Spain’s Podemos Party publishes its manifesto in Ikea Catalog form / Boing Boing
▻http://boingboing.net/2016/06/10/spains-podemos-party-publish.html
Spain’s anti-austerity, left-wing Podemos ("We Can") Party (previously), which grew out of Spain’s Occupy-like Indignados movement, has just published its election manifesto for the June 26 election — in the form of an Ikea Catalog.
Occupy Buddha: Reflections on Occupy Wall Street
▻http://www.filmsforaction.org/articles/occupy-buddha-reflections-on-occupy-wall-street
The word “Buddha” means to wake up. More precisely it means to see what is really going on (in other words, “dharma”), and understand that it has always been so. The Occupy Wall Street movement...
Inequality For All (2013)
▻http://www.filmsforaction.org/watch/inequality-for-all-2013
In the wake of the financial crisis and the recent rise of the Occupy movement, the issue of income inequality has gained unprecedented public awareness. Over the last thirty years, the U.S...
Is Shut It Down the New Occupy?
▻http://www.filmsforaction.org/articles/is-shut-it-down-the-new-occupy
As occupying public spaces was to the Occupy movement, “Shutting It Down” is to the new wave of protest around police brutality and systemic racism. “If We Don’t Get It, Shut It Down” has long...
Attaque la dette ! - Christine Treguier
▻http://www.politis.fr/Attaque-la-dette,28349.html
Il y a ceux qui spéculent sur la dette des États pour accumuler encore et toujours plus de profits, au détriment des petits à qui on demande ensuite de se serrer la ceinture. Et puis il y a ceux, plus rares, qui rachètent des dettes pour les effacer et empêcher les créditeurs indélicats de faire du profit sur les dos des plus faibles. C’est le cas de Strike Debt, un collectif membre de Occupy Wall Street. Il use du même mécanisme que les « pros » de la finance : acquérir ces dettes à vil prix : 50 cents les 10 dollars (40 cts pour 8 euros). Elle est pas chère ma dette, qui n’en veut ? Mais au lieu d’aller mettre le couteau sous la gorge des débiteurs désargentés pour s’enrichir à bon compte, le collectif efface purement et simplement leur ardoise. Cadeau ! Cette opération philanthropique est bien sûr éminemment politique et puissamment pédagogique puisqu’elle dévoile les mécanismes des petits arrangements entre amis de la grande finance mondiale.
Strike Debt s’est fait la main fin 2012, avec une première opération baptisée « Rolling Jubilee » Soit 14,7 millions de dollars (114 millions d’euros) de frais d’hôpitaux impayés, dus par des ménages américains, qui ne leur ont coûté finalement que 400 000 dollars (311 000 euros)....
#dette #Strike_Debt #Occupy_wall_street #prêt_étudiants #dette_hopital #elle_est_pas_chère_ma_dette
Against Conspiracy Theories - Why Our Activism Must Be Based in Reality
▻http://www.filmsforaction.org/articles/against-conspiracy-theories-why-our-activism-must-be-based-in-realit
A talk given at Occupy Wellington, New Zealand, to counter the prevalence of conspiracy theories amongst the local wing of the Occupy movement.
Kia ora kotou, thanks everyone for coming. Firstly...
Décembre 2011 – From Occupation to “Occupy”: The Israelification of American Domestic Security – Max Blumenthal
►http://english.al-akhbar.com/content/occupation-“occupy”-israelification-american-domestic-security
The Israelification of America’s security apparatus, recently unleashed in full force against the Occupy Wall Street Movement, has taken place at every level of law enforcement, and in areas that have yet to be exposed. The phenomenon has been documented in bits and pieces, through occasional news reports that typically highlight Israel’s national security prowess without examining the problematic nature of working with a country accused of grave human rights abuses. But it has never been the subject of a national discussion. And collaboration between American and Israeli cops is just the tip of the iceberg.
