Foreclose the Banks from FtheBanks on Vimeo.
This year let's foreclose the big banks, not our homes. Visit fthebanks.org to gear up with materials, info, and more.
Directory of Photography: Jeremy Baron, jeremybaronphotography.com/
Second Camera: Andrew Stern, andrewstern.net/
B Roll: OWS Community
Tuesday, March 13, 2012
Foreclose the Banks
U.S. adds Vatican to money-laundering ‘concern’ list
The Vatican has for the first time appeared on the U.S. State Department’s list of money-laundering centres but the tiny city-state is not rated as a high-risk country.
The 2012 International Narcotics Control Strategy Report was made public on Wednesday and Washington’s list of 190 countries classifies them in three categories: of primary concern, of concern and monitored.
The Vatican is in the second category, grouped with 67 other nations including Poland, Egypt, Ireland, Hungary and Chile.
It was added to the list because it was considered vulnerable to money-laundering and had recently established programmes to prevent it, a State Department official said.
G. A. Cohen - Against Capitalism
Gerald (Jerry) Cohen was a Marxist political philosopher. He was Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at Oxford and subsequently Quain Professor of Jurisprudence at University College London.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerald_Cohen
'Capitalism is a flawed economic order that is palpably failing humanity. Is it curable?'
From Denial and Demise by Sir John Whitmore:
Greed is not new. It pre-existed capitalism by millennia. It just shows up in even sharper relief at a particular stage of social evolution. This assertive/competitive state of consciousness is the fuel that drives individuals and businesses to strive for ever more and ever bigger. This stage is best described as the need for status and recognition, and naturally we have an economic system commensurate with that need. Capitalism glorifies it, such that it becomes our way of life, and keeps people stuck there. They see it as an end in itself, rather than as the passing level of immaturity that it reflects. This was accentuated when the Berlin Wall fell, since, in simplistic dualistic thinking, some people became convinced that capitalism was indeed the right or the best social structure for the world from then on.
A basic understanding of the evolutionary process should tell us that it is time to move on up to the next level, now the current system has become obsolete and the harm it is doing is intolerable for much of the world. Capitalism was invented in the West for Westerners and it offered riches to others who joined the club. It soon became so pervasive and dominant that other cultures were obliged to abandon their own evolutionary choices and adopt the Western system or die. Many of them die anyway, for Western capitalism does little to feed them: it serves Westerners first. Communism was seen as the only alternative, and it had some appeal as a collective counterweight to self-serving capitalism, but, at least in the way it was imposed and malpractised in the Soviet Union, it was doomed anyway.
Antisemitism and the (modern) critique of capitalism
The paper argues that modern antisemitism is the ‘rumour about Jews’ as personification of hated forms of capitalism. I will first look at some contemporary expressions of antisemitism, and theses IV and V explore Adono’s and Horkeimer’s (1989) and Postone’s (1986) understanding of Nazi antisemitism.
More...
The Critique of the Crisis of Capitalism Critique by HowTheWorldWorks
A critique of howtheworldworks video from a left wing/anarchist perspective.
ANONYMOUS Revolution 2012 New Message What we are capable of!
http://cafunonymous.blogspot.com/
-What are we capable of 2.0-
Each of us has our own path, but each of us share the same goal, a free humanity,together we stand.
People all around our world have made the choice to rise against this corrupted system.
The resistance continues. 2011 will forever be remembered as a year of global uprising. 2012, the whispers of revolution blow in the wind.
We are anonymous.
We continue to support the people as we "occupy" because we truly believe another world is possible, a world where choices are made from the Heart, a world free of fear.
As Humanity continues to connect at an accelerating rate...we continue to cross all borders. With knowledge comes understanding, with understanding we can overcome our issues, we must live in a world free of censorship.
As you watch this video governments around the world continue to arrest Anons and beat peaceful protesters. They fear us because we are evolving faster than they can control. We can no longer exist in their world of fear.... It is time to make our own change.
Now is the time to make our stand. There is no ONE right answer, our resistance must be as colourful as the spectrum. You can only disturb the hive so much before you get stung!
The people will only take so much!
You can no longer contain us!
We are just getting warmed up!
We are Anonymous. We are legion. We do not forgive. We do not forget. Expect Us.
