Revolution

Americans Consensus: Fix The Corrupt System

July 5, 2014 Patrick Caddell, Bob Perkins, and Scott Miller, www.huffingtonpost.com Organize! America, Elections, Politics, Revolution

July 4, 1776: In the shadow of the hangman's noose the signers of the Declaration of Independence ended their document that would change the world with these words -- "we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our Sacred Honor." July 4, 2014: In a different but no less significant crisis, the American people are being summoned to reclaim that first Revolution. The challenge of this moment is to redeem the promise of America, to revitalize the American Dream and to restore the People's rightful place as the sovereign rulers of America. Let's be blunt: America is in trouble. We are in danger of losing the American dream. That's not just the opinion of the three of us. It's the conviction of most Americans. Over the past six months, we have conducted an intense national research project among likely voters of all parties, and we are releasing the results now, for Independence Day, 2014. The battle lines of the new political order are emerging. When presented with the proposition that "the real struggle for America is not between Democrats and Republicans but mainstream America and the ruling political elites," over 66% of voters agree.

Most Patriotic Float: Activists, Whistleblowers And Muckrackers

July 4, 2014 Rivera Sun, www.PopularResistance.org Resist! Activism, Democracy, Revolution

Activists, whistleblowers, and muckrakers received an unexpected honor when Love-In-Action Taos marched in the Arroyo Seco Fourth of July Parade. Love-In-Action's Unsung Heroes procession, joined by members of CODEPINK Taos, featured five giant puppets of Rosa Parks, Sadako Sasaki, Amy Goodman, Dolores Huerta, and Winona LaDuke; over seventy prayer flag banners honoring those who work for social change, large banners and signs, and informational fliers to hand out to the crowd. To the marchers surprise, they were awarded a prize for "Most Patriot" by the Arroyo Seco Merchants Association - a decision that brought whoops of joy and tears to their eyes. It is rare that activists, whistleblowers, and muckrakers are acknowledged for the important roles they play in our society. As the Rolling Rebellion for Real Democracy kicks off, Love-In-Action Taos was honored to march in support of the long lineage of change makers who have stood up for democracy and social justice throughout US history.

Why It’s Way Too Soon To Give Up On The Arab Spring

June 30, 2014 Juan Cole, www.latimes.com Educate! Arab Spring, Egypt, Elections, Middle East, Revolution, Youth

Three and a half years ago, the world was riveted by massive crowds of youths mobilizing in Cairo's Tahrir Square to demand an end to Egypt's dreary police state. We watched transfixed as a movement first ignited in Tunisia spread from one part of Egypt to another, and then from country to country across the region. Before it was over, four presidents-for-life had been toppled and the region's remaining dictators were unsettled. The young Arabs who made the recent revolutions are ... distinctive: substantially more urban, literate, media-savvy and wired than their parents and grandparents. - Some 42 months later, in most of the Middle East and North Africa, the bright hopes for more personal liberties and an end to political and economic stagnation championed by those young people have been dashed. Instead, some Arab countries have seen counterrevolutions, while others are engulfed in internecine conflicts and civil wars, creating Mad Max-like scenes of postapocalyptic horror. But keep one thing in mind: The rebellions of the last three years were led by Arab millennials, by young people who have decades left to come into their own. Don't count them out yet.

Should Citizens Have A Right To Rebel?

June 26, 2014 Daniel Lansberg-Rodriguez, www.theatlantic.com Resist! Democracy, Revolt, Revolution, Thailand

Thailand’s Red-Shirt and Yellow-Shirt factions don’t agree on much, but they do have one thing in common: invoking Section 69 of the now-suspended Thai Constitution, which grants citizens a “right to peacefully resist any act committed to obtain powers to rule the country by means not in accordance with the modus operandi as provided in the Constitution.” For years, during the slowly escalating crisis of protests and political polarization that eventually precipitated Thailand’s recent coup, leaders of ousted Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra’s ruling party warned against elite plots to subvert the democratic process—an outcome for which the “right to resist” served as a shield. Meanwhile, opponents of Thailand’s former government also invoked the provision, arguing that the real interruption of the constitutional order occurred with the hijacking of national institutions by a harsh and subversive majoritarian populism—one machinated from afar by the exiled billionaire Thaksin Shinawatra and his allies.

