#Occupy Phoenix reading roundup for 10/30

The text of the Oakland general strike solidarity statement approved by the Occupy Phoenix General Assembly, 10/28/11


The latest news of interest in our continually updated readings regarding the #occupy movement:

Oakland on Strike! For a Radically Democratic Oakland without Cops, Politicians, or Bosses! (Counterpunch)

Three Nazis Kicked Out of Occupy Seattle (The Stranger)

Phoenix police chief: Occupy Phoenix demonstrations cost city over $200,000- Councilman Sal DiCiccio to suggest charging protesters (Arizona Republic)

Portland police arrest 25 Occupy Portland demonstrators overnight (The Oregonian)

Denver Anarchist Black Cross update from 3 weeks of social war in Denver, Colorado (Denver ABC)

Don't Assume those who confront the police are agents provocateurs (Joaquin Cienfuegos)

Occupy Denver: Police using rubber bullets and teargas (Censored News)

#Occupy Phoenix reading roundup for 10/25

The latest news of interest in our continually updated readings regarding the #occupy movement:

Occupy Tucson protesters launch satellite camps (Associated Press)

Occupy Tucson costing city thousands (KVOA)

Screw the PiggyBackers (Occupy Los Angeles)

Beyond Occupy Wall Street: 11 American Uprisings You've Never Heard of That Changed the World (BeyondChron)

Dear, Occupy Oakland: A letter on strategy (Occupy Oakland)

On #Occupy: Ryan Harvey (AK Press)

Chemical bomb tossed into Occupy Maine encampment (Portland Press Herald)

Occupy Albany: Under pressure to make arrests, police and troopers push back (Times Union)

Occupation Movement: Hactivists expose police and police brutality (Censored News)

Toward a Radical Strategy in Decolonize/Occupy Seattle (Black Orchid Collective)

Seattle: The Anarchist Anxiety (The Stranger)

Is Madagascar the model for Occupy Wall Street? (Globe and Mail)

Occupy Oakland's diversity is strength, challenge (San Francisco Chronicle)

Occupy Denver: 4 busted in police raid on squat (Denver Westword)

UPDATE: DPD Raids Squat, Support Needed (Denver Anarchist Black Cross)

#Occupy reading roundup 10/20

Our continually updated list of recommended readings regarding the #occupy movement:

Occupy PHX: Reach out to The People before the police (Prison Abolitionist)

Wall Street protesters divided over Occupy movement's demands (Infoshop News)

What ‘Diversity of Tactics’ Really Means for Occupy Wall Street  (ENews Park Forest)

Occupy Toronto; Why I could not participate in a movement to restore democracy (Ms. Marx)

Occupy Rome. The Day After (Struggles In Italy)

Occupy Wall Street takes lessons from The Yes Men (Wash. Post)

Anarchist opinion of Occupy Denver (Anarchist News)

(Un)occupy Albuquerque Connects Corporate Greed to Fight for Native Land (Colorlines)

From Occupation to Liberation (Truth-Out)

Some things worth checking out

Death and the Mielieboer: The Eugène Terre'Blanche Murder & Poor-White Canon-fodder in South Africa

But who are the Boers, truly, beyond the cartoons of black-bearded back-countrymen, scarecrows in the corn, leaning on ancient muskets? Afrikaners today are often are the sons, daughters, granddaughters and grandsons of the tens thousands of women who were deliberately starved to death in British concentration camps a century before as their farms were put to the torch. Do not brush aside this key fact because of the whiteness of their skin: their women-folk and children were deliberately exterminated in an imperialist war that generated so much global opposition at the time that it was the Iraq of its day: Scandinavians, Irishmen and Russians gave their lives on the far-away veld; angered Québécois burned down public buildings; and awed anti-American guerrillas in the Philippines learned their tactics by night. Scratch a highveld Boer and you will likely find a bitter hatred of British imperialism – based on living-memory family experience of the camps. And that war was provoked by the imperialists because Britain lusted after and finally burgled the goldfields of the highveld from a frontier people who had progressively retreated into the African interior away from the claws of the bankers, into the spears of the Bantu.

True, they were and often remain an austere, narrow people: one of their Calvinist sects, the Doppers, is deliberately named after the tin cap or dop used to extinguish a candle, the message being the need to extinguish the Enlightenment. And true, they often beat "their blacks" with an offhanded cruelty, and at best established a paternalistic overlordship over them known as baasskap (boss-hood). But in their warfare with, suffering at the hands of, and eventual enslavement of the Bantu, a strange relationship developed: alone among all white settlers on the African continent, they self-identified en masse as Afikaners, as Africans, not Europeans, and severed their ties to their distant motherlands. The they and their black neighbours lived, ate, thought and died, merged and became inextricably intertwined: well over 10-million more black South Africans today speak Afrikaans, the slave's idiom-rich, story-telling pidgin-Dutch of old, than do whites; while platteland (big-sky farmland) Afrikaners are fluent in African vernacular languages. For the British-backed English-speaking elites, the mining bosses and big land-owners, this closeness was worrisome; something had to be done to divide and rule them. Racialised divisions worked successfully among the working class until multiracial revolutionary syndicalism mounted a challenge from 1917 – a challenge undermined and dissipated within five years by the black nationalist mystifications of the aspirant bourgeois party that became the ANC. It may be that despite their progressive approach to the racial question, the syndicalists lost their grip on the labour movement because of the allure of politics of racial polarity that pitted whites and blacks against each other, a politics seized on with fervour by the NP on its ascension to power in 1948.

Via Anarkismo.

University Struggles at the End of the Edu-Deal

The student movement, however, faces a political problem, most evident in the US and, to a lesser extent, in Europe. The movement has two souls. On the one side, it demands free university education, reviving the dream of publicly financed 'mass scholarity', ostensibly proposing to return to the model of the Keynesian era. On the other, it is in revolt against the university itself, calling for a mass exit from it or aiming to transform the campus into a base for alternative knowledge production that is accessible to those outside its 'walls'.iv

This dichotomy, which some characterise as a return to the 'reform versus revolution' disputes of the past, has become most visible in the debate sparked off during the University of California strikes last year, over 'demands' versus 'occupations', which at times has taken an acrimonious tone, as these terms have become complex signifiers for hierarchies and identities, differential power relations, and consequences for risk taking.

