anti-nationalist – Page 74

¡Si tocan a un@ tocan a tod@s! /Solidarity with Spanish General Strikers

Llamamiento a todas las organizaciones políticas, sociales y de derechos humanos:
¡Si tocan a un@ tocan a tod@s!

Este curso el movimiento estudiantil viene respondiendo con fuerza a los ataques lanzados desde el Gobierno central y el de la Generalitat. El pasado 29M los estudiantes también salimos a luchar junto a la clase trabajadora contra la Reforma Laboral y todos los ajustes. La respuesta del Gobierno del PP, de CiU y el conjunto del Régimen está siendo la criminalización de la protesta. Tres compañeros, Dani e Isma de la UB de Físicas, y Javi del barrio de El Clot, están en prisión preventiva a modo de “cabeza de turco”. Quieren mandar un mensaje de miedo, a la vez que preparan fuertes recortes de derechos democráticos y libertades.

Desde No Pasarán creemos que la campaña anti-represiva que proponemos al conjunto de las organizaciones debe implementarse también con fuerza en nuestros centros de estudio. Las asambleas de facultad, la PUDUP y el conjunto de sindicatos y agrupaciones de estudiantes, PAS y PDI, debemos sumarnos con fuerza a la lucha contra la represión, sumando la defensa de nuestros derechos democráticos a la lucha cont ra los ajustes y la liquidación de la universidad pública.

Calling all political, social and human rights groups:
If they touch one of us they attack us all!!

The student movement has responded forcefully to attacks launched from the central government and the Generalitat. (Catalan Gov.) Last 29M (General Strike) students also went out to fight alongside the working class against the Labor Reform and all the Cuts. The Government’s response PP, CiU and the whole scheme is still the criminalization of protest. Three colleagues, Dani and Isma UB Physics and Javi in the neighborhood of El Clot, are in custody as “scapegoats.” They want to send a message of fear, while they prepare deep cuts in democratic rights and freedoms. Here at ‘No Pasarán’ we believe the anti-repressive proposals of all the organizations should be implemented , and also featured strongly in our study centers, assemblies, faculty meetings, the PUDUP and all trade unions and student groups, PAS and PDI, we must adhere strongly to the struggle against repression, adding the defense of our democratic rights to the fight against extreme Cuts and the liquidation of the public university.

Desde No Pasarán denunciamos la campaña de criminalización y la durísima represión de los Mossos en particular y la Policía en general, contra los trabajadores y jóvenes de la Huelga del 29M. Creemos que el repudio a esta política que la mayoría de las organizaciones de derechos humanos, sindicatos de izquierda, asociaciones, asambleas barriales y grupos políticos de izquierda están llevando a cabo mediante una gran cantidad de declaraciones, podría transformarse en una gran campaña en común en todo el Estado.

From ‘No Pasarán’ we denounce the campaign of criminalization and harsh repression of the Autonomous Police in particular and generally against young workers and the general strike of 29M. We believe that the present repudiation of this policy by most human rights organizations, leftist unions, associations, neighborhood assemblies and leftist political groups , could lead to a common campaign throughout the state.

Desgraciadamente otros grupos como como Iniciativa per Catalunya i Esquerra Unida i Alternativa han publicado declaraciones condenando a sectores de los trabajadores y la juventud indignada como ”violentos”. Así también lo han hecho las direcciones de CCOO y UGT. Y lo más lamentable, es que la CGT también se ha declarado “ajena” a la respuesta de los jóvenes y trabajadores a la represión policial. Estas organizaciones también están sufriendo este ataque represivo: dos estudiantes del AEP (Asociación de Estudiantes Progresistas) están en prisión preventiva, fueron encarcelados trabajadores de CCOO, criminalizados y reprimidos manifestantes de la izquierda sindical.

Interior ha expedientado a los sindicatos de CGT y CNT por convocar la manifestación.

Reject calls against ‘violence’ by Unions and politicians.

Unfortunately, political parties such as the Initiative for Catalonia, Esquerra Unida and Alternativa have issued statements condemning sectors of youth and workers and indignant as “violent.” So too have the leadership of the majority of CCOO and UGT trade unions. And most unfortunate is that the CGT has also declared itself to be “alien” to the response of young people and workers to police repression. These organizations are also suffering this repressive state attack: two students in the AEP (Association of Progressive Students) are in custody, CCOO workers were jailed, left wing trade union protestors have been criminalized and repressed .

