of fallacies, errors, and abysmal scholarship informing this pacifist propaganda tract (which one could easily mistake for a political attack from a vivisection industry front group or the FBI), see the essays by Best and Miller listed in note 7. Also see the devastating critiques from UK activists deeply involved in the campaigns Hall distorted and denounced: Steven Best, Jason Miller, Joan Court, Janet Tomlinson, and Lynn Sawyer, “Presence of Malice: UK Activists Vs. Lee Hall”, Alison Banville, “Lee Hall: Unplugged and Unmasked” and Lynn Sawyer, “On the Practice of Pluralism: A Response to Lee Hall and the London Vegan Festival Controversy.”

[7] On the importance of a pluralist and contextualist method, see Steven Best and Jason Miller, “Pacifism or Animals: Which Do You Love More? A Critique of Lee Hall, Friends of Animals, and the Franciombe Effect in the New Abolitionist Movement”, and “Averting the China Syndrome: Response to Our Critics and the Devotees of Fundamentalist Pacifism”.

[8] See Murray Bookchin, “Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism: An Unbridgeable Chasm”.

[9] On alliance politics in a total revolution framework, see the Introduction to Steven Best and Anthony J. Nocella II (eds.), Igniting a Revolution: Voices in Defense of the Earth (2006, AK Press).

——————————————————————————————

Dr. Steve Best is TPC’s Senior Editor of Total Liberation. Associate professor of philosophy at UTEP, award-winning writer, noted speaker, public intellectual, and seasoned activist, Steven Best engages the issues of the day such as animal rights, ecological crisis, biotechnology, liberation politics, terrorism, mass media, globalization, and capitalist domination. Best has published 10 books, over 100 articles and reviews, spoken in over a dozen countries, interviewed with media throughout the world, appeared in numerous documentaries, and was voted by VegNews as one of the nations “25 Most Fascinating Vegetarians.” He has come under fire for his uncompromising advocacy of “total liberation” (humans, animals, and the earth) and has been banned from the UK for the power of his thoughts. From the US to Norway, from Sweden to France, from Germany to South Africa, Best shows what philosophy means in a world in crisis.

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Watch the video here and go vegan. Do it for your health, for nonhuman animals and for the Earth!

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Written By ShiftShapers

Video games are getting more realistic all the time. Not that I’d know. I don’t play ‘em — don’t allow myself too. But, I noticed the bitterly ironic title, Modern Warfare in a headline today. It’s smashing sales figures and has been banned in Russia thanks to its hyper-realistically psychotic “No Russian” level in which you get to play terrorist and shoot innocent victims in an airport, all in service of a higher (American) good, of course. Did I mention it was realistic?

With luck, soon we’ll be seeing Modern Warfare 3 – Eat Depleted Uranium, and then MW4 – Fields of Phosphorus followed by MW5 – Death by DIME and then the ultimate, MW6 – MK77 Hell All Over Again. (Napalm never dies. It just gets renamed.)

Modern Warfare indeed.

Written By Beagle17

I currently serve with the Americorps, working inside Philadelphia public schools. I’m excited that national service is being pushed forward—if anyone is in a rough spot (existentially OR financially), I suggest you check it out! There’s so much that needs to be done in this country, and its easier than you think to get involved (if money isn’t that important to you). Oh, the beautiful irony of the anarchist working for the state…

To all my would-be cynics and far-too optimists, please keep doing what you’re doing. There’s nothing wrong with a little idealism and uh, elbow grease. You’re both wrong and you’re both right.

S’truth.

Any new news gathering sites? Where y’all headed? I learned so much here! I don’t have time to rock the internet like I used to, and find somewhere else. Direct me, please. :P

“The world shall know peace when the last king is strangled by the entrails of the last priest.“
- Anon

Do drop me a line:

griever85@yahoo.com

Written By cashonlyplz

send comments to the editor through a comment field

join up, post and make that a strong site with a name that does not turn folks off.

the East Coast Ledger site is owned by my uncle… not that he takes time with it much… it could use some good ideas format and content wise

think we will move all the obnoxious video links off the front page

lots of potential and open to muckraking

‘responsible’ posters will prob just be given master access (wp) so contact the ‘editor’ and get on and make it huge

word

so long and thanks for all the fish

Written By johnnycivil

Great sourcing here, big block quotes of some of the initial media impressions of the “weaponized anthrax” before the cover-up attempted to made us all forget we ever heard them say, “weaponized”

read up, and then go save the world.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article23969.htm

Written By Sander

Confronting Human Rights Abuses in US Prisons
—an interview with Bret Grote of HRC/Fed Up!

By Angola 3 News

Bret Grote is an investigator and organizer with Human Rights Coalition/Fed Up!, a prisoner rights/prison abolitionist organization based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Grote first became involved with the group after returning from the mobilization in Jena, Louisiana in Fall 2007. HRC sister chapters are in Philadelphia and Chester, PA. While covering a range of topics in this interview, Grote details how HRC/Fed Up! is documenting human rights abuses in Pennsylvania prisons, and using this documentation to fight back.

The website for the founding chapter of Human Rights Coalition (HRC) in Philadelphia says that HRC “was founded in 2001 based on the radical notion that there was a vital segment of the population missing from the organizing work against prisons: the families and loved ones of the over two million prisoners in this country. Not just as spokespeople or tokens, but in decision-making positions, deciding what campaigns to do and what issues to address. Incarcerated brothers took this idea, and asked their family members as well as some supporters to take the lead in building such an organization, and the HRC was born…There are many fronts to fight the prison system on, so many issues to address, but the voices of those most affected: prisoners’ families, ex-prisoners and the prisoners themselves, have to be at the forefront of any movement to change and, sometime in the future, to abolish the prison system entirely, because we are the ones who know the intimate pain this system causes.”

Angola 3 News: Can you please explain the history of the Human Rights Coalition/Fed Up chapter?

Bret Grote: Our chapter of the Human Rights Coalition (HRC) was formed in late 2004-early 2005 and was originally known as Fed Up! The group began as a collaboration between etta, an anti-prison activist who lives in Pittsburgh, and Kevin Johnson, a prisoner confined in Red Onion State Prison, a Supermax facility situated in southwestern Virginia adjacent to the Tennessee border. The two were collaborating on an arts-based educational project.

Given the inherent brutality in Supermax facilities, the diametrically opposed racial demographics between prison personnel and prisoners, and the prevailing culture of violent dehumanization within the U.S. prison system at every level, it is no surprise that reports of severe human rights violations began emerging from Red Onion and its twin institution Wallens Ridge State Prison, which sits 30 miles down the road atop a decapitated mountain, immediately after each opened in 1998 and 1999 respectively.

Fed Up! was formed in an effort to expose conditions of confinement in Virginia’s high-security prisons and mobilize prisoners’ family members and support people against the racism, brutality, deprivation, medical neglect and abuse, and psychological torture that define these facilities.

Over the next couple of years Fed Up! built a contact list of hundreds of prisoners in Red Onion and Wallens Ridge, documented dozens of reports of human rights violations, informed various governmental representatives and agencies-including the governor of Virginia—of these conditions, and mobilized allies for letter and phone campaigns in an effort to penetrate the silence that enables the worst of the abuse, and thereby having a chilling effect on the most grievous brutality.

Sometime prior to or during 2007, Fed Up! became an official chapter of the Human Rights Coalition, a prisoner rights/prison abolitionist organization whose founding chapter was and still remains active in Philadelphia. HRC was the brainchild of prisoners as well. Around the fall of 2007 and early 2008 HRC/Fed Up!—as we were then known—began to focus more exclusively on PA prisons for reasons of capacity and strategy, because, obviously, we have more potential and actual power in this state since we are based here.

During these last two years we have documented hundreds upon hundreds of human rights violations (to view a small portion visit our website) from over 20 prisons in the state system (PA has 27 state prisons). These reports have been collated from thousands upon thousands of pages of prisoner letters and reports, criminal complaints, affidavits and declarations, civil litigation documents, prison records, along with countless hours of interviews and dialogue with current and former prisoners and their family and support people.

What our investigations demonstrate beyond any reasonable doubt is that the state of Pennsylvania is operating a sophisticated program of torture under an utterly baseless pretext of “security”, wherein close to 3,000 people are held in conditions of solitary/control unit confinement each day.

Every single prison in the state has a control unit, and most of these consist of barren and often filthy cells that not only are the size of a bathroom, but are in fact bathrooms. Prisoners are confined for 23-24 hours per day in their cells. Reading materials are heavily restricted and censored. All incoming mail is subject to being read, except legal mail, although this policy is often violated while outgoing mail is subject to various forms of surveillance, tampering, and destruction. Restrictions on visitations are extreme and all visits with those in control units are conducted through thick glass with prisoners who are handcuffed throughout. Exercise “privileges” are granted 5-days per week when prisoners are taken to little cubicles of space enclosed by chain-link fencing and resembling dog kennels, presuming that the guards are willing to follow policy that day and that the prisoner in question feels secure being led from their cell to the “yard” by often flagrantly racist and sadistic guards.

While this capsule description of solitary confinement may appear inhumane and degrading enough to constitute torture—and it is—the concise litany of conditions above more or less corresponds to the aspects of solitary confinement that are mandated by policy, with the exception of some forms of mail tampering. The fact of the matter is that these control units are never operated in accordance with policy and instead serve as quite deliberate repositories for excessive and arbitrary violence, starvation and deprivation of water, psychological torment, etc.

Prisoners targeted most heavily by the regime of control unit torture are those who attempt to exercise constitutional rights to file grievances and lawsuits and expose conditions to the public. The other dominant filters that dictate an enhanced probability for placement in solitary confinement are race and mental health, as prisoners of color and those in need of psychological and psychiatric care constitute a higher concentration of prisoners in solitary than in the general prison population, which of course already has higher concentrations of both populations than the general population.

This focus on investigating, exposing, and fighting against state torture has emerged from a twinned set of obligations that need to accompany not only abolitionist movements, but struggles for social justice in general: the need to take immediate action in partnership and solidarity with those most heavily targeted by systems of oppression while simultaneously building a sustainable movement with a visionary, liberatory objective.

During the last year we have engaged in a number of other projects and community outreach and coalition-building efforts as well. Some of the more promising ones in terms of their necessity and importance for sustainable organizing are the recently launched project focusing on women’s incarceration, our Innocence Division which aims to support the wrongfully convicted, and perhaps most crucial, the recent formation along with a number of other local groups of the Human Rights Alliance Pittsburgh, which works to generate an integrated, multi-front human rights movement by means of organizing local communities to struggle for their rights and build political power.

A3N: What role do prisoners and the families of prisoners have in HRC’Fed Up! today?

BG: Prisoners and their family members have provided the inspiration, dedication, strategy, and educational perspective from the beginning of HRC’s work. Understanding the importance of documentation and securing affidavits, educating us on key aspects of the law and how to file criminal complaints, networking and bringing us into contact with other prisoners and activists: all of this has come from those on the inside.

Even more to the point, the resistance, humor, persistence, dignity, and unbreakable humanity of those subjected to conditions designed to humiliate, degrade, terrorize, break, and otherwise kill the human spirit is a constant wellspring of motivation that fortifies our collective commitment at HRC/Fed Up!