The contrast is not purely ideological. It is rooted in the contradictions facing every antagonistic movement today. Economic restructuring has fragmented the workforce, deepened divisions and, not last, it has increased the effort and time required for daily reproduction. A student population holding two or three jobs is less prone to organise than its more affluent peers in the '6os.

At the same time there is a sense, among many, that there is nothing more to negotiate, that demands have become superfluous since, for the majority of students, acquiring a certificate is no guarantee for the future which promises simply more precarity and constant self-recycling. Many students realise that capitalism has nothing to offer this generation, that no 'new deal' is possible, even in the metropolitan areas of the world, where most wealth is accumulated. Though there is a widespread temptation to revive it, the Keynesian interest group politics of making demands and 'dealing' is long dead.

Via Mute

A People's History of Koch Industries: How Stalin Funded the Tea Party Movement

The Soviet oil planners were delighted with Koch’s refineries, which “operated commendably, and would in the future be the type preferred by the heads of the Soviet Union’s petroleum industry when purchasing new cracking equipment.” The Communists were so impressed they kept giving Winkler-Koch business and regularly sent Soviet engineers to train in Wichita. It was a sign of growing mutual trust.

By the time he got out in 1933, Koch earned $500,000, which was a ton of money for a kid fresh out of college. This nut of money served as the foundation for the family’s future wealth, which Koch no doubt started acquiring at rock-bottom prices. After all, 1933 was one of the two worst years of the Great Depression—all assets were priced to go at 90% off. In the end, the capitalist-hating socialists ended up treating Koch fairly, way better than the monopolistic thrashing he got from his native land. So you’d think he’d at least something good to say about the Soviet Union when he got home?

Nope, not at all. He hated the Commies real bad. But for some reason he kept it to himself until the late 1950s (possibly because he was still doing work for the Soviet Union). Then, after coming back from a trip to the Soviet Union in 1956, he flies off the handle. According to a 1956 AP article, Fred Koch was among eleven prominent residents of Wichita, Kansas, “left for Moscow by plane today in an effort to convince the Russian people that Soviet propaganda about capitalists is untrue.” Sounds like the perfect cover for a business trip.

Via The Exiled

First Friday Transformed! Observers of art become participants in their own lives! Police confronted by mob after raiding the UM gallery

by Jon Riley

First Friday on "Roosevelt Row" took a decidedly confrontational turn last week after undercover Phoenix police officers ran a sting on the UM gallery down on 5th st. PCWC was tabling that night when we noticed everyone in the gallery being pushed out by a handful of uniformed and a couple of undercover cops. The crowd grew in the yard as word spread that they were busted for serving alcohol, particularly angering people as alcohol is prevalent at most of the spaces on First Friday, and to make matters worse the host of the gallery, a DJ, and two artists were held in hand cuffs inside.

Everybody forced out was pretty angry that the police were breaking up the show, so people took photos of both the uniformed and the undercover officers, yelled at the police, and chanted "Let them go!". It was nice to see a united group challenging the actions of the cops, even after the police brought the DJ out in an appeal to the crowd to leave the crowd, people saw through such a cynical move by not leaving, and instead shouting out support and blaming the cops for sending him out. In addition to that a cop came down and tried to talk to someone they perceived as a leader only to have the man cover his ears when the cop spoke, and a local art community big name tried to do one for the cops only to be told off. Everyone wanted their friends freed, right then and there, no compromise, no debate. The handful of cops called in reinforcements, and soon after 30+ cops arrived and cleared the front yard, many people stood their ground and refused to leave, causing a scuffle between a few people and a cop.

The folks inside were eventually released, only after being cited for serving without a permit, and everyone flooded into the gallery to take a last look at the art before the venue shuttered for the night. As we were walking off, word spread that a police car had been tagged, excitedly we turned around to check out a little anti-cop action! We were happy to see a few spray painted tags on the police SUV (one of the many police cars jamming 5th st up), even though one man was arrested.

All in all, a lovely cool late spring night in central Phoenix; an inspiring show of solidarity between young and old, art lovers, radicals, passer-bys, and friends of the detained; and mostly a spontaneous social rupture that Phoenix has needed for sometime. It was rewarding to see the smiles on faces when the police left the gallery with no one in cuffs, to hear people talking about how much fun confronting the police had been, and the crowd of people surrounding the police SUV laughing and taking pictures of the tags while the police stood by wearing grimaces. It was nice to see the police on the defensive! And, best if all, our resistance worked: all charges were dropped a couple weeks later!

We need to remember victories like this and how they happen if we want to defend our own autonomous spaces. When we all stand up in solidarity behind our collective desire to live our individual desires free from the control of Capital and the State, we liberate each other and ourselves. What will we do next time?

Nearly 20 cops stand guard over the gallery in the front yard.

The cops have left, people excitedly return to the UM gallery!

Art is everywhere: A beautiful site in downtown Phoenix.

News of interest 5/18/09

How to survive the coming century

ALLIGATORS basking off the English coast; a vast Brazilian desert; the mythical lost cities of Saigon, New Orleans, Venice and Mumbai; and 90 per cent of humanity vanished. Welcome to the world warmed by 4 °C.

Clearly this is a vision of the future that no one wants, but it might happen. Fearing that the best efforts to curb greenhouse gas emissions may fail, or that planetary climate feedback mechanisms will accelerate warming, some scientists and economists are considering not only what this world of the future might be like, but how it could sustain a growing human population. They argue that surviving in the kinds of numbers that exist today, or even more, will be possible, but only if we use our uniquely human ingenuity to cooperate as a species to radically reorganise our world.

The good news is that the survival of humankind itself is not at stake: the species could continue if only a couple of hundred individuals remained. But maintaining the current global population of nearly 7 billion, or more, is going to require serious planning.

-New Scientist

Militants threaten to blockade oil vessels

Nigeria's main militant group said on Monday it would blockade key waterways in the Niger Delta to try to prevent crude oil exports after days of military helicopter and gunboat raids on its camps.

