Skip to content

Social Change

Montreal Students Occupy CEGEP With Call To Occupy Everything

April 22, 2015 Jennifer Baker, www.revolution-news.com , , ,
Students have occupied the grounds of the CEGEP Saint Laurent and released a “Manifesto for a global occupation,” that “advocates the importance of community, citizen participation, community life and solidarity” in order to illustrate “the possibility to exist otherwise.” About a hundred people set up a self determined camp outside the college beginning on Monday morning to continue to protest against the government’s austerity measures and the ways police have been violently enforcing an injunction banning recent protests. Despite a night of rain, more tents were added since this morning, according to students on the premises. Students are using the #OccupeToute & #OccupyEverything hashtags encouraging others to join them and start other occupations across the province and the world.

Piven On Syriza & Greece’s Prospects For Fighting Austerity

April 21, 2015 Alexandros Orphanides, www.inthesetimes.com , , , ,
Anybody who is running for an election wants to win enough votes to take the seat for which she or he is campaigning. To do that, they tend to be conciliatory; they don’t want to make any enemies. They want to win just enough to get over the electoral barrier. They tend to be consensual, they tend to not want to make trouble. They want to keep everyone that voted for them last time and add the few more that they need to get over the hump. Movements are very different. They are dynamic. How they grow, how they succeed is very different. Protest movements in particular do two things. They identify issues that politicians want to ignore, because the politicians want to paste together a coalition that can win. Movement leaders, on the other hand, want to identify the issues that can mobilize people.

Disability Rights Activists’ Week Of Nonviolent Protest

April 21, 2015 Janine Bertram, www.adapt.org , , ,
ADAPT activists from across the nation gathered in Washington, DC and began our week of non violent, civil disobedience. We demanded President Obama act NOW to support the Community Integration Act. We were 150 strong and 53 ADAPT warriors were arrested. Justin Dart used to call us all patriots. For me, it is like coming home to be back on the line with my ADAPT sisters and brothers. A new disability kept me home for a couple years. That and the fact that I’ve reached wise crone age sent me down memory lane today. It was great interviewing old timers and youth about what the Community Integration Act means to them. Elaine Kolb is a wheelchair riding cultural worker and artist who joined the disability rights movement way earlier than half the ADAPTERS were born.

Sharp Rise In Environmental Activists Being Killed

April 21, 2015 RT, www.rt.com , ,
Environmental activists are being killed in record numbers, with at least 116 deaths reported last year, according to a report. UK-based group Global Witness claim two people around the world are killed each week campaigning against environmental destruction. The number of activists being killed has jumped 20 percent in the last year, while the group speculates actual figures could be even higher. Nearly three-quarters of reported deaths took place in Central and South America. Some 40 percent of victims are indigenous peoples, protesting against hydropower, mining, logging, water and land grabs.

People Who Used To Be In Jail But Are Now Changing The World

April 20, 2015 Darnell L. Moore, www.mic.com ,
Some formerly incarcerated individuals are doing just that, and defying the odds they face in a society where it's difficult to destroy the restrictive stereotypes connected to imprisonment. Using tools like filmmaking, public policy design, mental health advocacy and community organizing, these world-changers are shifting the culture and system of incarceration in the U.S. Their work is a reminder that jail time and criminal convictions are not the sum total of personhood. More importantly, it challenges an unjust criminal justice system that disproportionately targets racial and ethnic minorities. We need to know their names and stories because they are shattering what we think we know about criminality and the prejudices that determine who ends up behind bars or not.

Beating The 1 Percent: Start By Learning Their Favorite Moves

April 20, 2015 George Lakey, www.wagingnonviolence.org , , ,
The current energy debate in Philadelphia is over whether to accept a new vision of the region as a fossil fuel “energy hub,” enlarging pipelines for Marcellus Shale natural gas and North Dakota fracked oil, gearing up Philadelphia’s refineries and tanker shipping, and stimulating petrochemical manufacturing. Here the framing is: Would you rather create new jobs and expand our tax base to support our schools through this exciting vision, or stick with the status quo left by past deindustrialization? At the moment, the Philadelphia climate justice campaign fights for traction because the choice appears to be between the lesser of two evils. There’s not a vivid climate-friendly vision for economic development with an abundance of green jobs.

European Movements Share Strategies Ahead Of General Strike

April 16, 2015 Ter Garcia, www.wagingnonviolence.org , , ,
Shared problems need shared solutions. That’s why, last May, members of various European social movements met in Frankfurt to protest the European Central Bank in three days of action under the name “Blockupy.” There, they decided that they needed to do more to create joint strategies for fighting the excessive power of the financial sector and the resulting policies of austerity. Last weekend’s Agora 99 meeting in Madrid was an opportunity to start building this joint strategy. More than 200 European activists from dozens of movements participated in the meeting, with the objective of creating a working schedule for connecting their various tactics around issues of debt, democracy and rights, as well as building stronger networks and ties among the movements. For four days, those three issues were explored in more than 20 workshops.

Obama Visits The Caribbean To Undermine Alternative Models

April 11, 2015 Kevin Edmonds, www.telesurtv.net , , , ,
Projects such as Venezuela's PetroCaribe are popular in the Caribbean, leading to the first visit of a U.S President to Jamaica since the Cold War. ​On Wednesday, President Barack Obama visited Jamaica with the heads of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM), before heading over to Summit of the Americas which will be held in Panama from April 9 – 10. While Obama will try and cast himself as a “progressive” President that is charting a new path in the region, particularly in regards to the ongoing diplomatic thawing with Cuba, without a doubt it will be his March 9 Executive Order, in which he declared Venezuela “an unusual and extraordinary threat to U.S. national security and foreign policy” that will overshadow much of the Summit.