Rising People-Powered Movement Is Transforming The World

June 24, 2014 Margaret Flowers, www.kosmosjournal.org Strategize! Austerity, Climate Change, Occupy, Revolution, wealth inequality

On a snowy weekend in January, activists for social, economic and environmental justice from across the United States gathered in a Chicago union hall to plan a Global Climate Convergence: ten days of action from Earth Day to May Day. Many of these activists had never focused on the climate crisis before, being mired instead in fighting battles that loomed more immediately in their lives. Who has the capacity to worry about climate change when your community is hungry, cold, without shelter, lacks health care or is being poisoned? During that weekend meeting, we transcended the barriers that typically lead to working in narrow silos and treading water while the oceans literally and figuratively continue to rise around us. We stepped outside of our particular areas of advocacy, connected our struggles, and forged a collective effort to take action together this spring and beyond. The rallying cry was that the time has arrived to join hands and change course.

People’s Social Forums Planned Across Canada

June 24, 2014 Ana Collins, www.peoplessocialforum.org Organize! Arts, Canada, indigenous, Revolution

Indigenous histories teach us that we are all part of an intricate creation; where all beings carry their own bundle of gifts and responsibilities to creation. Our bundles help us at all times of our existence and give us tools in order to live a sustainable and fulfilling life. Creation is formed in a universal order that facilitates balance, interconnections, and happiness for all life. Essentially, creation is based on a relationship-making structure to maintain that balance and mino bemaadziwin: good way of living. The Peoples’ Social Forum, to be held in Ottawa, August 21-24, 2014, is about relationship building, bringing people together who don’t usually work together but who might be working on common causes, changing the nature of future relationships, honouring treaties, changing the structure of how things are done on this land, and respecting the teachings that the land has for us.

Want To Change The World? Read This First

June 23, 2014 Richard Heinberg, www.postcarbon.org Strategize! Anthropology, Environment, History, Revolution

History is often made by strong personalities wielding bold new political, economic, or religious doctrines. Yet any serious effort to understand how and why societies change requires examination not just of leaders and ideas, but also of environmental circumstances. The ecological context (climate, weather, and the presence or absence of water, good soil, and other resources) may either present or foreclose opportunities for those wanting to shake up the social world. This suggests that if you want to change society—or are interested in aiding or evaluating the efforts of others to do so—some understanding of exactly how environmental circumstances affect such efforts could be extremely helpful. Perhaps the most important key to grasping the relationship between the environment and processes of societal change was articulated by American anthropologist Marvin Harris (1927-2001). From the very beginning of efforts to systematically study human societies in the 18th and 19th centuries, it had been clear that there were strong correlations between how societies obtain their food (whether by hunting and gathering, horticulture, agriculture, animal herding, or fishing), and their social structures and beliefs about the world.

Open Source Revolution Will Conquer The 1%

June 20, 2014 Nafeez Ahmed, www.theguardian.com Strategize! Internet, Occupy, Revolution

Former CIA officer Robert David Steele: "The preconditions of revolution exist in the UK, and most western countries. The number of active pre-conditions is quite stunning, from elite isolation to concentrated wealth to inadequate socialisation and education, to concentrated land holdings to loss of authority to repression of new technologies especially in relation toenergy, to the atrophy of the public sector and spread of corruption, to media dishonesty, to mass unemployment of young men and on and on and on." So why isn't it happening yet? "Preconditions are not the same as precipitants. We are waiting for our Tunisian fruit seller. The public will endure great repression, especially when most media outlets and schools are actively aiding the repressive meme of 'you are helpless, this is the order of things.' When we have a scandal so powerful that it cannot be ignored by the average Briton or American, we will have a revolution that overturns the corrupt political systems in both countries . . . "

Representative Democracy Is Not Working, What Will?

June 17, 2014 Jerome Roos, www.roarmag.org Educate! Democracy, Revolution

We may be at the beginning of a great transformation in how humans govern themselves. There is certainly a need for change as what currently exists is not working. Recently there have been reports about how government no longer represents the people but represents a small minority of the wealthy (see these three reports here, here and here). Academics are beginning to describe the United States as an oligarchy, plutocracy or managed democracy. We have highlighted how representative democracy often does the opposite of what super-majorities of the people want (and this and this). The people see this lack of representation and turn off -- half do not register to vote and in most elections tiny minorities of registered voters bother to vote.