Family members’ involvement is central, as our planning meetings and letter-writing nights frequently, though not always, feature the participation of those with loved ones inside. We routinely ask people to step up and respond to our action alerts in defense of those being starved, beaten, denied medical care or otherwise targeted, and it has been the responses of family members that have led to our ability to amplify our voices and have some degree of a chilling effect in certain situations.

Still, we need to make a more dedicated effort in my view to community organizing, since most people in Pittsburgh do not know we exist, and those who do are not always able to make meetings for a variety of reasons, which primarily has to do with attending to familial and work responsibilities. We need to broaden our avenues for participation and create a diverse and steady stream of public forums in which the voices of current and former prisoners and their loved ones will be central and guiding. We need to consciously step up our efforts to build more leadership within targeted communities.

A3N: Can you please tell us about HRC/Fed Up!‘s ongoing investigations into SCI Dallas?

BG: In early June of this year we sent a letter to more than 20 current and former prisoners at the State Correctional Institution (SCI) at Dallas, PA, soliciting reports of human rights violations. Since then we have received thousands of pages in reports from dozens of prisoners detailing a wide range of gross and deliberate human rights violations.

The highest concentration of reports come from the Restricted Housing Unit (RHU), which is PA’s own acronym for the solitary/control units, and these conform to the broad characteristics outlined above regarding solitary confinement, although certain depredations have been more prevalent at SCI Dallas. These include high incidence of sexual harassment by RHU staff and even reports of guards encouraging prisoners to sexually assault and rape other prisoners; frequent incitement to suicide, which was fatally successful in a case I’ll discuss below; guards arriving to work drunk—we have had a shocking number of reports regarding this, particularly concerning Correctional Officer Jimmy Wilkes; no effective ventilation, which was exacerbated by the plastic “spit shields” placed on prisoners’ doors in the RHU and a source of extreme misery in the stifling heat of summer; brown drinking and washing water from excessive amounts of iron, which was confirmed in a letter from the Department of Environmental Protection to a prisoner in the RHU that HRC/Fed Up! has obtained.

The assaults, racism, denial of adequate or even any medical care in solitary or general population, especially mental health treatment, denial of due process in internal grievance and misconduct procedures, obstruction of access to the courts via the destruction of legal documents and arbitrary restrictions on usage of the law library are commonplace at SCI Dallas as they are throughout the control units of PA with varying degrees of intensity.

During the course of our still ongoing investigation, on August 24, 2009, a prisoner in the RHU named Matthew Bullock committed suicide. The PA DOC issued a press release, as is their legal obligation, on 25 August 2009 announcing his death. Only two days later we received the first report that guards were involved in encouraging and enabling Mr. Bullock’s death. Since then we have learned through more than half-a-dozen eyewitness reports, several of which were submitted as affidavits, that Mr. Bullock was extremely mentally ill and according to his family had attempted suicide on at least six separate occasions while confined in the PA DOC. Guards repeatedly kicked on the door of his cell and taunted him, telling him to kill himself, and calling him a child molester and rapist, despite his having no record of any such crimes. Mr. Bullock told guards he was going to kill himself on the morning of August 24. Guards encouraged him to do so and subsequently moved him from cell #50, which was/is a psychiatric observation cell with a camera, to cell #48, which had no camera. Guards on the afternoon shift then reportedly failed to make rounds. Mr. Bullock was found hanging in his cell at 6:15 pm.

Because our investigations involve advocacy and are pursued with the explicit aim of abolishing control unit torture and other human rights violations in the prison system, we have earned the trust of many prisoners, and this is the reason that so many have come forward with reports of torture and human rights violations in SCI Dallas and elsewhere. As a result of their courage in speaking out we were able to break the story of the Bullock suicide in the local newspaper, the Wilkes Barre Times Leader. Mr. Bullock’s trial lawyer read the story and contacted our office. We have provided a lot of documentation and witness statements to them, and they have recently opened an estate on Mr. Bullock’s behalf, which is the first step in an eventual lawsuit.

Despite the negative publicity and small measure of exposure, conditions have not improved in the slightest, and acts of retaliation have in fact escalated recently. Reports of assault and instances of days long starvation continue to come into our offices multiple times each week.

HRC/Fed Up! has compiled the evidence we have accumulated and periodically notified those in positions of power with attendant requests for transparent investigations so as to ensure accountability and enforce the rule of law in the administration of the criminal legal system. In early July, over 70 state representatives and senators were put on notice of our preliminary findings, along with the PA DOC, the PA Attorney General and Governor Rendell (who it must be noted has a sordid history of criminal conspiracy and human rights violations himself, stemming from his role as the District Attorney of Philadelphia during the city’s war against the MOVE organization and the frame-up of Mumia Abu-Jamal). Further notices were sent in September, with even more copious documentation. To date no action has been taken by the PA DOC, the Attorney General of PA, or the Governor. Nor has the District Attorney of Luzerne County—notorious site of the kids-for-cash judicial scandal—taken any action regarding criminal complaints regarding the Bullock incident or the acts of assault and starvation and intimidation against Andre Jacobs, a brilliant 27 year-old jailhouse lawyer who was recently awarded $115,000 in a case against the PA DOC.

Our strategy has been to grant PA state authorities the opportunity to do the right thing while simultaneously preparing for the predictable reality that they will not. Our next steps are the filing of formal criminal complaints with the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department and the issuing of a major human rights report detailing our findings regarding SCI Dallas. The basic idea is to methodically link state authorities at every jurisdictional level into a chain of notice and liability and to reflect the failure of the government to enforce the rule of law and uphold basic human rights onto the public consciousness in order to create the degree of exposure necessary for enabling mass movements and coherent, collective action against the injustices of the police-security state.

In the process we seek to bring methodically incremental increases in the forms and effects of pressure so as to provide improvements in immediate conditions. Or, in other words, we seek to win small battles as a method for building power and strength for the larger ones. Success often appears distant.

I just saw on the Wilkes-Barre Times Leader website that another prisoner died at SCI Dallas on Saturday morning (read here). Autopsy results have not been determined and/or released, and the name has not been made public either. The article says the individual fell ill early Saturday morning and died at the hospital. My question is why is this one being reported? Deaths from “natural causes,” i.e. medical conditions, are not required to be made public. Others have died at Dallas recently, or we’ve been informed, and the newspapers did not make mention of this. I’ve checked a half-dozen of our closer contacts and their names are still listed in the inmate locator. Nevertheless, I am concerned.

A3N: Does HRC see solitary confinement as a form of torture? Why do you think prison authorities use solitary confinement?

BG: What HRC or any members involve consider torture might be an interesting question, but it is of limited utility for effective political organizing. How do international law and the U.S. government define torture? The UN Convention against Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment defines torture as “any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity. It does not include pain or suffering arising only from, inherent in or incident to lawful sanctions.” Sounds clear enough.

How does U.S. statutory code define torture? Section 2340 of Title 18 of the federal criminal code defines torture as “an act committed by a person acting under the color of law specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering (other than pain or suffering incidental to lawful sanctions) upon another person within his custody or physical control.”

Do the conditions of control unit confinement meet this standard? There is not space here to go over the evidence, which could fill several hundred pages on the basis of our two-year investigations in prisons in PA alone, but those familiar with the subject have an unequivocal grasp of the reality that solitary confinement deliberately inflicts “severe pain and suffering,” especially psychological, and cannot be justified on legitimate, i.e. “lawful,” grounds. The reasons for these conclusions are several but I will simply touch on two matters here: the psychological impact of solitary confinement and its failure to meet stated policy objectives.

The scientific consensus deduced from copious research on the psychological impact of solitary confinement is that the experience generates considerable and sometimes permanent mental suffering. One of the foremost experts on the subject, Dr. Stuart Grassian, reveals that “even a few days of solitary confinement will predictably shift the electroencephalogram (EEG) pattern toward an abnormal pattern characteristic of stupor and delirium,” and outlines the following seven symptoms as being characteristic of an “organic brain delirium” associated with solitary confinement: a) hyperresponsivity to external stimuli; b) perceptual distortions, illusions, hallucinations; c) panic attacks; d) difficulties with thinking, concentration, and memory; e) intrusive obsessional thoughts: emergence of primitive aggressive ruminations; f) overt paranoia; g) problems with impulse control.

Questionnaires submitted by HRC/Fed Up! to over 75 prisoners in SCI Dallas and throughout the state confirm the presence of these same symptomatic patterns amongst a disturbingly large number of the solitary confinement population. Incidents of self-harm, including suicide attempts, occur regularly and are certainly under-reported. At SCI Fayette, between the months of July and September, HRC received reports from RHU prisoners that two men set their cells on fire, one of those same men cut himself and swallowed a razor, another man tried to hang himself, and another two cut their wrists and arms. These examples can be multiplied throughout the PA DOC and the entire country.

As for the pretext that solitary confinement reduces violence in prisons and ensures secure facilities, this is supported by literally zero credible evidence to my knowledge. All available testimony and reports would seem to indicate that solitary units create a psychological condition of such absolute repression that instances of violence and brutality proliferate. Not to mention the obvious fact that a stay in the hole exacerbates mental illness, rage, frustration, and other characteristics of anti-social behavioral traits.

Countless prisoners report being forced to max out their sentences because of alleged disciplinary infractions that land them in solitary. The conditions of confinement in the PA DOC are a major contributing factor to recidivism rates that hover around 50% in the first three years after release, helping to feed a chronic crisis of overcrowding. This refutes the notion that the PA DOC has any legitimate security, penological, correctional or other rationale behind the program.

In other words, there is nothing lawful in the sanctioning of one to solitary confinement, as it clearly contributes to social destabilization by engendering even more criminality on the part of prison personnel and prisoners in an endless cycle that diverts funding from desperately needed social programs in order to disappear and warehouse members of the underclass. These conditions are a flagrant violation of article 6 of the U.S. Constitution as well, which affirms that treaty law (i.e. international law) is the “supreme law of the land.” Thus, article 10 (3) of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights stipulates that “The penitentiary system shall comprise treatment of prisoners the essential aim of which shall be their reformation and social rehabilitation.”

A3N: What role does solitary confinement have in the overall prison system? Since 1970, the prison population has increased from 300,000 to over 2.3 million today. The US now has more total prisoners and the highest incarceration rate than any other country in the world. What do you attribute this increase to?

BG: I’ll be concise here. Solitary confinement is the innermost core of the US-led imperial architecture of terror. A succinct overview of this architecture can be formulated as follows:
1) The solitary confinement population is used to terrorize the prisoner population;
2) The prison population is used to terrorize poor communities in general and communities of color in particular;
3) Social and economic conditions in these communities are used to terrorize the middle classes;
4) The middle classes are used to carry out the social, economic, and political agenda of the ruling/owning class;
5) The ruling class uses this domestic base of power to organize empire abroad;
6) Empire generates a trajectory of apocalypse;
7) We have to stop this.

This sketch can be developed with varying degrees of nuance, focus, and elaboration, but seems durable enough for me.

