Spanish Police Arrest Anonymous Operation Hackers

Spanish police have detained three men they believe to be members of the Anonymous Operation hackers collective, according to news reports.

Authorities believe the trio took part in a number of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against a Sony PlayStation stoe and government Websites in Algeria, Chile, Colombia,Egypt, Iran, Libya and New Zealand, Spain’s national police said in a statement on June 10. The three men also allegedly attacked Spanish government, law enforcement, banking and media sites.

According to the police, they are not suspected of having taken part in the attack onSony’s PlayStation Networkin April that compromised over 101 million user accounts, or in the DDoS attacks that preceded the massive data breach. Anonymous has already denied involvementbut has acknowledged that individual members could have taken part independently.

“Police arrested 3 #Anonymous leaders in Barcelona, Alicante & Almería. They attacked governments of Egypt, Algeria, Libya, Colombia,” Spanish authorities posted on Twitter.

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Meanwhile, Anonymous take down Monstanto's website:

Check it yourself at:
http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/monsanto.com
Thanks to http://www.youtube.com/user/StrikerPrototype for the video.

Eulogy for European parliamentary democracy

A proposal to remember it by in the time of Real Democracy Now:

An alternate send-off:

Uranus Explodes into Aries: The Patron Saint of Rebellion in the Sign of Courage & Confrontation

Matt Savinar writes in Part II of II:

What opportunities might Uranus in Aries bring for you as an individual? Remember, as explained in Part I of this series, Uranus is the “Liberator” of the Zodiac while Aries is the sign of courage, confrontation, and self-preservation. To illustrate, consider the situation in Libya where Moammar Gadhafi has been to the Libyan people what a terrifyingly oppressive spouse is to their abused partner. According to this AP article, for instance, the perception among average Libyans has been that only Gadhafi mattered, only he was allowed to “dream about the future”. The ordeal of the four NY Times journalists kidnapped by one of Gadhafi’s militias makes clear the extent of the emotional devastation his rule has levied on the Libyan people:

"...a pattern had begun to emerge. The beating was always fiercest in the first few minutes, an aggressiveness that Colonel Qaddafi’s bizarre and twisted four decades of rule inculcated in a society that feels disfigured. It didn’t matter that we were bound, or that Lynsey was a woman..."

But moments of kindness inevitably emerged, drawing on a culture’s far deeper instinct for hospitality and generosity. A soldier brought Tyler and Anthony, sitting in a pickup, dates and an orange drink. Lynsey had to talk to a soldier’s wife who, in English, called her a donkey and a dog. Then they unbound Lynsey and, sitting in another truck, gave Steve and her something to drink. (Source)

The good news is that Uranus in Aries, in cahoots with other karmic bunker-buster type transits occurring right now, has emboldened the Libyan people to the point where they now stand a chance of overthrowing their oppressor once and for all. That, however, doesn’t mean the process won’t be without considerable struggle, suffering, and loss of life. If it takes a transit as potentially explosive as Uranus in Aries to liberate somebody – be it an individual or a collective entity such as a nation – then conditions have likely advanced to the point of extreme oppression. Overthrowing extreme oppression, unfortunately, rarely occurs in the absence of suffering and sacrifice.

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Finding a saint for revolutionaries is no picnic. Best pick as saint of revolutionary struggle: Che? Best pick for the European Uprising: St. Expeditus? Then there's St. Gemma, patron saint of the poor and unemployed. 

Here's a list of the top 10 unlikely patron saints:

I mean, even Mexican narco-traffickers have Jesus Malverde, their very own patron saint:

SPANISH REVOLUTION - English Muse 'Uprising'

Spain fights back.

Camping of "Indignant"at the town hall square in the city of Esparreguera (Catalonia, Europe).
Documentary Lluís Artigas Jorba. June 01, 2011

Far Beyond - A side (Europe protests)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Spanish_protests

Europe is starting to revolt. [note: contains footage from earlier, violent protest actions.]

Semi-naked women protest censorship in Ukraine

A group of female activists in Ukraine marked the country's National Journalists Day with a protest against the practice of receiving payments in exchange for positive news coverage. Waving placards reading "How much for the truth?", members of the women's protest group FEMEN also chanted slogans against corrupt journalists. During the protest the women tore off their jeans, leaving them dressed only in bikinis. The Russian word for jeans is very similar to the slang term for news coverage that has been paid for.

