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Slavoj Zizek, "Save us from the saviours" -
An essential read from the LRB:
Greece is not an exception. It is one of the main testing grounds for a new socio-economic model of potentially unlimited application: a depoliticised technocracy in which bankers and other experts are allowed to demolish democracy. By saving Greece from its so-called saviours, we also save Europe itself.
NYC MAY DAY 2012 ACTIONS
99 Picket Lines
Midtown Manhattan
Community groups, unions, affinity groups and OWS
more infoPop-up Occupation with Mutual Aid(unpermitted)
8am–2pm, Bryant Park, Manhattan
Occupy Wall Street
more infoMay Day Morning Commute from Brooklyn
8:00am, Maria Hernandez Park, Brooklyn
Free Coffee + Breakfast! MARCH from Knickerbocker to Flushing to Broadway to Continental Army Plaza
Occupy Williamsburg, Occupy Bushwick
more infoSitting Meditation
8–11am, Bryant Park (southwest corner), Manhattan
OWS Meditation working groupBike Bloc
9am, Union Square, Manhattan
Strike Everywhere
more infoThe Free University: Lectures, Workshops, Skill-Shares and Discussions
10am–3pm, Madison Square Park, Manhattan
more infoOccupy Brooklyn March over the Williamsburg Bridge and into Wall Street
10:30am, Continental Army Plaza, Brooklyn
Occupy Williamsburg, Occupy Bushwick
more infoBuilding Community Alternatives to Capitalism Day
11am–10pm, LaunchPad, 721 Franklin Ave., Brooklyn
Brooklyn Skillshare
more infoTeach-in: How to Keep Your Cool and Occupy…Understanding Aggression
11am, Bryant Park (southwest corner), Manhattan
OWS Meditation working groupHigh School Student Walkout Convergence
12pm, Fort Greene Park, Brooklyn
more infoGuitarmy: Guitar Workshop and Rehearsal with Tom Morello
Permitted Gathering Space for May Day Festivities
12pm, Bryant Park, Gertrude Stein Statue (east side), Manhattan
OWS Music working group
more infoCall2Create
art events all day throughout NYC
more infoWildcat March(unpermitted)
1pm, Sara D. Roosevelt Park (East Houston St. & 2nd Ave.), Manhattan
Strike Everywhere
more infoOWS Mutual Aid cluster
1pm-4pm, Union Square
OWS Mutual Aid cluster is hosting a free store, skill shares and workshops on a variety of subjects related to life outside the dominant capitalist paradigm.3pm May Pole Dance with Movement for Change and the Puppet Guild.
Meditation Flash Mob followed by Kirtan
1pm, Bryant Park (southwest corner), Manhattan
OWS Meditation working groupDay Without Workers/Día sin los Trabajadores: May Day March and Speakout
2pm, 5th Ave. at 54th St. in Brooklyn, marching to 36th St & 4th Ave. to take subway at 3:30pm to Union Square rally in Manhattan
Occupy/Ocupemos Sunset Park
more infoMayDay on D-Block!!
2pm, Houston & Ave D, Manhattan
LES public housing residents & tenants take their struggle to the street! All invited!
Occupy Avenue DOccupy Wall Street & Guitarmy March(unpermitted)
2pm, Bryant Park to Union Square, ManhattanLesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Two-Spirit, Trans and Gender Non-Conforming Contingent!
3pm at Regal Movie Theatre, 50 Broadway (at 13th St.) - joining rally at Union Square after
Audre Lorde Project, FIERCE, Queers for Economic Justice, Streetwise and Safe and the Sylvia Rivera Law Project
more infoSolidarity Rally with Tom Morello, Dan Deacon, Immortal Technique, Das Racist, Bobby Sanabria and special guests(permitted)
4–5:30pm, Union Square, Manhattan
May First Coalition, Labor Unions and OWS
more infoMay Day Choir Convergence
5:15pm, Madison Square Park (in front of the fountain), Manhattan
more infoOccupy the Rent Guidelines Board: A Tenants’ General Assembly
5:30pm, 7 East 7th St. (outside Cooper Union), Manhattan
Real Rent Reform CampaignSolidarity March(permitted)
5:30pm, Union Square to Wall Street, Manhattan
May First Coalition, Labor Unions and OWS
more info
#occupywallstreet: NYC Endorsers of May Day 2012 -
- AFSCME DC37
- AFSCME DC 1707
- AFSCME CSEA Region 2
- AFSCME Local 371 (SSEU)
- AFSCME Local 372 DC 37
- AFSCME Local 375 DC 37
- AFSCME DC 37 Retirees Association
- AFT - PSC/CUNY
- American Federation of Musicians Local 802
- Anakbayan NY/NJ
- Answer Coalition
- BAYAN-USA
- Brandworkers
- …
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• • • low end theory: Justice for Trayvon... but how? -
Reading about Trayvon Martin’s killing and am beyond saddened, sickened, and outraged at the continuation of state-sanctioned killing of black and brown youth. I wonder, however, if there another way to push for justice for Trayvon, without appealing to the prison-industrial complex as a means of retribution. Even if the state does prosecute his killer, what does it do to our communities in the long run when we ask for more surveillance, stronger penalization, more brutal justice? In the end, whose bodies will be most subjected to the PIC?
