Monday, July 4, 2011

The EcoSex Manifesto

ECOSEX MANIFESTO
Draft 1.0 of a work in progress.

(i) WE ARE THE ECOSEXUALS. The Earth is our lover. We are madly, passionately, and fiercely in love, and we are grateful for this relationship each and every day. In order to create a more mutual and sustainable relationship with the Earth, we collaborate with nature. We treat the Earth with kindness, respect and affection.

(ii) WE MAKE LOVE WITH THE EARTH. We are aquaphiles, teraphiles, pyrophiles and aerophiles. We shamelessly hug trees, massage the earth with our feet, and talk erotically to plants. We are skinny dippers, sun worshipers, and stargazers. We caress rocks, are pleasured by waterfalls, and admire the Earth’s curves often. We make love with the Earth through our senses. We celebrate our E-spots. We are very dirty.

(iii) WE ARE A RAPIDLY GROWING, GLOBAL, ECOSEX COMMUNITY. This community includes artists, academics, sex workers, sexologists, healers, environmental activists, nature fetishists, gardeners, business people, therapists, lawyers, peace activists, eco-feminists, scientists, educators, (r)evolutionaries, critters and other entities from diverse walks of life. Some of us are SexEcologists, researching and exploring the places where sexology and ecology intersect in our culture. As consumers we aim to buy green, organic, and local. Whether on farms, at sea, in the woods, or in cities small and large, we connect and empathize with nature.

(iv) WE ARE ECOSEX ACTIVISTS. We will save the mountains, waters and skies by any means necessary, especially through love, joy and our powers of seduction. We will stop the rape, abuse and the poisoning of the Earth. We do not condone the use of violence, although we recognize that some ecosexuals may choose to fight those most guilty for destroying the Earth with public disobedience, anarchist and radical environmental activist strategies. We embrace the revolutionary tactics of art, music, poetry, humor, and sex. We work and play tirelessly for Earth justice and global peace. Bombs hurt.

(v) ECOSEXUAL IS AN IDENTITY. For some of us, being ecosexual is our primary (sexual) identity, whereas for others it is not. Ecosexuals can be GLBTQI, heterosexual, asexual, and/or Other. We invite and encourage ecosexuals to come out. We are everywhere. We are polymorphous and pollen-amorous, We educate people about ecosex culture, community and practices. We hold these truths to be self evident; that we are all part of, not separate from, nature. Thus all sex is ecosex.

(vi) THE ECOSEX PLEDGE. I promise to love, honor and cherish you Earth, until death brings us closer together forever.

The ecosex revolution wants YOU. Join us.


Elizabeth M. Stephens & Annie M. Sprinkle


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Further reading: 

Daughter of Mossad Chief: I Refuse to Enlist in the Israeli Military


I refuse to take part in the war crimes committed by my country. Violence will not bring any kind of solution, and I shall not commit violence, come what may.

Omer Goldman, age 19, Tel Aviv

First Prison Sentence: 22nd Sept. - 10th Oct. 2008 (18 days)
Second Prison Sentence: 12th - 24th Oct. 2008 (10 days)

Omer Goldman, has had to confront the values of her own family. She is the daughter of the former deputy head of Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service and who is still considered one of the most powerful men in the Israeli security system. Omer, without her fathers permission visited a Palestinian town in the West Bank and at a check-point, alongside Palestinians, her supposed enemies, was fired upon by Israeli soldiers, We were sitting by the roadside talking and soldiers came along and after a few seconds they received an order and fired gas grenades and rubber bullets at us. Then it struck me, to my astonishment, that the soldiers were following an order without thinking. For the first time in my life, an Israeli soldier raised his weapon and fired at me.

Although, not surprisingly, her father does not support her decision to refuse, he still supports her as a daughter. He and I have very similar characters. I, too, fight to the end for what I believe in. But we are opposites ideologically.

In her declaration of refusal she stated:

I refuse to enlist in the Israeli military. I shall not be part of an army that needlessly implements a violent policy and violates the most basic human rights on a daily basis.

