CIVIL OBEDIENCE: “Matt Damon reads from Howard Zinn’s speech “The Problem is Civil Obedience” (November 1970)
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Category Archives: Civil Disobedience
CRIMINALIZATION OF DEMOCRATIC DISSENT: “The Revolutionaries in Our Midst” / Chris Hedges
[…]
On Friday the 28-year-old activist will appear for sentencing in the Southern District Court of New York in Manhattan. After having made a plea agreement, he faces the possibility of a 10-year sentence for hacking into the Texas-based private security firm Strategic Forecasting Inc., or Stratfor, which does work for the Homeland Security Department, the Marine Corps, the Defense Intelligence Agency and numerous corporations including Dow Chemical and Raytheon.
[…]
Hammond turned the pilfered information over to the website WikiLeaks and Rolling Stone and other publications. The 3 million email exchanges, once made public, exposed the private security firm’s infiltration, monitoring and surveillance of protesters and dissidents, especially in the Occupy movement, on behalf of corporations and the national security state. And, perhaps most important, the information provided chilling evidence that anti-terrorism laws are being routinely used by the federal government to criminalize nonviolent, democratic dissent and falsely link dissidents to international terrorist organizations. Hammond sought no financial gain. He got none.
[…]
Freedom of the press and legal protection for those who expose government abuses and lies have been obliterated by the corporate state.
Related articles
- Prominent figures voice support for hacktivist Jeremy Hammond (wikileaks-forum.com)
- Hacktivist Jeremy Hammond is championed for his actions (news.cnet.com)
- The War on Truth: Jeremy Hammond Political Prisoner (globalclarity.wordpress.com)
- The Revolution of the Mind is Underway (rinf.com)
APATHY: “The Silence of Our Friends”
h/t: Do Something
CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE: “Outside of the Russian Embassy in Stockholm, Sweden!”
h/t: Swedish
CIVIL LIBERTIES: “Exercising the Right to Peaceably Assemble in a Red State”
JUSTICE: “Statement by Julian Assange after One Year in Ecuadorian Embassy”
It has now been a year since I entered this embassy and sought refuge from persecution.
As a result of that decision, I have been able to work in relative safety from a US espionage investigation.
But today, Edward Snowden’s ordeal is just beginning.
Two dangerous runaway processes have taken root in the last decade, with fatal consequences for democracy.
Government secrecy has been expanding on a terrific scale.
Simultaneously, human privacy has been secretly eradicated.
A few weeks ago, Edward Snowden blew the whistle on an ongoing program – involving the Obama administration, the intelligence community and the internet services giants – to spy on everyone in the world.
As if by clockwork, he has been charged with espionage by the Obama administration.
The US government is spying on each and every one of us, but it is Edward Snowden who is charged with espionage for tipping us off.
It is getting to the point where the mark of international distinction and service to humanity is no longer the Nobel Peace Prize, but an espionage indictment from the US Department of Justice.
Edward Snowden is the eighth leaker to be charged with espionage under this president.
h/t: WikiLeaks
CAPITALISM: Interview / Richard Wolff on Challenging Capitalism in His New Book, “Occupy the Economy”
Can we challenge capitalism and prevail, considering that the top one percent control 50% of the available capital and the top five percent some 70% of the nation’s private funds? Richard Wolff is a closely followed Truthout contributor on economics. Currently, you can obtain his just-released “Occupy the Economy: Challenging Capitalism” directly from Truthout. If you want to know about alternatives to the current destructive course of our economy and how we, as a nation, got to this point, get your copy of “Occupy the Economy” by clicking here.
The following is an interview with Richard Wolff by Truthout staff member Matt Renner.
Matt Renner: In your introduction to the book, you discuss New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s “cleanliness” excuse for clearing the original Occupy Wall Street encampment at Liberty Square. Why do you think so many public officials and right-wing pundits describe the occupiers as “unclean”?
Richard D. Wolff: Their problem has been, and continues to be, that they have no response to Occupy’s basic attack on the inequity and antidemocratic social conditions summarized in the confrontation of, “1 percent against 99 percent.” They know that the vast majority of Americans feel the truth of Occupy’s social criticism, experience it in their lives, and sympathize with protest against and efforts to change a system with such unjust outcomes. So, they can refute little and need instead to distract public opinion from what Occupy focuses on.
One way to do that is to assert the existence of and then condemn some other quality or dimension of Occupy. In Bloomberg’s pathetic example, the best he and his advisers could come up with was a reference to Zuccotti Park as being “unclean” so as to then position the mayor and the police as militant janitors. Everyone who knows even a little about New York City knows that the mayor and the police preside over many filthy subway tunnels, highways, streets, empty lots and abandoned buildings without doing anything to clean them. So, suddenly asserting the importance of cleanliness simply exposed them to the ridicule such a position deserved. I suspect something similar is underway when others, perhaps taking their cue from Bloomberg in New York, decided to follow the cleanliness ploy.
SOCIAL ACTIVISM: Chris Hedges / Why OWS Frightens the Corporate Elite
“I don’t waste any emotional or intellectual energy on these elections. All hope is in the street. All hope is through acts of civil disobedience. We may not win, but if we’re going to win that’s the only place we are going to win.”
Book Excerpt: “Occupy the Economy: Challenging Capitalism” / Richard Wolff
[…]
Questioning and criticizing capitalism have been taboo, treated by federal authorities, immigration officials, police and most of the public alike as akin to treason. Fear-driven silence has substituted for the necessary, healthy criticism without which all institutions, systems, and traditions harden into dogmas, deteriorate into social rigidities, or worse. Protected from criticism and debate, capitalism in the United States could and has indulged all its darker impulses and tendencies. No public exposure, criticism and movement for change could arise or stand in its way as the system and its effects became ever more unequal, unjust, inefficient and oppressive. Long before the Occupy movement arose to reveal and oppose what U.S. capitalism had become, that capitalism had divided the 1 percent from the 99 percent.
[…]
Across the pages that follow, what emerges is the central importance of how capitalism very particularly organizes production: masses of working people generate corporate profits that others take and use. Tiny boards of directors, selected by and responsible to tiny groups of major shareholders, gather and control corporate profits, thereby shaping and dominating society. That tiny minority (boards and major shareholders) of those associated with and dependent upon corporations make all the basic decisions—how, what, and where to produce and what to do with the profits. The vast majority of workers within and residents surrounding those capitalist corporations must live with the results of corporate decisions. Yet they are systematically excluded from participating in making those decisions. Nothing more glaringly contradicts democracy than how capitalism organizes the corporate enterprises where working people produce the goods and services without which modern life for everyone would be impossible.
From: Occupy the Economy: Challenging Capitalism By Richard Wolff
Aphorism: On American Militarized Police Forces Killing OWS Protesters
By Madison S. Hughes (05.05.2012)
It will happen!
The military and police forces attract a great number of Hawks. Many are actually Chickenhawks, but more on that presently. They come stock with an aggressive and militant mindset. They are predominately white-wing reactionaries who are very traditional and theistic. They see the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) protesters as left-wing radicals who are very unconventional and secular. They believe the unemployed are so because they are lazy, and the have no work ethic. The OWS protesters see the downtrodden as victims of the system that, ironically, the Militarized Police Force are supporting against their own economic best interest. The contrast could not be greater.
Thus far the Militarized Police Force has demonstrated that they are, in fact, Chickenhawks. Their continual use of disproportional force against nonviolent, unarmed, passive protesters shows that they are just itching like a yeast infection to put a notch in their lipstick case.
It’s only a matter of time.
Always Question Authority 