As we demand Justice for Trayvon, I wonder if we can keep the call for prison abolition and real social transformation in mind.A few resources on the prison abolition movement and the prison-industrial complex’s disproportionate targeting of communities of color, especially women and queer/trans people of color:Women of Color and Prisons / INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence
Trans Youth and the Prison Industrial Complex / Sylvia Rivera Law Project
Yes. This is one of the complicated paradoxes of demanding justice from the very state that is so often the object of our critique—in order to demand justice we end up conferring legitimacy on the state whose ability to use violence we try to delegitimize. We may want to see George Zimmerman’s arrest, prosecution, and, probably, imprisonment, not only because some of us, in our more sadistic moments, would like to see him suffer (and thereby collapse suffering into our imagination of what justice should look like), but also because some of us likely believe it will be a way to register our collective rejection of the white supremacist imperatives that make a person like Trayvon Martin killable. Yet, in appealing to the power of the police to arrest, and to the power of the courts to sentence Zimmerman, we also make heard a message that we might otherwise hesitate to send: namely, that we believe that these institutions—the police, the courts, the law—are institutions capable of delivering the justice we want. The irony here is especially high in light of the track record of the Sanford Police Department that would, ostensibly be doing the arresting we demand. To what extent are we willing to appeal to a white supremacist police force as if it were capable of delivering justice for Trayvon? And also, why is this just about justice for Trayvon?
It is no disrespect to Trayvon Martin’s memory to point out that our ability to make him into a slogan is based less on who he was as a person than on our desire to fit him into a mold that will allow others to see him as worthy and deserving of justice. That mold is called the Innocent Victim, and its shape can be seen in the details that we choose to highlight and repeat ad nauseam about the case: He was unarmed, he was holding Skittles and Arizona Ice Tea, he was on foot, he had no criminal record, he was a “good kid.” Add whichever narrative that you’d like to hang on him here. It’s rather perverse, really, our collective love and desire for the innocent victim, the victim who “did nothing,” the victim who, we convince ourselves, must have been so pure that we immediately scoff at George Zimmerman’s alibi that he was acting in self-defense. What if Trayvon Martin had come at this white man who held a gun? Would his killing have been justified? Would we be protesting and petitioning as righteously as we are? What if he’d had, instead of Skittles, a bag of weed? Or a beer? Or a knife? Or something else that made it harder to make him look like a kid? How many fewer signatures would that correlate with on change.org?
It should hardly be disputable that a great share of what killed Trayvon Martin was his existence in a racist state system in which to be black is always to be seen as being guilty of something, a system in which criminality is always implied in blackness and in which blackness is understood as a predisposition toward criminality that nonblacks learn to imagine themselves as the innocent victims of.
It should also hardly be disputable that a great share of what subjects young black persons like Trayvon Martin to “the state sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death” has something significant to do with the ways in which we fetishize innocence. It has something significant to do with the ways in which in order to see a person, or a group, as deserving of justice, we expend so much energy toward shoring up evidence that they did nothing at all, toward proving, once and for all that the Trayvon Martins of the world get killed not because of what they did—not, that is, because they broke the law or used violence—but because of who they are. Black. By which we mean, through this distinction between being and doing that we should never have had to make, not criminal.
But what about the blacks who do commit crimes? The blacks who have criminal records? The blacks who might be found carrying knives rather than Skittles, or, lord forbid, both? The blacks who, unlike Trayvon Martin, might not have a parent living in the subdivision in which they happen to be walking at night? Would George Zimmerman’s bullets have been more appropriately directed at them, and not Trayvon? It may sound vulgar to say this, but in our collective dwelling on the details that make Trayvon Martin the innocent victim we want him to be, I get the sense that the answer is, more or less, yes. Or, to put it less vulgarly, I strongly doubt that if it were the case that Trayvon Martin had a criminal record, we would be seeing anywhere near the degree of public outcry that we currently are. There would be, in other words, much less of a palpable feeling that there has been a major and significant breach, breakdown, and failure of justice. We’d have a much harder time maintaining certainty that Trayvon’s killing was caused by what he was (black) than about what he’d done (break the law, in whatever fashion).
Innocence, Victimhood. Two social and legal constructions that make an almost inordinate claim both on whom we are and are not able to see as deserving of justice, and on whom we are and are not able to tolerate seeing as targets of violence. Our insistence in representing Trayvon Martin as an innocent victim is a stark reminder of how much we will will have to shift our angle of vision—to say nothing of our social infrastructure—in order collectively to regard millions upon millions of black and brown people as not only deserving but fundamentally entitled to a substantive kind of justice. For so many of those who have no claim to innocent victimhood, to have not done anything wrong, our public discourse has a radically difficult time imagining a form of justice whose instruments are something other than the barrel of a gun, or the interior of a cage.
G-8 summit to be held at Camp David, not Chicago | Chicago Tribune -
A big Occupy win?
The G-8 summit will be held at Camp David, not in Chicago as had been scheduled.
The White House announced the change in the following statement:
“In May, the United States looks forward to hosting the G-8 and NATO Summits. To facilitate a free-flowing discussion with our close G-8 partners, the president is inviting his fellow G-8 leaders to Camp David on May 18-19 for the G-8 Summit, which will address a broad range of economic, political and security issues.
“The president will then welcome NATO allies and partners to his hometown of Chicago for the NATO Summit on May 20-21, which will be the premier opportunity this year for the president to continue his efforts to strengthen NATO in order to ensure that the Atlantic Alliance remains the most successful alliance in history, while charting the way forward in Afghanistan.”
The 38th G8 summit was to be held in Chicago alongside the NATO summit. It would have been the first time since 1977 in London that the two organizations held meetings in the same city at the same time.
Chicago police estimated that 2,000 to 10,000 demonstrators were expected to show up for the overlapping G-8 and NATO summits. At least two major demonstrations were already planned for downtown during the summit, and organizers said they wanted to send crowds of marchers down Michigan Avenue in the middle of the day.
Meetings of leaders of international economic organizations like the G-8 have drawn violent large-scale protests for more than a decade.
Protests and other forms of activism will be stunted at Camp David, to say the least, but the Masters of the Universe are scared - that much is undeniable.
(via occupywallstreet)
Twitter turns over Occupy user's data to police -
(Source: occupywallstreet)