Like most of my peers, I too have not dared to question the ethics of the Israeli military. But when I visited the Occupied Territories I realized I see a completely different reality, a violent, oppressive, extreme reality that must be ended.

I believe in service to the society I am part of, and that is precisely why I refuse to take part in the war crimes committed by my country. Violence will not bring any kind of solution, and I shall not commit violence, come what may. 

PLEASE SEND THIS VIDEO ALONG. Send your message to Israel. Americans aren't supposed to know this, THE REST OF THE STORY...

If you were a captive of the media mind control police (i.e. the corporate news media) you'd
believe two things:

1. Israel is "defending" itself against the Palestinians

2. All Israelis support their government's policy of endless war against Palestinian civilians.

It's this second lie that the Israeli media mafia guards most closely - and desperately hopes Americans never figure out.

Contrary to Israeli war party propaganda in the US, not all Jews and not all Israelis support Israel's Nazi-like conduct in the Occupied Territories.

This simple fact is probably the single most censored piece of news in the United States.

Here are some young people heading to prison because they won't join the genocide. You can support these brave kids here:

FORUM TO WRITE TO ISRAEL
http://december18th.org

The Tin Foil Hat In Song

Scott Dunbar - One Man Band Singing Tin Foil Hat



Rocky Votolato - Tinfoil Hats


the tinfoil hat song

Illuminati Satire







Riding Against the Lizard - On the need for anger now. Towards a poetics of anger

By William Wall, Three Monkeys Online

"Anger is the political sentiment par excellence. It brings out the qualities of the inadmissible, the intolerable. It is a refusal and a resistance that with one step goes beyond all that can be accomplished reasonably in order to open possible paths for a new negotiation of the reasonable but also paths of an uncompromising vigilance. Without anger, politics is accommodation and trade in influence; writing without anger traffics in the seductions of writing."
Nancy, J-L, 
The Compearance[ref]

How should we describe the extraordinary consensus that existed in this country — a consensus that united us all around core concepts like ‘free markets’, ‘competition is the only way’, ‘private enterprise good, public enterprise bad’, ‘social partnership’, ‘entrepreneurship’, ‘greed is good’, ‘conspicuous consumption’? For a long time we lived inside a bubble. The walls of the bubble were invisible to us, they coloured everything we looked at but everything was that colour anyway so we thought it was colourless. It was, nonetheless, a bubble. What we hear these days, in the media, in conversations, in political speeches and union negotiations is the pop of the bubble bursting. We are faced with an absolute incongruence — between what we have been told and what we see.1 What this incongruence will tell us remains to be seen, but it makes us strange to ourselves, wakes us from our dream of shopping and eating and enables us to look back at our days in the bubble with at least the illusion of detachment.

Sometime during his seven-year incarceration at the hands of Italy’s fascists, the Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci developed a theory of ideological hegemony. It is probable that the idea first occurred to Gramsci during his meditation on another Italian philosopher and political analyst, Niccolo Macchiavelli, for that acute political analyst had observed the self-defeating nature of oppression as a political weapon. What Gramsci argued was that in modern democracies the powerful do not maintain their power — their hegemony — by coercion alone. In classical Marxist thought the ruling classes have at their disposal the police and the army, the prison system and the courts, the market and the all-important threat of destitution. All of these weapons are experienced as coercive by the poor. None of it belongs to them, and all of it, including the law, favours the rights of property and power.

However, it was clear to Gramsci that something else was needed to explain the fact the people voted for, or gave tacit consent to, a system that favoured a very small minority at their expense, actually voted to give power to the people who coerced them. The answer was ‘ideological hegemony’.2

In Gramsci’s formulation, a vast number of actors within a state contribute to the exclusion of hostile ideas. Thus, in a liberal capitalist democracy groups such as the churches, charities, political parties, special interest groups, schools, environmental activists, trades union, etc., all contribute to an illusion of political debate. It is an illusion because all of these groups, though they would like to tinker with the details, are in agreement on the fundamentals. Gramsci called this the ‘common sense’ position3. Genuinely radical voices are treated with contempt, and characterised as foolish and ‘ideological’ from the ‘common sense’ point of view, because the ideology of the majority is transparent to those who live within its confines — the bubble of my opening paragraph.

