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Social Change

‘No Justice, No Peace’: Clarity Of Purpose, Warning To Ruling Class

June 18, 2015 Glen Ford, www.blackagendareport.com , , , ,
By Glen Ford in Black Agenda Report - The logic of the emerging movement is Black self-determination – the principle that Black people have the inherent human right to determine their own destiny – which, in the immediate sense, means control over how they should be policed, and by whom. The venerable slogan “No Justice – No Peace” has served as a workhorse of the current protest, and would be an ideal organizing principle if the implications of the slogan were fully understood, rather than simply mouthed. The slogan takes the political position that the price that Power must pay for continued injustice against Black people is the loss of civil peace. It is a vow by the movement to transform the crisis that is inflicted on Black people into a generalized crisis for the larger society, and for those who currently rule.

New NASA Data Show World Is Running Out Of Water

June 17, 2015 Todd C. Frankel, www.washingtonpost.com , , ,
By Todd C. Frankel in The Washington Post - The world’s largest underground aquifers – a source of fresh water for hundreds of millions of people — are being depleted at alarming rates, according to new NASA satellite data that provides the most detailed picture yet of vital water reserves hidden under the Earth’s surface. Twenty-one of the world’s 37 largest aquifers — in locations from India and China to the United States and France — have passed their sustainability tipping points, meaning more water was removed than replaced during the decade-long study period, researchers announced Tuesday. Thirteen aquifers declined at rates that put them into the most troubled category. The researchers said this indicated a long-term problem that’s likely to worsen as reliance on aquifers grows.

Organizing Or Mobilizing?

June 17, 2015 Gibrán Rivera, www.interactioninstitute.org , ,
By Gibrán Rivera in Interaction Institute - Organizers… Bring people together, they organize people to address whatever emerges as the people’s priorities. The organizers focus on listening, building community, building trust and building respect. Organizers welcome conversation, strive for genuine diversity, push for distributed ownership of the group, and know group process. Organizers default toward consensus, need to make sure all views are heard and want to keep everyone engaged. Mobilizers … Work with people in order to focus on a set of steps to get something done. Mobilizers focus on moving people to act. Mobilizers push and pull the people they can to take a sequence of steps. Mobilizers attract and sustain engagement by demonstrating momentum and direction. Mobilizers default toward pushing to the next step.

Wave Of Protests Spread To Scandal-Weary Honduras & Guatemala

June 16, 2015 Elisabeth Malkin, www.nytimes.com , , , ,
By Elisabeth Malkin in The New York Times - In Guatemala, angry citizens marched under pelting rain, undeterred. In Honduras, they carried torches at dusk. A wave of protests against corruption scandals that is sweeping across Latin America has reached Central America. The presidents of Guatemala and Honduras face allegations that people close to them have conspired to siphon money from threadbare public health systems or maneuvered to cheat the state out of tax revenue. Although neither President Otto Pérez Molina of Guatemala nor President Juan Orlando Hernández of Honduras has been directly accused, growing numbers of protesters are demanding their resignations. Central Americans are no strangers to such malfeasance, of course. Former presidents and their associates in Costa Rica, Nicaragua and Guatemala have been tried for corruption by their successors.

Ecuador’s Citizens’ Revolution: Retaking Power From The Old Elites

June 15, 2015 TeleSur, www.facebook.com , , ,
By TeleSur - After five years in office, the government has significantly boosted economic growth to the extent that it is one of the best in the region, at an average of 4.2 percent over the past seven years. That success was achieved in spite of the fact Correa came to office on the eve of the global financial crisis, and Ecuador is hampered by not having its own currency. Central to stronger growth was the tripling of social investment, which now accounts for 15 percent of the country's GDP, along with safeguards to ensure the wealth is being successfully redistributed to benefit all Ecuadoreans. As a result, the poverty index has fallen by one-third, with over 1.1 million lifted out of poverty since 2007.

