New Left Project
27 July 2012
The following is an open letter from IOPS (the International Organisation for a Participatory Society) a potentially important new initiative in the struggle for a more just world...
An Open Message to All Who Seek A New and Better World
We are members of what is called the the Interim Consultative Committee of the…
The Direct Action Working Group met Thursday night and has scheduled Day of Chalkupy in response to Occupy Los Angeles' #A9 Call for Global Day of Action - Chalkupy the World
We will meet at 11:am at Duncan Plaza and chalk the city! Map and details forthcoming!
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by the Center for Biological Diversity
CHARLESTON, W.V.— The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service today proposed Endangered Species Act protections for a small fish called the diamond darter and 122 river miles of its critical habitat in West Virginia and Kentucky. The decision stems from a 2011 landmark legal settlement with the Center for Biological Diversity to speed protection decisions for 757 species around the country.
Healthy Communities are a Human Right!:
Teach-in for Protection of the San Francisco Peaks
Panels, workshops, and small group sessions addressing:
Sacred Sites, Environmental Justice, Legal Cases, Water Issues, Legislative Action, Civil Disobedience, & more.
Join community & student activists to learn about the environmental & social justice struggle to protect the sacred San Francisco Peaks and how to get involved.
Environmental and community advocates got some jarring news Tuesday when a federal judge rejected EPA's "guidance" on surface mine permitting in Appalachia -- the centerpiece of its three-year effort to curtail the environmental damage caused by mountaintop-removal coal mining.
While it was unwelcome news, it was not as devastating as portrayed in the initial round of news stories, which appeared to be heavily influenced by the coal industry's false narrative about an "
by WILL POTTER on MAY 29, 2012
Newly released FBI presentations show the flawed and misleading information the government is using to train agents to identify and investigate “domestic terrorist” groups such as “black separatists,” anarchists, animal rights activists, and environmentalists.
Among the more troubling portions of the training materials are warnings of activists using the Freedom of Information Act, engaging in non-violent civil disobedience, and gathering in coffee shops.
The domestic terrorism training materials were obtained through the Freedom of Information Act by the ACLU. They offer additional insight into a disturbing pattern of FBI activity misrepresenting political activists as “terrorists” and manufacturing “domestic terrorism threats” where none exist, akin to the notorious COINTELPRO program of J. Edgar Hoover.
In presentations on “Anarchist Extremism,” the FBI warns:
– Anarchists are “Criminals seeking an ideology to justify their activities”
– Anarchists are “Not dedicated to a particular cause”
– Green anarchists believe “individuals should ‘get back to nature’”
Their meeting locations include “college campuses, underground clubs, coffee houses/ internet cafes.” Their criminal activity includes “Sleeping Dragons” (a form of civil disobedience in which people lock arms in PVC pipes).
Anarchists are also “paranoid / security conscious,” according to the presentation. This is an interesting observation coming from the FBI, considering there have been two recent cases where the FBI played a key role in infiltrating anarchist groups in order to orchestrate alleged terrorist attacks. In the Cleveland May Day arrests, and in theChicago NATO arrests, the FBI trumpeted the arrest of “terrorists” that agents themselves tried desperately to create.
However, not all anarchists are engaged in these types of plots, the FBI acknowledges. They use a “variety of tactics” including “civil disobedience” (such as resisting home foreclosures, creating community gardens, and many other activities not mentioned by the bureau).
The FBI also warns that anarchists may have “crossover ideologies” including animal rights extremism and environmental extremism.
In the training presentation on these so-called “eco-terrorists,” the FBI lists lawful, First Amendment activity and low-level criminal activity (such as civil disobedience) as examples of domestic terrorism.
The FBI is particularly focused in these presentations on information gathering and what it calls a “public relations war” by activist groups. “Media is sometimes slanted in favor of activists,” the FBI says. “Activists spin the truth.”
Examples of information gathering listed by the FBI include requests for public documents under the Freedom of Information Act. In one presentation, FOIA requests are listed as examples of “University targeting.”
Elsewhere the FBI warns of “cold calls” and using “USDA Report [sic].”