In this respect the proliferation of solitary confinement/supermax conditions in the U.S. has corresponded closely with the rise of policies of mass incarceration and the global regime of neoliberal capitalism and its economic ideology of corporate supremacy, which I won’t describe here except to say that the deindustrialization of U.S. society has generated an ever-escalating number of people who are useless to the accumulation of wealth. When these populations become fodder for the prison industry they obtain economic capital while the systematic removal of massive numbers of poor people, especially people of color, from anything but marginal or token participation in the economic, social, and political domains serves the political function of neutralizing potential bases for movements against the unjust status quo.

A3N: Concerning strategies of resistance, how do you think human rights and international law framework can be applied to prison conditions as a method/strategy/philosophy for investigations, exposure, and organizing? How does this relate to other struggles against the PIC and for human rights generally?

BG: Human rights, which are rooted in international law and designed to ensure the self-determination of peoples and thus a humane, sustainable, and legitimate social order, have a number of immediate advantages as framing instruments for the widest array of political struggle possible.

First of all, this frame turns reality right side up and exposes with grim clarity the criminality of the corporate-state. No matter the severity of crimes committed by those languishing anywhere in the U.S. prison system—and nobody disputes that some of those in prison are dangerous, violent, and pathologically anti-social—these crimes pale in comparison to wars of aggression, radical and ceaseless violations of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Convention against Torture, the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, the Genocide Convetnion, etc. ad nauseam.

In fact, the systemic criminality of the political-economic order generates the oppressive power relations and attendant conditions of poverty, addiction, illicit economic activity, and normalized violence—especially against women and children—that fosters officially defined and punished crime. For those who are serious about ending violence and poverty in our collective communities it is imperative that a core objective of such a project is to mobilize a coherent mass movement from below to put constraints on and eventually eliminate altogether the ability of those in positions of power to engage in serial violations of the rights of others.

This framework has everything to do with accountability and necessitates that we work tirelessly to generate understanding and action around the reality that those who design and operate systems of power in this society are guilty of perpetrating crimes against humanity and must be stopped.

Specifically, in the context of day to day organizing around the prison system, it means that individuals and organizations concerned with the rights and lives of prisoners need to familiarize themselves with the basic principles of international human rights law as it pertains to the criminal legal system (I refuse to call it a justice system) and collect evidence regarding the state’s failure to implement basic human rights and constitutional safeguards for prisoners. The UN Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners, the Body of Principles for the Protection of All Persons under Any Form of Detention or Imprisonment, the Basic Principles for the Treatment of Prisoners, amongst other human rights documents, are appropriate for orienting a host of campaigns toward dismantling the worst practices of the present system while simultaneously implementing alternative structures and practices.

Widespread dissemination of human rights documents and literature and the creation of community and movement curriculums toward this end are other means to build, and in part reconstruct, a rights-based culture of political dissent. Rights-based cultures naturally create movements that make demands and mobilize to enforce those demands, without asking for permission from repressive authorities or the ideal historical circumstances for organizing from below. A rights-based culture is a culture of struggle, cooperation, collective accountability, historical consciousness, and dedicated to creating a better world for those generations that will follow. Rights-based cultures are constituted by unbreakable bonds of solidarity, trust, and responsibility.

As anybody familiar with even a fraction of the history of popular struggles for social justice knows, these movements—while they rise and fall, wax and wane—never disappear so long as injustice exists; they are built to last. In fact, the human rights framework corresponds to the liberation movements of the 60 and 70s embodied in the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement amongst others.

Ultimately, human rights discourse and organizing revolves around the question of power: what forces in society hold power, how is it defined, who makes decisions and who suffers the consequences. For this end it is essential that we work to proliferate human rights alliances so as to build the necessary capacity and solidarity to confront the question of power. That is why the Human Rights Alliance of Pittsburgh, young as it is, strikes me as one of our most promising projects.

More practically, a method of documentation, intervention, and movement-building is effective for 1) tracking and exposing human rights violations in prisons, and other areas of society as well; 2) accumulating evidence to strengthen arguments in support of mass action for social reconstruction; 3) building trust with prisoners and their families by taking advocacy actions to the greatest degree possible; 4) building an organizational network with communication infrastructure that will serve to inform, foster dialogue, and mobilize increasing numbers of prisoners and their families and communities.

A3N: What link can we make between the work of HRC/Fed-Up! and the movement to free the Angola Three and all political prisoners?

BG: The relationship between the work of HRC/Fed Up! and the struggles of the Angola 3 are inseparable. Solitary confinement and the prison system as a whole have the primary function of silencing and/or liquidating precisely those radical movements embodied in the case and lives of Robert King, Herman Wallace, and Albert Woodfox.

Solitary confinement is a mechanism to isolate and neutralize leadership elements, people with the ability to articulate a common vision, support their principles with action, and build trust, solidarity, self-empowerment, and unbreakable determination within oppressed populations inside the prison and out. As Angola’s Warden Burl Cain clarified the matter, albeit while speaking against the release of Albert Woodfox, “He wants to demonstrate. He wants to organize. He wants to be defiant. . . . A hunger strike is really, really bad, because you could see he admitted that he was organizing a peaceful demonstration. There is no such thing as a peaceful demonstration in prison.” Any act of dissent or protest is unacceptable to the totalitarian mindset.

As Cain further stated about Woodfox, “I still know he has a propensity for violence…he is still trying to practice Black Pantherism, and I still would not want him walking around my prison because he would organize the young new inmates.” For those familiar with the actual program and ideology of the Black Panther Party, Cain’s statement contains a key insight: the struggle for human rights amongst oppressed peoples is an unacceptable threat to a system built and sustained upon the denial of those rights.

Our task in this context is clear: to carry forward in our work with renewed intensity and dedication, honoring those who struggled before us, acting on our responsibilities toward those who will follow, and building the movements of today that will confront and ultimately defeat this unspeakably cruel and inhuman system.

A3N: How can readers best support HRC/Fed Up! with its work?

BG: We have no staff and even less money, so financial contributions are extremely helpful. We have a lot of printing and mailing needs, as we send dozens of letters to prisoners each month, not to mention criminal complaints, letters to state officials and legislators, and other operational costs, including transportation costs for a possible speaking tour and visits to prisons. Checks can be made to HRC/Fed Up! and sent to us at 5125 Penn Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA 15224.

Most importantly, however, get in contact with us so we can learn from each other’s work and practice mutual aid and solidarity in whatever ways appropriate and possible. Send an email to hrcfedup@gmail.com or call 412-361-3022.

And finally, please do send an email and join our Emergency Response Network to help us spread information and take collective action in urgent situations involving starvation, assaults, medical neglect, and other human rights violations in PA prisons. Set up your own ERN for your city, state, and/or region, and lets network to help shatter the silence that enables the torture to continue.

—Angola 3 News is a new project of the International Coalition to Free the Angola 3. Our website is www.angola3news.com where we provide the latest news about the Angola 3. Like this interview with Bret Grote, we are also creating our own media projects, which spotlight the issues central to the story of the Angola 3, like racism, repression, prisons, human rights, solitary confinement as torture, and more. Our online video series has now released interviews with Black Panther artist Emory Douglas titled “The Black Panther Party and Revolutionary Art,” author J. Patrick O’Connor titled “Kevin Cooper: Will California Execute An Innocent Man,” author Dan Berger titled “Political Prisoners in the United States,” and Colonel Nyati Bolt titled “The Assassination of George Jackson.”

Written By angola3news

I created a blogspot page to archive GNN threads. Let me knwo if you want me to add a thread.

http://gnnarchive.blogspot.com/

“what exactly is the objection to releasing the content of the site to be archived?”
-SunTzu

“none. you should start moving it off and re-posting or archiving.”
-Silverback

Written By FloydAnderson

Written By johnnycivil

it is done: though all appears to remain functional from within, gnn is closed.

it’s been fun y’all.

stay in touch. hope to see you at GUN.

you’re all invited to the GNN Wake in the GUN chat! (unmoderated, of course)

and of course, feel free to use GUN to archive your GNN blogs and articles.

Written By ShiftShapers

“WASHINGTON — The United States ambassador to Afghanistan, who once served as the top American military commander there, has expressed in writing his reservations about deploying additional troops to the country, three senior American officials said Wednesday.

“The position of the ambassador, Karl W. Eikenberry, puts him in stark opposition to the current American and NATO commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, who has asked for 40,000 more troops. New York Times, Nov. 11

This isn’t just any envoy. General Karl Eikenberry has served two tours of duty in Afghanistan, the second as head of the Combined Forces Command. After the second Afghan tour, Eikenberry was Chairman of the NATO Joint Military Committee. He’s a West Point graduate with advanced degrees from Harvard and Stanford and is fluent in Mandarin Chinese.

General McChrystal has asked for 50,000 troops in early October. By October 28, the president was said to favor a “McChrystal light” number as low as 15,000. On Nov. 7, just four days before Eikenberry’s statement, McClatchy Newspapers put Obama’s preferred number at 30,000. At this moment, the president is reported have rejected all of the troop increases on the table, according to Associated Press at 12:02 am EDT, today, November 12.

How did we get from McChrystal’s request for 50,000 troop requests in early October to Eikenberry’s “written reservations about deploying additional troops” just days before President Obama’s planned decision?

The only thing we know for sure is that Eikenberry’s statement was no accident. Clearly, there is dissent in the Pentagon and White House as evidenced by this publicly reported assessment by a serving ambassador and distinguished officer. Of interest, on troop levels, the Eikenberry statement agrees with the much criticized assessment of Vice President Joe Biden on made after a trip to Afghanistan

Two Paths – Obama’s Hedge

When General Stanley McChrystal was appointed to command combined forces in Afghanistan, he put together his own team for the long haul:

“General McChrystal is assembling a corps of 400 officers and soldiers who will rotate between the United States and Afghanistan for a minimum of three years. That kind of commitment to one theater of combat is unknown in the military today outside Special Operations, but reflects an approach being imported by General McChrystal, who spent five years in charge of secret commando teams in Iraq and Afghanistan.” New York Times, June 10

Little was know of the five year of secret commando work in the two nations until a Seymour Hersh gave a speech at the University of Minnesota on U.S. Intelligence policies. Hersh said:

“Right now, today, there was a story in the New York Times that if you read it carefully mentioned something known as the Joint Special Operations Command — JSOC it’s called. It is a special wing of our special operations community that is set up independently. They do not report to anybody, except in the Bush-Cheney days, they reported directly to the Cheney office. … Congress has no oversight of it. It’s an executive assassination ring essentially, and it’s been going on and on and on.” MinnesotaPost.Com March 11

According to Time Magazine, from 2003 through 2008, McChrystal “led the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC).”

The March 11 description of Joint Special Operations Command, and its leader, General McCrystal, was seemingly contradicted by Hersh on May 19 (See analysis) but the cat was out of the bag on the general’s tactics. Unless Hersh was referring to some other Joint Special Operations Command that McChrystal ran, we have a special type of general in charge of the war in Afghanistan.

A report in March validated the problems with the JSOC mission of commando actions eliminating enemies of the state: “The commander of a secretive branch of America’s Special Operations forces last month ordered a halt to most commando missions in Afghanistan, reflecting a growing concern that civilian deaths caused by American firepower are jeopardizing broader goals there” New York Times, March 9. In the same article, Iraq commander General David Petraeus was said to have “supported the decision to suspend the Special Operations missions.”