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Brainwashing the Corporate Way

By John Pilger, Global Research
JohnPilger.com

One of the most original and provocative books of the past decade is Disciplined Minds by Jeff Schmidt (Rowman & Littlefield). “A critical look at salaried professionals,” says the cover, “and the soul-battering system that shapes their lives.” Its theme is postmodern America but also applies to Britain, where the corporate state has bred a new class of Americanised manager to run the private and public sectors: the banks, the main parties, corporations, important committees, the BBC.

Professionals are said to be meritorious and non-ideological. Yet, in spite of their education, writes Schmidt, they think less independently than non-professionals. They use corporate jargon – “model”, “performance”, “targets”, “strategic oversight”. In Disciplined Minds, Schmidt argues that what makes the modern professional is not technical knowledge but “ideological discipline”. Those in higher education and the media do “political work” but in a way that is not seen as political. Listen to a senior BBC person sincerely describe the nirvana of neutrality to which he or she has risen. “Taking sides” is anathema; and yet the modern professional knows never to challenge the “built-in ideology of the status quo”. What matters is the "right attitude".

A key to training professionals is what Schmidt calls “assignable curiosity”. Children are naturally curious, but along the way to becoming a professional they learn that curiosity is a series of tasks assigned by others. On entering training, students are optimistic and idealistic. On leaving, they are “pressured and troubled” because they realise that “the primary goal for many is getting compensated sufficiently for sidelining their original goals”. I have met many young people, especially budding journalists, who would recognise themselves in this description. For no matter how indirect its effect, the primary influence of professional managers is the extreme political cult of money worship and inequality known as neoliberalism.

European Spring: The Gradual demise of Capitalism

By Gaither Stewart, Dandelion Salad


It’s an accumulative kind of thing, the demise of capitalism worldwide: at first the waning and the dwindling, now the rapid corkscrew-like downwards spiraling, of greedy, vicious, cannibalistic capitalism busily devouring itself. Today, one can only conclude the imminence of its just demise.

Just as one once said in Italy during the agony of the death of the Italian Communist Party, just as one once spoke of the loss of the propulsive force of the French Revolution, current events show that also capitalism, the capitalist system itself, has lost its self-proclaimed propulsive force. Today, for a growing number of capitalists it is a case of si salvi chi puo, every man for himself. No one can logically claim that capitalism as an economic-social-political idea propels forward world society.

In the face of the current disaster of the capitalist system, one can ldetermine that capitalism’s ideology, its promises for societal well-being, were false from the start. One can no longer defend capitalism in good faith. Marx was right, over a century and a half ago: capitalism has hung itself in its excess, in its greed for more and more and more.

Underlying what I prefer to call the Mediterranean Spring rather than the European Spring are a host of symptoms of a highly infectious pandemic of rejection of the capitalist system. The movement of the movements infecting Spanish youth camping on the plazas of their nation today is transversal. Its common denominator is anti-system, which, though they might not yet realize it, I believe translates into anti-capitalism.

Rejection of what is and what has been in Europe. The fever has spread across all of southern Europe, from Portugal to Greece. The Spanish-Portuguese mood is almost identical in Greece, where working people, especially youth, refuse to pay for the greed of capitalism. Also some similarities are visible in the overturn of systems in Tunisia and Egypt. Now today also in Italy, the grass roots—youth and workers. the unemployed and the underpaid underemployed—demand the same rights claimed by protesters in Spain and Portugal and Greece.