The FBI also warns of activist attempts to use “false employment.” This is undoubtedly related to activists who seek employment at factory farms and vivisection labs in order to expose animal welfare abuses. As I have reported here previously, the FBI has considered terrorism charges for non-violent undercover investigators. And multiple states have been seeking to criminalize undercover investigations as well.
As I document in Green Is the New Red, there has been a slow and relentless expansion of “terrorism” rhetoric and investigations over the last 30 years. This type of language and FBI investigation was initially confined to property crimes by the Animal Liberation Front and Earth Liberation Front (groups that have caused millions of dollars in economic loss, but have never harmed a human being).
Now this already-broad terrorism classification has been expanded even further. The Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act was drafted to target anyone who causes the “loss of profits” of an animal enterprise. The FBI acknowledges this shift in “terrorism” investigations in a slide that says the new law “alleviates the use of force or violence criteria.”
The ACLU’s Mike German has an excellent dissection of the FBI’s “black separatist” documents. German writes:
Who are “Black Separatists” and is there any evidence they pose a terrorist threat?
Internet searches of “Black Separatist terrorism,” “Black Separatist bombing,” and “Black Separatist shooting” fail to bring up any recent incidents that could be fairly described as terrorist violence. No “Black Separatist” terrorist incidents are included in the FBI’s list of “Major Terrorism Cases: Past and Present,” nor on the more comprehensive list of terrorist attacks going back to 1980, which are detailed in an FBI report entitled “Terrorism 2002-2005.” While Black nationalist groups like the Black Panthers and the Black Liberation Army were certainly involved in political violence back in the 1970s, they no longer exist, and the last acts of violence attributed to either groupwere more than two decades ago.
So why are Atlanta FBI agents now searching for black separatist threats? Because the FBI appears to be training them to believe there is one using factually flawed materials.
The FBI is targeting “black separatists,” anarchists, animal rights activists, and environmentalists in nearly identical methodologies. And these new documents show just how little these tactics change over time and between movements.
The FBI is manufacturing these “terrorism threats” through what I would call a process of conflation. Disparate groups are being conflated, across ideological and tactical divides, and presented as a united “threat.” For instance, the FBI notes that “black separatists” are a movement that “consists of multiple groups” lacking a unified ideology, but they are lumped together because they “all share racial grievances against the U.S., most seek restitution, or governance base [sic] on religious identity or social principals [sic].”
Just as the FBI invented a new class of domestic terrorists in 2009 called “American Islamic Extremists,” the FBI long ago embraced a new class of domestic terrorists called “eco-terrorists.” A wide range of groups, from the Humane Society to the Animal Liberation Front, have been conflated into this catch-all term. This use of language is essential to the demonization of entire social movements because it aides in reshaping them as an “other.” They are not individuals with specific political grievances, they become a mass of unreasonable extremist threats.
At the same time, the FBI is conflating a wide range of tactics. People who support anarchists or “black separatists” in their words are conflated with the very small group of people who have engaged in illegal activity. That’s how the FBI is including FOIA requests and civil disobedience as example tactics in a domestic terrorism presentation. Juxtapose this with the tactics of militia extremists and white supremacists, who have murdered, lynched, bombed, assaulted government officials and created weapons of mass destruction.
To most reasonable people, such a stark disparity between these groups would raise questions about how the FBI is allocating its domestic terrorism resources. How did such misguided policies come about?
These presentations point to one possible answer to that question: The FBI creates terrorism threats by directly training agents to believe they exist.
http://www.greenisthenewred.com/blog/fbi-domestic-terrorism-training-anarchists-eco/6199/
Economics has increasingly become an intellectual game played for its own sake and not for its practical consequences for understanding the economic world. Economists have converted the subject into a sort of social mathematics in which analytical rigour is everything and practical relevance is nothing.
At least three Nobel laureates have expressed their concerns. At a very early stage Wassily Leontief in 1982 objected that models had become more important than data: “Page after page of professional economic journals are filled with mathematical formulas … Year after year, economic theorists continue to produce scores of mathematical models and to explore in great detail their formal properties; and the econometricians fit algebraic functions of all possible shapes to essentially the same sets of data.”
In 1997, Ronald Coase complained: “Existing economics is a theoretical system which floats in the air and which bears little relation to what happens in the real world.” Near the end of his life, Milton Friedman observed: “Economics has become increasingly an arcane branch of mathematics rather than dealing with real economic problems.”
