During the last three weeks, the Bolivian indigenous movement has taken to the streets in protest against a plan to build a multinational highway running through the Amazon, which would cross indigenous territory and a national reserve. The protests, in which indiginous groups were joined by other national civil movements, now seem to be growing in momentum, to the point of becoming a true popular mobilization.
The Amazon highway is a project financed by the Brazilian government. The road is supposed to connect Bolivia with both the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, crossing through Brazil and Chile. But it is also slated to pass through the Isiboro Sécure National Park and Indigenous Territory (TIPNIS). Two main concerns lie behind the indigenous protests of the highway: its environmental effects, as well as the indigenous community’s frustration with facing deadlock in their attempts to gain access to the decision-making process.
Galvanized by the Occupy Wall Street movement, protests began in New Zealand, touched parts of Asia, spread to Europe, and resumed at their starting point in New York with 5,000 marchers decrying corporate greed and economic inequality in Times Square. Meanwhile, 24 people were arrested at a Manhattan Citibank branch while trying to close their accounts.
Yemeni security forces used live rounds as well as tear gas and water cannons to disperse thousands of people attempting to march on the city center in Sanaa from their stronghold in Change Square. At least 16 people were killed.
The dissident group Ladies in White sent a message of defiance to the Cuban government on Sunday, having men join them for their weekly protest march for the first time since forming in 2003. It is also believed to be the first time in decades men had taken part in a public protest in Cuba.
Author, commentator, civil rights activist and Princeton University professor Cornel West was arrested while protesting on the steps of the Supreme Court on Sunday about corporate influence in politics.
Activists with the October 2011 Stop the Machine protest in Washington’s Freedom Plaza gathered outside the Supreme Court yesterday to draw attention to corporate influence in politics. Nineteen people were arrested, including author, commentator, civil rights activist and Princeton University professor Cornel West.
As the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) phenomenon grows, it has been expressing many truths, even while struggling to find a single over-arching message. The search for captions, slogans, and themes that illuminate the changes sought is characteristic of civil resistance campaigns. This is not merely branding, but a way to sharpen the concrete results that can result from such a dramatic outpouring of human aspiration, emotion, energy, protest, and yearning. Some observers have grown impatient with the evolving messaging coming out of OWS, but, historically, slogans have often changed as a campaign proceeds.
Today, people in cities from New York to Hong Kong—in both directions—are responding to the longstanding call from the Spainish Indignados for a day of protest against rampant corruption, austerity, and the power of high finance over and against the needs of the vast majority of people. The call has been strengthened, heartened, and echoed in recent weeks by the occupation movement in the United States that began at Occupy Wall Street, on top of this whole year of revolutionary activity, starting in Tunisia. The news is so far highlighting images of protesters damaging property—windows broken, cars on fire—even while briefly noting that, in the vast majority of cases, the protests are entirely peaceful. Typical.
The really important question, though, is whether and how this outburst of outrage will turn into meaningful change in the structures of power. Coordinated, worldwide protests have happened before in recent years—February of 2003, against the war in Iraq, or even 350.org’s mobilization against inaction on climate change in October of 2009. What can the movement do to turn this passion and momentum into a strategy that will really undermine the foundations of the corporate elite’s power? Protests on the streets can only be a beginning. What will it take to make this system cost more to maintain than to transform?
Han Han is a Chinese high school dropout who ended up penning a series of bestselling young adult novels. Since then, he’s evolved into an incisive political and social critic on his blog—famously posting a pair of quotation marks around an empty space after Liu Xiaobo won the Nobel Prize—and his dogged commentary on corruption and government wrongdoings have given him a credibility inside and outside of China that you wouldn’t expect from someone whose fanbase was once comprised mostly of teenage girls, or whose primary occupation these days is racing cars. He’s heralded at home as the next Lu Xun, one of China’s most important intellectuals and critics of the past century, and is so popular that he’s able to get away with writing just about whatever he wants (though especially hard-hitting posts often get deleted after the fact—but not after they’ve already been re-posted thousands of times over). With Evan Osnos’s fantastically nuanced New Yorker profile over the summer and celebratory articles over the past few years, some of us here in the U.S. might be swayed into thinking that Han Han is, like Liu Xiaobo and Ai Weiwei, one of China’s Great Democratic Hopes.
All of which might make it a bit surprising to watch Han Han, the voice of China’s youth, casually dismiss his fellow netizens’ online protests in a recent Channel News Asia interview:
As protesters busily cleaned up Zuccotti Park last night in their successful effort to prevent an eviction due to “sanitation” reasons, this is as good a time as any to remember that popular perception is paramount—even over issues as seemingly mundane and inconsequential as hygiene and apperance. During the 1989 Tiananmen protests in Beijing, one of the primary demands of the students was that the government rescind their classification of the protests as one of “turmoil,” and thus legitimize it among the general populace. Here’s a passage from Zhang Liang, Andrew Nathan and Perry Link’s The Tiananmen Papers, recounting the scene at the square on May 17, a month into the protests (and two weeks before the crackdown), about how the protesters sought to achieve this:
The 792nd consecutive weekly vigil outside of Alliant Techsystems in Minneapolis in August.