It has become contagious. A fever. The Mediterranean world is burning: the demand is economic democracy, political justice and peace. In Spain, Real democracia ya! Real democracy now. The time of indifference seems over and past. Society has awakened. Spain’s indignados, modern Don Quixotes, have occupied sixty plazas across the Spain. The Indignant Ones movement in Portugal is the same. The movement is hailed and imitated by Greeks and Italians. In France, they occupied for a brief time the Bastille. Capitalism should tremble. For when indifference ends, social activism takes over. Revolution is in fact already underway.

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Bradley Manning’s Army of One

How a lonely, five-foot-two, gender-questioning soldier became a WikiLeaks hero, a traitor to the U.S., and one of the most unusual revolutionaries in American history.


Hiatus - Insurrection (Rebel Sonix Remix)

Killing Democracy One File at a Time: Justice Department Loosens FBI Domestic Spy Guidelines

By Tom Burghardt, Dissident Voice


While the Justice Department is criminally inept, or worse, when it comes to prosecuting corporate thieves who looted, and continue to loot, trillions of dollars as capitalism’s economic crisis accelerates, they are extremely adept at waging war on dissent.

Last week, the New York Times disclosed that the FBI “is giving significant new powers to its roughly 14,000 agents, allowing them more leeway to search databases, go through household trash or use surveillance teams to scrutinize the lives of people who have attracted their attention.”

Under “constitutional scholar” Barack Obama’s regime, the Bureau will revise its “Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide.” The “new rules,” Charlie Savage writes, will give agents “more latitude” to investigate citizens even when there is no evidence they have exhibited “signs of criminal or terrorist activity.”

As the Bill of Rights Defense Committee (BORDC) recently pointed out, “When presented with opportunities to protect constitutional rights, our federal government has consistently failed us, with Congress repeatedly rubber-stamping the executive authority to violate civil liberties long protected by the Constitution.”

While true as far it goes, it should be apparent by this late date that no branch of the federal government, certainly not Congress or the Judiciary, has any interest in limiting Executive Branch power to operate lawlessly, in secret, and without any oversight or accountability whatsoever.

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Musical Innerlube: Dead Kennedys - Riot

Police-The Largest Street Gang in America

Independence Day Propaganda

...But from a libertarian standpoint, the American Revolution has a very dark side. There is also nuance lost in the common narrative. It wasn’t a simple tax revolt, at least not as conventionally limned. For one thing, Americans had resented the 1764 Revenue Act’s reduction of the 1733 Molasses Act tax rate, despising the enforcement mechanism and efficiency of the new law more than the tax itself. Even less understood is the 1773 Boston Tea Party, a revolt against a tax cut – a reduction in British taxes on East India tea, designed to undercut the price of smuggled Dutch tea. Monopoly privileges over the cheaper tea were also involved, but as Charles Adams has written, the Boston Tea Party "was a wanton destruction of private property in an age when private property was held in great esteem . . . [which] was not well received in the colonies. . . . [Benjamin] Franklin was shocked and acknowledged that full restitution should be paid at once to the owners of the tea. Most Americans believed this way, but unfortunately the majority of Americans were to feel the heel of the British boot." After the rebellion against tea began to spread, with boycotts emerging elsewhere and Boston merchants finally rejecting all tea just in case it was English, the Crown responded with the Coercive Acts. They were implemented by a bolstered presence of the military police state – another reminder to modern Tea Party activists that they should be especially concerned about the law enforcement arm of the state.

The entire uprising against Britain entailed no small dose of hypocrisy, at least on the part of the American leaders. Most everyday colonists who fought and died had a true interest in liberty, having resented the taxes and military presence that naturally resulted from the British war against France in the late 1750s and early 1760s. The first major battle in that war, the Battle of Jumonville Glen, was an ambush of French Canadians spearheaded by George Washington. This siege cascaded into the Seven Years War, a world conflict involving Britain, France, Prussia, Hanover, Portugal, the Iroquois Confederacy, Austria, Russia, Spain, Sweden, Saxony, and another half-dozen countries – a war that lasted three years after hostilities ceased in North America. When the colonists faced the lingering price of this international war, powerful Americans led a revolt against their king, sending poor colonists to die in a war that mostly served the interests of the few, much as they had done a generation earlier to advance the interests of the American elite and British empire, including in the takeover of Canada and Florida.