What happened after these prestigious complaints? David Colander lamented in 2009 that none of these prominent warnings “had any effect on US graduate economic education.” As Mark Blaug wrote pessimistically in 1998: “We have created a monster that is very difficult to stop.”
The problem is not necessarily mathematics per se, but the obsession with technique over substance. Arguably there is a proper place for some limited use of useful heuristics or data-rich models within economics. But what should determine their adoption is not their technical aesthetics, but their usefulness for helping to explain the real world.
Geoffrey M. Hodgson is Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Institutional Economics.
Members of Pussy Riot behind bars. (photo: Reuters)
02 August 12
ome people have their eyes on the prize. A prize beyond medals. That prize is freedom, freedom of expression, freedom to protest. I am talking about Pussy Riot, who are drawing the eyes of the world to what is happening in Russia. Pussy Riot - crazy punks, yeah? No, they are not crazy, daft or naive. They are being tried for blasphemy in what is still, nominally, a secular state. They are highlighting what happens to any opposition to president Vladimir Putin and, indeed, they do look fabulous. If you want to see protest as art or the art of protest, look at these women and their supporters.
Described as punk inheritors of the Riot Grrrl mantle, they are so much more. They are now on trial in Moscow for a crime that took 51 seconds to commit. Please watch it on YouTube. They mimed an anti-Putin song in the main Orthodox cathedral wearing their trademark balaclavas and clashing colours. For this “hooliganism ” and “religious hatred”, the three women have already served five months in jail. They now face a possible seven-year sentence, in a country where fewer than 1% of cases that go to trial end in a not guilty verdict.
Pussy Riot function symbolically as the head of a protest movement in Russia that is being shut down. Bloggers have been arrested, and people are scared to express any anti-Putin sentiment. Only state-sanctioned demonstrations are allowed. The slide into dictatorship is apparent and, significantly, one of the biggest benefactors has been the church, which has performed a massive “land grab”. Pussy Riot exist to draw attention to precisely what is so disturbing, a totalitarian nation where the church and state are become one. Some have warned that Russia is becoming a new entity, a Christian fundamentalist state. Members of the Orthodox church have said the separation of the secular and the spiritual is “a western idea”. This what Pussy Riot are up against.
The women have been called Satanists by state prosecutors and various priests, though their supporters paint them as sweet young mothers. Doubtless they are, but they are also cleverly using long-established forms of anonymous anarchic protest. The balaclavas mean anyone can be Pussy Riot. TheGuerilla Girls in the Art World did this. An anarchist “strike” once involved all of us writing with the byline Karen Eliot. Occupy does it. The dull and respectable left too often ignores the genius of these forms of dissent.
Indeed, as Tobi Vail of Bikini Kill, one of Pussy Riot’s inspirations, says, these methods of protest cannot be jailed. Their name itself is to oppose the idea of the feminine as “receiving”; instead the female sex organ, they say, can “suddenly start a radical rebellion against the cultural order”. These women have read everything from Simone de Beauvoir to Judith Butler and Rosi Braidotti. They know what they are about.
No wonder the patriarchs of Russia are worried. Pussy Riot have spread the word, and the word is that their “great leader” resembles a Gaddafi or Kim Jong-un. They have done so through a series of cunning stunts and are now recognised as prisoners of conscience by Amnesty. Sting has worn a Pussy Riot T-shirt, though I would prefer to see all the rock stars in balaclavas and for Madonna to get one as soon as possible.
What Putin cannot stop, though, is a concept. Pussy Riot are essentially conceptual artists. This is what makes them threatening – it is not possible to imprison a concept. The celebration of rock and punk as anthemic that we saw last week was lovely, but Pussy Riot are a reminder that revolution always begins first in culture, in the radical act. In the society of the spectacle, that act – Pussy Riot’s sporadic performances – get YouTube hits and retweets. In these days of Twitter shallows, remember it is the virtual world that has pushed Pussy Riot into the spotlight and in the real world they are in prison.
