It is no longer five minutes to midnight. After Arab Spring leaps to Spain, and Greece, and on to New York’s Wall Street, it suddenly feels like five minutes to dawn.
We no longer need assume that there is no time to stop the world going to shit. There is an opening and we are flooding into it.
We are suddenly in a moment that is not marked by exhausted routine protests that speak for no one and speak to no one.
The oppressors (our common enemies) are no longer unchallenged — or more no longer unchallengeable. They are instead rocked backward, confused, bewildered, furious. The billionaire mayor of New York can’t clear a tiny park — and suddenly the question is not how to force the occupiers out, but whether he may be forced out of power if he pursues that course.
The following is a remarkable scientific history describing how AIDS went from an isolated illness of chimpanzees to a worldwide human epidemic infecting 60 million lives. It starts in the 1920s with the arming of hunters in equatorial Africa with guns, the expansion of chimp killing alongside an explosion of colonial immunization campaigns — and then it jumps through a series of “amplifiers” to Haiti’s blood bank system and U.S. sex tourism , and from there to the gay bar and bathhouse scenes of the early 1980s.
This is a cultural history involving the domination of colonial powers, the impact of world war, and the horrific desperation of African women forced into prostitution. It involves the criminal use of non-sterilized needles in African inoculation campaigns where people immunized against one disease are (by the same act) given another.
This article documents the work of Dr. Jacques Pépin, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Sherbrooke in Quebec, whose book “The Origins of AIDS,”was published last week by Cambridge University Press. It first appeared in the New York Times.
Our story begins sometime close to 1921, somewhere between the Sanaga River in Cameroon and the Congo River in the former Belgian Congo. It involves chimps and monkeys, hunters and butchers, “free women” and prostitutes, syringes and plasma-sellers, evil colonial lawmakers and decent colonial doctors with the best of intentions. And a virus that, against all odds, appears to have made it from one ape in the central African jungle to one Haitian bureaucrat leaving Zaire for home and then to a few dozen men in California gay bars before it was even noticed — about 60 years after its journey began.
The Malcolm X Grassroots Movement struggles to defend the Human Rights of African people in the United States and around the world. The Occupation of Wall Street is an important opportunity to highlight the economic struggles of the 99% and in particular those of New Afrikans (people of African descent in the diaspora). Corporate and national wealth continues to be built on the stolen land of indigenous peoples and on the backs of New Afrikans, immigrants and poor people of European descent; profits are made because of our suffering.
The agricultural and industrial strength that laid the foundation for U.S. economic power exists because of the blood, sweat and tears of the Afrikans who were enslaved. Enslaved Africans literally built Wall Street, the vary wall from which Wall Street gets its name, were Africans were bought and sold. The sale of our Black bodies enriched the early traders and bankers. Now, everyday Wall Street bankers desecrate our ancestor’s graves and dishonor their work by trading this blood money on top of an African burial ground.
This was originally on gawker.com. H/T to Ajagbe for the heads up.
At a New York cyber security conference one day before the protest began, Loyd cited Occupy Wall Street as an example of a “newly emerging threat to U.S. information systems.” (In the lead-up to Occupy Wall Street, Anonymous had issued threats against the New York Stock Exchange.) He told the assembled crowd the FBI has been “monitoring the event on cyberspace and are preparing to meet it with physical security,” according to a New York Institute of Technology press release.
Meet the Guy Who Snitched on Occupy Wall Street to the FBI and NYPD
By Adrian Chen
The Occupy Wall Street protests have been going on for a month. And it seems the FBI and NYPD have had help tracking protesters’ moves thanks to a conservative computer security expert who gained access to one of the group’s internal mailing lists, and then handed over information on the group’s plans to authorities and corporations targeted by protesters.
Since the Occupy Wall Street protest began on September 17, New York security consultant Thomas Ryan has been waging a campaign to infiltrate and discredit the movement. Ryan says he’s done contract work for the U.S. Army and he brags on his blog that he leads “a team called Black Cell, a team of the most-highly trained and capable physical, threat and cyber security professionals in the world.” But over the past few weeks, he and his computer security buddies have been spending time covertly attending Occupy Wall Street meetings, monitoring organizers’ social media accounts, and hanging out with protesters in Lower Manhattan.
Prepared to face the police -- Wall Street Friday morning Oct 14. Photo: Stan Rogouski (click for the full picture)
The following fist appeared on alternet. Yotam Marom is an organizer, educator, musician, and writer. He is a member of the Organization for a Free Society. He can be reached at Yotam.marom@gmail.com.
Thanks to Radical Eyes for suggesting this.