Americans’ anti-imperial motivations in the Revolution were often genuine, but not always pure. The hostility toward Britain for its Quebec Act, for example, was indeed motivated in part by libertarian sentiment: anger that the colony was losing such common law rights as habeas corpus. But there was also animosity toward British for reversing its ban on Catholicism in Quebec. The Continental Army’s first major operation was to invade Canada to "liberate" the inhabitants from British rule (and with the intention to subject them to U.S. rule). The Canadians, mostly of French stock, were meanwhile generally neutral toward the war between these two hostile powers. Five thousand Americans died in the narrowly failing effort to conquer Canada, and thousands have been dying in disingenuous U.S. wars of liberation ever since.


Furthermore, the American Revolution ushered in a horrific warfare state whose tyrannical nature never completely subsided after the war. A year before the Declaration of Independence, General Washington began the process of structuring the military along authoritarian lines, instituting gratuitously unequal pay, dealing death to deserters, and even attempting (but failing) to raise the maximum corporal punishment to 500 lashes. "In short," writes Murray Rothbard in Conceived in Liberty (Vol. 4), "Washington set out to transform a people’s army, uniquely suited for a libertarian revolution, into another orthodox and despotically ruled statist force after the familiar European model."

The American government relied on a form of conscription and even, by 1779, began impressing people into the navy – the very same oppressive practice Britain had committed to the consternation of the colonists. The Continental Congress flooded the country with paper money, increasing the money supply by 50% in 1775 and causing commensurate rises in prices. Government contractors became incredibly wealthy, leaving most Americans to suffer the brunt of the burden for many years...

Greek sovereignty to be massively limited: Juncker

Erik Kirschbaum reports for Reuters


Greece faces severe restrictions on its sovereignty and must privatize state assets on a scale similar to the sell off of East German firms in the 1990s after communism fell, Eurogroup chairman Jean-Claude Juncker said.

In an interview published after euro zone finance ministers in the Eurogroup approved a further 12 billion euro ($17.43 billion) installment of Greece's bailout, Juncker said he was optimistic that measures agreed with Athens would help to resolve the country's problems.

"The sovereignty of Greece will be massively limited," he told Germany's Focus magazine in the interview released on Sunday, adding that teams of experts from around the euro zone would heading to Greece.

"For the forthcoming wave of privatizations they will need, for example, a solution based on a model of Germany's 'Treuhand agency'," Juncker added, referring to the privatization agency that sold off 14,000 East German firms between 1990 and 1994.

Julian Assange and Slovenian Philosopher Slavoj Žižek -- Live From London

Watch live streaming video from democracynow at livestream.com

On a panel held on Saturday in London, Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! hosted Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaksand Slovenian political philosopher Slavoj Zizek.

The Powers of Manipulation: Islam as a Geopolitical Tool to Control the Middle East

by Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya Global Research July 2, 2011

As Washington and its cohorts march towards the Eurasian Heartland, they have tried to manipulate Islam as a geo-political tool. They have created political and social chaos in the process. Along the way they have tried to redefine Islam and to subordinate it to the interests of global capital by ushering in a new generation of so-called Islamists, chiefly amongst the Arabs.

The Project to Redefine Islam: Turkey as the New Model and “Calvinist Islam”

Turkey in its present form is now being presented as the democratic model for the rebelling Arab masses to follow. It is true that Ankara has progressed since the days it used to ban Kurdish from being spoken in public, but Turkey is not a functional democracy and is very much a kleptocracy with fascist tendencies.

The military still plays a huge role in the affairs of the state and government. The term “deep state,” which denotes a state run secretly from the top-down by unaccountable bodies and individuals, in fact originates from Turkey. Civil rights are still not respected in Turkey and candidates for public office have to be approved by the state apparatus and the groups controlling them, which try to filter out anyone that would go against the status quo in Turkey.