Despite his record or, perhaps, because of it, General McChrystal was appointed to the Afghanistan command after these statements and controversies over JSOC.

Just two weeks later, President Obama appointed General Eikenberry as U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan. In addition to his career achievements, Eikenberry’s good relationships with the Karzai government and NATO were mentioned prominently.

Eikenberry was a logical choice as ambassador to Afghanistan given the ongoing military missions and his emphasis on improvements in living conditions for citizens. He’d held high level and top level command in the country for a total of thirty six months. During that time, he had concentrated on a multi level approach with an emphasis on building a strong civil base of for a government and military run by the people.

In testimony before Congress in February, 2007, Eikenberry outlined progress in the military effort and civic governance and the largest threat to success:

“The long-term threat to campaign success, though, is the potential irretrievable loss of legitimacy of the Government of Afghanistan. If the Afghan Government is unable to counter popular frustration with the lack of progress in reform and national development, the Afghan people may lose confidence in the nature of their political system.” Congress, Feb. 17, 2007

Eikenberry listed progress in public education, infrastructure, and training efforts for Afghan police and military but stressed the need for more support for civilians in the forgotten war. He stressed the stakes for NATO in the largest ever non European military effort. While not “make or break,” the stakes were high. He also made this highly significant point: “Pakistan’s military and security forces have taken significant casualties against the same enemy that we in Afghanistan face” Feb. 17, 2007

Eleven months into the new administration, we have radically different choices for policy in Afghanistan advanced by diametrically opposed military professionals appointed by the same president.

Why the Radical Split in Advice and Why Now

It seems that General McChrystal is on a special mission based a specific philosophy of warfare and that General Eikenberry is performing his duty according to his current assignment with an ongoing evaluation of the various players and facts at hand. McCrystal job has been killing what Seymour Hersh called “enemies of the state” in Afghanistan and Iraq. He’s not finished. They’re still out there. He made commitments to the 400 officers and soldiers that he hand picked. He doesn’t want to let them down.

Given his history and assignments before his command role, everything he’s done suggests that he would want to finish the job. Why wouldn’t he push for as many more troops as he can get?

But the real questions are: does finishing that job make any sense and will more troops help finish the job?

Eikenberry’s position has evolved over time. He once got along with Karzai but, as ambassador, during the recent presidential campaign, he appeared with the opposition candidates who accused Karzai of election fraud in the first election and pushed Karzai to overturn the initial disputed results that would have ruled out a runoff election.

Can you recall any U.S. ambassador ever showing up at a press conference with opposition candidates challenging the legitimacy of an election?

Eikenberry was interviewed on NPR just two days after he testified before Congress in 2007. He said, “The Taliban military forces remain a much weaker enemy. Whenever the Taliban masses on the battlefield, those Taliban forces are defeated, always in very short order.” He went on to offer this: “… the challenge has been building the state of Afghanistan, extending the writ of governance. That has been a very steady growth of progress that we’ve had with the government of Afghanistan over the last six years” NPR Feb. 13, 2007.

Two and a half years later, General Eikenberry has “expressed in writing his reservations about deploying additional troops to the country” just at the point when President Obama was said to be announcing some level of troop increases. The key to success, as outlined by the general previously, was real progress in responsive and trustworthy civil governance that delivers for the people.

In his congressional testimony, Eikenberry quoted a poll in which, “almost 90% of the Afghan people consider reconstruction and economic development the most important requirement to improve their quality of life.”

It is fair to assume that the illegitimate election played a major role in Eikenberry’s questions about the future of the Afghanistan military mission. His recommendations represent a huge step given the stakes for the NATO military effort and the larger concerns about the nation. Other factors may have included the McChrystal emphasis killing “bad guys” and the inevitable deaths of innocents paired with lackluster U.S. financial support for Afghan rebuilding and development.

General Eikenberry is both a soldier and scholar of history and political science. He knows the history of occupations that fail to deliver for the populace and he’s telling us right now that the U.S. can’t succeed with more military forces in a nation run by an illegitimate president who has been exposed for election fraud. More troops are not the solution. In his view, success requires stronger governance and real democracy which means transparent elections free of fraud.

Had the attempt to capture Osama Bin Laden been just that, he’d have been captured or found dead and the United States would not be in this dilemma. But that begs the question. Of the choices this administration will make, which do not include immediate withdrawal, General Eikenberry’s is the most clearly reasoned position and has the strongest immediate and historical basis by far, in my opinion.

But what kind of ongoing evaluation can we expect from an administration that split the policy difference in the first place by appointing General McChrystal as military commander and General Eikenberry as Ambassador? That’s too much of a difference to split.

The White House’s rapid downward trend in troop commitment from, 40,000 to zero for the moment indicates that an alarm bell is ringing. If they just face the truth, they’ll announce that we’ve “hit bottom” and, as a result, we can’t afford any more of this because we’re flat broke. If they just listen to the people through public polling, they’ll come up with something palliative that will allow the president to stay above 50% approval, at least until the next banking crisis. That something was to rely on the advice of General Eikenberry, at least for now.

This is almost the same process President Obama put the military through just after his inauguration when General Petraeus tried his push for more troops in Iraq (see analysis).. Obama’s a very good poker player. Let’s hope that we move beyond gaming to a foreign policy based on recognizing our limitations and inserting fundamental respect for the lives and well being of all citizens wherever they might be.

It would be helpful to review this 2007 testimony and apply the democratic principles at home as well as abroad:

“In closing, allow me to emphasize that we are now at a critical point where a strategic investment in capabilities is needed to accelerate the progress toward the desired goal of helping establish a moderate, stable, and representative Government of Afghanistan.” General Karl M. Eikenberry, Congress, Feb 11, 2007.

That’s what the general did. He tried to “help establish” a “representative government” by insisting on fair elections. When he discovered they weren’t fair, he stood with the opposition in protest and used his influence to get another vote. When the “winner” of that runoff won because the process was so crooked, Eikenberry then advised there was no point in providing more troops since more troops were not the answer. The first step in the answer requires an honest election. He’s right. The citizens of Afghanistan have the same needs and rights and deserve the same respect we deserve, the same that all people deserve. What a refreshing philosophy. It’s almost cause for “hope.”

source

Written By realityocean

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Written By realityocean

The report highlights a contradiction: world cereal production is at its second-highest level ever, yet food prices remain very high. It identifies 77 countries that are both low-income and food deficit.

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Written By realityocean

Investigative journalist Declan McCullagh revealed that the “change” administration’s legal eagles issued an order that required the “Philadelphia-based Indymedia.us Web site ‘not to disclose the existence of this request’ unless authorized by the Justice Department, a gag order that presents an unusual quandary for any news organization.”

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Written By realityocean

BE THE FIRST ONE ON YOUR BLOCK!

Written By nothingshithead

Still 5 people getting military trials, but at least a few are going to be charged with a crime before incarcerated. That trial will be very important in giving the public access to information about 9/11. With their bullshit reasons for not making the info public, this trial will drag more hidden truths in to the open.

Information dissemination in a non-hierarchical form is not only the most effective resistance, it is in fact the only resistance any INDIVIDUAL can do.

A perfect topical example comes to mind. The newspapers are finally printing the true story of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Reagan didn’t do shit, the cold war did fuck all for anyone but the people who made money off defense spending. The Berlin Wall fell because of rumors of a travel visa. In the future there might be travel visas offered. The rumor became travel is now ok, people went to the wall. There were too many people at the wall for the guard to just shoot all of them, it is out of the question to just fire on unarmed civilians without provocation. Then there were so many that if he fired on them they might take him out. The mass amount of people inspired by the truth that the demarcation between east and west Berlin was finally over, reified that “truth”. Up until that time everyone just understood that east and west Berlin are two separate places, one cannot cross the border. In this, as far as I can see positive, story of self-determination a people who identify as German, Berliners, etc. all of a sudden just believed that travel was possible, then brought that dream in to reality, just by thinking that the possibility of travel was truth it became truth.

Most things are obvious, the more opinions we get on any subject the more it will help bring about better decisions in terms of avoiding human extinction and the endless struggle for justice. A global democracy of ideas, not a market of ideas, because we all know by now there never has been and never will be a free market.

Written By nothingshithead

As the world’s biggest companies and their friends in government continue to fight a transition to more just and sustainable ways of living, climate change threatens to turn our world upside down with water shortages, crop failures, sea level rise and ecosystem collapse. A million species face extinction by the end of the century, and the people who have contributed least to the problem will continue to be the hardest hit. What can be done at this critical juncture, with our future at stake?

Throughout history, social change has come about when regular people get fed up with business as usual, get organized, and take to the streets. If we leave climate solutions up to politicians and corporations, then we will lose – not just a political battle, but the life-support systems of the planet. Time is running out to avert the worst impacts of climate change: the time to act is now.

A broad coalition of organizations working for social, ecological, racial and economic justice has come together under the banner of the Mobilization for Climate Justice. Join us as we organize mass action on climate change on November 30, 2009! November 30 (N30) is significant both because it immediately precedes the upcoming UN Climate Conference in Copenhagen and is the ten-year anniversary of the protests that shut down of the World Trade Organization meetings in Seattle, demonstrating the incredible power of collective action.

Every indication is that any agreement that emerges from Copenhagen will be nothing more than business as usual—sacrificing real emissions reductions in favor of market-based approaches that enhance corporate profits while delaying a transition away from fossil fuels. The current approach to climate change in the UN, and in the US Congress, is based on the creation of a new market in carbon emissions. Carbon trading (aka “cap and trade”) and carbon offsets do not address the root causes of global warming, nor do they reduce emissions. They are designed by and for corporations, and are a dangerous distraction that should be abandoned.

We urgently need to implement real solutions like ending excessive consumption, keeping fossil fuels in the ground, re-localizing production and consumption, and drastically reducing greenhouse emissions. We must also protect the rights of workers, displaced peoples, and others affected by the transition.

In recent months, people of the world have taken valiant action for climate solutions. On Oct. 24th, people in 181 countries staged over 5,200 actions calling for global action on climate change. And on November 4, African delegates walked out of pre-Copenhagen negotiations in Barcelona – demanding that rich countries commit to deeper and faster emissions cuts – while European activists used civil disobedience to disrupt the talks.

And now, we’re asking you to join us in taking the next step – a global day of action for climate justice on Monday, November 30, 2009. Take the day off, get together with friends, and take a stand for real, just and effective solutions to the climate crisis!

WHAT YOU CAN DO ON N30:

Several actions are already being planned for November 30 – and many more will be coming soon – so if there’s an action happening in your city or region, we urge you to join it! See the MCJ site for a map of N30 actions across the country and across the world.

If there isn’t an action being organized in your town, organize one! If you’re already involved in a campaign against a company that’s contributing to climate injustice, organize an action on against them November 30. You can submit actions by clicking HERE.

If you’re organizing an action from scratch, we’d suggest you go after one of the following companies: Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, Chevron, BP, or American Electric Power. We picked these six companies because they’re all, through their investments, lobbying, and day to day business, going out of their way to obstruct real solutions to the climate crisis. For more info about them, see our Corporate Criminals page.