The security forces launched an offensive against militant camps around Warri in the western Niger Delta on Friday after two oil vessels were hijacked and its soldiers were attacked, leading to the heaviest fighting in at least eight months.

"We have ordered the blockade of key waterway channels to oil industry vessels both for the export of crude and gas and importation of refined petroleum products," the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) said.

"This means vessels now ply such routes at their risk," the group said in an e-mailed statement.

-NEXT

Reliving the Sean Bell Case by Renaming a Street

New York politicians love to rename streets, and the battles that ensue range from the explosive to the mundane.

The City Council’s vote in 2007 to reject renaming a street in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, after the black activist Sonny Carson came closer to dividing the Council along racial lines than any issue that members could recall. On the other hand, when Rose Feiss, the founder of a lampshade factory, was honored in 1987 with an eponymous boulevard in the South Bronx, the main objection was that the change might confuse people looking for the former Walnut Street.

So William G. Bell is prepared for anything as he pushes for a Sean Bell Way in Jamaica, Queens. “I can’t get no more disappointed than what I already went through,” said Mr. Bell, who is seeking to rename several blocks of Liverpool Street for his son Sean, 23, who was killed there in a barrage of police bullets as he left a nightclub on what would have been his wedding day, Nov. 25, 2006.

Police officers testified that in a chaotic scene outside the club they believed that a friend of Sean Bell’s had a gun. No gun was found. When a Queens judge last year acquitted the three detectives involved, the decision spurred protests that led to hundreds of arrests.

-New York Times

Indigenous Chiapans Insist They Are in Prison For Belonging to the EZLN

El Amate, Chiapas. May 6 - "I have been detained because I belong to the Zapatista Army of National Liberation" (EZLN), Miguel Vazquez Moreno declared today when he gave his testimony in the second criminal court in the State Center for Social Rehabilitation of Convicts (CERSS in its Spanish initials) number 14, El Amate, where none of the officials and employees, of course, are wearing face masks. Nor do they seem aware that there is a national and state health emergency.

In contrast to his first "statement" given under coercion in pre-charge detention, Vazquez Moreno is assisted by an interpreter who speaks his language, or at least a variation of his dialect (the interpreter the authorities have provided is from Cancuc, while the eight detained men from San Sebastian Bachajon speak the tzeltal dialect of Chilon). But, at least they understand each other, and that is enough.

From behind the railing he declares himself innocent of the charges against him, and requests that he be freed for lack of evidence to proceed with a trial. And he introduces himself in this manner: "I am from the ejido San Sebastian Bachajon and I belong to the support bases of the EZLN, an organization that defends its right to exercise autonomy and self-determination as indigenous peoples, its right to territory and natural resources."

-La Journada (translated to English by Kristin Bricker)

News of Interest 5/11/09

For Somali Pirates, Worst Enemy May Be on Shore

Mr. Boyah, who lives in a simple little house, explains: “Don’t be surprised when I tell you all the money has disappeared. When someone who never had money suddenly gets money, it just goes.”

He claims that his estimated take of several hundred thousand dollars disappeared down a vortex of parties, weddings, jewelry, cars and qat, the stimulating leaf that Somalis chew like bubble gum. Also, because of the extended network of relatives and clansmen, “it’s not like three people split a million bucks,” he said. “It’s more like 300.”

Oh, Mr. Boyah added, he also gives 15 percent to charity, especially to the elderly and infirm. “I’d love to give them more,” he said.

Over all, he seemed like a man on a genuine quest for redemption — or a very good liar.

-New York Times

U.S., Europe Are an Ocean Apart on Human Toll of Joblessness

The little German town of Hohenlockenstedt, where Mr. Butt worked, also used to be a manufacturing powerhouse. In the 1970s it had more industrial jobs than inhabitants; factories had to bus workers in.

Today, hardly any industry is left. In December, the auto-parts factory where Mr. Butt worked for eight years, HWU GmbH, announced its own shutdown. Workers protested, occupying the factory for a week. Mr. Butt, a burly 42-year-old, participated as employees barricaded the gates with forklifts and slept in the factory's canteen. Their demand: Save our jobs.

It was hopeless. Mr. Butt found himself out of work in January. Normally, German workers get severance pay in large-scale layoffs, but HWU didn't have enough money. As a result, Mr. Butt's benefits are about as bad as it gets for a laid-off German factory worker. Still, compared with the U.S., it's a lucrative package. First, he (and everyone else) got a job at a so-called "transfer" company, a private business that offers training and job-hunting advice with funding from the state and the former employer.

Through transfer companies, German workers can receive the bulk of their former salary for as much as a year before they even have to apply for unemployment. Mr. Butt is getting four months at 80% of his old salary of €2,700 (roughly $3,600) a month. After tax, he's taking home about €350 less than before.

-Wall Street Journal

The masterpiece that killed George Orwell

The circumstances surrounding the writing of Nineteen Eighty-Four make a haunting narrative that helps to explain the bleakness of Orwell's dystopia. Here was an English writer, desperately sick, grappling alone with the demons of his imagination in a bleak Scottish outpost in the desolate aftermath of the second world war. The idea for Nineteen Eighty-Four, alternatively, "The Last Man in Europe", had been incubating in Orwell's mind since the Spanish civil war. His novel, which owes something to Yevgeny Zamyatin's dystopian fiction We, probably began to acquire a definitive shape during 1943-44, around the time he and his wife, Eileen adopted their only son, Richard. Orwell himself claimed that he was partly inspired by the meeting of the Allied leaders at the Tehran Conference of 1944. Isaac Deutscher, an Observer colleague, reported that Orwell was "convinced that Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt consciously plotted to divide the world" at Tehran.

-The Guardian

A Pocket-Size Leveler in an Outsize Land

The cellphone appeals, too, because it plays into the Indian need to place people. Cellular differences today perform the role that forehead markings and strings around torsos and metal bracelets once did: announcing who outranks whom.

Small people have small phones, and big people have big ones. Small people have numerical-soup numbers, and big people have numbers that end in 77777 or something equally important-sounding or easy to remember. Small people have one phone, and big people have two. Small people set their phones merely to ring, and big people make Bollywood songs play when you call them.