If ever we needed an anarcho-feminist protest, it is now. But I would say that, wouldn’t I? Sure, the unimaginative can reduce this to “Punks against Putin” and say these women have no manifesto. They are up to something else altogether: making complicated points look simple. They are the opposition and they are girls with guitars and knitted hats, not men with guns. This is wonderful.
For some, anarchism has always been an inherently feminist philosophy as it opposes relationships based on power. Pussy Riot come from the country where Bakunin argued against Proudhon for the equality of women and against the authoritarian family. It is also the country of another woman who walked the walk: Emma Goldman. She saw anarchic protest as a legitimate opposition against government control. Of such protests she said: “It seems to me that these are the new forms of life, and that they will take the place of the old, not by preaching or voting, but by living them.”
Pussy Riot are these new forms of life, even as they sit in a cage – an actual cage – facing these ridiculous charges because Putin is threatened. He should be. It cannot be said enough. We are all Pussy Riot.
See Also: Pussy Riot Members ‘Deprived of Sleep and Food’ During Trial
The Transform Now Three with their signs, via http://transformnowplowshares.wordpress.com.
In the early morning on Saturday, July 28, three gray-haired trespassers made their way into a nuclear weapons facility in Tennessee. They were armed with human blood, hammers, candles, flowers, crime-scene tape and a Bible. In the process of their break-in and after, they have managed to close down operations at the facility for days on end and raise searching questions about how secure — and how justified — the United States’ vast nuclear stockpiles really are.
According to Transform Now Plowshares’ own account:
Michael R. Walli (63), Megan Rice, SHCJ (82), Greg Boertje-Obed, (57), succeeded in a disarmament action at the Oak Ridge Y-12 Nuclear facility before dawn today.
Calling themselves Transform Now Plowshares they hammered on the cornerstone of the newly built Highly-Enriched Uranium Manufacturing Facility (HEUMF), splashed human blood and left four spray painted tags on the recent construction which read: Woe to the empire of blood; The fruit of justice is peace; Work for peace not for war; and Plowshares please Isaiah.
Under the cover of darkness they intermittently passed beyond four fences in a walk for over two hours through the fatal force zone. “We feel it was a miracle; we were led directly to where we wanted to go” said Greg.
After navigating through the complex they came to a long, white, windowless building marked HEUMF. “It was built like a fortress”, Greg said describing the four guard towers.
Unimpeded by security, they attached two banners to pillars of the building. “Transform Now Plowshares” read the first with a green and black icon showing part bomb part flower. A second stated “Swords into Plowshares Spears into Pruning Hooks–Isaiah”. In addition, between the pillars they strung red crime tape.
The action was more successful than anyone could have imagined. The local paperreported on Wednesday (as part of a blog with detailed and ongoing coverage):
In an apparently unprecedented action, the government’s contractor today ordered a “security stand-down” at the Y-12 nuclear weapons plant. All nuclear operations are being put on hold and all nuclear materials will go into vaults while plant workers focus solely on security.
The order by B&W Y-12, and supported by the National Nuclear Security Administration, comes because of the security lapses that allowed peace protesters to penetrate the plant’s highest security area on Saturday morning.“The National Nuclear Security Administration fully supports this step which is necessary to ensure continued confidence in safe and secure operations at Y-12,” the federal agency said in a press statement.
The statement said the stand down is effective today and is expected to end sometime next week.
The activists made their anti-nuclear convictions evident in a declaration, which opens with a passage from the Book of Isaiah:
We come to the Y-12 facility because our very humanity rejects the designs of nuclearism, empire and war. Our faith in love and nonviolence encourages us to believe that our activity here is necessary; that we come to invite transformation, undo the past and present work of Y-12; disarm and end any further efforts to increase the Y-12 capacity for an economy and social structure based upon war-making and empire-building.
A loving and compassionate Creator invites us to take the urgent and decisive steps to transform the U.S. empire, and this facility, into life-giving alternatives which resolve real problems of poverty and environmental degradation for all.
In the report on the incident that appeared in Reuters yesterday, the emphasis was much more on the gravity of the security breach that the action represented than on its actual intent. The writer seems to struggle with the idea that those who perpetrated the breach, including a 82-year-old nun, were neither terrorists nor citizens acting out of a sense of concern for their nation’s security apparatus:
Ralph Hutchinson, coordinator for the Oak Ridge Environmental Peace Alliance, said the group’s intention was not to demonstrate the lack of security at the plant, but to take a stance against the making of nuclear weapons.