Then They Came For The Revolutionaries

June 17, 2014 Bel Trew, www.foreignpolicy.com Strategize! Activists, Egypt, Law, Military, Police, Prison, Revolution

Every night when Egyptian activist Mohamed Kamel goes home, there is a man outside his building who follows him until he enters the doorway. The figure doesn't speak; he doesn't leave his post. He just keeps watch. "I smile at him and tell him, 'Please do come up and have dinner with me,'" said the 38-year-old, Cairo-based high school manager. "What else can I do?" Kamel is part of April 6 Youth Movement, a revolutionary group founded in 2008 to support striking industrial workers. Its members, estimated by the organization to number in the tens of thousands, were also a driving force behind the 2011 revolution that toppled Hosni Mubarak. But now, despite having supported the ouster of Islamist President Mohamed Morsi, the group finds itself under fire from the military-backed government in Cairo. Last week, an Egyptian court outlawed the movement after a lawsuit accused it of espionage and tainting the image of the state. The group's most prominent voices, meanwhile, have been thrown in jail. In December, founder Ahmed Maher, 32, and Mohamed Adel, 25, were sentenced to three years in prison for participating in an illegal rally and allegedly assaulting a police officer.

Egypt’s April 6 Youth Movement Fears New Military Rule

June 14, 2014 Louise Osborne, www.occupy.com Resist! Egypt, Military, Protest, Revolution, Youth

In a quiet cafe in Cairo’s hip Zamalek quarter, Ahmad Abd Allah sits on a sofa hunched over a laptop. A shisha pipe in hand, the 34-year-old types quickly, peering intensely at the computer screen. His mobile buzzes and he picks it up distractedly, his eyebrows furrowed as he types a message before taking another puff on the pipe. “We’re having a protest tonight,” he explains, adding that around 5,000 youth are expected to attend the demonstration despite the threat of arrest and imprisonment under Egypt's new anti-protest law. Allah is a member of the April 6 Youth Movement that was instrumental in ousting dictator Hosni Mubarak three years ago. Now, the rush of those heady days has faded to disappointment. On June 8, former army chief Abdel Fattah al-Sisi was inaugurated as Egypt's president, a position he won by a landslide in a vote that many viewed as a sham – and others saw as a victory of stability over freedom. The resurgence of the military in Egypt has also made Allah and his fellow youth activists outlaws. In the run-up to the late May election, an Egyptian court banned the April 6 movement on charges of espionage and defaming the government – what Allah says are trumped up excuses to silence the opposition. “It’s crazy," he said.

Commonbound: New Economy For A New Society

June 14, 2014 Aaron Cantu, www.truth-out.org Create! Corporatism, Democracy, New Economy, Revolution

I landed at "CommonBound: Moving Together Toward a New Economy" in Boston, Massachusetts with the dilemma of having to critically report on a movement in which I've wanted involve myself for years. The conference was organized by the New Economy Coalition, a nonprofit with its own small full-time staff that works to connect people across the country operating in the "new economy" - worker-owned businesses and cooperatives, credit unions, community land trusts and other "post-capitalist" endeavors - in the hopes that this widespread structural rearrangement can form the backbone of a social, political and economic revolution. Certain aspects of the "new economy" are not so new: living in harmony with the environment, for example - an oft-repeated value among the 700 people who attended the conference last weekend - is hardly a new idea to many indigenous cultures (some of which were represented prominently at CommonBound). And even in a Western context, Karl Marx praised the federation of worker cooperatives under the 1871 Paris Commune as a vision of "'possible' communism," which was strikingly similar to CommonBound’s vision of a decentralized, worker-owned economy facilitated by friendly municipal and state governments.

DoD Preparing For Social Movements Since 2008

June 12, 2014 Nafeez Ahmed, www.theguardian.com Educate! Arab Spring, Occupy, Revolution, Wars and Militarism

Social science is being militarised to develop 'operational tools' to target peaceful activists and protest movements: A US Department of Defense (DoD) research programme is funding universities to model the dynamics, risks and tipping points for large-scale civil unrest across the world, under the supervision of various US military agencies. The multi-million dollar programme is designed to develop immediate and long-term "warfighter-relevant insights" for senior officials and decision makers in "the defense policy community," and to inform policy implemented by "combatant commands." Launched in 2008 – the year of the global banking crisis – the DoD 'Minerva Research Initiative' partners with universities "to improve DoD's basic understanding of the social, cultural, behavioral, and political forces that shape regions of the world of strategic importance to the US."

The Rules Of Revolt

June 9, 2014 Chris Hedges, www.truthdig.com Strategize! China, Revolution

There are some essential lessons we can learn from the student occupation of Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, which took place 25 years ago. The 1989 protests began as a demonstration by university students to mourn the death of Hu Yaobang, the reformist Communist Party chief who had been forced out by Deng Xiaoping. The protests swiftly expanded to include demands for an end to corruption, for press freedom and for democracy. At their height, perhaps a million people were in the square. The protests were crushed on the night of June 3-4 when some 200,000 soldiers, backed by tanks and armored personnel carriers, attacked. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of unarmed demonstrators were killed.

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