The cellphone, in short, has made itself Indian. There are 65 times more cellphone connections than broadband Internet links, and the gap is widening. And so those who wish to influence Indians are not waiting for the computer to catch on, but are seeking ways to adapt the cellphone to the things Westerners do online.

Indian companies have invented methods, via simple cellphone text-messaging, to wire money to temples, pay for groceries, find jobs and send and receive e-mail messages (on humble phones with no data connection).

But the most intriguing notion is that cellphones could transform Indian democracy.

Even in this voting season — the results of a four-week election will be announced May 16 — Indians are famously cynical about their senior-citizen-dominated, dynastic, corrupt politics. The educated often sit out elections. But with cellphones becoming near universal, experiments are sprouting with the goal of forging a new bond between citizen and state, through real-time, 24-hour cellular participation.

-The New York Times

Prison radio station is nominated for four national awards

Although prison radio has been around since the mid-1990s in Britain, when Feltham Young Offenders Institute started a station, there is now one in every seven prisons.

The aim is to provide communication at a place where conditions are poor, and where prisoners, who are on remand awaiting trial on allegations ranging from credit card fraud to murder, arrive with a typical reading age of about 11. Nominated in the speech category at tonight’s awards is Prisoner’s Voices, a discussion programme in which inmates interview each other — and where Mark (not his real name), who has “a lot of hate and dislove for myself”, talks about cutting his wrists and says that his arms “to be honest, look a mess”.

A prisoner harms himself every other day at HMP Brixton, and while most incidents are trivial, seven inmates killed themselves between 2006 and 2008, at a jail that the chief inspector described as one that “exemplifies all the problems of our overcrowded prison system”.

-Times of London

DOJ Budget Details High-Tech Crime Fighting Tools

Another high-tech program includes the development of the Biometric Technology Center, a joint Justice, FBI and DoD program. Building the center will cost $97.6 million and will serve as a research and development center for biometric technology.

Last year, the FBI announced it would partner with the University of West Virginia to establish the center. Eventually, the Biometric project will be a vast database of personal data including fingerprints, iris scans and DNA which the FBI calls the Next Generation Identification (NGI).

The FBI has awarded the NGI contract to Lockheed Martin to update and maintain the database which is expected to come online in 2010. After being fully deployed the NGI contract could cost up to $1 billion.

DOJ's budget request also mentions an INTERPOL program called Project Vennlig, which is a terrorist information sharing program run by the international anti-crime organization. The Defense Department initiated the program to obtain criminal information about insurgents killed or captured in Iraq.

The DOJ budget request notes the program gathers information from insurgents' cell phones and documents found in their possession: "The purpose of the initiative is to obtain and integrate collected information for the use of INTERPOL member countries and U.S. law enforcement agencies in proactively targeting terrorism."

-ABC News

News of Interest 5/7/09

Texas police shake down drivers, lawsuit claims

Maryland resident Amanee Busbee said she also was threatened with losing custody of her child after being stopped in Tenaha with her fiancé and his business partner. They were headed to Houston with $50,000 to complete the purchase of a restaurant, she said.

"The police officer would say things to me like, 'Your son is going to child protective services because you are not saying what we need to hear,' " Busbee said.

Guillory, who practices in nearby Nacogdoches, Texas, estimates authorities in Tenaha seized $3 million between 2006 and 2008, and in about 150 cases -- virtually all of which involved African-American or Latino motorists -- the seizures were improper.

"They are disproportionately going after racial minorities," he said. "My take on the matter is that the police in Tenaha, Texas, were picking on and preying on people that were least likely to fight back."

-CNN


Nevada town rallies to save prison camp

A small town finds out that slave labor is something worth fighting for in this recession.

In this former boomtown forgotten by much of the state, the small prison is a savior for residents and the cash-strapped town manager. Supervised inmates shovel snowed-in driveways, yank out weeds, clean rain gutters, slash brush and dig graves.

"They do everything but herd cattle," said Perchetti, 63, who runs the Tonopah Convention Center. "Shoot, they fixed my plumbing a few times."

So when state officials proposed mothballing the camp to help narrow Nevada's $3-billion budget gap, residents prepared for battle. They repeatedly car-pooled to the capital -- a 460-mile round trip. To lawmakers and their staff, they handed out save-the-camp pleas written by senior citizens, high school principals, the Salvation Army, students.

-Los Angeles Times


SC man is latest accused recession bank robber

See also this article from the Arizona Republic today for local insight into this phenomenon otherwise known as the "reverse bailout".

Windsor is one of a growing list of unlikely suspects, ordinary people from ministers to ex-cops citing financial duress since the start of the recession in late 2007 for allegedly turning to a crime that targets fast cash — bank robbery.

Money troubles, specifically job losses, have also been named as possible motives in at least four of the mass shootings that have scarred the country this winter, including the deaths of 13 people and a gunman in Binghamton, N.Y., the killings of three police officers in Pittsburgh and four more plus the shooter in Oakland, Calif., and the deaths of 10 people and a gunman in south Alabama.

Bank holdups haven't grabbed the same attention, but industry figures show they go up during recessions, and experts say the pressure inevitably pushes some otherwise law-abiding people to find themselves accosting a teller at a window.

-Associated Press

Millionaires don't feel so rich: survey

Some 46% of the 1,012 participants in the annual Fidelity Investments study said they "do not feel wealthy and are taking action to reassess and rebuild their wealth."
0:00 /5:27Buffett: Behind the scenes

That's a big change from last year, when only 19% said they didn't feel rich. Fidelity blamed the drop on the corresponding plunge in wealth, with an average 19% reduction in household income and investable assets, and a 28% plunge in real estate holdings.

Fidelity, a Boston-based financial services company, described the average respondent as having $3.5 million in assets and $306,000 in annual household income.

-CNN

Cow jumps fence, escapes slaughterhouse

I think there's a lesson here for all of us.

A cow has escaped from a New York City slaughterhouse and may have a new lease on life.

Police say the black heifer bolted Wednesday afternoon from Musa Hala Inc., which butchers animals according to religious restrictions.

The cow wandered in Queens for about a kilometre before police captured her an hour later and took her to an Animal Care and Control centre, where she was nicknamed Molly.