“It wasn’t so they could show how easy it was to bust into this bomb plant, it was because the production of nuclear weapons violates everything that is moral and good,” Hutchinson said. “It is a war crime.”
Making clear the seriousness of the breach, the article continues:
Peter Stockton, a former congressional investigator and security consultant to the Energy Department, expressed skepticism at government assertions the nuclear material was not at risk.
“It is unbelievable this could happen,” Stockton said. “The significance is outrageous. If they were terrorists, they could have blown open the door and got inside.”
Stockton said the security breach was the “worst we’ve ever seen.”
In the tradition of past Plowshares actions, the combination between tactical sophistication and principled motivation helps draw attention to the action in ways that just tactics or conviction couldn’t do alone. By engineering such a significant break-in, the activists were able to take advantage of public anxieties about security to spread their message to a much broader audience than, for instance, the annual, ritualized trespasses at the SOA Watch protests generally do. In addition to calling attention to the nuclear weapons themselves, the activists also shed light on the dangers of an increasingly privatized security industry that includes WSI Oak Ridge, the contractor responsible for protecting the facility.
The impact of actions such as these, however, is often lessened by the fact of being isolated, which limits their capacity to build real momentum and power against the entrenched military industry.
At least in this case, there has been a national day of action in the works for Hiroshima Day on August 6, including actions around the country and a “mass civil disobedience” at the Los Alamos laboratory in New Mexico. It is being promoted as “Occupy Nukes,” and thus will be a test of whether the networks formed through the Occupy movement last fall can be rallied to reenergize organizing against militarism. A robust movement can begin with a single, courageous action like the one at Oak Ridge, but to be successful it will have to go a whole lot further.
Václav Havel, who died on December 18, epitomized the power of the pen. A playwright and actor, he was born in Prague in 1936, two years before Nazi Germany militarily occupied Czechoslovakia. As I have written elsewhere, the Stalinist effort to destroy internal opposition to the Czechoslovak communist regime and its worsening economic policies led to hundreds of executions and tens of thousands of imprisonments. Millions were left suffering. Rigid communist economic views, bureaucratization of all dimensions of life, and recurring shortages meant that people could survive under communist rule only through venality and by shortcutting regulations. Those who went along with the habitual corruption—including the great proportion of managers and professionals—found themselves subjected to blackmail and entrapped by lies.
Havel’s family property was confiscated after 1948 by the regime, and he was denied access to education because of his “bourgeois” background. Yet he managed to reach the university level. In 1959, he got a job as a stagehand in a Prague theatrical group and started writing plays with Ivan Vyskocil. By the late 1960s, Havel was a resident playwright of the Balustrade theatrical company.
One of the first Czechoslovaks overtly to refuse conformity with the totalitarianism that descended after 1948, he would be in and out of prison starting in 1977. On August 9, 1969, Havel sent a private letter to Alexander Dubček, first secretary of Czechoslovakia’s communist party, urging him to oppose reintroduction of callous one-party rule, following the Soviet-led invasion by 750,000 Warsaw Pact troops in response to the reforms led by Dubček and during what came to be known as the Prague Spring of 1968. In 1969, the government blacklisted Havel’s writings and charged him with subversion.
Under Stalinism, the Havel family’s farmhouse in northern Bohemia, where he died, served as a retreat for informal authors’ conferences. There, writers and theatrical personalities found a place of calm and strength after being alienated from each other when authorities destroyed their articles, novels and plays.
For more than a century, those ruling in the name of Marxism maintained that theirs was the true opposition to repression and injustice. As Havel and his colleagues sought to uncover such hollow posturing with a strategy called by Havel “living in Truth,” it challenged the pretenses of the communists, who would over a period of years lose their ability to make the people obey. In due course, the erosion of the legitimacy and authority of the party-state by these activist intellectuals would be among the currents that forced the communist party to abandon its efforts to hold onto its hegemony.