Corporations like these will keep trying to distract us with false solutions, but we will send them a loud, clear message: Our climate is not your business!

Help us spread the word – we’ll see you in the streets!

www.actforclimatejustice.org

Written By ShiftShapers

This is a sad story. The jews still have Gaza under siege in the most brutal way possible. Of course there is nothing much about it in the jew-controlled MSM. It’s not just building materials that foaming-at-mouth jews are prohibiting from entering the Gaza concentration camp, to humiliate and abuse the long-suffering Palestinians, and to make their life intolerable – jews also stop medicine, fuel and water getting so they can kill babies. jews are evil beyond imagination.

As one might expect, the evil jews have made every effort to starve the Palestinians over the last 60 years, since they invaded Palestine and set up terrorist camps. jews particularly want to kill the children. jews do so enjoy killing human children. That said, to keep the shit in the UN from becoming vocal, the dirty evil sadistic jews let in just enough food and provisions to torture the Palestinians to keep them chronically malnourished on the edge of starvation, and to do maximum psychological and heath damage to babies and child. jews are evil loathsome Satanic monsters.

Gaza: Signs of worsening malnutrition among children

Regarding this recent story herewith in particular, a bunch of kids were hunting birds in Gaza for desperately needed meat. The evil jew monsters, who stand in watch towers overlooking the Gaza concentration camp, hoping children will come near so they can kill them, shot at the children trapping birds for food.

Naturally, the lying jews came out with some fake story about ‘terrorists planting explosives’. jews are lying evil filth, and they will always tell their biggest evil lies to cover their deliberate child-killing atrocities. The lies evil jews tell to cover acting on their lust to kill children, are truly the work of Satanic monsters.

In the event, jews killed at least 4 children, including 10 year old, Mahmoud Gayed. As you might know, it’s difficult to find out the names of the other children killed because dirty evil jews control the mass media, and now it seems, the Internet search engines. However, it is known another child was critically injured and taken away by jews (the evil jews will most likely kill him now for his organs), and jews arrested 3 other children (to torture for the pleasure of evil jew animals in the IDF).

You have never been faced with true Satanic evil until you have met a dirty jew. They are a malignancy on the Earth. jews destroy, defile and abuse everything in their vicinity.

As to Obnog – what a corrupt sack of shit. From what I can see, all token blacks in power are the pets of jews, and will commit any crime for bling. Here are some of Obnog’s most recent antics in relation to Satanic jews:

1. On his world tour (last year), he spent 45 minutes in the Palestinian area of the occupied West Bank in Palestine just grinning and saying nothing, yet 32 hours in jew area of occupied Palestine (no doubt discussing how many $millions he will get for fake book deals and fake lecture tours from the evil jews, for allowing them to continue to rape the USA and continue to slaughter Palestinians). He also said he wants to see Jerusalem as the capital of the fictitious Israel in occupied Palestine, but totally omitted any mention of the Palestinians rights to and on, their own land.

2. Obama Signs Subsidies (for Israel’s Dairy Farmers). What a fucking obscenity from the nog. He uses taxpayers money to subsidise food production for evil child-killing jews, so they can export cancerous shite (riddled with growth hormones) back the US for massive profits, yet completely ignores starving children in Gaza. Only a black could do that with a smile on his face.

3. US drops demand for Israeli settlement freeze. This is utterly ridiculous. Obnog has decided (in exchange for ‘bling’) that jews can continue thieving the land of Palestinians (contrary to international law), can continue destroying Palestinian homes, and can continue turning the West Bank into a concentration camp like Gaza. He had the criminal perverted old slimy slag, Clinton, who will do anything for money, do his dirty work.

4. jews in occupied Palestine are by far the largest recipient of U.S. foreign aid – with Egypt second. Obnog has vowed to increase payments to jew terrorists in occupied Palestine to fund the brutal siege of the Gaza concentration camp, the extension of the apartheid wall in the West Bank, and the expansion of illegal jew enclaves in the West Bank. He has said he will also continue paying $3 billion each year to the corrupt Egyptian government to make sure the boder with Gaza is kept shut, to ensure Palestinians remain malnourished, and without medical supplies (especially for babies and children) and other basic necessities to ease their suffering.

The above being just a few examples of Obnog’s lies and betrayals, and supplication to the evil Satanic jews.

Obnog is a lying stinking cheap nog. He doesn’t believe a single word he slimly reads off his omnipotent autocue. To make the point, remember this from his Cairo speech in June 2009:

On the other hand, it is also undeniable that the Palestinian people – Muslims and Christians – have suffered in pursuit of a homeland. For more than 60 years they have endured the pain of dislocation. Many wait in refugee camps in the West Bank, Gaza, and neighbouring lands for a life of peace and security that they have never been able to lead. They endure the daily humiliations – large and small – that come with occupation. So let there be no doubt: the situation for the Palestinian people is intolerable. America will not turn our backs on the legitimate Palestinian aspiration for dignity, opportunity, and a state of their own.

What the cheap nog was really saying is, “I will never keep my word about anything, and will betray anybody for bling. I want to be richer than the war criminal cunt Tony Blair, when I leave the White Crib. Fuck you – you fucking rag-heads – the jews have all the money.”

Sadly, I don’t expect to live long enough to see jews completely exterminated. However, it seems to me it’s an absolute certainty that humans will try to rid the Earth of Satanic malignant, evil, child-killing jews, in the not too distant future. Obviously, with genetic testing and accurate record keeping, it should be a simple matter for people to kill all jews on Earth. I hope reasonable methods are used when the time comes – like digging pits locally, for example, and burning jews in the community, instead of all this silly WW2 concentration camp nonsense. I think people would welcome seeing justice being done.

There are about 15 million jews on Earth. Almost all of these are concentrated in occupied Palestine and jew-controlled USA. On the other hand, their are 6.5 billion humans on Earth. This means there are 435 humans to each jew on Earth. Humans, therefore, can take a high attrition rate in a war against evil child-killing Satanic jews. It follows from this, that any jew death that costs less than 435 human lives is a good victory, and a step forward in a war against evil child-killing malignant Satanic jews.

As to when jews will face justice: The USA is clearly running on empty, and will implode soon, USSR style. As soon as it can no longer to fund and support jew terrorism, I expect evil Satanic jews will be brought to account for their relentless crimes against humanity quite quickly.

Written By floopin

On November 14 “Robert Erickson” was introduced to the Minnesota Tea Party Against Amnesty as a Minneapolis resident concerned about illegal immigration. Sometimes the devil is in the details, as the supporters of the anti-immigrant Minnesotans Seeking Immigration Reform (MINN-SIR) slowly learn.

On the other hand, some of them never quite figured out that “Robert” wasn’t on their side.

TEA PARTY FAIL!

Several dozen Tea Baggers held an anti-immigration rally on the steps of the Minnesota State Capitol where they were met by an only slightly smaller group of counter-protesters.

The highlight of the event is the speech by “Robert Erickson,” a “concerned citizen from Minneapolis.” Erickson launches into what seems like a standard red-meat anti-immigrant speech. His real intentions are betrayed only by a slight smirk. It is only when he accuses immigrants of spreading disease and then indicts them for “killing millions” with small pox that it becomes clear that the immigrants he has in mind are the European conquerors of North America and their descendants.

The Tea-Baggers seem pretty clueless, and for the most part don’t even seem to realize they have been punk’d, even when Erickson closes out with a chant of “Columbus Go Home!”

Here is the text of Erickson’s prepared speech:

“Columbus Go Home!”: Prepared transcript of “Robert Erickson’s” speech:

Hi, my name is Robert Erickson and I’m really excited to be here. Its people like all of you, and events like this that make our country great! Give yourselves a round of applause!

I just want to talk about a couple themes this afternoon because I love this country and I want to see America be the best place it can be.

Mr. Gutierrez is getting ready to propose an immigration bill in just a few short days, and we have to make sure he knows that we want a bill that’s tough on immigration. Now is the time for us to stand up and make our voices heard!

In Minneapolis, where I’m from, we have a huge immigrant population that’s been causing a number of problems. With the economy in recession, and so many people getting laid off, and unable to find work, immigrants should not be competing for the few jobs that are out there. Its just not fair to the folks who have a claim to this land and the right to be here. All across America, they are contributing to the flooding of our job markets making it hard for American’s to find jobs. Well I’m fed up and its time to let our politicians know that enough is enough, and we’re not gonna take it any more!

We need to secure our borders to protect our country. We need to restore order and put an end to the anarchy that’s sweeping the nation. We need tougher immigration laws to make sure that we send these people back where they came from. We need to protect the sovereignty of the real Americans. We need to hold our politicians accountable.

Its no secret that with an invasion of immigrants, comes waves of crime. We see them involved in massive theft, in murder, and bringing diseases like smallpox, which is responsible for the death of millions of Americans. These aren’t new problems though, they have been going on for hundreds of years, and continue to this day.

I say its time for us to say enough is enough! Are you with me? Are you with me? Lets send these European immigrants back where they came from! I don’t care if they are Polish, Irish, English, Italian, or Norwegian! European immigrants are responsible for the most violent and heinus crimes in the history of the world, including genocide and slavery! Its time to restore the sovereignty of people native to this land! I want more workplace raids, starting with the big banks downtown. There are thousands of illegals working in those buildings, hiding in their offices, and taking Dakota people’s jobs. Let’s round them up and ship them out. Then we need to hit them at home where they sleep, I don’t care if we separate families, they should have known better when they came here illegally!

If we aren’t able to stand up to these European immigrants, who can we stand up to? We need to send every one of them back home, right now. America for Dakota people, not Europeans! They stole this land through genocide and ethnic cleansing!

Thank you very much, and we’ll see you in the streets!

Columbus go home! Columbus go home! Columbus go home!

Written By ShiftShapers

Yours truly has a 5 second speaking bit haha

Written By STOPSTRIPMINING

Written By Figmint

Energy

Let’s start with Peak Oil. One view is that we’re running out of fossil fuels, and hence doomed, or at least doomed to war, poverty, and eventually, living in caves.

Let’s look at that one first. The company algenol biofuels has developed a strain of algae which can grow in sea water, eat CO2 from biomass or fossil fuel power plants, plus nutrients, and turn it straight into gaseous ethanol, which is captured from the tanks by clear plastic sheeting and distilled in central tanks.

They have an up-and-running test plant they developed with Dow Chemical, which can produce 6,000 gallons of ethanol per acre per year. Corn can produce about 400 gallons per acre.

The process actually desalinates water, at a rate of one gallon of fresh water produced for every gallon of ethanol produced.

Algenol is currently building a scale plant on barren land in the Sonora Desert, which will produce an estimated 1 billion gallons per year of fuel from seawater.

You would need a lot of land to produce enough ethanol to meet U.S. gasoline demands. The U.S. has plenty of surplus Federal land in the form of military bases, many of which the military doesn’t want anymore.

The U.S. military base in China Lake, California, for example, is so big that if it were converted to ethanol production, it could produce about 6% of U.S. gasoline demand. That’s more than we get from Iraq.