-Associated Press

News of interest 5/3/09

A Workers’ Paradise Found Off Japan’s Coast

HIME ISLAND, Japan — If Marxism had ever produced a functional, prosperous society, it might have looked something like this tiny southern Japanese island.

At first glance, there is little to set Hime (pronounced HEE-may) apart from the hundreds of other small inhabited islands that dot the coasts of Japan’s main isles. The 2,519 mostly graying islanders subsist on fishing and shrimp farming, and every summer hold a Shinto religious festival featuring dancers dressed as foxes.

But once off the ferry, the island’s sole public transportation link to the outside, visitors are greeted by an unusual sight: a tall, bronze statue of Hime’s previous mayor, rare in a country that typically shuns such political aggrandizement. Rarer still is that the statue was erected by his son, who is the island’s current mayor.

-New York Times

The Secret History of Kim Jong Il

I first met Kim Jong Il in October 1959. He was a senior at the elite Namsan Senior High School, and I was a 27-year-old professor of Russian at the Pyongyang University of Education. I also happened to have been chosen as a private tutor for the family of North Korean President Kim Il Sung. One day, the Great Leader remarked that he found his son’s Russian to be very poor and told me to go to his school and evaluate both Kim Jong Il’s proficiency and the quality of Russian education there. Handpicked by Joseph Stalin to rule over North Korea and a fluent Russian speaker himself, Kim Il Sung deemed study of the language essential to relations with the Soviet Union, North Korea’s biggest political, economic, and military patron. At the school, I attended every Russian class, made evaluations, and then summoned the 17-year-old Kim Jong Il into the principal’s office. The principal, one of the school’s Russian teachers, and I, in accordance with Kim Il Sung’s orders, jointly administered an oral Russian exam for Kim Jong Il.

-Foreign Policy Magazine

Drug War Repression Hits Zapatistas and the Other Campaign

In an operation that bears all the marks of drug war-style repression, state and federal police detained six adherents to the Other Campaign, one Zapatista, and one unaffiliated man in Agua Azul, Chiapas. The military was also involved; it shot six warning shots into the air with live ammunition at a protest blockade, and it provided military intelligence that Chiapas state officials say was used to detain the men. The Agua Azul region is an area that in recent years has been the site of violent attacks against Zapatistas perpetrated by members of the paramilitary Organization For Defense of Indigenous and Campesino Rights (OPDDIC). OPDDIC members allegedly participated in the operation

-Narco News

San Francisco May Day: Anarchists Attack Union Square Stores

High-end Union Square stores felt the wrath of a “black bloc” Friday night, just before nine p.m. That’s when, according to witnesses, a herd of about 50 protesters wearing black bandanas over their faces and cloaked in black hoodies tore through O’Farrell and Grant Streets, leaving havoc in their wake.

The group, police believe to be anarchists, may have splintered off from a May Day protest on immigration, before smashing at least 15 storefront windows in the Union Square shopping district. Debeers, Longchamp, Prada, Armani, Tumi, Guess and Montblanc were among the stores hit by the masked mob. Bystanders said the group shot paintballs and burned fake $100 bills while using bricks and sledgehammers to smash-in windows. Their message: down with capitalism.

-SF Law and Politics Examiner

Mike Davis: The swine flu crisis lays bare the meat industry's monstrous power

The Mexican swine flu, a genetic chimera probably conceived in the faecal mire of an industrial pigsty, suddenly threatens to give the whole world a fever. The initial outbreaks across North America reveal an infection already travelling at higher velocity than did the last official pandemic strain, the 1968 Hong Kong flu.

Stealing the limelight from our officially appointed assassin, H5N1, this porcine virus is a threat of unknown magnitude. It seems less lethal than Sars in 2003, but as an influenza it may be more durable than Sars. Given that domesticated seasonal type-A influenzas kill as many one million people a year, even a modest increment of virulence, especially if combined with high incidence, could produce carnage equivalent to a major war.

Meanwhile, one of its first victims has been the consoling faith, long preached by the World Health Organisation, that pandemics can be contained by the rapid responses of medical bureaucracies, independent of the quality of local public health. Since the initial H5N1 deaths in Hong Kong in 1997, the WHO, with the support of most national health services, has promoted a strategy focused on the identification and isolation of a pandemic strain within its local radius of outbreak, followed by a thorough dousing of the population with antivirals and (if available) vaccine.

-The Guardian

News of Interest 4/17/2009

You are being lied to about pirates

Who imagined that in 2009, the world’s governments would be declaring a new War on Pirates? As you read this, the British Royal Navy - backed by the ships of more than two dozen nations, from the U.S. to China - is sailing into Somalian waters to take on men we still picture as parrot-on-the-shoulder pantomime villains. They will soon be fighting Somalian ships and even chasing the pirates onto land, into one of the most broken countries on earth.

But behind the arrr-me-hearties oddness of this tale, there is an untold scandal. The people our governments are labeling as “one of the great menaces of our times” have an extraordinary story to tell - and some justice on their side.

-San Francisco Bay View

Dozens of U.S. citizens deported

Pedro Guzman has been an American citizen all his life. Yet in 2007, the 31-year-old Los Angeles native - in jail for a misdemeanor, mentally ill and never able to read or write - signed a waiver agreeing to leave the country without a hearing and was deported to Mexico as an illegal immigrant.

For almost three months, Guzman slept in the streets, bathed in filthy rivers and ate out of trash cans while his mother scoured the city of Tijuana, its hospitals and morgues, clutching his photo in her hand. He was finally found trying to cross the border at Calexico, 100 miles away.

-Associated Press

Get the Feeling You're Being Watched? If You're Driving, You Just Might Be

The village of Schaumburg, Ill., installed a camera at Woodfield Mall last November to film cars that were running red lights, then used the footage to issue citations. Results were astonishing. The town issued $1 million in fines in just three months.

But drivers caught by the unforgiving enforcement -- which mainly snared those who didn't come to a full stop before turning right on red -- exploded in anger. Many vowed to stop shopping at the mall unless the camera was turned off. The village stopped monitoring right turns at the intersection in January.