The Battle against Neoliberalism: Massive Popular Uprising in Greece

by Yorgos Mitralias, Global Research, June 11, 2011
Greek Committee Against the Debt and CADTM

Hundreds of thousands of Greek ‘Indignés’ (‘Outraged’) walk out to wage war against their neoliberal persecutors

Two weeks after it started the Greek movement of ‘outraged’ people has the main squares in all cities overflowing with crowds that shout their anger, and makes the Papandreou government and its local and international supporters tremble. It is now more than just a protest movement or even a massive mobilization against austerity measures. It has turned into a genuine popular uprising that is sweeping over the country. An uprising that makes it know at large its refusal to pay for ‘their crisis’ or ‘their debt’ while vomiting the two big neoliberal parties, if not the whole political world in complete disarray.

How many were there on Syntagma square (Constitution square) in the centre of Athens, just in front of the Parliament building on Sunday 5 June 2011? Difficult to say since one of the characteristic features of such popular gatherings is that there is no key event (speech or concert) and that people come and go. But according to people in charge of the Athens underground, who know how to assess the numbers of passengers, there were at least 250,000 people converging on Syntagma on that memorable night! Actually several hundreds of thousands of people if we add the ‘historic’ gatherings that took place on the main squares of other Greek cities (see map).

At this juncture we should however raise the question: how can such a mass movement that is shaking the Greek government (in which the EU has a particular interest) not be mentioned at all in Western medias? For these first twelve days there was virtually not a word, not an image of those unprecedented crowds shouting their anger against the IMF, the European Commission, the ‘Troika’ (IMF, European Commission, and European Central Bank), and against Frau Merkel and the international neoliberal leaders. Nothing. Except occasionally a few lines about ‘hundreds of demonstrators’ in the streets of Athens, after a call by the Greek trade unions. This testifies to a strange predilection for scrawny demos of TU bureaucrats while a few hundred yards further huge crowds were demonstrating late into the night for days and weeks on end.

This is indeed a new form of censorship. A well-organized political censorship motivated by the fear this Greek movement might contaminate the rest of Europe! Confronted as we are with this new weapon used by the Holy Alliance of modern times, we have to respond together both to expose this scandal and to find ways of circumventing such prohibition to inform public opinions, through developing communication among social movements throughout Europe and at once creating and reinforcing our own alternative media…

Going back to the Greek ‘Outraged’, or ‘Indignés’ or Aganaktismeni, we have to note that the movement is getting more and more rooted among lower classes against a Greek society that has been shaped by 25 years of an absolute domination of a cynic, nationalist, racist and individualist neoliberal ideology that turned everything into commodities. This is why the resulting image is often contradictory, mixing as it does the best and the worst among ideas and actions! For instance when the same person displays a Greek nationalism verging on racism while waving a Tunisian (or Spanish, Egyptian, Portuguese, Irish, Argentinian) flag to show his internationalist solidarity with those peoples.

Should we therefore conclude that those demonstrators are schizophrenic? Of course not. As there are no miracles, or politically ‘pure’ social uprisings, the movement is becoming gradually more radical while still branded by those 25 years of moral and social disaster. But mind: all its ‘shortcomings’ are subsume into its main feature, namely its radical rejection of the Memorandum, of the Troika, the public debt, the government, austerity, corruption, a fictional parliamentary democracy, the European Commission, in short of the whole system!

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Mark Levine: Arab Revolutions Mask Continuance of Economic Status Quo

In an article in Al Jazeera Mark Levine a history professor at the University of California in Irvine argues that to a considerable extent the economic status quo remains after Arab Spring revolutions. The worst off in society will remain badly off and without power even given the politcial changes since the economic underpinnings of these countries remains oriented toward pleasing international investors and lending institutions such as the IMF and World Bank.

Levine notes that the World Bank and IMF have been restructuring the economies of the Middle East for decades, with largely negative results. Yet they are poised to play a major role in the post-revolutionary efforts to stabilise Egypt, Tunisia and other post-authoritarian states.

After 1967 there has been a turn towards market liberalization throughout the Middle East going back as far as the Nasser period. From the start of the 1970s-era infitah, or opening, under Anwar Sadat, there have been over a dozen episodes of mass protest and even revolt against IMF and World Bank-imposed austerity measures.l.

Local governments often made some effort to resist the imposition of what is today referred to as "Washington Consensus" policies, which advocate trade liberalisation, privatisation, opening economies to foreign goods and investment, stabilising budgets and exchange rates, and cutting government expenditures and presence in the economy.

Mubarak cronies held great power and also influence within the IMF. In fact one of the main reasons the army was willing to sacrifice Mubarak according to some sources was because of its anger at the increasing power of his son Gamal and his colleagues, such as former - and recently convicted - IMF official Youssef Boutros-Ghali, who were accruing significant power through the financialisation of the economy and other policies that weaken the power of the army and the more traditional national capitalist elite.

Despite the less than encouraging history of involvement in the region, the World Bank, IMF and other mainstream institutions have all sought to insert themselves into the economic reform process that most observers believe must accompany political reform in order for the latter to succeed.

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