OWS to Take to the Streets of Manhattan October 15th
“Make no mistake about it, we are not aimless; we simply speak a different language – a language of mutual respect, participation, self-management, and action.” October 13, 2011 |
Liberty Plaza is teeming with people gathering for assemblies, talking politics, or meeting in work teams. 300 occupiers are listening intently to a lecture on participatory economics, while others are posing for pictures with the enormous golden calf made and donated by local interfaith leaders. There are people passing by on their way to work, travelers getting off tour buses to take pictures, students from local high schools being toured around. There are people from the Bronx and Bed-Stuy, Minneapolis and Madrid. There are drag queens networking with transit workers, Rabbis leading a thousand people through a Yom Kippur ceremony, and members of the People of Color Caucus planning to “Occupy the Hood.” People are doing yoga, teaching composting techniques, cleaning the square, and livestreaming the occupation to its million viewers worldwide. Some even manage to steal a few hours of sleep amidst all the commotion.
Last night, while on the phone with a journalist (who wouldn’t have returned our phone calls two weeks ago but is now begging us to say something, anything), I stumbled upon an impromptu demonstration at the famed Charging Bull. This was only blocks away from a pop-up Occupy Wall Street art exhibition, which happened to be across the street from a towering financial building newly donned with a banner reading – “Banks got bailed out, we got sold out.” Downtown Manhattan is an occupied zone, a bustling revolutionary city-center. People are taking the struggle on the road, expanding it, pushing it forward. We are making the movement part of our lives, and our lives part of the movement.
The following has been written and circulated in Seattle. All across the U.S. there are debates within the Occupations over how to view the police and local politicians — over what tactics to employ, how to respond to both claims of support and brutal actions of police. Here is one important response.
A letter to our fellow occupiers from the Red Spark Collective
“I respect the desire by Occupy Seattle participants to create a forum for the public to express their viewpoints. They are passionate, and I respect their passion.”
Mayor McGinn posted that little line to his blog on the ninth of October. That was only four days after his police were bending our fingers backward to break our grip on the last tent being pulled out of Westlake. It was two days after his cops forced us out from the only dry spot under the awning. One day after his cops began taking our umbrellas from us in the freezing rain.
Almost from day one, they’ve been trying to get us to leave, the mayor and his cops. The reasoning seems unclear.
City Hall, where the mayor invited us, is not more comfortable, it is too small to sustain our numbers. and it is not at the heart of the wealthiest part of this city. They argue that we are being disruptive, that we are hurting business – but this is an occupation. So isn’t that a part of what we are trying to do?
‘Occupy’ anti-capitalism protests spread around the world
Protests inspired by the Occupy Wall Street movement in New York and the “Indignants” in Spain have spread to cities around the world.
Tens of thousands went on the march in New York, London, Frankfurt, Madrid, Rome, Sydney and Hong Kong as organisers aimed to “initiate global change” against capitalism and austerity measures.
There were extraordinary scenes in New York where at least 10,000 protesters took their message from the outpost of Zuccotti Park into the heart of the city, thronging into Times Square.
This is a printable PDF leaflet based on an essay that appears here on Kasama. This is printable in black and white — on standard 8.5 x 14 paper, with a simple fold. Help distribute this over the next few days.
The crowd erupted in cheers upon the announcement: as of 6:30 this morning, Occupy Wall St. was not moving. Mayor Bloomberg and the NYPD postponed their plans to “clean” the park, and averted a confrontation with a 3000-strong occupation. We, raising our brooms in the air like peasants resisting tyrants, cheered and broke into spontaneous chants, beginning with: “We..ARE..the 99%!”
While recognizing that the threat is still looming, we celebrated this moment as an important victory, not just for New York, but for the other occupations. Facing our most serious threat thus far, we stood our ground and won. But let’s step back for a moment.
Twice, we have been brutalized by police and twice, we grew in support and numbers. With their third move, they backed down. For days, Mayor Bloomberg whipped up a campaign of lies about sanitation, crowding, harassment of business owners and people on their way to work, but it backfired.
Last night, the Mayor’s office was threatening to evict OWS from its park by Wall street. Mass mobilization of supporters and wide responses averted this. One person said to us, “Occupy Wall Street is the only think happening in New York these days… it has gone from being an event to something dominating events.” How to wield, consolidate, continue, defend, expand, radicalize…. all of this confronts everyone, and yet is advancing without anyone’s specific permission.
NEW YORK – Just a few hours after protesters learned they’d be able to stay indefinitely at the lower Manhattan plaza where they’ve been camped out for a month, there was a confrontation between police and protesters after the demonstrators marched away from the plaza named Zuccotti Park, CBS News station WCBS-TV reports.
It is hard to find archeological evidence of thought.
We know from bones that modern humans, in our own specific form, emerged from other hominid groups about 200,000 years ago. And we know that they spread out from Africa later into Europe, Asia and Australia.