-Wall Street Journal

Paris liberation made 'whites only'

Papers unearthed by the BBC reveal that British and American commanders ensured that the liberation of Paris on 25 August 1944 was seen as a "whites only" victory.

Many who fought Nazi Germany during World War II did so to defeat the vicious racism that left millions of Jews dead.

Yet the BBC's Document programme has seen evidence that black colonial soldiers - who made up around two-thirds of Free French forces - were deliberately removed from the unit that led the Allied advance into the French capital.

-BBC News

Obama to seek $83.4 billion for Iraq, Afghan wars

President Barack Obama is seeking $83.4 billion for U.S. military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, pressing for a war supplemental spending bill like the ones he repeatedly voted against when he was senator and George W. Bush was president.

Obama's request would push the costs of the two wars to almost $1 trillion since the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, according to the Congressional Research Service. The additional money would cover operations into the fall.

-Associated Press

News of Interest 3/20/09

Bash Back! Statement of Support to Those Who Evicted the RCP

Yesterday, March 14th, the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) was forcibly evicted from the San Francisco Anarchist Book Fair. Surprisingly some “Anarchists” have criticized the move and have even defended the Maoist’s right to free speech. These Anarcho-Liberals have gone as far as to suggest that throwing water on the RCP’s literature is violence. Soon after the incident, the RCP started a petition denouncing their eviction. Dozens of so-called “Anarchists” signed the petition.

These Bash Back!ers think the petition is a fantastic idea, and we want to thank those who signed the petition of a historically heterosexist organization. Now we know whose side you all are really on.

-Bash Back! News

High unemployment rate boosts Army recruitment

South Carolina has long been a fertile ground for recruiters, its 10.4 percent jobless rate — second-highest in the nation — appears to be prompting even more people to visit or give the Army a call.

Through the first five months of the 2009 fiscal year, which began Oct. 1, the number of troops signed by the Army’s Columbia Recruiting Battalion was up 17 percent compared to a similar period in 2008. By the way, the jobless rate in South Carolina in 2008 was 6.9 percent.

-McClatchy

The ICE Docs That Cost a Mother of Three a Broken Arm and a Beat-Down

I've obtained the documents the MCSO was so hot to have Maria del Carmen Garcia-Martinez mark with her fingerprint. You can see them for yourself, here.

Initially, I believed that there was just one page, but now I see there are four pag es that the MCSO had Garcia-Martinez put her fingerprint on. Garcia-Martinez, who cannot read or speak English, believed the paperwork was a voluntary removal form to send her back to Mexico, and so refused to cooperate. She relented after six MCSO guards broke her arm, and left her in a room for several hours. When eight MCSO returned later that night and told her to give up her fingerprint or else, she allowed them to put her finger on the documents.

-Phoenix New Times

Violence on Paris streets as millions protest against Nicolas Sarkozy's handling of economic crisis

Schools, courts, post offices, universities and hospitals were closed, with public transport severely disrupted, as up to 200 marches were organised against President Nicolas Sarkozy's approach to the global downturn.

The biggest protests were in Paris, where police said up to 85,000 people took five hours to walk from Place de la République to Place de la Nation. As the light faded, hundreds of riot police were sent to the area where anarchist groups waving revolutionary flags were among those massing. Riot police fired rounds of tear gas after demonstrators lit fires and smashed shop windows. Fighting broke out on all corners of the square, with police moving in to try to arrest ring leaders.

-Daily Telegraph

Leading climate scientist: 'democratic process isn't working'

Protest and direct action could be the only way to tackle soaring carbon emissions, a leading climate scientist has said.

James Hansen, a climate modeller with Nasa, told the Guardian today that corporate lobbying has undermined democratic attempts to curb carbon pollution. "The democratic process doesn't quite seem to be working," he said.

Speaking on the eve of joining a protest against the headquarters of power firm E.ON in Coventry, Hansen said: "The first action that people should take is to use the democratic process. What is frustrating people, me included, is that democratic action affects elections but what we get then from political leaders is greenwash.

-The Guardian

Vandals Strike Berkeley Marine Recruiting Center

The United States Marine Corps Officer Selection Office in downtown Berkeley came under attack once again Wednesday night when a group of vandals broke the building’s windows with sledgehammers and splashed them with red paint.

Officers at the recruiting center at 64 Shattuck Square were not able to say whether the incident was related to protests taking place throughout the rest of the country on the eve of the sixth anniversary of the Iraq war.

Berkeley Police Department spokesperson Officer Andrew Frankel said the police received a call at 8:54 p.m. Wednesday from an eyewitness who reported that three suspects were breaking the Marine Corps office’s plate-glass windows and splashing them with red paint.

-The Berkeley Daily Planet

News of Interest 3/06/09

Caught on film and stored on database: how police keep tabs on activists

At 11:37am on August 8 last year, two police surveillance officers sat in a patrol car in Kent and switched on their Sony digital video camera.

When the tape started to roll, they stated they were "evidence gatherer" surveillance officers and explained the purpose of the operation. A lead surveillance officer and his assistant, they were on duty to help police the Climate Camp demonstration, an environmental protest against the nearby Kingsnorth coal-fired power station.

What the pair did not know when, 20 minutes later, they stood on a grass verge at the entrance to the camp and started work, was that their surveillance footage would be obtained by the Guardian. It would provide evidence of the crude monitoring methods u sed to glean information about campaigners and would prove that journalists are being targeted by police surveillance units.

-The Guardian

Arsonists Torch Berlin Porsches, BMWs on Economic Woe

When Berlin resident Simone Klostermann returned from vacation and couldn’t find her Mercedes SLK, she thought it had been towed. Police told her the 35,000- euro ($45,000) car had been torched.

“They’d squirted something flammable into the car’s engine block in the gap between the windshield and the hood,” said Klostermann. “The engine was completely destroyed.”

The 34-year-old’s experience isn’t unique in the German capital. At least 29 vehicles were destroyed in arson attacks this year, most of them luxury cars, according to police. The number is already about 30 percent of the total for 2008. The latest to go up in flames was a Porsche, on Feb. 14, two days after a Mercedes was set alight in a public car park.

