 The Resistance Report is a trusted and growing outlet for movement building news, analysis, interviews and editorial commentary. Creator and host Dennis Trainor, Jr was active in the Occupy movement and helped plan the Occupation of Washington, DC at Freedom Plaza. He wrote and directed the critically acclaimed documentary, American Autumn: an Occudoc, and is currently working on a documentary for Move To Amend. Produced by Acronym TV in conjunction with Popular Resistance, you can find The Resistance Report right here every Saturday at noon (EST). A full archive of episodes is below.
By Eleanor Goldfield for Occupy – Resisting the Black Snake in the Bayous: L’eau est la vie – water is life. From the deep bayous and what’s left of the Louisiana wetlands, we take a look at the indigenous led camp standing in the way of the Bayou Bridge Pipeline – the benignly named crude oil project threatening huge swaths of waterways and some of the state’s last line of defense against climate change. We trace the money that makes the pipelines flow, not only in Louisiana but in Pennsylvania and Florida as well. We sit down and talk with Bold Louisiana state director Cherri Foytlin about her continued fight to protect her land, her family and her community against the destructive practices of both big oil and their paid off politicians. Unfortunately for them, she has no plans to step aside – and we can and should all be inspired by her fight.
By Eleanor Goldfield for Occupy – According to Professor Guy McPherson, we have 10 years or less to live on this planet. His specific brand of doomsday-ism is couched in the theory that no other climate scientists are recognizing the complete picture – taking all the ills together, from permafrost melt to ocean acidification. While it’s odd that no other climate scientists are lining up behind that theory, this segment is less about the time argument and more about how you spend that time. McPherson suggests that because of this limited window of life we have left, we should all pursue “a life of excellence.” Stopping short of actually explaining what that means, McPherson suggests that we let go of hope, live with death in mind but also try to enjoy life as much as we can. Well, I call bullshit on this specific brand of nihilistic doomsdayerism. Fighting for a better world is not just about 70 years from now. It’s about today – and however much time we have left, regardless of climate change or whether we die tomorrow in a freak boating accident. Dissecting doomsday-ism and inspiring the fight on Act Out!
By Eleanor Goldfield for Act Out! The G20 has historically been a meeting of bankers and finance ministers. Indeed, it wasn’t until 2008 that the first summit was held in Washington, DC as the global financial crisis pressed world leaders to at least make it look like they cared about the fate of millions. Today, the G20 is basically a vapid soiree where the G7 and BRICS nations shake hands, smile for the camera, take in a concert and essentially change nothing but time zones. Camp White Pine is a forest defense camp currently engaging in a large scale tree-sit in central Pennsylvania in order to combat the Mariner East 2 Pipeline. This 350+ mile long proposed pipeline would carry natural gas liquids through Ohio, West Virginia and Pennsylvania to an export facility on the east coast.
By Eleanor Goldfield for Act Out! Net Neutrality ensures that big telecoms like Verizon, AT&T, Comcast etc. can’t slow down or restrict your access to any site. If you want to visit my show page via occupy.com, they can’t stop you. If you want to watch porn or cat videos – hopefully not any combination of the two – ISP’s or internet service providers can’t stop you, or demand that you pay more in order to access Mr. Whiskers knocking his food off a table like a boss. Democratic Confederalism may sound yawn-worthy but it is in fact what has successfully stopped ISIS from advancing into Northern Syria and done so while simultaneously building a flat-structure, democratic, feminist society. Known as the Rojava region, this predominantly Kurdish area of Northern Syria has been home to both oppression and resistance for decades, if not hundreds of years. It is here that the Kurdish resistance movement started manifesting progressive alternatives to the capitalist patriarchy already in the 80s.