[…]
Besides JINSA, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has positioned itself as an important liaison between American police forces and the Israeli security-intelligence apparatus. […]
The ADL claims to have trained over 45,000 American law enforcement officials through its Law Enforcement and Society program, which “draws on the history of the Holocaust to provide law enforcement professionals with an increased understanding of…their role as protectors of the Constitution,” the group’s website stated. All new FBI agents and intelligence analysts are required to attend the ADL program, which is incorporated into three FBI training programs. According to official FBI recruitment material, “all new special agents must visit the US Holocaust Memorial Museum to see firsthand what can happen when law enforcement fails to protect individuals.”
ReGeneration (2010)
▻http://www.filmsforaction.org/watch/regeneration-2010
The award-winning documentary film, #ReGENERATION, explores the galvanizing forces behind the Occupy Movement and the state of social activism in our society. The film takes an uncompromising look...
WALL STREET The Occupy Movement
▻http://www.filmsforaction.org/watch/wall-street-the-occupy-movement
An American version of the Belgian documentary cRISEs UP
A new generation of activists has arisen in the slipstream of a new economic and financial crisis. For three years, the Ghent-based...
Installations, videos and projects in public space by Oliver Ressler » In the Red
▻http://www.ressler.at/in_the_red
In the Red is a film about the Strike Debt group, an offshoot organization of Occupy Wall Street in New York City. The group organizes around debts, an instrument of control and maintenance of economic power. Strike Debt initiates several activities to expose hidden mechanisms of financial capitalism. Similar to Occupy, the movement organizes along affinity groups: The theory group issues a handbook—the Debt Resistors’ Operations Manual—for those attempting to renounce their debt. The action group organizes protests, provides free medical care and information about their activities. The Rolling Jubilee group buys, for very little money, the huge amounts of personal debt the banks have already written off; they then “abolish” the debts and therefore free the debtors from their bills. By this grandiose act, Strike Debt spreads information about how the secondary debt market is working. Few people in the U.S. know that when individuals consistently fail to pay bills from credit cards, loans, or medical insurance, their bank or lender usually sells that debt to a third party. These sales occur for a fraction of the debt’s true value—typically for five cents on the dollar—and debt-buying companies then attempt to recoup the debt from the individual debtor and thus make a profit.
Noam Chomsky: America Is a Terrified Country | Alternet
▻http://www.alternet.org/noam-chomsky-america-terrified-country
As you move up in income level you get more influence. When you get to the very top, and here the Occupy movement was a little misleading— it’s not one percent, it’s a tenth of a percent. When you get to the top tenth of a percent, where there’s a huge concentration of wealth, you can’t even talk about influence. They get what they want.
“The Occupy Movement: Two Steps Forward, One Step Back” by Ronald W. Cox
▻http://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/classracecorporatepower/vol1/iss1/3
The op-ed evaluates the successes and limitations of the Occupy Movement in the United States. Ronald W. Cox argues that the Movement was inspirational in directing media focus to the trends of growing inequality and the privileges and power of the one percent. The critique of establishment parties and progressive organizations was a key part of the Occupiers efforts to rethink the meaning of social change. The limitations of the Movement became evident, however, in its extremely decentralized structures that emphasized consensus over majoritarian decision-making, and in its refusal to acknowledge and hold accountable its own leaders.
There Is No Station 2
▻http://www.psmag.com/politics/life-in-the-data-there-is-no-station-2-60857
For 15 years, I’ve worked as a firefighter for the City of Oakland. You’ve heard of Oakland. We’re the city that had a freeway collapse in an earthquake, 3,500 homes destroyed by a grass fire, and the most aggressive Occupy movement in the country. We also had 131 homicides last year, making us the third-most-dangerous city in the United States. And, my fire department ran 52,321 calls for medical emergencies, fires, car wrecks, sports riots, and all manner of other mayhem.