-Bloomberg.com

Climate change protest disrupts flights at Aberdeen airport

Flights at one of Scotland's busiest airports were disrupted today when climate change protesters dressed as Donald Trump played golf on a taxiway.

Nine demonstrators from the Plane Stupid campaign group cut through Aberdeen airport's perimeter fence at around 2.15am in protest at BAA's plans to expand the airport.

Seven protesters who had put up a "wire fortress" on a taxiway for North Sea helicopters handed themselves over to Grampian police at about 8.20am. Two others on the terminal roof surrendered to police at about 9.30am.

-The Guardian

7.3 million people in US prisons in '07

A record high-number of 7.3 million Americans were behind bars or under a correction system in the US in 2007, according to a research.

The record-high number, one in every 31 adults, includes people in prison or jail, and on probation or parole.

The results of the research conducted by Pew Center further indicated on Monday that America's prison population has skyrocketed over the past quarter century.

-Press TV

Mobile prison cells will cage criminals on the beat

The "mobile urban jails" will be used in targeted areas such as tho se rife with knife crime and anti-social behaviour or where there is no police station nearby.

They will allow officers to process criminals, fingerprint them and issue, on-the-spot fines, bail or court summons without having to go back to a police station.

A satellite link will even allow a custody sergeants to charge offenders via video while offenders could be held for up to six hours.

-Daily Telegraph

Mutiny at the Market

A tenants' mutiny at Grand Central Market was resolved last week after a group of merchants who had withheld their February rents came to an agreement with the landlord and paid up.

As part of the resolution with landlord The Yellin Company, rents will be lowered and advertising fees charged to the tenants will be eliminated.

The fracas, which resulted in many rents being paid two weeks or more late, is yet another sign of the financial hardships stemming from the national recession. Although most visitors to the Downtown Los Angeles landmark were unaware of the situation, several tenants said their future survival is in question.

-Los Angeles Downtown News

News of Interest 2/20/09

Experts say Mexico ripe for insurrection

The Mexican government is not aware of an armed movement that presents a threat to Mexico's security, but officials are monitoring whether the self-styled Movimiento Armado del Norte (Northern Armed Movement) resorts to more than online rhetoric in the future.

Experts said Mexico's instability, due to widespread killings and economic woes, could give rise to a new insurrection, at least in parts of the country.

The alleged organization issued two communiqués this year, the second with a Chihuahua state dateline. It claims to exert influence in the states of Chihuahua, Baja California, Sonora, Coahuila and part of Durango.

-El Paso Times

Trees Absorb a Fifth of Carbon Emissions Pumped out by Humans

Dr Simon Lewis, a Royal Society research fellow at the University of Leeds and author of the paper, said: "We are receiving a free subsidy from nature. "Tropical forest trees are absorbing about 18 per cent of the CO2 added to the atmosphere each year from burning fossil fuels, substantially buffering the rate of climate change."

Dr Lewis said the trees could be mopping up even mor

e carbon dioxide than before because CO2 already in the atmosphere is acting like a fertiliser, but man could not rely on them forever.

"Even if we preserve all remaining tropical forest, these trees will not continue getting bigger indefinitely," he added.

-DailyTelegraph

Starting at home, Iran's women fight for rights

In a year of marriage, Razieh Qassemi, 19, says she was beaten repeatedly by her husband and his father. Her husband, she says, is addicted to methamphetamine and has threatened to marry another woman to "torture" her.

Rather than endure the abuse, Qassemi took a step that might never have occurred to an earlier generation of Iranian women: she filed for divorce.

Women's rights advocates say Iranian women are displaying a growing determination to achieve equal status in this conservative Muslim theocracy, where male supremacy is still enscribed in the legal code. One in five marriages now end in divorce, according to government data, a fourfold increase in the past 15 years.

-International Herald Tribune

The collapse of manufacturing

$0.00, not counting fuel and handling: that is the cheapest quote right now if you want to ship a container from southern China to Europe. Back in the summer of 2007 the shipper would have charged $1,400. Half-empty freighters are just one sign of a worldwide collapse in manufacturing. In Germany December’s machine-tool orders were 40% lower than a year earlier. Half of China’s 9,000 or so toy exporters have gone bust. Taiwan’s shipments of notebook computers fell by a third in the month of January. The number of cars being assembled in America was 60% below January 2008.

The destructive global power of the financial crisis became clear last year. The immensity of the manufacturing crisis is still sinking in, largely because it is seen in national terms—indeed, often nationalistic ones. In fact manufacturing is also caught up in a global whirlwind.

-The Economist

Obama’s War on Terror May Resemble Bush’s in Some Areas

Even as it pulls back from harsh interrogations and other sharply debated aspects of George W. Bush’s “war on terrorism,” the Obama administration is quietly signaling continued support for other major elements of its predecessor’s approach to fighting Al Qaeda.

In little-noticed confirmation testimony recently, Obama nominees endorsed continuing the C.I.A.’s program of transferring prisoners to other countries without legal rights, and indefinitely detaining terrorism suspects without trials even if they were arrested far from a war zone.

The administration has also embraced the Bush legal team’s arguments that a lawsuit by former C.I.A. detainees should be shut down based on the “state secrets” doctrine. It has also left the door open to resuming military commission trials.

-New York Times

News of Interest 2/2/2009

China birth defects 'up sharply'

Jiang Fan, from China's National Population and Family Planning Commission, said environmental pollution was a cause of the increase.

-BBC News

In Paris, an anti-ad insurgency

The Dismantlers, as a nationwide group of anti-ad crusaders call themselves, aren't violent or loud or clandestine. In fact, they invite the police to protest rallies where they deface signs. With a copywriter's flair, one of their slogans warns: "Attention! Avert your eyes from ads: You risk being very strongly manipulated." The goal of the Dismantlers is to get arrested, argue the righteousness of their cause in court and, you guessed it, gain publicity.

"We challenge the mercantile society that destroys all human relationships, professional relationships, health, the environment," said Alexandre Baret, 35, a founder of the group. "It's a message that proposes to attack advertising as the fuel of this not very healthy society."