Turkey is not being presented as a model for the Arabs due to its democratic qualifications. It is being presented as the political model for the Arabs, because of a project of political and socio-economic “bida” (innovation) involving the manipulation of Islam.

Although very popular, the Turkish Justice and Development Party or JDP (Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi or AKP) was allowed to come into power in 2002, without opposition by the Turkish military and the Turkish courts. Before this there was little tolerance for political Islam in Turkey. The JDP/AKP was founded in 2001 and the timing of their founding and their electoral win in 2002 was also tied to the objective of redrawing Southwest Asia and North Africa.

This project to manipulate and redefine Islam seeks to subordinate Islam to dominant World Order capitalist interests through a new wave of "political Islamism", such as the JDP/AKP. A new strand of Islam is thereby being fashioned through what has come to be called “Calvinist Islam” or a “Muslim version of the Protestant work ethic.” It is this model that is been nurtured in Turkey and now being presented to Egypt and the Arabs by Washington and Brussels.

This “Calvinist Islam” also has no problem with the “reba” or interest system, which is prohibited under Islam. It is this system that is used to enslave individuals and societies with the chains of debt to global capitalism. It is in this context that the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) is calling for so-called “democratic reforms” in the Arab World.

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Slavery ... A Global Investment

Real Democracy Now holds public assembly in Dublin, Ireland

Real Democracy Now held a public assembly in Dublin outside the Central Bank. This assembly gave everyone a chance to air his, or her grievances, and discuss how real Democracy can be brought to Ireland.


Musical Innerlube: Rush - Bastille Day

Uprising: Will Emerging Markets Shape or Shake the World Economy




Watch the Lester Morse Distinguished Lecture with Mr. George Magnus, Senior Economic Adviser at UBS Investment Bank, discussing his new book "Uprising: Will Emerging Markets Shape or Shake the World Economy."

Chilean student protest: Thriller por la Educacion

Tiger Lilies at Syntagma Square

People of Greece rise up! from granmaTV on Vimeo.



Tiger Lillies performing live at Syntagma Square on June 28th, 2011. One of the most surreal moments of that afternoon.

Colombia: Women's sex strike gets husbands' support

It all started last Thursday, when more than 250 women in Barbacoas, a remote, rural town in Colombia, began their "Crossed Legs Strike," saying their husbands would get no sex from them until they pressured authorities to get the town's only access road repaired so it could be used, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Now the men in the town are joining in the action, according to Colombia Reports:
After some initial frustration, men have decided to facilitate the protest against the corrupt local government by taking to their central park on Saturday to stage a hunger strike.

“(Men) have come together with women with a hunger strike. This is not improvised, this is a process that began a year ago to reclaim respect for human rights and gender advocacy,” a local Circuit court judge said.

Playing God: The Loving Psychopath

2011 Global Revolution Goes Viral Enough

Two Battles in Athens

Notes From Underground:


Internationalist Perspective statement

After Tahrir Square in Cairo and the Puerta del Sol in Madrid, once again Syntagma Square in Athens is the focal point of resistance against the consequences of capitalism’s crisis. In Spain, the ‘indignados’ stated they were inspired by the revolt in Egypt and Tunisia, and likewise demonstrators in Syntagma are proclaiming their linkage to the struggles in North Africa and Spain. Clearly, in our times, borders cannot stop the spirit of resistance; and the official media can no longer control the flow of information. The struggle is contagious.

With admiration and solidarity we are watching the tens of thousands battling the security forces of the Greek government in response to the draconian austerity program that it is savagely imposing on the working class (youth, employed, unemployed, pensioners, immigrants without papers). But there’s more than one battle going on in Athens. 

