NO YOU

thepeoplesrecord: FBI Lables Occupy Movement a “Domestic...

Sat, 02 Jun 2012 02:00:54 -0400

FBI Lables Occupy Movement a “Domestic Terrorist Organization”

Cases where the FBI entraps activists with undercover informants have become a common tactic to smear Occupy’s intent & to put occupiers behind bars for serious offenses. Cases include the Cleveland 5 (accused of attempting to blow up a bridge) & the NATO 3 (accused of having Molotov cocktail materials; attorneys say the evidence was planted by an informant).

By the way, Russia Today is a great news source that gives an international perspective on news happening in the United States. Throw it in your Google Reader!

Slavoj Zizek, "Save us from the saviours"

Tue, 29 May 2012 11:04:23 -0400

Slavoj Zizek, "Save us from the saviours":

lizoain:

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.

occupywallstreet: NYC MAY DAY 2012 ACTIONS 99 Picket...

Sun, 29 Apr 2012 20:21:57 -0400

occupywallstreet:

NYC MAY DAY 2012 ACTIONS

99 Picket Lines
Midtown Manhattan
Community groups, unions, affinity groups and OWS
more info

Pop-up Occupation with Mutual Aid(unpermitted)
8am–2pm, Bryant Park, Manhattan
Occupy Wall Street
more info

May 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 info

Sitting Meditation
8–11am, Bryant Park (southwest corner), Manhattan
OWS Meditation working group

Bike Bloc
9am, Union Square, Manhattan
Strike Everywhere
more info

The Free University: Lectures, Workshops, Skill-Shares and Discussions
10am–3pm, Madison Square Park, Manhattan
more info

Occupy Brooklyn March over the Williamsburg Bridge and into Wall Street
10:30am, Continental Army Plaza, Brooklyn
Occupy Williamsburg, Occupy Bushwick
more info

Building Community Alternatives to Capitalism Day
11am–10pm, LaunchPad, 721 Franklin Ave., Brooklyn
Brooklyn Skillshare
more info

Teach-in: How to Keep Your Cool and Occupy…Understanding Aggression
11am, Bryant Park (southwest corner), Manhattan
OWS Meditation working group

High School Student Walkout Convergence
12pm, Fort Greene Park, Brooklyn
more info

Guitarmy: 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 info

Call2Create
art events all day throughout NYC
more info

Wildcat March(unpermitted)
1pm, Sara D. Roosevelt Park (East Houston St. & 2nd Ave.), Manhattan
Strike Everywhere
more info

OWS 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 group

Day 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 info

MayDay on D-Block!!
2pm, Houston & Ave D, Manhattan
LES public housing residents & tenants take their struggle to the street! All invited!
Occupy Avenue D

Occupy Wall Street & Guitarmy March(unpermitted)
2pm, Bryant Park to Union Square, Manhattan

Lesbian, 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 info

Solidarity 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 info

May Day Choir Convergence
5:15pm, Madison Square Park (in front of the fountain), Manhattan
more info

Occupy the Rent Guidelines Board: A Tenants’ General Assembly
5:30pm, 7 East 7th St. (outside Cooper Union), Manhattan
Real Rent Reform Campaign

Solidarity 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

Sun, 29 Apr 2012 20:21:42 -0400

#occupywallstreet: NYC Endorsers of May Day 2012:

occupywallstreet:

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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Sun, 01 Apr 2012 18:13:45 -0400

lizoain: I had the opportunity to take part in a debate on...

Sun, 01 Apr 2012 10:40:00 -0400

lizoain:

I had the opportunity to take part in a debate on austerity in Spain on Al Jazeera’s Inside Story.

Nice job Lizzy.

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Thu, 29 Mar 2012 10:38:45 -0400

• • • low end theory: Justice for Trayvon... but how?

Wed, 21 Mar 2012 12:55:00 -0400

• • • low end theory: Justice for Trayvon... but how?:

lowendtheory:

wordsandsteel:

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:

Masked Racism: Reflections on the Prison Industrial Complex / Angela Y. Davis

What is the Prison Industrial Complex? / Critical Resistance

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

Mon, 05 Mar 2012 17:20:01 -0500

G-8 summit to be held at Camp David, not Chicago | Chicago Tribune:

theamericanbear:

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.

Twitter turns over Occupy user's data to police

Sun, 04 Mar 2012 12:44:03 -0500

Twitter turns over Occupy user's data to police

Death of Hunger-Striking California Prisoner Sparks New Outrage over Inmates’ Suffering

Fri, 24 Feb 2012 16:49:05 -0500

Death of Hunger-Striking California Prisoner Sparks New Outrage over Inmates’ Suffering

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Tue, 21 Feb 2012 20:14:00 -0500

lizoain: Via Greek Left Review. One-third of Greeks support...

Mon, 20 Feb 2012 10:44:52 -0500

lizoain:

Via Greek Left Review.

One-third of Greeks support radical change through revolution.

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Thu, 16 Feb 2012 12:00:31 -0500

"Corrections Corporation of America, the nation’s largest operator of for-profit prisons, has..."

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 11:22:14 -0500

“Corrections Corporation of America, the nation’s largest operator of for-profit prisons, has sent letters recently to 48 states offering to buy up their prisons as a remedy for “challenging corrections budgets.” In exchange, the company is asking for a 20-year management contract, plus an assurance that the prison would remain at least 90 percent full…”

- Private Prison Corporation Offers Cash In Exchange For State Prisons

David S. Miller, "The Zuckerberg Tax"

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 12:44:38 -0500

David S. Miller, "The Zuckerberg Tax":

lizoain:

From the NY Times:

“A mark-to-market system of taxation on the top one-tenth of 1 percent would raise hundreds of billions of dollars of new revenue over the next 10 years. The new revenue could be used to lower payroll taxes, extend the George W. Bush tax cuts, repeal the alternative minimum tax, reduce the budget deficit, prevent military cuts or a combination of all of these.

This tax would not affect the middle class, or even most wealthy Americans. Nor would it affect small-business owners. It would affect only individuals who were undeniably, extraordinarily rich. Only publicly traded stock would be marked to market.”

"When asked how his band’s name reflected their political beliefs, Corbin stated “Traumatic Anal..."

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 12:20:19 -0500

“When asked how his band’s name reflected their political beliefs, Corbin stated “Traumatic Anal Devastation is obviously metaphorical for the way the government and capitalism has continually raped the public at-large.””

- Newt Gingrich Rally In Las Vegas Interrupted By Local Grindcore Band

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Sun, 05 Feb 2012 16:24:17 -0500

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Thu, 02 Feb 2012 15:08:00 -0500

truth-has-a-liberal-bias: On Jan. 1, 1981 (when Democrat Jimmy...

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 14:56:00 -0500

truth-has-a-liberal-bias:

On Jan. 1, 1981 (when Democrat Jimmy Carter was President) the minimum wage went from $3.10 to $3.35. Nineteen days later, Republican Ronald Reagan became President and the minimum wage didn’t go up again until April 1, 1990.

The minimum wage went up twice under Daddy Bush & twice under President Clinton, but then we had another long-stall…from Sept. 1997 until July 2007, there was no raise.

If you look at the 30-year time period of 1981-2011, you see that 19 of those 30 years went by without an increase in pay for millions of Americans.
.
This has made the minimum wage no longer a “minimum wage”. And this problem is long overdue to be addressed.

We need a Living Wage in the USA.

From what I remember, Congress raised its own salary something like six or seven times between 1997 and 2007, and the total value of the increases was equal to the amount a minimum wage earner would make in a year. Or maybe it was equal to the federal poverty threshold for an individual. Either way it was bullshit