-LA Times

Skateboarding in Afghanistan Provides a Diversion From Desolation

It looked like an ordinary neighborhood playground: six children tumbling off their skateboards to the tune of laughter. But only hours before, just 20 yards away, the body of a suicide car bomber was sprawled beside a glistening pool of blood.

Afghan youth have learned to recover almost instantly from such routine violence. One person determined to inject some normalcy into their lives is Oliver Percovich. A 34-year-old from Melbourne, Australia, he plans to open this country’s first skateboarding school, Skateistan, this spring. He sees sport as a way to woo students into after-school activities like English and computer classes, which are otherwise reserved for the elite.

-New York Times

One last chance to save mankind

I'm an optimistic pessimist. I think it's wrong to assume we'll survive 2 °C of warming: there are already too many people on Earth. At 4 °C we could not survive with even one-tenth of our current population. The reason is we would not find enough food, unless we synthesised it. Because of this, the cull during this century is going to be huge, up to 90 per cent. The number of people remaining at the end of the century will probably be a billion or less. It has happened before: between the ice ages there were bottlenecks when there were only 2000 people left. It's happening again.

-New Scientist

Chinese earthquake may have been man-made, say scientists

The 511ft-high Zipingpu dam holds 315 million tonnes of water and lies just 550 yards from the fault line, and three miles from the epicentre, of the Sichuan earthquake.

Now scientists in China and the United States believe the weight of water, and the effect of it penetrating into the rock, could have affected the pressure on the fault line underneath, possibly unleashing a chain of ruptures that led to the quake.

-London Telegraph

NATO: Members may use Iran for Afghan supplies

NATO would not oppose individual member nations making deals with Iran to supply their forces in Afghanistan as an alternative to using increasingly risky routes from Pakistan, the alliance’s top military commander said Monday.

Gen. John Craddock’s comments came just days after NATO’s secretary general, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, urged the U.S. and other members of the Western military alliance to engage with Iran to combat Taliban militants in Afghanistan.

-Air Force Times

Turkey and the army: Conspiracy theories

Mr Aygan’s confessions are the latest in a series of sensational revelations unfolding in a case that takes its name from Ergenekon, a supposedly clandestine organisation. Some 86 people, including retired generals, journalists and politicians, who purportedly planned to carry out a string of high-profile murders, sow chaos and provoke a military coup in Turkey, have been on trial. Some defendants are said to have ties with the mafia and drug gangs.

On January 22nd a further 39 people (five of them serving army officers) were rounded up in pre-dawn raids across the country. These arrests have turned Ergenekon into what many say is the most significant criminal investigation in Turkey’s history. The prosecutors are now exploring links with the 2007 murder of Hrant Dink, a Turkish-Armenian editor, who had been threatened by a retired general, Veli Kucuk, before his death. Mr Kucuk was arrested in January 2008 and is alleged to be among Ergenekon’s ringleaders.

-The Economist

Mayor Gets Tough, Goes on Trial

On Monday, Mr. Melton is scheduled to go on trial -- for the third time since taking office -- on felony charges related to his hard-line, gun-toting tactics. Mr. Melton is battling three counts in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Mississippi on civil-rights and related weapons charges after he and two police bodyguards, and a group of young acquaintances wielding sledgehammers, allegedly destroyed a home where the mayor has claimed occupants used and sold crack cocaine.

-Wall Street Journal

News of interest 1/25/09

Mesa police shootings doubled in 2008

While overall crime was on the decline last year, shootings by Mesa police more than doubled from 2007.

Twenty-two officers used their firearms in seven incidents in 2008, killing five people who approached police with knives and guns. The year before, police were involved in three incidents and used deadly force in each one.

Mesa Police Chief George Gascón considers the number of shootings "small" compared to the 26,000 arrests and the 300,000 phone calls officers responded to in 2008.

-Arizona Republic

Greek police battle with rioters

Hundreds of anarchist protesters in Greece have fought running battles with police through the centre of the capital, Athens.

The demonstrators were demanding the release of people arrested during rioting last month after a policeman shot dead a youth aged 15.

Rioters smashed shop windows and threw stones and petrol bombs, police say.

...

The futility of firing tear gas at rioters who wear gas masks has dawned on the authorities and it is reported that Greece is taking delivery of water cannon, which should be ready for action within a fortnight, our correspondent reports.

-BBC News

Spain: How Eta went to war over the environment

The militant Basque separatist movement has its traditional strongholds in urban centres such as Bilbao. But as it seeks to display its eco credentials - by sabotaging a new high-speed rail link - a bloody battle is being fought in one of the region's most beautiful locations. A project director has already been murdered and now his colleagues fear they may be next.

In the Herriko Taberna, a bar in Bilbao's working-class area of Santutxu, a new picture hangs on the wall this weekend: the face belongs to Garikoitz Aspiazu, a local boy who was, police claim, the military chief of the Euskadi Ta Askatasuna, the armed Basque nationalist group long known to the world as Eta. In a necklace and a pink T-shirt, Aspiazu, linked to at least four deaths, smiles out at the drinkers, the slices of tortilla, the posters and the prizes for the Christmas raffle. 'A very good guy,' said Josu Telleria, who helps run the bar. 'We played football together. He was a great striker.'

Aspiazu, who was arrested a month ago, is lost to the struggle for the time being. But there are plenty of others to carry on the fight. In the same bar Carlos Ruiz, a former steelworker and member of a campaigning group close to the extremist Basque nationalists, argues that the violent confrontation with Madrid stems from its refusal to allow the Basques to decide their own future.

-The Guardian

India: Hydro-Pharmacology

Medical researchers have found that some of the streams, rivers, and groundwater in Patancheru, India, are really "a soup of 21 different active pharmaceutical ingredients, used in generics for treatment of hypertension, heart disease, chronic liver ailments, depression, gonorrhea, ulcers and other ailments. Half of the drugs measured at the highest levels of pharmaceuticals ever detected in the environment."

"If you just swallow a few gasps of water," a German doctor said to MSNBC, "you're treated for everything. The question is for how long?" Indeed, all of this has the unsurprising effect that "some of India's poor are unwittingly consuming an array of chemicals that may be harmful, and could lead to the proliferation of drug-resistant bacteria."

-BLDGBLOG