Youth Civil Rights Leaders Explain How To Activate Their Generation

April 11, 2015 Carl Gibson, www.occupy.com , , ,
At a time when established progressive organizations are asking about how to loop in today’s tech-savvy youth, some of Forward Together’s youth leaders stressed that the medium isn’t as important as the message itself. “All media is just getting intensified. I don’t think people are throwing out their books,” said 21-year-old Denea Crowell, a junior at NC Central University. “As things continue to happen in the U.S. and our communities, people are becoming more conscious. Not only do they want to learn, they want to do something.” According to 19-year-old Hakeem Dykes, a freshman at Shaw University, younger generations are becoming more turned on to independent media than ever before, simply because it devotes a greater portion of its coverage to stories young people are interested in.

“Fighting Against Austerity Will Be Feminist & Transinclusive”

April 10, 2015 Verity Stevenson, www.thelinknewspaper.ca , , ,
A heavy police presence and a game of snakes and ladders characterized Tuesday night’s women and trans people-only protest against austerity measures, as one protester put it. About 200 women huddled at Norman Bethune square on the northeast corner of Maisonneuve Boulevard and Guy Street at 9 p.m. On the opposites sides of both streets were taut lines of police officers, some with bikes, others in riot gear. This was before the protest started. The non-mixed nature of the protest was meant to give women a space to denounce budget cuts and shifts in investment that are said to by-and-large affect them more than men, without being spoken for by men.

DeChristopher Wants Churches To Take Moral Leadership On Climate

April 8, 2015 Tim DeChristopher, www.truth-out.org ,
Recently, there has been a growing discussion of climate change as a moral issue, both in academia and in religious communities. This past fall I spoke at three religion and climate change conferences in as many months, including a conference at Harvard Divinity School, “Spiritual and Sustainable: Religion Responds to Climate Change,” and in June 2015 I will join many global thinkers at a process theology conference on climate change in Claremont, California. The highly anticipated encyclical from Pope Francis on climate change will undoubtedly contribute and bring attention to this discourse. Frequently, however, the acknowledgment that climate change is a moral issue on which religious people should engage is the end of the conversation.

Meet The Privacy Activists Who Spy On The Surveillance Industry

April 8, 2015 Daniel Rivero, www.fusion.net , , ,
On the second floor of a narrow brick building in the London Borough of Islington, Edin Omanovic is busy creating a fake company. He is playing with the invented company’s business cards in a graphic design program, darkening the reds, bolding the blacks, and testing fonts to strike the right tone: informational, ambiguous, no bells and whistles. In a separate window, a barren website is starting to take shape. Omanovic, a tall, slender Bosnian-born, Scottish-raised Londonite gives the company a fake address that forwards to his real office, and plops in a red and black company logo he just created. The privacy activist doesn’t plan to scam anyone out of money, though he does want to learn their secrets.

Protests Shut Down Austerity At Point Of Production

April 7, 2015 Jonathan Leavitt, www.truth-out.org , , ,
On March 21st, the first day of spring, Quebec students went on strike over the Liberal Couillard government’s austerity policies; those numbers swelled to over 60,000 striking students by Monday the 23rd. Approximately 140,000 total Cegep (pre-university vocational college), college and university students will hold strike votes with renewable mandates this spring. As the constituent power and momentum of the strike builds one general assembly at a time, at least 105,000 students have voted to shut it down at the point of production on April 2nd.Printemp 2015 is attempting to unite striking student unions with 400,000 public sector workers in contract negotiations in a province-wide “social strike” May 1st.

Imagine Coalition Of Black Lives Matter, LGBT Equality, Fight For 15

April 7, 2015 Ian Reifowitz, www.dailykos.com , , , ,
Silos are dangerous. I’m not talking about the kind that house nuclear missiles, but rather the metaphorical kind, the kind that divide people who could and should be working together toward a shared goal. Too often, progressives have found themselves divided into these kinds of silos, for example, with women—themselves typically divided by race and ethnicity—fighting for gender equality, LGBT folks fighting for gay rights, unions and workers fighting for labor rights, and on and on. To some degree, these divisions are understandable. Part of the way a marginalized group empowers itself is by creating a movement in which its members play a predominant role.

Quebec’s Long Struggle To Build A Democratic Left Party

April 6, 2015 Pierre Beaudet and Richard Fidler, www.rabble.ca , , , ,
In 1971, I worked at the Montréal Central Council of the CSN, where my mentor Michel Chartrand was president. Maligned as an anarcho-syndicalist, he embodied the left opposition in the CSN. He enraged the right wing in the central, which split in 1972 to found the Centrale des syndicats démocratiques (CSD). Chartrand was even beaten up by some thugs during a meeting of the CSN Confederal Council. His relations with Pepin were not cordial. Pepin never indicated any support for him during his lengthy imprisonment under the War Measures Act. Chartrand criticized him above all for not really believing in the "second front." Notwithstanding his outspoken personality in public, the private Chartrand was a humanist, an assiduous reader with a great love of art and a fine taste for good food and wine.
«12345678910»

Urgent End Of Year Fundraising Campaign

Online donations are back! Keep independent media alive. 

Due to the attacks on our fiscal sponsor, we were unable to raise funds online for nearly two years.  As the bills pile up, your help is needed now to cover the monthly costs of operating Popular Resistance.

Donate Here

Urgent End Of Year Fundraising Campaign

Online donations are back! 

Keep independent media alive. 

Due to the attacks on our fiscal sponsor, we were unable to raise funds online for nearly two years.  As the bills pile up, your help is needed now to cover the monthly costs of operating Popular Resistance.

Donate Here
Sign Up To Our Daily Digest

Independent media outlets are being suppressed and dropped by corporations like Google, Facebook and Twitter. Sign up for our daily email digest before it’s too late so you don’t miss the latest movement news.