Oh, and algae can be used to produce plastic or fertilizer as well, just like fossil fuels. Different strains of algae can also eat fertilizer runoff from industrial farms (currently an ecological problem) while others can eat nutrients from sewage waste (another problem).

Basically, the U.S. military has at its disposal the land, resources and technology to provide America with a domestic supply of oil, indefinitely.

But we don’t have to drive oil-powered cars. The technology for electric cars has existed for some time, and still exists.

That same military base, if covered with solar panels, would produce about 60% of the U.S.‘s current energy capacity, at a cost of about $3 trillion, which is one estimate for the cost of the Iraq war, and smaller than the bank bailouts. Not that you’d want so many solar panels in one place.

Renewable energy sources really do exist, really do work, and really can sustain industrial civilization indefinitely. There certainly are problems, like fluctuation power capacity due to variable sunlight or wind speed, but hydro power, biomass (burning stuff) and future tech like wave farms or high altitude wind power could certainly help even things out, in entirely renewable and sustainable ways. And no, periodic brownouts would not mean the end of industrial civilization.

So are we doomed? Possibly. We have the resources, technology, infrastructure, and brains to sustain industrial civilization. The problem is purely political, as all of those things are currently being squandered in unhelpful wars.

Water

Another line of doom-saying is that “we’re running out of water.”

First of, the rate of water use in the U.S. has stabilized. It’s not growing, even with a growing population and a (formerly) growing economy.

It is true that cities in many places are withdrawing water faster than it replenishes, leading to ecological disasters and the threat of dead cities. It is possible, (although very wasteful and stupid) to ship in water long distances to provide fresh water to dry places. However, there
s a far better solution, called toilet to tap, whereby sewage water is reused as drinking water. It sounds gross at first, until you realize that reverse osmosis water purification is necessary for toilet-to-tap actually makes water cleaner that the out-of-date technologies we currently use. Have you read about how pharmaceuticals have been found in the U.S. water supply? Reverse osmosis would take care of again. Toilet-to-tap also creates a closed water loop, which makes it possible to have cities virtually anywhere, even in deserts. It’s a process that can solve water shortage problems while also cleaning water to a higher degree of purity, which will have knock-on health effects.

Why isn’t is done? In America, cities are hardly maintaining the obsolete water systems we do have, let alone modernizing. Again, it’s a question of politics. Funding and manpower are going to wars and bankers, while needed infrastructure is neglected.

Arable Land?

Organic permaculture farming techniques can actually return higher yields than petrochemical intensive farming practices. And it’s indefinitely sustainable. If we run out of arable land, it’s a political failure, not an inevitable characteristic of an industrial civilization. There’s noting about technology which demands poor land-use, and there’s more than enough land to feed everybody in an infinitely sustainable way.

Overpopulation

Please. Industrial civilization stabilizes and reveres population growth rates. All of the most advanced nations have negative population growth rates. If the whole world were rich, the whole world would have a decreasing population.

Industrial Civilization is not Doomed

However, there are forces which would like you to believe it is. These are the forces of the status quo. Oil companies would like you to believe that they are essential, and without them we’ll collapse, because there are no alternatives. They would love a world in which no alternatives are developed, and in which declining oil stocks result in higher oil prices and higher prices for them. Agrobusiness would love for land to be depleted globally, making farmland more scarce and food prices higher, again resulting in higher profits for them. Private water companies want you to turn to them when the aquifer runs dry, rather than have your city invest the needed resources to create a closed water loop with clean, pure water. The status quo doesn’t mind at all if the system collapses, as long as they get to sit on top of it and ride it down.

There are two types of people who claim that industrial civilization is doomed; that there are too many people; that ‘climate change must be stopped’; that we’ve all going to starve and run out of energy.

The first type are the elites, the oligarchs, the status quo politicians and industrialists, who want to lock the current system in place, even if it means death and destruction.

The second type are their useful idiots, who think that hunger and thirst and poverty and natural disasters will somehow, all by itself result in a better society without feudal lords ruling over it.

What’s severely lacking in political discourse, mainstream or radical, are people who believe that a better society is possible and that social problems can be solved, and who have specific suggestions for solving them.

Having a plan of action or a workable, thought out solution is not authoritarian or paternalistic, but the suggestion that it is is reactionary and counter-revolutionary. The problems we face are all political, and the solutions are also all political. The dead silence when it comes to alternative solutions is perhaps the biggest obstacle we face as a society, for surely nothing will be solved until our problems are considered solvable and then a consensus emerges as to the preferred solutions. Is industrial civilization doomed? Only if it chooses to be.

Written By bacchus

Trials of Khalid “we’ll torture your children if you don’t confess” Sheik Muhammad and the amazing dead then alive three-in-one crazy psychiatrist Major Hassan.

Will they let us watch?

Written By bacchus

The Team is Real

step one: Wear the button when you’re at work. Hook people up (discounts, freebies, extras, etc.)

step two: Wear the button when you go out. Get hooked up. Remember to ask your teammates where they work.

step three: Build the team. Talk to your friends and trusted co-workers. The more people on the team, the better.

We are line cooks and bartenders, waitresses and bakers. We sell produce at farmers’ markets; we operate cash registers, we stock shelves and make espresso drinks. We take commodities, rearrange them and move them around, adding value so that our employers may make a profit. We are workers in the service industry, in essence no different from those who work on construction sites or in the few remaining factories of our post-industrial cities.

Unlike our industrial counter parts, most of us have been ignored by organized labor. We are excluded from collective bargaining by assertions that our work is too precarious, that we can’t be expected to stick around long enough, that our workplaces are too small. Yet when we confess to our more securely employed acquaintances that we work for minimum wage, we never fail to hear the refrain, “Sounds like y’all could use a union.” Not that we morn the official union’s lack of interest in our exploitation. We don’t need more boredom, bureaucracy and control in our already stifled, suppressed lives. But we could do with a bit more money at the end of the month, a few more groceries in our pantries, a dose of complicity in our friendships, and a sprinkling of agency in the places where we spend most of our waking hours.

In the absence of a formal organization with pretensions of representing our interests, we are forced to supersede the union form and take directly for ourselves that which we are denied by the market. Along with workplace sabotage, slacking off instead of hustling, and the occasional sick day when it is just too beautiful outside, workplace theft constitutes our everyday practice of class struggle, our faceless resistance. Even those of us who work for “responsible,” “ethical” businesses find ourselves looking for ways to take home some extra food or to slip some bills out of the register. And when we can, we give freely of the commodities we produce, transforming them from objects with value (a price tag) to objects for free use (nourishment, intoxication, fun…). In this way, we subvert the commodity form on a daily basis by giving free food and drinks to our friends, but we do it in a limited and isolated manner.

The Team is an attempt to coordinate and elaborate that subversion: to spread it beyond the circumscribed boundaries of friendship while at the same time creating new relationships based on a common material condition, that of exploitation, and a common practice of rebellion, that of re-appropriation. Essentially The Team functions by the use of a common identifier – a button, a pin, a t-shirt or hat, anything that could be used to alert a stranger to the presence of a fellow member. The identifier should be unique enough to be easily distinguished, yet not so explicit as to tip off the boss. The deployment of explanatory cards is an optional compliment that while adding a potential risk also provides the opportunity to interject a more explicitly anti-capitalist theme. What do the kids say these days?

Everything for Everyone!

With only a few months of practical application, The Team has proven to be a moderate success in at least one average-sized Midwestern city. Almost two hundred buttons and cards have been given to enthusiastic young service workers. Some of us have enjoyed a trip to the grocery store with no bill upon checking out. Others have been able to feed their caffeine addictions for another day with no exchange of currency. Soon we hope to be riding city buses and partying in hotel rooms. Perhaps one day something will “fall off the truck” into our laps. In the meantime we are finding that social activities that normally leave us feeling isolated from those immediately surrounding us are now enveloped in an atmosphere of excitement and purpose. Knowing head nods and revealing conversations have once again found their way into the air around us. One story reached us of a twenty-something barrista whose adolescent dreams of a network of free coffee suppliers has, years later, found resonance with our little union of thieves. We are finding that even apathetic hipsters and seemingly hostile liberals are making themselves at home in our attempt to do class struggle.

The Team, of course, is not a perfect system. There are many flaws, the exclusion of workers who can not directly seize what they produce foremost among them, yet we believe that for every obstacle we, as a class, are capable of finding a creative solution. Some have suggested a central warehouse for things like toilet paper, soap, light bulbs, and office supplies – commodities that most jobs provide access to. Others have expressed interest in a directory of free social services. In the end, the point is not to establish some sort of alternative economy where we all just go on working our miserable jobs, but rather to help create a climate of subversion, to plant seeds that may manifest in various untold forms, to experiment, and above all to begin to attack the sources of misery.

In our fantastical visions of the near future, we see ourselves reclining on patio furniture while savoring lattes, stocking our larders with the finest of produce from local markets. We are enveloped in sensations of pleasure foreign to our proletarian tongues as we drink freely of the bourgeoisie’s wine. When we travel, we are greeted by friends and strangers with gifts of bounty and luxury. And when guests are received by us in turn we show them a night on the town like no other. A cornucopia of goods, freely taken and given, all at the expense of those who would exploit our lives, all in the spirit of the negation of capitalist relations.

These words have been written with the hope that others, beside ourselves might take up this project and make it their own.

Endorsed By:

— Committee for Attacks Against the World of Work (CAAWW – Birds of the Coming Storm)

— The Team, Local Union Zero

Written By ShiftShapers

Corrupted governments bought by corporate institution
Impose taxes meant for services to be rendered
Not to fund wayward financial misadventure
Life’s struggles are accepted as cost of survival
But the tipping point of frustration has been reached
So all need to awaken to the harsh and true reality
That all that has been gained is poised for loss complete

The shackles of debt’s servitude are ripe for defeat
The working class of humanity need become replete
In their anger to topple the columns of the institutions
That have become the imposers of control
To take the fight of revolution into the streets
To regain their natural birth-right to freedom and peace
And all the prosperity that hard work can conceive

Written By canadian

6,250.

4,000 of those deaths were reported in the United States.

That’s while the UK is “diagnosing” swine flu over the phone.

So but whatever — because it gets weirder.

In the United States, between 1971 and 2001, an average of 41,400 people died of the flu every year.

How many people have died of Swine Flu, in the United States — as opposed to some other kind of flu — this year?

If, in the last 318 days, 4,000 people have died of Swine Flu — an average of 13 people a day have died of swine flu.

According to the statistical average, 113 people die, every DAY, in the United States, of the flu flu.

So how come the CDC is only reporting 13 out of the 113 that can be statistically expected to be dying of any flu whatsoFNeva, in the United States, every day?

Written By microdot

is on the case of Manchurian candidates.

Apparently, mini beauty queens are being groomed for suicide bombings by al Kiddya, using drugs and hypnosis.

Janet Napolitano, who worked as a drug sniffer dog before she was called to high office by Obnogstein, has volunteered to sniff the pants of mini beauty queens to test for drugs to make sure they are not in clutches of al Kiddya.

Napolitano is a true patriot. She’ll be licking the slits of illegal immigrants next to keep the USA safe.

Written By floopin

Mike Whitney—November marks the 10th anniversary of the WTO demonstrations in Seattle. Can you explain why you went even though you knew you might be harassed, gassed, beaten or arrested?