In the midst of all that, as in cities across the country, our budget tanked. Laying off- 80 cops was the start of our austerity. When it came to the fire department, the city got creative. Our firehouses are numbered from 1 to 29, but that’s a trick. There’s no Station 2. There’s no 9, no 11, no 14. So really, 29 means 25. And then last year, we closed two more, so 29 meant 23. But we didn’t actually close them. We “flexibly deployed” them, which means that no firehouse in the city is closed for good. Instead all the firehouses take turns shutting down for three-day stretches. It’s kind of a brilliant marketing move—the closures are so sporadic that most people don’t even know they’re going on. No neighborhood groups mobilize; no city-council member pounds the podium; and the risk is shared by every block, every school, every grandmother who falls asleep with her cigarette burning.
The Visual Emergence of the Occupy Gezi Movement, Part One: Oh Biber!
During June 2013, the Occupy Gezi Movement emerged as the greatest challenge to Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s decade-long rule in Turkey. In the streets and in Gezi Park, as well as through its widespread use of social media such as Facebook and Twitter, the resistance movement has produced images in both real and digital spheres. Much of the visual output strikes at Erdoğan’s hubris and verbal threats, his attacks on personal freedoms, his brutal crackdown against the protests, and his pressuring of mainstream media into self-censorship. Although they conveyed serious concerns, the movement’s rhetorical and pictorial messages were often humorous, witty and intellectually alluring in their use of wisecracks and satire. Such levity offered biting commentary on the obscenity of police violence while also building group cohesion for an array of oppositional constituencies.
▻http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/12714/the-visual-emergence-of-the-occupy-gezi-movement-p
Egypt, Brazil, Turkey: without politics, protest is at the mercy of the elites | Seumas Milne | Comment is free | The Guardian
▻http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jul/02/politics-protest-elites-brazil-egypt-organisation
Despite their differences, all three movements have striking common features. They combine widely divergent political groups and contradictory demands, along with the depoliticised, and lack a coherent organisational base. That can be an advantage for single-issue campaigns, but can lead to short-lived shallowness if the aims are more ambitious – which has arguably been the fate of the Occupy movement.
...
In the era of neoliberalism, when the ruling elite has hollowed out democracy and ensured that whoever you vote for you get the same, politically inchoate protest movements are bound to flourish. They have crucial strengths: they can change moods, ditch policies and topple governments. But without socially rooted organisation and clear political agendas, they can flare and fizzle, or be vulnerable to hijacking or diversion by more entrenched and powerful forces.
That also goes for revolutions – and is what appears to be happening in Egypt. Many activists regard traditional political parties and movements as redundant in the internet age. But that’s an argument for new forms of political and social organisation. Without it, the elites will keep control – however spectacular the protests.
via oAnth at D* : ▻https://joindiaspora.com/posts/2611396
Revealed: how the FBI coordinated the crackdown on Occupy | Naomi Wolf | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk
– ►http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/dec/29/fbi-coordinated-crackdown-occupy
– Revealed: how the FBI coordinated the crackdown on Occupy
New documents prove what was once dismissed as paranoid fantasy: totally integrated corporate-state repression of dissent
[...]
[S]ix American universities are sites where campus police funneled information about students involved with OWS to the FBI, with the administrations’ knowledge (p51); banks sat down with FBI officials to pool information about OWS protesters harvested by private security; plans to crush Occupy events, planned for a month down the road, were made by the FBI – and offered to the representatives of the same organizations that the protests would target; and even threats of the assassination of OWS leaders by sniper fire – by whom? Where? – now remain redacted and undisclosed to those American citizens in danger, contrary to standard FBI practice to inform the person concerned when there is a threat against a political leader (p61).
As Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, executive director of the PCJF, put it, the documents show that from the start, the FBI – though it acknowledges Occupy movement as being, in fact, a peaceful organization – nonetheless designated OWS repeatedly as a “terrorist threat”:
[...]
#ows #occupy #surveillance #FBI #classification #USA
Making Worlds
▻http://www.makingworlds.org
Making Worlds: a #Commons Coalition is a collaborative effort by #OWS and other groups and individuals to explore the utility of the commons in creating a better world.