And we know, of course, from the masterpieces preserved deep in caves, that our ancestors invented art of great symbolic power.
Other highly successful hominid species have been identified (Neanderthal, Homo erectus, etc.), who made tools and even used fire to cook. But art, symbolic thought and perhaps speech of a sophisticated kind so far appear unique to our branch of the human tree. Now we are starting to date where, in our own development — that art and symbolic thought emerged.
[right: Rock and shell smeared with early human body paint, recently discovered and dated in Africa. Photo: Grethe Moell Pedersen]
[right: Blombos Cave is an archaeological site with significant information about the behaviour of our ancestors]
Now a new discovery — of a “paint factory’ creating body paint of red ocher, charcoal and animal fat — documents human artistic and symbolic activity far earlier than previously known. Again: this is among modern humans, not our Homo erectus predecessors.
I once saw an interview with a man from among the indigenous peoples deep within the Amazon basin. He was asked why his group painted their bodies in distinctive and imaginative ways. He said simply: “It is what makes us different from animals in the forest. They don’t do that. It makes us human.” Now we have signs that we have been making ourselves human in that way far far early that was previously known — in a dating that starts to approach the emergence of our specific species (Homo sapiens) itself.
This news appeared first in the journal science, and is reported in the two following articles: first from BBC, then from New York Times.
United States Supreme Court Rejects Appeal from Philadelphia DA’s Office
(New York, NY) — Today( 11th October) the United States Supreme Court rejected a request from the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office to overturn the most recent federal appeals court decision declaring Mumia Abu-Jamal’s death sentence unconstitutional. The Court’s decision brings to an end nearly thirty years of litigation over the fairness of the sentencing hearing that resulted in Mr. Abu-Jamal’s being condemned to death. Mr. Abu-Jamal will be automatically sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole unless the District Attorney elects to seek another death sentence from a new jury.
The NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund, Inc. (LDF) and Professor Judith Ritter of Widener Law School represent Mr. Abu-Jamal in the appeal of his conviction and death sentence for the 1981 murder of a police officer in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The Supreme Court’s decision marks the fourth time that the federal courts have found that Mr. Abu-Jamal’s sentencing jury was misled about the constitutionally mandated process for considering evidence supporting a life sentence.
Many people are struggling to identify ways to move forward — to raise consciousness and political sophistication and clarity within the Occupy Together movement with out killing the new or shattering creative unities among the diverse. Here is one such attempt. By posting it, Kasama does not intend to endorse it — we are ourselves developing what to say and saying it. but we share it because of its interesting content, and the value of a substantive debate. Thanks to Jase for suggesting that we post this — which first appeared on Solidarity is Our Strength.
10 Points for the Occupy Movement
By Jase Short
Against Wall Street’s culture of economic exploitation, environmental degradation and human oppression we stand together to testify that another world is possible, a decent and humane world, a democratic world of liberty, dignity and solidarity
1) Our main focus ought to be support for the Occupy Wall Street movement with respect for our autonomy balanced by a coordination with other occupy efforts; united our movement will have impact, divided we will dwindle to nothing;
2) Awareness and respect for the democratic process centered around the General Assembly is of paramount importance; cavalier “cowboy activism” only leads to fragmentation and easy targeting for provocateurs, as well as other forms of repression and misrepresentation (which discredits us);
Greek streetfighting defending the Peoples Assembly against police
Winter Has Its End is a project of revolutionary journalists who, this last summer, traveled to Greece’s “movement of the squares” and to Nepal’s sharp debate over whether to settle or make revolution. Here are some of their key articles — with major importance for the Occupy Together movement that has spread across the U.S.
“I arrived twelve hours ago in Athens, and rushed to find the crowds of street-fighters. The police tear gas has already hit around me about twenty times. Athens’ Syntagma Square has for weeks been the site of the People’s Assemblies, huge rallies that challenge the government’s plans. Tonight this Square, the very heart of Greece, is a battleground where the police and resistors have been fighting face to face, line against line.”
“The Thessaloniki Expo is Greece’s equivalent of the US State of the Union speech. The Prime Minister retreated behind barricades for the first time, as he is universally despised for selling the country to European bankers and the International Monetary Fund, and imposing austerity. The current ruling party, PASOK, is nominally social-democratic, but just as Obama is imposing austerity in the US — the “left” face of the ruling class always knows who butters its bread. “
“On May 5, this movement hit the square with the demand of “real democracy,” consistently drawing crowds in the hundreds of thousands. It occupied the square and cohered a whole movement of youth who were new to political life…. The one thing in this experience that I have been most impressed with was the KOE’s creativity and willingness to shift when something unexpected happens, and at the same time holding on to a revolutionary strategy.”
