Saturday, November 12, 2011 - Infoshop News

After the events of November 2nd and 3rd we have seen the government, the corporate media, and even some of our comrades within the Occupy Oakland camp make "anarchists" the scapegoats for actions they disagree with, and we've heard that “anarchists” take advantage of the Occupy movement without “being a part of it.” However, many essential aspects of the Occupy movement are based on anarchist principles and build upon years of anarchist organizing.

November 13 2011 - Libcom

The Royal family despite their huge wealth...locked away at least three members of their own family in state run mental asylums for over seventy years. When these asylums were closed, they then moved to care homes and left to rot. They denied their existence for over fifty years, and listed them as dead...The ones that have died were buried in council cemeteries in graves marked with plastic tags...

Washington and Israel threaten Iran with war.

By FIRMIN DeBRABANDER - November 11-13, 2011

Many have commented on the remarkable callousness fashioned by this Republican presidential field...What’s driving this show of meanness? You might say it’s just what the electorate...wants. It seems like there are some seriously angry voters out there these days...And yet, I suspect this is no fleeting trend, but something with deeper ideological roots. In short, I sense Ayn Rand.

By Mike Epitropoulos - Znet

The mainstream press around the world is jubilantly covering the change in leadership in both Greece and Italy, as the people in those countries and the other “PIIGS” continue to have harsh austerity measures imposed upon them...In both cases, the Troika...have been putting heavy pressure on these already-conservative governments to step up the speed and severity of cuts in social spending, cuts in the public sector and wages, and of course privatizations.

From inception, Eurozone planning was flawed. Uniting 17 dissimilar countries under rigid rules failed.

By Brian Tashman - Right Wing Watch

While Religious Right leaders lauded tea party groups for taking to the streets, now they are asking for the government, and God, to crush the Occupy Wall Street movement...Earlier this week, the Family Research Council asked members to pray against “these raucus [sic] groups” and “ideological anarchists,” asking for God to “harvest souls for Christ among them”[.]

By Rob Evans and Paul Lewis - The Guardian

[Former undercover cop Mark] Kennedy has admitted that he infiltrated a Danish community centre that had housed progressive causes for more than a century, obtaining intelligence that helped police to storm it and close it down in violent raids...Kennedy said he went to 22 countries in total during his seven years under cover, pretending to be an environmental activist. The list also includes Spain, Poland, France, and Belgium.

When Washington goes to war or threatens it, America's media march in lockstep, cheer-leading. Fiction substitutes for fact.

By MIKE KING - November 11-13, 2011

The State...uses acts of violence as a means to increase its own power while rarely having any measurable effect on violent crime or accountability to the communities it controls. People are not protected, violence increases, and services get cut to fund more police. The police have the power to command resources...without any accountability for police profiling and violence, or even with respect to the basic effectiveness of their strategies for diminishing crime. This is normalized in our culture without very many people asking why.

The demo shuffled, zombie-like through the streets of London, with progress severely restricted by a heavy police presence. Effectively the cops had decided to place the whole demonstration in a mobile kettle, with lines of police marching alongside; every side street was barricaded with police horses dictating the pace at the front and a further 15 riot vans, 6 police cars and a dog van bringing up the rear. Overall more than 4,000 cops...were deployed. No one was allowed to join the demo and you certainly couldn’t leave...

Tuesday, 8 November 2011 - Libcom

[Mark and Helen Mullins], unable to get either employment or welfare, were forced to live in a single room of their house and to walk a 12 mile round trip to a Salvation Army food bank once a week...Far from the tabloid myth of welfare scroungers living it large on state handouts, what we have is an ex-soldier and his disabled wife having to live off donated food and eventually finding it so tough that they took their own lives.

By Kirsten Anderberg - November 12, 2011

The list of street characters I have met in my life as a woman street performer is long and memorable. While street performing, you become a part of the fabric of the streets and are privy to the front row drama that goes on there. You watch “bums” you know get hauled off to Detox, “bag ladies” who just tipped you shortly thereafter yell at walls and homeless teens being preyed on by the sex industry, all in a day’s work singing on a street corner. To those of us who lived much of our lives on streets, other street people became family.

By Mark Weisbrot - November 11, 2011

Some of us have been warning for months about the crisis scenario that is accelerating today in Europe. In particular, I have noted that the European authorities were pushing Italy down a dangerous path, in similar fashion to what they did to Greece. The formula is deadly: force budget tightening on an economy that is already shrinking or on the edge of recession. This shrinks the economy further, causing government revenue to fall and making still further tightening necessary to meet the target budget deficit.