Making Worlds: a Commons Coalition brings projects working to reclaim the commons to the fore of the #Occupy movement. Commons are resources that are neither private nor state-owned like air, water and soil, the internet and human culture. We need to safeguard them from the private market. Making Worlds grows out of an understanding that Occupy itself is a form of commoning, a process in which everyone can participate, every voice can contribute, an open movement that belongs to no one and to everyone. Through holding conversations in communities around the city among organizations, activists and others, we aim to create links between the Occupy movement, the Commons movement, activist organizations and people who may not consider themselves activists. This way we can become visible to each other and work together on our common problems.
cf. ce #livre peut-être, en plus de celui de VECAM ▻http://vecam.org/mot70.html #biens_communs
►http://www.wealthofthecommons.org/home
▻http://vecam.org/article1212.html
▻http://www.remixthecommons.org/mosaique-2
Remix biens communs est un projet d’oeuvres multimédia collaboratives et évolutives. Il vise à documenter et illustrer les idées et pratiques entourant la question des biens communs tout en l’explicitant directement par le processus de création.
le wiki de travail : ▻http://wiki.remixthecommons.org/index.php/Documentation_Remix
Revealed: how the FBI coordinated the crackdown on Occupy | Naomi Wolf | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk
►http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/dec/29/fbi-coordinated-crackdown-occupy
The document shows a terrifying network of coordinated DHS, FBI, police, regional fusion center, and private-sector activity so completely merged into one another that the monstrous whole is, in fact, one entity: in some cases, bearing a single name, the Domestic Security Alliance Council. And it reveals this merged entity to have one centrally planned, locally executed mission. The documents, in short, show the cops and DHS working for and with banks to target, arrest, and politically disable peaceful American citizens.
As Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, executive director of the PCJF, put it, the documents show that from the start, the FBI – though it acknowledges Occupy movement as being, in fact, a peaceful organization – nonetheless designated OWS repeatedly as a “terrorist threat”.
Danish Bank Uses Occupy Imagery in Advertising Campaign: New Normal | Occupy Washington, DC
For those who have walked the streets of CPH recently, it was impossible to ignore. Danske Bank started a new campaign to brand itself through posters and banners, associating images of protests by occupy movements, paraplegics runners, women in power in a men’s world and endless lines of enslaved workers to the danske bank logo and to the slogan “the new normal”.
Apparently, the mounting global wave of challenge against the established powers devoted to the exploitation of humans and environments, can become an advertising for the very same actors who collaborate in this exploitation, banks. This urges questions about the power of the capitalist pseudo-cultural machine to reverse and to recycle anti-systemic movements of ideas into innocuous advertising material. The real “normalization of dissent”, indeed.
Salvatore Paolo De Rosa
Ph.D Human Geography Department at Lund University
Sweden" <salparadiso03@YAHOO.IT>
Ad Campaign Provokes Angry Response of Bank Hypocrisy
►http://october2011.org/blogs/kevin-zeese/danish-bank-uses-occupy-imagery-advertising-campaign-new-normal
By Kevin Zeese - Posted on 26 November 2012
Den Danske Bank has a new campaign out where they can slap their label “The new normal” on practically any controversial staged news image shot by Peter Funch. The campaign is created by the ad agency named Mensch. The entire campaign is so hypocritical it’s making Danes blood boil and people are raging everywhere from forums to newspapers about it.
In newspaper Politiken the headline reads: Hey bankers, do you think we’ve forgotten that you are the über-bad guys?, Danish Kommunikationsforum even goes so far to dig up images that compare shots from the Occupy movement to Den Danske Bank ad, to a Benetton campaign. Tobias Lau at Børsen dubs the campaign “the worst piece of communication of 2012”, and the Danish arm of Occupy even bothered to reply with a spoof full of typos. “Nice pictures and music in the video of yours, but must you misuse a humanitarian movement?” it asks.