One is a battle between two factions of the ruling class over how to respond to the global capitalist crisis and the specific form that it has taken in Greece: a sovereign debt crisis, the specter of state bankruptcy, and the inability of the state to make its debt payments to bondholders (the big European banks). For the Socialist (PASOK) government, the necessary response is an austerity program that will satisfy the conditions set by the banks, by the European Central Bank (ECB), and the IMF, and that will permit new loans that will avert a default. For the “hard” left, the Stalinist KKE, the  “radical left” (Syriza), and the unions, the necessary response is a rejection of the proposed austerity measures, a default on the debt, withdrawal from the euro zone, return to a Greek currency, and new parliamentary elections that will produce a government that will protect flag and nation. A new government of the KKE, Syriza, and the unions, a government that defaults on the state debt and sticks it to the big banks and bondholders, will not solve the present crisis or spare the working class the pain and misery of its own draconian austerity plan. So long as the capitalist state itself is not overthrown, so long as the commodity form and wage labor are not abolished, the capitalist law of value will impose its rules, its imperatives, and  — in the face of the present global crisis – its austerity measures and attack on the living standards of those who have only their labor power to sell. Like PASOK, the KKE or Syriza, were it to come to power would have to put the working class on rations. And such a government would impose its will on the working class with the same tear gas and stun grenades if the workers did not accept the need for patriotic sacrifice – not sacrifice for the IMF, for bondholders, but sacrifice for the Nation, for the motherland, for Greece.

That lesson is already drawn by many of the militants fighting in Syntagma square: their leaflets and their arguments against the left, the unions, and the leftists, have made that clear. And that is the second battle being waged in Athens. For those engaged in thatbattle, the abolition of capitalism, of the dictatorship of the economy, of the commodification of every facet of human life, has to be an integral part of the present struggle, not some distant goal, a stage that can be reached only at some future time. The only way for workers to defend their immediate existence, to claim their “bread” today, to be able to have any possibility of living a decent life, is to directly attack the whole system of production, of social relations based on the value-form and wage-labor. It is that perspective that pro-revolutionaries can provide within these struggles, in the assemblies that arise in the occupations of the public space within this second battle. That conception, with all of the complex issues that it raises, is the only way to begin to create a human community. And that entails clarity on the actual bases of capitalism, its laws of motion, and its underlying social relations. Communism should not be seen either as state ownership of the means of production, nationalization, or as worker’s self-management of individual enterprises and units of production, both of which, in different ways, would perpetuate proletarian labor and the imperatives of the law of value, of capital accumulation. Nationalization or worker’s self-management, “radical” though each appears, will be subject to the same crisis tendencies, the same exploitation of living labor and extraction of surplus value, as any other form of capitalist production. It is the signs of that second battle in Athens that here and now concretely represents a principle of revolutionary hope.        

 INTERNATIONALIST PERSPECTIVE

Steve Forbes in an Exclusive Interview from Athens, Greece


We met Steve Forbes in Athens during the Greek Power Summit in which he participated a the keynote speaker. In his exclusive interview he talks about the Greek economic crisis and new media.

Iceland Declares Independence from International Banks

By Bill Wilson, NetRightDaily

Iceland is free.  And it will remain so, so long as her people wish to remain autonomous of the foreign domination of her would-be masters — in this case, international bankers.

On April 9, the fiercely independent people of island-nation defeated a referendum that would have bailed out the UK and the Netherlands who had covered the deposits of British and Dutch investors who had lost funds in Icesave bank in 2008.

At the time of the bank’s failure, Iceland refused to cover the losses.  But the UK and Netherlands nonetheless have demanded that Iceland repay them for the “loan” as a condition for admission into the European Union.

In response, the Icelandic people have told Europe to go pound sand. The final vote was 103,207 to 69,462, or 58.9 percent to 39.7 percent.   “Taxpayers should not be responsible for paying the debts of a private institution,” said Sigriur Andersen, a spokeswoman for the Advice group that opposed the bailout.