Riots And Social Change

June 13, 2015 Jonathan Chait, www.nymag.com , ,
By Jonathan Chait in NY Mag - The recent spate of protests against police brutality have changed the way the left thinks about rioting. The old liberal idea, which distinguished between peaceful protests (good) and rioting (bad), has given way to a more radical analysis. “Riots work,” insists George Ciccariello-Maher in Salon. “But despite the obviousness of the point, an entire chorus of media, police, and self-appointed community leaders continue to try to convince us otherwise, hammering into our heads a narrative of a nonviolence that has never worked on its own, based on a mythical understanding of the Civil Rights Movement.” Vox’s German Lopez, while acknowledging the downside of random violence, argues, “Riots can lead to real, substantial change.”

5 Ways Powerful People Trick You Into Hating Protesters

June 13, 2015 David Wong, www.cracked.com ,
By David Wong in Cracked - Let's say that tomorrow you are elected Secret Ruler of the USA, a position that gives you total power over the government, economy, and the culture at large -- everything that hippies refer to as "the system." Now, your first job is to not get beheaded by rioting peasants, which means your first job is really to maintain "stability" (i.e., "keeping things mostly the way they are"). Immediately you'll find that you're facing a never-ending stream of protests from disgruntled groups who say they're being treated unfairly or otherwise getting left out -- this group over here is upset that somebody got abused by the police; this other bunch is demanding better wages or something. How do you handle it?

Hedges: We Are In A Revolutionary Moment

June 6, 2015 Elias Isquith, www.salon.com , ,
By Elias Isquith in Salon - It’s with us already, but with this caveat: it is what Gramsci calls interregnum, this period where the ideas that buttress the old ruling elite no longer hold sway, but we haven’t articulated something to take its place. That’s what that essay I quote by Alexander Berkman, “The Invisible Revolution,” talks about. He likens it to a pot that’s beginning to boil. So it’s already taking place, although it’s subterranean. And the facade of power — both the physical facade of power and the ideological facade of power — appears to remain intact. But it has less and less credibility. There are all sorts of neutral indicators that show that. Low voter turnout, the fact that Congress has an approval rating of 7 percent, that polls continually reflect a kind of pessimism about where we are going, that many of the major systems that have been set in place — especially in terms of internal security — have no popularity at all.

Overcoming The Barriers To Developing A Strategy To Win

June 5, 2015 Chris Dixon, www.writingwithmovements.com , , ,
By Chris Dixon in Writing With Movements - What exactly is strategy? Rahula Janowski, a longtime activist in San Francisco, summed it up well: “What’s your goal? What can you do to get there? What are your plans to get there? That’s your strategy.” In this sense, strategy is something we can develop on many different timelines (from days to decades) and scales (from small groups to global movements). In all cases, however, a strategy is a plan or series of plans for moving us from where we are to where we’d like to be. A major problem in left movements in North America is that we tend to do this sort of planning so infrequently. This, unfortunately, is what a lot of left political activity looks like. As we struggle, Tracy emphasized, there are no guarantees, but we can improve our possibilities of getting what we want if we’re intentional about what we’re doing. It comes down to a question, he said: “Do you want to have a chance at winning something?”

When A Pipeline Comes To Your Town…

June 4, 2015 Lee Stewart, www.beyondextremeenergy.org , ,
By Lee Stewart in Beyond Extreme Energy - The presentation below prepared by Ted Cady serves as a tool in our social movements to share and expand our knowledge necessary to fight back. The presentation shares an understanding of the market, FERC and environmental regulations, the infrastructural changes to made when a pipeline comes to your town, and the vast array of associated risks to the environment and health. Furthermore, the presentation provides a collection of tactics and recommendations that the movement can use to in the struggle for environmental justice and the protection of our communities. The presentation was deilvered at the recent #StoptheFERCus actions. Much gratitude to Ted and Ann Nau for the presentation and the PowerPoint resource, and to everyone who attended as well.