This is from our group in CPH, crisis mirror:
“New Normal”? On bankers’ communication attempts to normalize misery | CrisisMirror
►http://www.crisismirror.info/political-analyses/new-normal-assimilating-the-anticapitalist-imagery-by-danske-bank
“New Normal”? On bankers’ communication attempts to normalize misery
The latest Danske Bank’s communication strategy is full of images of unrest; the Occupy movement, protestors with stones and Greek flags against the police, images of slave workers in the world’s production lines, pictures of despaired citizens from across the globe. Danske Bank, Denmark’s biggest bank institution surfaces behind these images with the slogan ‘new Normal’. What does it mean? Perhaps the normalization of the times’ ambiguity is the campaign’s target, avoiding references to the causes of global unrest, and bypassing critical explanations of the growing citizens’ discontent, related to systemic injustices caused by financial and industrial strategies to exploit people and the natural environment, or the anti-social policies of austerity that the neoliberal sharks pursue with a fundamentalist zeal in Europe and elsewhere, as ‘essential’ (‘essential for what’, we need to remember to constantly ask ourselves and others).
And this is some nice counter-guerrilla-marketing:
►http://newnormalnewstandards.tumblr.com
New Normal New Standards
#communication_guérilla reverse à moins que ce ne soit le contraire / ah oui j’ai lu trop vite « counter-guerilla » #marketing
Installations, videos and projects in public space by Oliver Ressler
Je profite d’un message d’Olivier pour vous présenter son remarquable travail : résistance, géographie, territoire, espace... l’artiste autrichien Olivier Ressler, joue et se joue de tout
►http://www.ressler.at/category/projects
1. Take The Square A 3-channel video installation, 2012
►http://www.ressler.at/take_the_square
The emergence of the movements of the squares and the Occupy movement in 2011 can be seen as a reaction by people who opposed and began to fight the massive increase in social inequality and the dismantling of democracy in times of global financial and economic crisis. The movements of the squares are non-hierarchical and reject representation; direct democracy shapes their activities. The occupation of public places serves as a catalyst to develop demonstrations, general strikes, meetings and working groups on different focal points. Successful site occupancies in one place often inspire occupations in other cities, without a linear relationship.
❞
2. After the Crisis is Before the Crisis
►http://www.wyspa.art.pl/title,OliverResslerSpatialOccupations,pid,44,oid,38,cid,381,type,4.html
Oliver Ressler will present a new body of work that addresses the starting points and implications of the global financial and economic crisis as well as the underlying flaws in the model of parliamentary democracy revealed by the crisis. Ressler’s films and installations are often based on interview situations in which the artist creates a platform for the concerns of his protagonists. Exemplary is the 8-channel video installation /What is Democracy/ (2009), which was shown at Wyspa Institute of Art in 2010, in which by means of interviews with activists he essentially formulates a global analysis of the deep political crisis facing the western model of democracy. This crisis is manifested in the fact that elections in parliamentary democracies increasingly become rituals devoid of meaning, while the real decisions are made outside of public debates. Ressler’s wall text /Elections are a Con/ (2011) alerts us to this danger, while the wall text /Too Big to Fail/ (2011) and the films /The Bull Laid Bear/ (2012, co-directed with Zanny Begg) and /Robbery/ (2012) explore the handling of the financial and economic crisis, the bailout of banks and its social consequences.
3. Cartographies of Hope: Change Narratives
►http://www.dox.cz/en/exhibitions/cartographies-of-hope-change-narratives
“It’s not the story of the battle; it’s the battle of the story!”
Patrick Reinsborough
In the last few years we have witnessed how the corrosion of the three main modes of social imaginary that defined modernity – the market economy, the public sphere, and the self-government of citizens – has reached a critical point. As a result, the increasing number of people in different fields, social scientists, artists, public intellectuals, and activists are calling for rethinking and reinventing social change. Such voices, however, are too often fragmented in their respective boundaries, and, consequently, they have not yet been able to articulate a compelling alternative metanarrative that the public would identify with and which would thus result in a major positive change.