WTO upholds ruling, Boeing's illegal aid tops $5.3bn
The 27-nation bloc says a solution to the trade dispute, the world’s most costly, must only come through negotiations. “I have always been saying we are ready to start unconditional discussions,” De Gucht said. “That remains so.”
The dual cases have become increasingly important as competitors from China, Canada and Brazil emerge, and the rulings may set industry-defining guidelines for government support in the $70 billion civil-aviation industry.
Judges originally found that Boeing got at least $5.3 billion in illegal aid between 1989 and 2006 and was slated to get $3 billion to $4 billion in incompatible future aid based on Washington state tax measures. Today’s appellate ruling means the harm caused by the subsidies may be found to exceed $5.3 billion, though the panel didn’t name a figure.
The EU has estimated the total amount of subsidies between 1989 and 2006 at $19.1 billion. The amount of harm is important because it is the basis on which a government can request permission to impose a specific level of sanctions.
Aid Breakdown
The illegal aid includes NASA research and development programs for $2.6 billion between 1989 and 2006 and Department of Defense programs with aid as high as $1.2 billion in the same period. There were also three Washington state tax breaks valued at as much as $4 billion from 2006-2024 and foreign sales corporation export subsidies amounting to $2.2 billion until 2006, as well as $476 million in Kansas aid.
Data points on tactics and revolution
An article by George Lakey is circulating around the Internet under the headline, “The More Violence, The Less Revolution.” While title is a quotation from 1930s radical Bart de Ligt, the thrust of the piece is to read Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan’s large-scale study Why Civil Resistance Works (website) under this headline. Chenoweth and Stephan do make a serious and wide-ranging attempt to measure the outcomes of tactical choices made by movements, and both their data and conclusions should be read widely among people interested in changing their societies. Chenoweth and Stephan’s expansive category of civil resistance is actually one that spans across existing internal debates in the Occupy Movement (and earlier generations of tactical debates in the global justice movement and elsewhere). Vitally, their analysis of what conditions make civil resistance successful can help us focus our tactical conversations in a very productive direction.
George Lakey, while an opponent of both violent tactics and property destruction, issued a strong rejoinder to Chris Hedges’ The Cancer in Occupy, arguing: “The issue of the appropriateness of property destruction and/or violence is, like any other aspect of community organizing, not settled by blanket statements or posturing but by getting in there and dialoguing, over and over again. Advocates of nonviolent action need to learn from the Civil Rights movement and the field of community organizing in this way—there really aren’t any shortcuts.” Lakey has developed a nuanced, historically informed position on nonviolence. His strategic approach to thinking about nonviolence that has been surprisingly contagious internationally. And Lakey is willing to have difficult conversations with people who profoundly disagree with him, to his credit.
[ ... ]
Surveying across the data, I would say: The shortage of nonviolent social revolutions places the burden on advocates of nonviolence to explain the methods by which large amounts of property without violence to explain how this will happen. On the other hand, the shortage of violent democratic revolutions places the burden on advocates of a military conflict to explain how their methods will allow for a participatory democracy to emerge. No one can look at the history of the past century and point to consistent success of their method at achieving revolutionary transformations.
(Looking across this panorama, the heavy weight of external intervention, often by the United States, becomes a crucial factor. Unless we can stop the next Clinton from strong-arming or overthrowing the next Aristide, the conversation about how to start transformative revolutions is irrelevant for important parts of the world. From the positive side, movements seeking social transformation have the challenge of creating enduring new orders that can resist that kind of external pressure, something that has historically happened through limits on democratic freedom. Civil resistance as the defense against such coups, which succeeded in 2002 in Venezuela and 2008 in Bolivia, could alter this balance.)
America Beyond Capitalism
Gar Alperovitz describes a model that challenges private monopoly ownership without a powerful bureaucratic state.
This Day in History: Gandhi Leads Civil Disobedience in India
On March 12, 1930, Indian independence leader Mohandas Gandhi begins a defiant march to the sea in protest of the British monopoly on salt, his boldest act of civil disobedience yet against British rule in India.