Jeffrey St. Clair—-I had no intention of being harassed, gassed, beaten, shot at or arrested. This was Seattle after all. The police don’t act that way in the Emerald City. I didn’t particularly want to go, but Cockburn couldn’t be budged from Petrolia. The Turtles and Teamsters theme turned me off. Many of the groups behind the “official” protest had prostrated themselves at the feet of the Clinton Administration for seven years as they hacked away at the foundations of the environmental, labor and human rights policies that had been in place since the Great Society without so much as a whimper of protest. It had all the hallmarks of another Potemkin protest by the politically neutered progressive bloc. But there were rumblings from the underground that a more impolite demonstration might erupt on the streets. I wanted to show up just in case. Besides, there was an exhibition of paintings by my favorite American artist Morris Graves showing in town. In the end, Graves had to wait.

MW—What groups participated in the demonstrations and was there a common-thread that tied them together?

Jeffrey St. Clair—-The French philosopher Michel Foucault quipped, “It’s resistance that unites us.” So it was in Seattle. If there was a common thread that united Earth Firsters, anarchists, Longshoremen and even wheat farmers from the Great Plains it was resistance against the machinery of government, from the WTO to the Clinton administration to the Seattle Police Department. In the end, this strange melange included even the people of Seattle as they were indiscriminately brutalized by their own cops. The street protests were organized (if you can call it organized) by the Direct Action Network and the Ruckus Society, along with some independent operators such as the Black Bloc. But the over-reaction of the Seattle cops did more to swell the size and intensity of the protests than any of those groups. It was a unique convergence of forces and circumstances that created a one-of-a-kind spectacle that even the Situationists might have enjoyed.

MW—Most people have only heard the media’s version of the events (along with the endless footage of the attack on the Starbuck’s store) Can you explain what the media “got wrong” in their coverage?

Jeffrey St. Clair— You can’t expect the corporate media to critique global capitalism, can you? In the end, I didn’t think the media coverage of the Seattle demonstrations was that terrible. Of course, the media made no attempt to understand what was driving the protests, but that would have required them to get out on the streets and interview people as concussion grenades were exploding overhead—not something the business press, assembled for the WTO, was comfortable doing. The media certainly globalized the protests and made those street battles an inspiration to activists around the world. I don’t mind seeing those images of Starbucks and Niketown getting whacked. In the end, I think the media, particularly the Seattle media, turned against the cops—at least what I was able to watch in my cramped motel room at the King’s Inn. Give the Black Bloc their due. By smashing a few windows in advance of the WTO, they largely preempted any coverage of the phony labor/green parade and rally and got the cameras out on the streets where they belonged.

MW—“5 Days that Shook the World”, the book that you co-authored with Alexander Cockburn and photographer Allan Sekula, is a classic of radical journalism. But I’m afraid it hasn’t gotten the attention it deserves. Apart from the riveting storyline and the high-octane prose, there’s quite a bit of information here that would interest antiwar protesters and civil libertarians. It looks like many of the repressive measures that people associate with the Bush era, actually had took root during the Clinton administration; extralegal surveillance, preemptive arrest, and the rise of paramilitary-type law enforcement. What did Seattle teach you about repression in America?

Jeffrey St. Clair—-The WTO protests exposed what many of us had been writing about for years: the militarization of policing in America. The images of cops dressed in black stormtrooper gear, firing concussion grenades, plastic bullets and tear gas at protesters, business people and shoppers on the streets of America’s most self-consciously progressive (and white) city revealed how thoroughly infected the nation’s police forces had become with these brutal tactics and anti-constitutional measures. Of course, none of this would have come as a surprise to the residents of South Central Los Angeles, where these tactics had been a daily fact of life since at least the tenure of Darryl Gates in the 1980s. But now the traumas of black America had shown up on the streets of one of America’s whitest cities. The Clinton administration had proved with lethal force it was more than willing to trample basic constitutional guarantees at Waco in the horrific and totally unjustified raid on the Branch Davidians, where more than 100 people were burned to death. Of course, at the time few progressives sympathized with Koresh and his followers and many of them defended the actions of the FBI and ATF, even after watching those women and kids go up in flames. It’s also worth noting that the Waco raid saw the Clinton administration trample the Posse Comitatus Act, which prohibited domestic operations by the US military.

It’s now been proved that the Delta Force had a hand in the Waco catastrophe. Again liberals were mute on this constitutional incursion by Clinton. Then after the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, Clinton pushed congress to pass the Counterterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, which was a precursor of the Patriot Act. This law widely expanding policing powers, set up the noxious Joint Terrorism Task Forces, where the FBI set up shop with local cops, and became to criminalize various kinds of dissent and protest . Seattle revealed the maturation of these tactics to middle-class and liberal America.

MW—The book takes a few jabs at liberals (like Medea Benjamin) and Big Labor who didn’t really lift a finger to disrupt the WTO meetings. How do explain the willingness of liberals and labor to roll over and let the corporations decide how they think the world should be divided up? Do you think the Iraq war protests would have been more successful had they used the tactics of WTO demonstrators rather than ambling sheeplike through city-centers waving signs and mooning for the cameras?

Jeffrey St. Clair—-It’s no surprise that the big environmental groups and big labor didn’t try to disrupt the WTO meetings or even come to the aid of the street protesters as they were being brutalized by the cops. All they really wanted was a seat at the negotiating table, even if they knew they were going to get creamed in the negotiations. These groups barely stood up to Reagan and Bush I. They were silly putty in Clinton’s hands, willing to swallow, and at times, even defend every betrayal, from NAFTA and the destruction of welfare to logging in ancient forests. Medea Benjamin is a different story. She wanted to claim ownership of street protests but didn’t want to be tarred by elements that made her funders and friends in the media uncomfortable. Her defense of Niketown was outrageous, but entirely predictable. Witness her recent statements urging a limited, modified pull-out from Afghanistan. She thrives on media stunts and in order to continue to be a quotable source (even by Bill O.) she needs to distance herself from the more radical elements, in this case, a few black kids helping themselves to some overpriced, sweatshop produced Nike footware liberated by the Black Bloc. It was a pathetic performance.

I don’t think the Seattle experience can or will be repeated. You can only take the ruling class off guard once every few decades. The greatest protest against the Iraq war was done by a single person: Cindy Sheehan and her lonely vigil outside Crawford, Texas. The failure was in the anti-war movement’s inability to capitalize on Cindy’s courageous stand. This illustrates—along with the failure to run the Bush crowd out of town after Katrina—of the deep institutional impotence of the American left, a paralysis that has become even more pronounced in the age of Obama.

MW—“Jeffrey St. Clair’s Seattle Diary” (chapter 2) is just a great read. Can you explain the mood of the crowd and the fear you must have felt when the helicopters were buzzing overhead and the small army of truncheon-wielding robocops were clearing the streets and dragging hundreds of protesters off to jail?

Jeffrey St. Clair—-I wasn’t frightened. It was an altogether exhilarating experience. But then again I didn’t get hit in the head with a plastic bullet or locked up in a stifling bus for 20 hours. A little tear gas now and then is good for the soul.

MW— Here’s the final entry to your “Seattle Diary”:

“I walked out on the street one last time. The acrid stench of CN gas still soured the morning air. As I turned to get into my car for the drive back to Portland, a black teenager grabbed my arm. “Hey, man, does this WTO deal come to town every year?” I knew how the kid felt. Along with the poison, the flash bombs and rubber bullets, there was an optimism, energy and camaraderie that I hadn’t felt in a long time.” What was achieved in Seattle that week in 1999?

Jeffrey St. Clair—-It was an inspirational week. Seattle proved that after swallowing seven years of crap from a Democratic regime it was possible for some progressives to awaken from their hibernation and express in a direct and confrontational way their anger with their political masters. It showed that resistance is not only possible, but that it can also be fun. The movement is in repose once again. But, who knows, it make reawaken any time in the next seven years….

Notes on WTO demonstrations by Alexander Cockburn:

“As we wrote at the time, You can take state power by surprise over twenty or thirty years, and state power spends the next two or three decades making sure it won’t happen again. See May/June ’68 in Paris. The next big anti-WTO rally after Seattle was in Washington DC and as JoAnn Wypijewski reported for CounterPunch after that rally, the Maryland / DC cops had orders to shoot to kill if necessary. You can chart the fanatic vigilance of the state by the near impossibility of demonstrating within eyeshot of Bush or Cheney. There were several instances of people in wheel chairs and a sign, awaiting the Royal Progress of W or C, being hauled off to distant wire pens, there to exercise their First Amendment rights. Jeffrey and I were at the Democratic convention in Los Angeles in the summer of 2000 and the armed police presence was beyond belief, with squads of motor bike cops regularly roaring along the sidewalks. It took the arrival of a black president in the White House to persuade the police that it was okay to have a man with a revolver strapped to his leg to demonstrate at an Obama town hall meeting with a sign quoting Jefferson on the need to water the tree of liberty with the blood of tyrants.

Of course one’s tendency is to think that a hugely exciting event like the Seattle Days is the beginning of something — but alas, Seattle was more epilogue than overture. The organized left fell apart in the Clinton years and hasn’t effectively reconstituted itself since. In fact in the US the left as an energetic intellectual and political force is nearly dead, engorged by the Democratic Party. Of course there are those who fight on – like us here at CounterPunch, and the fact that we have a large and loyal audience across the world for our stuff encourages us to believe there’s life in the Old Mole still.”

“5 Days that Shook the World”, co-authored by Jeffrey St. Clair, Alexander Cockburn and Allan Sekula, Verso Publishing, London

Written By ShiftShapers

There’s only one way to avoid the collapse of this human experiment of ours on Planet Earth: we have to consume less.

Buy Nothing Day was a radical concept when we first introduced it 20 years ago. It struck a blow against the very heart of our consumer culture. For the first decade of its existence it had a profound and sweeping effect, shining a light on the dark side of consumerism at a time when the world was largely oblivious to its insidious effects. Year after year it fired up the world’s imagination – inspiring its fair share of sympathy and solidarity, resistance and mockery. I remember people laughing their heads off at the sight of my BND button. But somehow, as the years wore on (and despite the fact that last year it was celebrated in 65 countries around the world), the day seems to be losing its edge. Now, as humanity faces crises of ecology, psychology and faith, the time has come to rethink the day, to reanimate it with new intensity, purpose and scale.

This year we’re calling for a wildcat general strike. On November 27/28 we’re asking tens of millions of people around the world to bring the capitalist consumption machine to a grinding – if only momentary – halt. We want you to shut off your lights, your televisions and other nonessential appliances. We want you to park your car, turn off your phones and log off your computer for the day. We’re calling for a Ramadan-like fast. From sunrise to sunset, we abstain en masse. Not only from shopping but from all the temptations of our five-planet lifestyles.

Instead we’ll feed our spirits and minds with a feast of subversive activities: pranks, shenanigans, credit card cut-ups, bicycle swarms, mall invasions and all manner of culture jams and creative détournements … and some of us will take things even further with sit-ins, demonstrations, passive resistance and acts of nonviolent defiance, anarchy and civil disobedience. If we can create a big enough ruckus on November 27/28, then we may be able to catalyze what the Situationists tried to set in motion half a century ago: a chain reaction of refusal against consumer capitalism … a sudden, unexpected moment of truth … the first ever global revolution.