Throughout the 1970s, statements and manifestoes were being posted overnight on kiosks and walls. Citizens copied or memorized them to share them with other sections of the country. In April 1975, Havel publicly criticized the government’s disdain for the principles it had accepted in the Helsinki Accords, the Final Act of which was signed on August 1 of that year. In an “Open Letter to Gustáv Husák,” general secretary of Czechoslovakia’s communist party, he voiced the deep ethical crises faced by communist Czechoslovakia and protested the policy of “normalization”—code word for re-imposing harsh Soviet control after the crushing of the Prague Spring. Doing what the party-state most detested, he violated the protocols of silence. Having sent the letter by regular mail, he simultaneously released it to international news agencies. In this, his first systematic philosophical writing, Havel concentrates on fear and moral decay. As the letter’s contents quietly spread, waves of dissent broke, followed by repression. In 1976, civic defiance groups rapidly formed.
An active figure in a dissenting community of actors, playwrights and staff of Czechoslovakia’s admired theatrical companies, and connected with university-based academicians, in 1972 he and others founded Edice Petlice, or Padlocked Editions, a semi-clandestine press that published typescripts of fiction, philosophy and literature. Photocopy machines were forbidden, but typewriters were allowed. By 1987 Padlocked Editions had available more than 400 manually-typed volumes. Havel damned the party-state “not because it was Communist, but because it was bad.” Forbidden printing presses cultivated fearlessness, as clandestine publications and journals communicated below the radar of government censorship. Musicians, rock bands, entertainers and artists spread ideas. One popular tactic was to bog down government officialdom with incessant protest letters from aroused citizens.
When musicians from the Plastic People of the Universe, an underground rock group, were arrested in 1976, it set the stage for Charter 77. The energies of diverse former party reformers, artists, theater people and Roman Catholic intellectuals congealed to defend the musicians’ right to free expression. Milan Hlavsa had created the band in 1968, soon after the Warsaw Pact’s invasion, basing its name on the song “Plastic People” by the U.S. musician Frank Zappa. On New Year’s Day in 1977, a document signed by 243 citizens materialized. The most significant occurrence since the 1968 Prague Spring, Charter 77 contested “the system of the virtual subjection of all institutions and organizations in the state to the political directives of the apparatus of the ruling party and the arbitrary decisions of the influential individuals.” In muted and studiously “antipolitical” wording, it suggested that the Moscow-imposed and Czechoslovak communist system had no popular mandate. Among the signers were leaders from the Prague Spring, artists, clergy, engineers, journalists, professors and its creator, Václav Havel. Charter 77 argued that the Czechoslovak regime must honor all international agreements, including the UN Universal Declaration on Human Rights and the Helsinki Accords that it (and the Soviet Union) had agreed in 1975 to uphold. Within two years, eleven of the foremost signers were locked up, Havel and five others receiving prison terms of two to five years.
By 1979, with Havel under a four-and-a-half year sentence, his letters and other prison writings continued to spread covertly, inspiring pro-democracy movements across Eastern Europe. His major works include four plays and three one-act dramas. Havel’s writings often ponder the justifications given by individuals who cooperate with a repressive machine and are compelled to reconcile, within themselves, their collaboration with a malicious order. Shunning the cliché of excusing individuals as impotent against state coercion, he penned essays on the origins of power and totalitarianism. His dramas enact the pressures of living under corrupt authoritarian systems of tyranny, non-accountability, unrelenting moral compromise, random violence, cruelty, police states and the necessity of living in Truth as a means of breaking a vicious cycle.
The concept of living in Truth brought Havel recognition as a moral philosopher and playwright. He never joined the communist party. The Beatles musician John Lennon was an icon of clever defiance for the growing opposition in Czechoslovakia in the 1970s; Havel said he was a Lennonist, not a Leninist.
Havel’s years in prison, and an even longer time being banned and censored, made him emblematic of those who sought to prevail despite a ruthless Eastern bloc. Deeply grasping the value of communications, he relied on underground publications called samizdat (Russian for “self-published,” as opposed to state-published) to spread his commentary and tracts on political responsibility. Czechoslovaks had been using samizdat as a means of contention since the country fell under Soviet domination in 1948. Frequently typed on yellowed onionskin paper onto ten carbon copies, samizdat was crucial for the covert circulation of ideas leading to the Velvet Revolution. Samizdat also established essential links between democracy movements throughout Eastern and Central Europe, often reaching the West. Havel’s fellow countrymen and women viewed him as a leader who prized honor and honesty.
