(via amodernmanifesto)

zerevolution:

Slavoj Zizek: Occupy Wall-Street and modern Anti-Capitalism

”There is the hippie deviation. Some people, I was asking them on Wall Street (about their political claims) and I received answers like:

”Don’t ask me about program, we’re here to have a good time, to have fun!”

And I find it most disgusting because I can tell you what will happen 10 years from now. They will become ordinary businessmen and once in a while they will meet in the cafeteria and share their ”good memories”…and then they will return to their bank jobs.”

(via solitarysocialist-deactivated20)

I agree with the sentiment, but I think it’s a mistake to blame these problems on the blanket term, “you Americans.” We need to separate the American people from the government that rules over us. Polls consistently show that Americans want these things, it’s just that we have very little control over how the country is run.

(via tenthousandunicorns)

noneofthismatters:

Reblogging for those who don’t know and those who asked me about the livestream link, it’s up. See below.

Violence and Legitimacy in the Occupy Movement and Beyond:
A Debate between Chris Hedges and the CrimethInc. Ex-Workers Collective on Tactics & Strategy, Reform & Revolution

Wednesday, September 12, 2012, 7:00 pm
Free admission

Proshansky Auditorium
Lower level, CUNY Graduate Center
365 Fifth Avenue (@ 34th street)
New York City, NY 10016

Not in NYC or can’t make it? A free livestream of the event will be available online. Watch here: http://www.crimethinc.com/livestream

(via noneofthismatters-deactivated20)

RT interviews Scott Olsen: “Voting for a Democrat or a Republican is a waste of vote.”

Revolution 2012: It’s Time To Rise

thepeoplesrecord:

U.S. ignores UN’s demands to protect Occupy protesters (photo)
June 20, 2012

The mishandling of peaceful protesters with the Occupy Wall Street movement will be discussed this week at the annual UN Human Rights Council meeting when two rapporteurs for the United Nations will make reports.

Frank La Rue, the UN’s special rapporteur for the protection of free expression, and Maina Kiai, the organization’s special rapporteur for freedom of peaceful assembly, will present their reports at this week’s meeting, the twentieth edition of the annual conference. Particularly in focus, though, will be how the United States government has failed to act on requests made by the two experts during the last year to address growing concerns over how law enforcement has acted towards the Occupy movement.

In one letter sent from the envoys to US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the rapporteurs urge the Obama administration to “explain the behavior of police departments that violently disbanded some Occupy protests last fall.” Elsewhere they say that they’ve been concerned that excessive force waged on protesters “could have been related to [the protesters’] dissenting views, criticisms of economic policies, and their legitimate work in the defense of human rights and fundamental freedoms.”

Despite sending that letter to Secretary Clinton more than six months ago, neither rapporteurs has not been offered a response yet, reports Huffington Post. A spokesperson for the State Department tells HuffPo that “the US will be replying,” but declined offering any other details.

“We do not comment on the substance of diplomatic correspondence,” the spokesperson responded, differing questions elsewhere.

“The Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division is the lead agency for violations of human rights or civil rights in the United States,” wrote the spokesperson, sending the UN experts to them for an answer, half a year after they asked for assistance. With hundreds of arrests being chalked up to the Occupy movement and countless accounts of police brutality reported already, however, it is sending a clear message to some that the White House isn’t all that concerned over how local law enforcement agencies are interacting with protesters.

Lack of an answer does not make the US look good in the international community,” American Civil Liberties Union Director Jamil Dakwar tells Huffington Post.”The US should at a very minimum respond to a letter like this,” he says. “And if they believe that law enforcement agencies operated under legal, constitutional authority and there were no problems, then they should explain that and present that” before the Human Rights Council.

Source

(via oldenough2burmom)

U.S. Veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan Return War Medals at NATO Summit

Scott Olsen went out there wearing a bike helmet lol

This is a great read.