A similar referendum in 2009 on the issue, although with harsher terms, found 93.2 percent of the Icelandic electorate rejecting a proposal to guarantee the deposits of foreign investors who had funds in the Icelandic bank. The referendum was invoked when President Olafur Ragnur Grimmson vetoed legislation the Althingi, Iceland’s parliament, had passed to pay back the British and Dutch.

Under the terms of the agreement, Iceland would have had to pay £2.35 billion to the UK, and €1.32 billion to the Netherlands by 2046 at a 3 percent interest rate.  Its rejection for the second time by Iceland is a testament to its people, who feel they should bear no responsibility for the losses of foreigners endured in the financial crisis.

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Greek austerity measures could violate human rights, UN expert says

From the UN News Centre:


30 June 2011 – 
The United Nations independent expert on foreign debt and human rights warned today that the austerity measures and structural reforms proposed to solve Greece’s debt crisis may result in violations of the basic human rights of the country’s people, the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) reported.

“The implementation of the second package of austerity measures and structural reforms, which includes a wholesale privatization of state-owned enterprises and assets, is likely to have a serious impact on basic social services and therefore the enjoyment of human rights by the Greek people, particularly the most vulnerable sectors of the population such as the poor, elderly, unemployed and persons with disabilities,” said Cephas Lumina, who reports to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva.

“The rights to food, water, adequate housing and work under fair and equitable conditions should not be compromised by the implementation of austerity measures,” he said, urging the Government to “strike a careful balance between austerity and the realization of human rights, taking into account the primacy of States’ human rights obligations.”

Mr. Lumina also called upon the authorities to maintain some fiscal leeway to meet its people’s basic human rights, particularly economic, social and cultural rights.

“Tax rises, public expenditure cuts and privatization measures have to be implemented in such a way that they do not result in unbearable suffering of the people,” he said.

“Debts can only be paid out of income,” Mr. Lumina said. “A shrinking economy cannot generate any revenue and contributes to a reduced capacity to repay the debt. More time should have been allowed for the restructuring measures already in place to work.”

The independent expert also called on the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the European Union (EU) and the European Central Bank (ECB) to remain aware of the human rights impact of the policies they design in attempting to resolve the sovereign debt crises in Greece and other countries.

“There will be no lasting solution to the sovereign debt problem if the human rights of the people are not taken into account,” said Mr. Lumina, who serves in an unpaid capacity.

US Uncut MUSIC VIDEO - Chris Priest


Wealth didn't trickle down, everybody's screwed now
Free ride, only for the biggest of the banks
They've made it well known, they don't want to pay for roads
Let me tell ya something bout' our friends B of A...

Dead beats, tax cheats, hiding money overseas
Take this piece of shit loan, rate it "Triple A" please
Tape off Wall Street, white collar crime scene
Shut down, marked out of business temporarily

We didn't start the fire
It was always burning, since the world's been turning
We didn't start the fire
No we didn't light it but we gotta fight it

Always jackin' up the rate, never give a man a break
Make the poor pay for the rich man's mistakes
Hedge fund fat cats, I propose a new tax 
70 percent for being such huge douchebags

Next crisis that you face, don't ya come to us and beg
We ain't gonna bail you out, you can go to hell

And next time, by the way, people try to rob your bank
Don't you call on our cops, you can fuck yourself

And we ain't puttin out your fires
Cuz your greedy asses never paid your taxes
If companies didn't cheat, we could pave our streets
We could educate our kids, that's just what the fact is

Politicians want to cut pensions they should leave alone,
Privatize the profits, let the losses hit the old folks
When the stocks crash, what you saved gets bled dry
Funneled up to Wall Street & you ain't got a life line

Make em chop from the top, don't you cut another cop
Go to where the money is, don't you cut our services
Government we used to know, picked clean to the bone
Business big wigs aren't paying what they owe

"OUR EDUCATION IS UNDER ATTACK, 
WHAT DO WE DO?
FIGHT BACK."

Lyrics by Chris Priest (except the first chorus)

HUGE thanks to all the US Uncut chapters that provided the video footage!


Google
 

image from http://www.spitting-image.net

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