Havel’s living in Truth concerns the ability of persons who regard themselves as powerless to understand that they possess a form of power and can act upon it. Otherwise, he argued, one mutely functions in the midst of injustice, official deception and corruption—doing nothing to produce change, while sustaining an unjust structure through one’s silence. To stop living within a lie, one must withdraw cooperation with the machinery of oppression. Living in Truth lets citizens repossess their humanity and take responsibility, in compatibility with the appreciation of nonviolent struggle for the connection between the means and ends. Havel said this in plain words: those who live in Truth “create a situation in which the regime is confounded, invariably causing panic and driving it to react in inappropriate ways.” He regularly expressed his conviction that the power that comes with living in Truth is the power to overturn repressive structures and undermine dictatorships. Such power resides within each person.
When historian Timothy Garton Ash arrived in Prague in November 1989, he said to Havel of the time required for the self-liberation of adjacent nation-states: “In Poland it took ten years, in Hungary ten months, in East Germany ten weeks: perhaps in Czechoslovakia it will take ten days!” November 17, Day One of what would be called the Ten Days, marked the start of the Velvet Revolution, which began with 15,000 students condemning the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia and honoring Jan Opletal, a student killed by Hitler’s army half a century earlier. By some accounts, the pupils numbered 50,000 when they turned toward Wenceslas Square, where police accosted them, beating some and arresting others. By Day Two, word spread to Prague’s Charles University and other universities. Students first called for strikes, but the theatrical circles soon declared support and proposed a national general strike. On Day Three, a pro-democracy Civic Forum (Občanské Fórum) emerged, many of whose members had been active in Charter 77. Over the following three days, throngs occupied Prague, as they would indeed for much of the famous Ten Days. Havel became the beacon for the Civic Forum, which used the Magic Lantern Theater for its headquarters. Speaking to multitudes in Wenceslas Square on November 24, the seventh consecutive day of massive demonstrations, he invited the police and armed forces to join the opposition.
The Ten Days in reality took twenty-four. At gatherings, processions, and rallies nationwide, popular sentiment favored Havel assuming the presidency, which he would soon do.
During the 1970s and 1980s, a proud, cultured nation that had lost its freedoms gradually re-developed a civil society, a domain not controlled by government. In this political space, the artistic, drama, journalism, literary and university communities—and those who had been obliged into manual labor washing windows or stoking furnaces, banned as authors, or tossed in jail—interacted and worked to set themselves free from the corrosion of economic, moral and political decomposition. Its guiding light was Havel.
Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.) thinks he has our number.
Inhofe is convinced that his savvy refutations of global warming have pinned the environmental movement back on its heels. That his clever, amusing digs at climate change show that he's a winner and we're all losers. On Wednesday, he told his peers that "the global warming movement has completely collapsed…
So, the guy who ran the agency that oversaw offshore drilling in the wake of the spill in the Gulf is worried about a big spill happening again. Stock up on Bounty, Alaska.
A former federal regulator warned today that growing “complacency” since the 2010 Gulf oil spill threatened to undermine changes that have boosted safety and government oversight of offshore drilling.
American activists may lament that their work isn't bringing about enough change (or media coverage), but they rarely have to put their lives on the line or face crippling corruption.
Activists in other parts of the world are not so lucky.
A story from Mexico, in the New York Times:
On the morning of April 15, 2011, using rocks and fireworks, a group of women attacked a busload of AK-47-armed illegal loggers as they drove through Cherán, residents said.
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Last night, Liverpool Antifascists held perhaps our largest ever meeting, in response to the events of 21st July, when the James Larkin Society's anti-fascist march was aggressively targeted by hundreds from the English Defence League, Combined Ex-Forces and other far right groups. To achieve what had amounted to a nationwide fascist mobilisation, the fascists had falsely linked the Irish flute band with being "IRA supporters"
This video says about itself:
Hiroshima child- Fazil Say - Nazim Hikmet
Hiroshima Child
I come and stand at every door
But none can hear my silent tread
I knock and yet remain unseen
For I am dead for I am deadI'm only seven though I died
In Hiroshima long ago
I'm seven now as I was then
When children die they do not grow…
By Rhett Butler / Mongabay
A directive signed Monday by Brazil’s Solicitor-General could hamper the efforts of indigenous tribes to win government recognition of their traditional lands, reports Survival International, a human rights group focused on native peoples.