“We intentionally chose a different path based on a longer trajectory and rooted in a set of shared experiences that emerged directly from recent struggles. Vague populist slogans about the 99%, savvy use of social networking, shady figures running around in Guy Fawkes masks, none of this played any kind of significant role in bringing us to the forefront of the Occupy movement. In the rebel town of Oakland, we built a camp that was not so much the emergence of a new social movement, but the unprecedented convergence of preexisting local movements and antagonistic tendencies all looking for a fight with capital and the state while learning to take care of each other and our city in the most radical ways possible.”

anticapitalist:

New Police Strategy in NYC - Sexual Assault Against Peaceful Protesters

Horrifying

“What happened to you?” I asked.

“Oh, this?” she held it up. “I was in Liberty Park on the 17th [the Six Month Anniversary of the Occupation]. When the cops were pushing us out the park, one of them yanked at my breast.”

“Again?” someone said.

We had all been hearing stories like this. In fact, there had been continual reports of police officers groping women during the nightly evictions from Union Square itself over the previous two weeks.

“Yeah so I screamed at the guy, I said, ‘you grabbed my boob! what are you, some kind of fucking pervert?’ So they took me behind the lines and broke my wrists.”

Actually, she quickly clarified, only one wrist was literally broken. She proceeded to launch into a careful, well-nigh clinical blow-by-blow description of what had happened. An experienced activist, she knew to go limp when police seized her, and how to do nothing that could possibly be described as resisting arrest. Police dragged her, partly by the hair, behind their lines and threw her to the ground, periodically shouting “stop resisting!” as she shouted back “I’m not resisting!” At one point though, she said, she did tell them her glasses had fallen to the sidewalk next to her, and announced she was going to reach over to retrieve them. That apparently gave them all the excuse they needed. One seized her right arm and bent her wrist backwards in what she said appeared to be some kind of marshal-arts move, leaving it not broken, but seriously damaged. “I don’t know exactly what they did to my left wrist—at that point I was too busy screaming at the top of my lungs in pain. But they broke it. After that they put me in plastic cuffs, as tightly as they possibly could, and wouldn’t loosen them for at least an hour no matter how loud I screamed or how much the other prisoners begged them to help me. For a while everyone in the arrest van was chanting ‘take them off, take them off’ but they just ignored them…”

Boots Riley of The Coup talking about Occupy Wall Street, on whether it’s working, and on what needs to be done

enlighteningnews:

 (05-01) 19:30 PDT Oakland —

Oakland police clashed repeatedly with Occupy activists Tuesday, firing tear gas canisters and flash-bang grenades at several hundred protesters near City Hall in brief but volatile skirmishes that escalated as quickly as they dissipated.

Some protesters shoved against police lines with black shields bearing an “A” for anarchy. Some threw objects at officers, surrounded police cars and pounded on them. In one case, a protester dressed in black threatened an officer with a pole.

But many protesters remained peaceful, throwing flowers at the cops’ feet or marching peacefully with children in the Fruitvale District, vowing to avoid the violence downtown.

The daylong series of events on May Day was held throughout parts of Oakland, San Francisco and the rest of the Bay Area by a wide range of protest groups, including Occupy, to honor International Workers’ Day and denounce economic inequities.

In Oakland in particular, the mood was tense from the beginning, despite the range of events that went from peaceful rallies to confrontations and vandalism.

“The tempo of the crowd was a lot more assertive, a lot more aggressive” than in past demonstrations involving Occupy groups, Oakland Police Chief Howard Jordan said in an afternoon press conference. He said the mood was so volatile that by 9 a.m. he had called for mutual aid from about a half-dozen area law enforcement agencies.

Read the rest…

inothernews:

BEAT COP   A police lieutenant swung his baton at an Occupy Wall Street protester on International Workers’ Day, or May Day, in New York Tuesday. The protests were the most visible organizing effort by anti-Wall Street groups since Occupy encampments were dismantled in 2011. (Photo: Mary Altaffer / AP via The Wall Street Journal)

Some things never change.

Black bloc <3