By Lee Camp for Redacted Tonight. In this episode of Redacted Tonight, host Lee Camp tears Amazon and CEO Jeff Bezos a new one. He explains the true “cost of convenience” when it comes to the online retailer behemoth. Amazon is quickly taking over our lives and homes. It may sound extreme, but now with their $14 billion purchase of Whole Foods, Amazon is leaping into the “IRL” sphere. The plan is most likely to induce more people to pay to become Prime members by offering deals on food. Amazon controls a huge amount of online sales traffic and now they’re getting into the food sphere, combine that with the reality that they have a $600 million contract with the CIA and that Bezos owns the Washington Post, and it’s certainly time to push back and try to divest. Next, Lee presents a new segment called, “What You Won’t Hear.” He delves into stories the mainstream media may cover, but definitely won’t give you the full story. He talks about the police officer’s acquittal in the Philando Castile murder trial, as well as a massive carbon-sucking machine in Switzerland. In the second half of the show, correspondent John F. O’Donnell joins Lee at the desk to break down a new report by the NGO, Save the Children, entitled, “The End of Childhood Index.” The international child’s rights organization did a comparative analysis of 172 countries to determine the best and worst countries to be a child. Where the US ranks will certainly surprise you. Finally, correspondent Naomi Karavani files a scathing report about the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA). Naomi delves into a botched drug operation the DEA embarked upon in Mexico. They recklessly shared confidential information that led directly to a massacre. A Propublica report, which largely went under the radar, spotlights the DEA’s role. Naomi also highlights an incident with the DEA in Honduras where they misled congress and the DOJ about fatal shootings.
By Lee Camp for Redacted Tonight. Redacted Tonight host Lee Camp has the latest on an impending crisis robots are causing. As jobs are rapidly becoming automated, what will it mean the society of workers made of flesh and blood and not controlled by a processor? Robots are climbing the ladder and will soon take over more mortal jobs. Though it may not be hard to imagine that cashiers will disappear, with self check out already around the corner, there are also white collar jobs at risk. With this imminent job loss, what on Earth can we do as a society to take on skyrocketing unemployment? Lee gets into why the growth of artificial intelligence doesn’t necessarily mean the end of the world if we harness these changes the right way. Then to Europe.
By Lee Camp for Redacted Tonight. If you’ve noticed lately that corporations have been pillaging our world’s ever-dwindling natural resources as if they’re a Vegas style buffet while placing a premium on food, shelter, and medicine, then congratulations! You’ve seen that our country’s free-market capitalist system is reinforcing false scarcity–creating scarcity where there is none in order to make us pay more than we should for basic necessities. Advertising is a perfect example of how our economy reinforces your insecurities in order to make you buy and consume things you don’t really need, all while making corporations even richer. But by way of technology, there is hope that some human beings still want to create systems where everyone can benefit instead of a select few. Lee Camp has this and more on the latest Redacted Tonight.
By Lee Camp for Redacted Tonight. Following bombings in Afghanistan and Syria, the media has become rather fluent in the “language of war.” Turn on your TV and you’ll be witness to government and mainstream media outlets trying to soften and normalize barbaric bombing by using manipulative words to describe it all. The mainstream media’s use of words like “cruising” and “loitering” to describe weapons that maim and destroy innocent people only diminishes the gravity of warfare. And at its core, the media’s propping up the technology of weapons, such as the Tomahawk missile, are essentially a massive, glorified advertisement for waging more war. What’s more, networks like MSNBC and Fox News both gush over the missile strikes and even suggest that these actions make Trump look more presidential. Redacted Tonight host Lee Camp shows how it should be hardly a surprise that in a time of war, corporate-funded media outlets are lacking in the humanity department.
By Abby Martin for The Empire Files. While the Israeli state espouses multiculturalism and diversity, it oppresses not just the Palestinian population, but also any Black person within its borders. From warehousing African asylum seekers in giant prison camps, to criminalizing and carrying out eugenics programs against its Ethiopian Jewish citizens, Israel’s treatment of Black people reveals that the Zionist project is not just about Jewish supremacy, but also white supremacy. In this on-the-ground investigation, Abby Martin talks to Osman Ali, a refugee from Darfur, at Holot prison camp about the treatment of refugees by the government, and Tehune Maharat, an Ethiopian Jewish activist whose cousin was killed in an apparent hate crime by Israeli police, about the rampant and institutional racism in the country.