Britain's Salt Acts prohibited Indians from collecting or selling salt, a staple in the Indian diet. Citizens were forced to buy the vital mineral from the British, who, in addition to exercising a monopoly over the manufacture and sale of salt, also exerted a heavy salt tax. Although India's poor suffered most under the tax, Indians required salt. Defying the Salt Acts, Gandhi reasoned, would be an ingeniously simple way for many Indians to break a British law nonviolently. He declared resistance to British salt policies to be the unifying theme for his new campaign of satyagraha, or mass civil disobedience.
Civil disobedience at risk all over—Georgia, Virginia, Chicago and “colonial Williamsburg”
Via News from Underghround:
GEORGIA:
1) Georgia Law Would Outlaw Picketing; Make Sit-Downs A Felony
By Kenneth Quinnell
http://crooksandliars.com/kenneth-quinnell/georgia-law-would-outlaw-picketin
2) SB 469 Would Make Civil Disobedience a Felony in Georgia
Written By: GLORIA TATUM
http://www.atlantaprogressivenews.com/interspire/news/2012/03/01/sb-469-would-make-civil-disobedience-a-felony-in-georgia.html
CHICAGO:
3) Outlawing dissent: Rahm Emanuel’s new regime
Bernard Harcourt
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2012/jan/19/outlawing-dissent-rahm-emanuel-new-regime
VIRGINIA:
4) Your Body Under Arrest: Police in Riot Gear Remove Peaceful Women’s Rights Protestors in Virginia
by Jodi Jacobson
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/03/05-6
5) City may corral protests, preaching
By Steve Vaughan
http://www.vagazette.com/articles/2012/03/04/slide_show/doc4f5173d7497a4985952351.txt
War Tax Resistance resources and Tax Day (mid-April) plans
To those interested in war tax resistance/refusal and supporters in Maine,
With US weapons arming the world and continuing US troop invasions in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other parts of the world, it’s more important than ever to know where your tax dollars are going and how to pay for peace, not war. And where our tax dollars actually SHOULD go are just as important.
More...
More...
Women War Resisters: Oral Histories, Contemporary Visions
by Rosalie G. Riegle, Bad Subjects
From 2004 to 2007, I interviewed 157 war resisters from the U.S. and Europe. Many of these were women--young and old, married and single, living with families or in community.
Women have always resisted war. As mothers and lovers, they grieve the loss of their companions and the maiming of body and soul caused when their warrior men fight other warrior men. Most tolerate uneasily the false heroism of their male companions’ beer talk, hearing instead the battle nightmares of the dark. Some do more than quietly tolerate. They resist, both by saying no in legal protest and tax resistance and by “acting no” with their bodies when they take part in nonviolent direct action for peace. Some resisters call this civil disobedience; others use the term “civil resistance” reasoning that they are obeying international law, while their government is disobeying it. These actions disrupt their lives and often mean long jail or prison terms.
[ ... ]
One of the most successful---and least remembered---raft board raids was “Women Against Daddy Warbucks,” an action framed specifically as feminist in philosophy and execution. Linda Orell, a woman arrested for that action, wrote me, “[There was] massive chauvinism. At that time, a lay woman who did not cower in her niche as a married person was on just about as low a rung . . . as one could get.”
After careful planning, five women spent the entire night inside a building containing several Manhattan draft boards, shredding over 6000 A-1 files without being apprehended. Two days later they turned themselves in at a dramatic Rockefeller Center rally, raining the shredded files like confetti over the crowd, and the waiting FBI. While several arrests were made and a grand jury attempted, in the end no one was prosecuted because Federal judge Constance Baker Motley, a former civil rights activist, dismissed the charges.
SOLIPSIST
Directed by Andrew Thomas Huang
andrewthomashuang.com
WINNER at SLAMDANCE 2012 of the Special Jury Prize for Experimental Short
View here.
Uprising: 2012
http://www.freedominfonetwork.org
FIN on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/freedominfonetwork
FIN on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/freedominfonet
For a full transcript of the monologue contained in this video: http://pastebin.com/A68LxS4b
This video was created by EndFear for the Freedom Informant Network.
Music: (In order)
NiN - Right Where it Belongs V2 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XnV1DGqK6us&feature=related
John Murphy - The Boathouse http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u_PkkMcb55Q
Future World Music - New Beginnings (remix) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q9QUSBk2UnU
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