As I mentioned in this space earlier, I was recently in Barcelona at the War Resisters International’s seminar on War Profiteering and Peace Movement Responses. It was a really interesting time to be a Yankee abroad. The streets in the city center filled up with protests against budget cuts each evening, and everyone at the meetings was talking about OccupyWallStreet in slightly awed and disbelieving tones—as though to say “even the U.S. of A. is getting with the program.”
I was repeatedly asked where I thought the Occupy Movement was headed, a question I cleverly avoided—“look, is that a tapas bar over there? How do you say, ‘more wine, please’ in Spanish?” It is a good question, but as Donald Rumsfeld used to say: “that’s above my pay grade.”
At the end of each long day participating in different seminar tracks (war and exploitation of natural resources, exposing the bad guys, new trends in war profiteering) and workshops on how to research the arms trade, use social media and campaign against drone warfare, we gathered in the city center for the Trobada, convened by the Center for Study of Justice and Peace (Centre d’Estudis per a la Pau JM Delàs). Lots of people turned out for these nightly events, the one at which I presented drew more than one hundred people on a Friday night (but no one in Barcelona eats dinner before 10 pm anyway).
With only a few days left until the global day of action on October 15, people on the streets of Spain are getting ready. They’re at the epicenter of demonstrations being planned in more than 70 Spanish cities for Saturday, together with 869 cities in 71 countries around the world.
In Spain, at least, a lot of attention is focused around the government’s recent cuts in education. A so-called “Marea Verde”—“Green Tide,” because the color of the shirts used in the rallies—began in Madrid at the beginning of the school year in early September. It was promoted by the citizen platform Soy Pública, a teacher’s protest movement against layoffs and longer working hours. Thousands of teachers in Madrid took to the streets and started assemblies in more than 55 institutions. In just a few days, the mobilization spread to other regions like Castilla-La Mancha and Aragón. Following protests of more than 68,000 people in Madrid, others in Toledo, Albacete and Barcelona followed. Now, Soy Pública is getting ready to participate in Saturday’s action.
Are you a chronic pimple-popper who needs a virtual venue in which you can get your fill of puss-driven ecstasy? There is an app for that.
Would you like to intonate a gamut of context appropriate flatulence? Hey, there is an app for that: iFart.
Want to know where you can get homemade tacos 24 hours a day made by transvestite Eskimo nuns? More than likely, there will soon be an app for that too.
As techno-geeks, brazen socialites and avant-garde activists alike clamor about the “revolutionary” technological advancements made by Apple in their iPhone, iPod and iPad products, a closer look at the company’s policies and practices reveals a more savage and unethical ethos of capitalist profiteering at the expense of foreign labor (a.k.a people). While trying to portray itself as the pioneer of casual, cutting-edge ‘cool’ through its “Think Different” campaign, Apple has sought to align itself with such iconic peacemakers as John Lennon and Mohandas Gandhi (see Salman Rushdie’s thoughts on the matter). Yet even a cursory glance at the foundation of Apple’s manufacturing scheme which relies predominantly on the horrendous exploitation of Asian and African laborers, clearly reveals the gratuitous cultural and spiritual symbolism from which they seek to draw in order to achieve their empire of branding supremacy.
A friend of mine once called Las Vegas “the Lourdes of America.” People come looking for a miracle, but it’s the casinos that mostly cash in. This doesn’t stop the 36 million pilgrims who travel annually to this neon oasis, searching for some indefinable fulfillment, away from home, untethered from their habitual routines and inhibitions, a little off-balance, spending money like the water that is rapidly disappearing in this overbuilt desert.
Las Vegas always feels a little like Wall Street on steroids—or is it the other way around? This past Saturday, October 8, more that 1,000 people made this point intentionally or not as they brought the Occupy movement to the Strip. Setting off from the New York New York casino, they voiced a common frustration at the deepening economic inequality in the United States and the increasing financial pain in their city, where the home foreclosure calamity grows daily.
This demonstration, like those spreading across America in over 1,300 cities, sharpened one facet of the crisis we face today.
Two protests the next morning highlighted another one.
Peace and justice advocates caravanned north from Las Vegas along Interstate 95 on Sunday, October 9 to take action together at the Nevada National Security Site (formerly the Nevada Test Site) and Creech Air Force Base, which operates drone aircraft being used around the world.
During the last three weeks, the Bolivian indigenous movement has taken to the streets in protest against a plan to build a multinational highway running through the Amazon, which would cross indigenous territory and a national reserve. The protests, in which indiginous groups were joined by other national civil movements, now seem to be growing in momentum, to the point of becoming a true popular mobilization.
Han Han is a Chinese high school dropout who ended up penning a series of bestselling young adult novels. Since then, he’s evolved into an incisive political and social critic on 
With only a few days left until the global day of action on October 15, people on the streets of Spain are getting ready. They’re at the epicenter of demonstrations being planned in more than 70 Spanish cities for Saturday, together with 869 cities in 71 countries around the world.
A friend of mine once called Las Vegas “the Lourdes of America.” People come looking for a miracle, but it’s the casinos that mostly cash in. This doesn’t stop the 36 million pilgrims who travel annually to this neon oasis, searching for some indefinable fulfillment, away from home, untethered from their habitual routines and inhibitions, a little off-balance, spending money like the water that is rapidly disappearing in this overbuilt desert.