The directive “opens up all indigenous areas to mineral, dams, roads, military bases and other developments of ‘national interest’ without the need to consult with or address concerns of indigenous peoples”, according to an expert familiar with the directive who asked to remain anonymous.
Violence has surged in recent weeks between the government and the FARC on Nasa ancestral lands in Cauca, a province in the country’s southwest that is a historic rebel stronghold and a key hub for the production and trafficking of cocaine.
Fed up with enduring decades of bloodshed, the indigenous community of 115,000 in Colombia’s southwest Cauca department has launched a peaceful fight to get war off its land.
Washington, DC – On Sunday, Aug. 5, leading Bahraini human rights defender Nabeel Rajab, President of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights (BCHR), will return to court for the verdict in his appeal of a three-month prison sentence for criticizing the country’s Prime Minister in a tweet. His comments were about Khalifah ibn Sulman al-Khalifah, the uncle of the King of Bahrain and the country’s unelected Prime Minister for nearly 41 years.
There's a natural question that follows from the massive blackouts in India this week: Could it happen here?
The far-too-short answer is yes. It could happen here. But it is very, very unlikely -- at least on that scale.
Maggie Koerth-Baker, author of Before the Lights Go Out, has a wonderful post at Boing Boing answering this specific question.
Bryan Boyer and Dan Hill may be saints, sent down on high by the God of City Planning. They have come up with a tool that may actually make the process of improving a neighborhood less tedious, less difficult, and less prone to 10-hour-long community meetings in which everyone has to say what they think. It's not finished yet, but if Brickstarter, a crowdsourcing tool for community projects, does what it promises, starting a community garden or a co-working space may no longer take years off your life, both in time and in stress.
This video says about itself:
Discovering Abundant Corals at Shell's Arctic Drill Site
During the first research submarine dive in the Chukchi Sea, Greenpeace marine biologist John Hocevar discovered abundant Gersemia rubiformis corals, also known as sea raspberry, where Shell hopes to begin Arctic offshore drilling this summer. The discovery raises questions why the Arctic corals are not adequately addressed in the environmental impact statement for…
Then get out on the streets!
Also, recent abc audio interview about Julian's situation with Ciaron O'Reilly. Listen here.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i2vTrHRAE58&feature=g-upl
QUITO: The mother of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who is lobbying Ecuador to grant him asylum, says she is worried her son could face execution if extradited to the United States. Christine Assange met on Wednesday with President Rafael Correa, who is considering whether to grant political asylum to Assange.
The Australian campaigner took refuge in the Ecuadoran embassy in London in mid-June to avoid extradition to Sweden.
By Emilio Godoy / Inter-Press Service
Small-scale hydroelectric dams with a capacity of under 30 MW are seen by the authorities in Mexico as an important alternative for generating energy. But local communities reject them on the argument that they would cause social, economic and environmental damages.
On the front line of the struggle are communities in the southern states of Puebla, Tabasco, Veracruz, Oaxaca and Chiapas, where there is great potential to harness hydro energy with small dams.
Argentina's EAAF forensic anthropology team said that it identified the remains of a Cuban diplomat abducted 36 years ago by agents of the South American nation's 1976-1983 military regimes.
What turned out to be the remains of Crescencio Nicomedes Galañena Hernandez were discovered in June by some boys who spotted bones sticking out of cement-filled barrels while playing on a field in the Buenos Aires suburb of San Fernando.
The governor of Mississippi, Phil Bryant, has said it was unfortunate that a predominantly white church in the state wouldn't allow a black couple to get married in its sanctuary, adding that the state should encourage the union of any couple – as long as it was made up of a man and a woman.
Charles and Te'Andrea Wilson said they weren't allowed to marry in July at First Baptist Church of Crystal Springs, a small town south of Jackson.