As Latin America Moves Left It Successfully Confronts Hunger

June 3, 2015 Marianela Jarroud, www.ipsnews.net , , , , ,
By Marianela Jarroud in IPS News - The Latin American and Caribbean region is the first in the world to reach the two global targets for reducing hunger. Nevertheless, more than 34 million people still go hungry. “This is the region that best understood the problem of hunger, and it’s the region that has put the greatest emphasis on policies to assist vulnerable groups. The results achieved have been in accordance with that emphasis,” FAO regional representative Raúl Benítez told IPS. According to The State of Food Insecurity in the World (SOFI) 2015 report, released Wednesday by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), hunger affects 5.5 percent of the population of Latin America – or 34.3 million people. That means the region has met the target of halving the proportion of hungry people from 1990 levels, established by the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) adopted by the international community in 2000, with a 2015 deadline.

Urban Electoral Revolt In Spain Leads To New Urban Agenda

May 29, 2015 Carlos Declós, www.roarmag.org , , , ,
In Barcelona, the prominent anti-evictions activist Ada Colau won the city’s mayoral race. In Madrid, once a stronghold of the Popular Party, the former judge Manuela Carmena also has a chance to govern, depending on whether her platform and the deteriorating Socialist party are willing to strike a deal. In the four largest cities, it is quite possible that the mayor will belong to neither of the two major parties. The same is true in Galicia’s major cities, Santiago and A Corunha. In Cádiz, Spain’s unemployment capital, another new, anti-austerity platform finished a close second. Much of the right-wing Spanish press is already attributing these spectacular results to a cult of personality around the people leading these platforms, accompanied by the typical references to populism and Venezuela, with an occasional shout-out to North Korea for extra flavor (as if the resort to these arguments weren’t the epitome of populist rhetoric).

Marching On Monsanto And Its Government Protectors

May 28, 2015 Systemic Disorder, www.systemicdisorder.wordpress.com , , , ,
Controlling and knowing what we eat should be a fundamental human right beyond questioning. That it is not sent hundreds of thousands into the streets of cities around the world on May 23, the third annual March on Monsanto. People on every continent save Antarctica participated in a March on Monsanto — demonstrations took place in 452 cites in 48 countries in opposition to Monsanto Company’s attempt to gain control over the world’s food. More than 200 U.S. cities, 47 Canadian cities, 22 French cities and 13 Argentine cities were among the places hosting organized marches. RT, in an online roundup of events around the world, also noted that protestors in Berlin, one of 10 German demonstrations, made connections among health concerns even though there is no commercial cultivation of food containing genetically engineered organisms in the country, and GMO bans exist in nine of Germany’s 16 states and in hundreds of municipalities.

Matt Taibbi: Why Baltimore Blew Up

May 27, 2015 Matt Taibbi, www.rollingstone.com , , , , ,
When Baltimore exploded in protests a few weeks ago following the unexplained paddy-wagon death of a young African-American man named Freddie Gray, America responded the way it usually does in a race crisis: It changed the subject. Instead of using the incident to talk about a campaign of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of illegal searches and arrests across decades of discriminatory policing policies, the debate revolved around whether or not the teenagers who set fire to two West Baltimore CVS stores after Gray's death were "thugs," or merely wrongheaded criminals. From Eric Garner to Michael Brown to Akai Gurley to Tamir Rice to Walter Scott and now Freddie Gray, there have now been so many police killings of African-American men and boys in the past calendar year or so that it's been easy for both the media and the political mainstream to sell us on the idea that the killings are the whole story.

The Recipe For A Municipal Movement

May 26, 2015 Guerilla Translation, www.guerrillatranslation.org , , , , ,
Municipal Recipes is a documentary about how we’ve gotten to this point, where citizens from new political subjectivities are experimenting with organisational models in order to manage institutions. The documentary features people linked to various social movements and the new municipal “confluence platforms” that are taking root in Spain. They include: Gala Pin, from the Mortgage Victims Platform(PAH) and the municipal candidacy Barcelona En Comú; Pablo Carmona, from the Fundación de los Comunes and Ahora Madrid; Marta Cruells, from Barcelona en Comú; Francisco Jurado, fromDemocracia 4.0 and Open Euribor; and Guillermo Zapata, from the Patio Maravillas social center and Ahora Madrid. As they share a meal together, they discuss the various questions and issues that frame the historical moment, trying to push forward a new world that is opening up.
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