By Lee Camp for Redacted Tonight. There is a specific type of global mind control other than the mainstream media that grips us daily without us realizing: Corporate advertisements. They have a powerful influence on our emotions and esteem to the point that we adopt whatever they peddle as our own beliefs. And a recent Starbucks commercial demonstrates how the corporate-coffee giant uses more than caffeine to control your brain. What was meant to be a touchy-feely campaign from Starbucks to unite American coffee consumers over good times and bad instead served as a sobering reminder of the ills of capitalism, corporate pollution of the Earth and economic inequality. They may manipulate you into believing they’ve got your back, but what corporations like Starbucks really got is your money–and your morals. Self-professed coffee drinker Lee Camp lays into the gods of the frappucino and more in the latest Redacted Tonight.
By Staff of Popular Resistance – There’s a reason we ended up with ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson as Secretary of State and we ALMOST ended up with a Labor Secretary in Andy Puzder who prefers robots to humans. The answer is simple: We, the taxpayer, have always subsidized the costs of corporations to slowly kill us while making the pockets of corporate CEOs fatter. A closer look at fast food production in this country shows exactly that. Animal agriculture industries, such as factory farming, that contribute to us eating those artery clogging cheeseburgers come at the added expense of increased water and air pollution. We are paying the price for this environmental destruction literally and figuratively.
By Lee Camp for Redacted Tonight. During a CNN Town Hall, Democratic House Rep Nancy Pelosi was caught off guard when a young man told her that more than half of Millennials aren’t exactly fans of capitalism. He had the stats to back it up: A Spring 2016 Harvard Institute of Politics poll of 3,000 Millennials found that 51 percent of them held this view. It’s no surprise this many Millennials shun capitalism given their massive student loan debts and difficulty in finding high paying jobs and affordable housing, among other struggles. But when he asked her if Dems could go farther left of right-wing views on capitalism, Pelosi’s reply only proves that her party needs to acknowledge how capitalism is destroying the world and its future if they want any hope of appealing to what could become one of the largest voting blocs in America. Lee Camp digs into Pelosi’s faux pas and more on the latest episode of Redacted Tonight.
By Staff of Popular Resistance – If Donald Trump’s recent threat of military action against Iran sounds familiar to you, then It should. Democrats in Congress already beat him to it before Trump’s tiny hands could even grace the bible at his swearing-in ceremony. How did they do this? By creating a resolution in January to threaten military action against Iran if they tried to obtain nuclear weapons. Unfortunately, what’s being touted as a move for U.S. safety and security is starting to sound eerily similar to the threat to invade a country to find deadly weapons that turned out to never exist (think Iraq). So what’s the REAL reason behind this threat of military action? All signs seem to point both underground and in America’s wallets.
By Eleanor Goldfield for Act Out! Conveniently signed into law on December 23rd, the benignly named Cultural Engagement Center just seeks to “recognize, understand, expose, and counter foreign state and non-state propaganda and disinformation efforts aimed at undermining United States national security interests.” Or as journalist Rick Sterling put it, it sets aside “160 million dollars to combat any “propaganda” that challenges Official Washington’s version of reality.” And, yes, bees are dying. And for those of us who enjoy eating food, that’s bad news. Enter the solitary bee. This means local bees pollinating local plants and crops, promoting the overall ecological health of the entire area they populate. Charlie Mohr of Crown Bees explains more about how we can save the bees, our food and our land with solitary bees.
By Eleanor Goldfield for ActOut! Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, Trump thinks climate change is a Chinese hoax. So in light of recent reports from NASA climate scientists, which for example reveal a gigantic rift in the Antarctic’s Larsen ice sheet, Trump is gutting their research and plans to put climate change deniers at the helm of the EPA. Once the ice sheet is set adrift, it will be equal to the size of Delaware. An ice shelf on the West side of the Antarctic is breaking up from the inside, which is highly unusual. Temperatures in the Arctic are record-breaking. All of this adds up to warmer ocean temperatures and higher predicted sea levels. Scientists are calling this a climate emergency. There is only one thing standing in the way of continued climate destruction…
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