Written By ShiftShapers

Jeez – what cunts.

American terrorists have water-boarded great hero, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, at least 183 times, so obviously whatever he says must be true. Naturally anybody tortured relentlessly for 7 years non-stop would never admit to something they had not done.

The trial is going to be conducted in New York a few hundred yards from where the World Trade Centre was demolished by terrorist jews (helped by CIA shit). No doubt the court will be picketed by foaming-at-the-mouth dirty jews baying for the death of humans, and screeching for human babies to be burned alive.

It’s ridiculous. Does anybody anywhere in the world (except for evil fucktard fat American bastards conditioned by dirty lying jews) not know that the twin towers and WTC7 were professionally demolished.

Obnog is complete failure. Like all blacks he is a pet of the jews, and 100% compliant in any crime when promised ‘bling’. Not only has the nog failed to call for investigations into the crimes of Bush and the Nazi jew cabal that surrounded him, he is in fact continuing and even furthering jew terrorism against humans.

In the coming war with the USA, no prisoners should be taken. All American terrorist filth should be burned in pits like rats.

Written By floopin

GreenTextbooks.org specializes in the recycling of textbooks, DVDs, CDs. Buying used textbooks not only saves you money, but cuts down on greenhouse gases caused by the manufacturing of new textbooks.
With GreenTextbooks.org you’re not only saving trees, you are saving some green. GreenTextbooks.org is one of the first “GREEN” textbook marketplaces.

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Written By greentextbooks

On November 28th, activists from across the country will converge on Morgan for Fur Free Saturday. Morgan is the largest fur farming town in the country, with 15 active mink farms. For the first time, the animal rights movement will bring all the tears and rage for the millions killed every year for fur to the belly of the beast: Morgan, Utah. This convergence will climax in a one-mile march through the heart of this fur farm capital, past two of Morgan’s mink farms.

The mere threat of this protest has already generated enormous media coverage, and Morgan County’s mink farmers and police are scared. Morgan has responded by amending their protesting ordinance to outlaw protesting within 1000 feet of a mink farm. Activists responded by filing two lawsuits, charging the ordinance is unconstitutional. The protest will continue.

Morgan is clearly a town contemptuous of the constitution and steeped in the tradition of murder. Two lawsuits and numerous news headlines later, we remain committed to march on Morgan November 28th, and are calling on activists nationwide to join us.

This event is likely to be legend.

More info at the Fur Free Utah website: www.furfreeutah.com

Contact: peteryoung@furfreeutah.com

All activists arriving from out of town will be provided with a place to stay.

Written By ShiftShapers

Welcome to the Soviet system of Justice™.

Gitmo 9/11 suspects heading to NY trial
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/us_guantanamo_us_trial

Written By Rio_Alto

Abstract A new paradigm is needed for industrial civilization, because neither the traditional theory of exponential industrial growth nor the more recent steady-state hypothesis can satisfactorily explain historical data. As a basis for the paradigm, the long sweep of human history is divided into three phases: (1)pre-industrial, (2)industrial, and (3)de-industrial. This essay focuses on the second, or industrial, phase. The paradigm is embodied in four theories. The first theory states that industrial civilization can be graphed over time by energy-use per person in the shape of a single pulse waveform. The second theory is derived from a well-established principle of human ecology. It defines a set of necessary conditions for the advance, stagnation and decline of industrial civilization in terms of world total energy-use and world total population. Next, the subject of governing is analyzed in terms of ten requirements for system control. The third theory is derived from this analysis. It relates the size, or complexity, of a society over time to the average energy-use per person in that society. Historical population and energy-use data and other considerations are used as the basis for the fourth theory. This, a predictive theory, states that the life-expectancy of industrial civilization is less than 100 years.

Written By Livingston

The other day I received a pre-publication copy of The Battle of the Story of the Battle of Seattle, by David Solnit and Rebecca Solnit. It’s set to come out ten years after a historic coalition of activists shut down the World Trade Organization summit in Seattle, the spark that ignited a global anticorporate movement.

The book is a fascinating account of what really happened in Seattle, but when I spoke to David Solnit, the direct-action guru who helped engineer the shutdown, I found him less interested in reminiscing about 1999 than in talking about the upcoming United Nations climate change summit in Copenhagen and the “climate justice” actions he is helping to organize across the United States on November 30. “This is definitely a Seattle-type moment,” Solnit told me. “People are ready to throw down.”

There is certainly a Seattle quality to the Copenhagen mobilization: the huge range of groups that will be there; the diverse tactics that will be on display; and the developing-country governments ready to bring activist demands into the summit. But Copenhagen is not merely a Seattle do-over. It feels, instead, as though the progressive tectonic plates are shifting, creating a movement that builds on the strengths of an earlier era but also learns from its mistakes.

The big criticism of the movement the media insisted on calling “antiglobalization” was always that it had a laundry list of grievances and few concrete alternatives. The movement converging on Copenhagen, in contrast, is about a single issue—climate change—but it weaves a coherent narrative about its cause, and its cures, that incorporates virtually every issue on the planet. In this narrative, our climate is changing not simply because of particular polluting practices but because of the underlying logic of capitalism, which values short-term profit and perpetual growth above all else. Our governments would have us believe that the same logic can now be harnessed to solve the climate crisis—by creating a tradable commodity called “carbon” and by transforming forests and farmland into “sinks” that will supposedly offset our runaway emissions.

Climate-justice activists in Copenhagen will argue that, far from solving the climate crisis, carbon-trading represents an unprecedented privatization of the atmosphere, and that offsets and sinks threaten to become a resource grab of colonial proportions. Not only will these “market-based solutions” fail to solve the climate crisis, but this failure will dramatically deepen poverty and inequality, because the poorest and most vulnerable people are the primary victims of climate change—as well as the primary guinea pigs for these emissions-trading schemes.

But activists in Copenhagen won’t simply say no to all this. They will aggressively advance solutions that simultaneously reduce emissions and narrow inequality. Unlike at previous summits, where alternatives seemed like an afterthought, in Copenhagen the alternatives will take center stage. For instance, the direct-action coalition Climate Justice Action has called on activists to storm the conference center on December 16. Many will do this as part of the ‘bike bloc,’ riding together on an as yet unrevealed “irresistible new machine of resistance” made up of hundreds of old bicycles. The goal of the action is not to shut down the summit, Seattle-style, but to open it up, transforming it into “a space to talk about our agenda, an agenda from below, an agenda of climate justice, of real solutions against their false ones…. This day will be ours.”

Some of the solutions on offer from the activist camp are the same ones the global justice movement has been championing for years: local, sustainable agriculture; smaller, decentralized power projects; respect for indigenous land rights; leaving fossil fuels in the ground; loosening protections on green technology; and paying for these transformations by taxing financial transactions and canceling foreign debts. Some solutions are new, like the mounting demand that rich countries pay ‘climate debt’ reparations to the poor. These are tall orders, but we have all just seen the kind of resources our governments can marshal when it comes to saving the elites. As one pre-Copenhagen slogan puts it: “If the climate were a bank, it would have been saved”—not abandoned to the brutality of the market.

In addition to the coherent narrative and the focus on alternatives, there are plenty of other changes too: a more thoughtful approach to direct action, one that recognizes the urgency to do more than just talk but is determined not to play into the tired scripts of cops-versus-protesters. “Our action is one of civil disobedience,” say the organizers of the December 16 action. “We will overcome any physical barriers that stand in our way—but we will not respond with violence if the police [try] to escalate the situation.” (That said, there is no way the two-week summit will not include a few running battles between cops and kids in black; this is Europe, after all.)

A decade ago, in an op-ed in the New York Times published after Seattle was shut down, I wrote that a new movement advocating a radically different form of globalization “just had its coming-out party.” What will be the significance of Copenhagen? I put that question to John Jordan, whose prediction of what eventually happened in Seattle I quoted in my book No Logo. He replied: “If Seattle was the movement of movements’ coming-out party, then maybe Copenhagen will be a celebration of our coming of age.”

He cautions, however, that growing up doesn’t mean playing it safe, eschewing civil disobedience in favor of staid meetings. “I hope we have grown up to become much more disobedient,” Jordan said, “because life on this world of ours may well be terminated because of too many acts of obedience.”

An updated tenth-anniversary edition of Naomi Klein’s No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies comes out in November.

Written By ShiftShapers

If anybody had told me back in Vietnam days that Senator Robert Byrd, who supported that illegal and immoral war, would become one of the bravest and most eloquent opponents of the current and even more illegal and immoral — if that is possible — Terror Wars, I would have questioned his sanity. There are many, many examples of former servants of the empire having become, especially since 9/11 and the start of the fraudulent Terror Wars, what they would probably themselves have called a few years earlier “radical dissidents.” Many former “conservatives” have left Noam Chomsky in the dust in the distance they have traveled from center stage to join the “wild men in the wings,” as McGeorge Bundy referred to Chomsky et al. in 1967.

It would seem that a revolution has taken place, but it is a strange kind of revolution, because nothing much has changed. Here we are again in the middle of a “quagmire” that has cost more than a million lives (4,600 of them Americans), and almost $700 billion, threatening to cost another $179 billion in 2010 and with a “liberal” president about to send in tens of thousands of additional troops. Some of us “radical dissidents,” in the permanent state of frustration and dismay that unfortunate predilection for old-fashioned “family values” such as truth and justice condemns us to, are fond of saying that we must change people’s minds before we can change the world. But that revolution of the mind, if the polls I’ve seen are not mistaken, has in fact taken place. What happens now?

There are two possibilities, as I see it: 1) nothing, i.e., things continue as they are because it really doesn’t matter what people think and Big Brother already has us completely in hand, or 2) this is the calm before the storm. The latter possibility, as seen from the Fox News perspective, may be brought on not only by “terrorism” but also by “socialism,” as rabble-rousers like Glenn Beck are screaming at us. However illogical and vapid such propaganda is, it serves a purpose: when the day comes, when martial law is declared, we should not be too surprised, or wonder about the reasons. It may not even be necessary by 2014 (in Glenn Beck’s scenario) to connect the next 9/11, economic collapse, disease epidemic, or other catastrophe to fictive “terrorists” like the 19 Arabs or crazed “socialists” like President Obama. Who will be wondering and analyzing why it happened, once it does? We will be glad to have toilet paper and a handful of mush, like millions of other serfs on the planet.

Given these two choices, one is tempted to hope for the first. After all, life in the Brave New World Order ain’t that bad. At least we have toilet paper. We’ll need a lot of it to keep our consciences clean. Or maybe not. Our age, the age of the truth movement, the antiwar movement, the single-payer health insurance movement, the save Social Security movement, the decriminalize marijuana movement, the yes-we-can movement, etc., may become known to historians as the most constipated of all time. Never before, they will say, have so many wanted to do so much, and done so little.

(For links see http://www.opednews.com/articles/Hello-Vietnamistan-Goodby-by-Michael-David-Morr-091110-338.html)

Written By mdmorrissey