4. Occupy Everything
Die mit der Finanz- und Wirtschaftskrise verstärkt einhergehende Umverteilung von unten nach oben brachte 2011 neue Protestbewegungen hervor: den „Arabischen Frühling“, die Platzbesetzungsbewegungen in Spanien und Griechenland, und die von den USA ausgehende Occupy-Bewegung. Obwohl diese Bewegungen nicht direkt miteinander in Verbindung stehen, haben sie doch einiges gemeinsam: Es sind regional agierende, nicht-hierarchische Bewegungen, die Repräsentation ablehnen und Entscheidungen auf direkt-demokratische Weise fällen. Der Besetzung von zentralen öffentlichen Plätzen kommt die Rolle eines Katalysators für die Formulierung und Herausbildung politischer Projekte und Arbeitsgruppen durch die Beteiligten zu. Erfolgreiche Platzbesetzungen an einem Ort inspirieren dabei oftmals zu Besetzungen in anderen Städten.
Commentary on the struggle for Freedom
I’m a soldier (largely online) helping in the international fight for freedom. Be it the Arab Spring, Occupy Movement - you name it. On this blog I run a commentary on the latest news in the struggle (largely the Arab Spring) from evidence from a variety of outlets and sources, a little of my own interpretations, and genuine compassion for the oppressed.
To read more
►http://badpoliticalopinions.blogspot.fr/2012/05/srebrenicas-are-happening-all-over.html?spref=tw
Aux sources iconographiques de l’hacktivisme contemporain | Samuel Archibald (Pop-en-stock)
►http://popenstock.ca/dossier/article/remember-remember-5th-november-aux-sources-iconographiques-de-lhacktivism
Je ne me propose pas ici de faire une critique sauvage des membres d’Anonymous, j’aurais bien trop peur que mon ordinateur explose. Je ne voudrais pas non plus tourner en dérision l’emploi du masque de Guy Fawkes par les membres d’Occupy. Comme tout geek qui se respecte, cependant, je suis spontanément irrité lorsqu’une chose que je connais bien est recyclée à grande échelle par des gens qui, je le soupçonne, la connaissent moins bien que moi. C’est ce qu’on pourrait appeler le syndrome du t-shirt des Ramones. Source : Pop-en-stock
Dave Lucas: #OWS NYC Occupation Terminated
►http://dave-lucas.blogspot.fr/2012/03/ows-nyc-occupation-terminated.html
According to media reports, the Occupy Wall Street movement’s six-month anniversary celebration on Saturday was truncated by police arresting dozens of protesters at its focal point, Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan.
The Movement To Teach The Economy What It Is Doing | Disinformation
►http://www.disinfo.com/2012/02/the-movement-to-teach-the-economy-what-it-is-doing
In an essay penned over a decade ago titled “In Distrust of Movements”, farmer, author, and critic Wendell Berry beautifully summed up the nature of and need for an Occupy movement. Via the irrisistible fleet of bicycles:
One way we could describe the task ahead of us is by saying that we need to enlarge the consciousness and the conscience of the economy. Our economy needs to know — and care — what it is doing. This is revolutionary, of course, if you have a taste for revolution, but it is also a matter of common sense.
People in movements…often become too specialized, as if finally they cannot help taking refuge in the pinhole vision of the institutional intellectuals. They almost always fail to be radical enough, dealing finally in effects rather than causes. Or they deal with single issues or single solutions, as if to assure themselves that they will not be radical enough.
And so I must declare my dissatisfaction with movements to promote soil conservation or clean water or clean air or wilderness preservation or sustainable agriculture or community health or the welfare of children. Worthy as these and other goals may be, they cannot be achieved alone. I am dissatisfied with such efforts because they are too specialized, they are not comprehensive enough, they are not radical enough, they virtually predict their own failure by implying that we can remedy or control effects while leaving causes in place.