The Interior Ministry has brought charges against the trade unions CGT and CNT for convening the event.

Por eso llamamos a las compañeras y compañeros de estas organizaciones a que reconsideren esta posición. Ante la ofensiva del Estado es necesario conformar la más amplia movilización en defensa de nuestros derechos y poner en pie una campaña en todo el Estado para enfrentar la política de represión y criminalización de la protesta social que la Audiencia Nacional, el Gobierno Central y el Govern de Catalunya están llevando a cabo contra las trabajadoras, trabajadores y el pueblo.

Por la dimisión del Conseller de Interior de la Generalitat Felip Puig y el Ministro del Interior del Gobierno central, Jorge Fernández Díaz.

Solidarity Call

Therefore we call upon the comrades of these organizations to reconsider this position. Against the offensive of the state it is necessary to form the largest mobilization in defense of our rights and put in place a statewide campaign to address the policy of repression and criminalization of social protest that the Courts , the Central Government and the Govern Catalonia are carrying out against workers, employees and the people.

We call for the resignation of Councillor of Interior of the Felip Puig and the Minister of Interior of the Central Government, Jorge Fernandez Diaz.

Libertad Deteni*s YA

Al mismo tiempo que exigimos la libertad inmediata y sin cargo alguno de todas las personas detenidas y encarceladas durante esta jornada, proponemos a todas estas organizaciones y sindicatos como una de las primeras medidas a tomar en común, formar una “gran caja de resistencia” que pueda afrontar las multas y fianzas impuestas a los encarcelados; como se ha exigido a 5 personas que paguen entre 3.000 y 4.000 euros y uno de ellos no ha podido pagar por lo que se quedó en prisión.

Free the prisoners .. Call for Bail fund

At the same time we demand the immediate release without charge of all persons arrested and detained during the General Strike, we offer all these organizations and trade unions, as one of the first measures to be taken together, the formation of a “big Fund of resistance” that can stand up to fines and pay bail bonds, imposed on the prisoners, as 5 people have been required to pay between 3,000 and 4,000 euros and one of them could not pay and remained in prison.

¡Libertad a los presos por luchar!
¡Anulación de las causas y procesos judiciales a todos los activistas del 29M!
¡Basta de persecución y criminalización a los luchadores!
¡Puig y Fernandez Díaz Dimisión!
Juicio y castigo a los responsables políticos y policiales de la represión
Por la mayor unidad contra la represión del régimen con manifestaciones,
campañas y cajas de resistencia.
Freedom for those imprisoned for fighting back!
Cancellation of the charges and prosecutions for all activists of 29M general strike!
No more persecution and criminalization of the fighters!
Diaz Fernandez and Puig … Resign NOW!
Trial and punishment for policy makers and police repressers
For the greatest possible unity against the repressive regime, with demonstrations,
campaigns and resistance bail funds.

http://arevolucionarianopasaran.wordpress.com

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Tactical Briefing #29 – Battle for the Soul of Occupy

Sunday, April 15 2012 Occupy Wall Street
First they silenced our uprising with a media blackout… then they smashed our encampments with midnight paramilitary raids… and now they’re threatening to neutralize our insurgency with an insidious campaign of donor money and co-optation. This counter-strategy worked to kill off the Tea Party’s outrage and turn it into a puppet of the Republican Party. Will the same happen with Occupy Wall Street? Will our insurgency turn into the Democrats’ Tea Party pet?
Tactical Briefing #29 – Battle for the Soul of Occupy

Alright you jammers, occupiers and Springtime dreamers,

It’s up to you to decide if our movement goes the way of Paris ’68, the dust bin of could-have-been-insurrections, or something more daring, more inspiring, something not yet dreamed.

Will you allow Occupy to become a project of the old left, the same cabal of old world thinkers who have blunted the possibility of revolution for decades? Will you allow MoveOn, The Nation and Ben & Jerry to put the brakes on our Spring Offensive and turn our struggle into a “99% Spring” reelection campaign for President Obama?

We are now in a battle for the soul of Occupy… a fight to the finish between the impotent old left and the new vibrant, horizontal left who launched Occupy Wall Street from the bottom-up and who dreams of real democracy and another world.

Whatever you do, don’t allow our revolutionary struggle to fizzle out into another lefty whine and clicktivist campaign like has happened so many times in the past. Let’s Occupy the clicktivists and crash the MoveOn party. Let’s #DEFENDOCCUPY and stop the derailment of our movement that looms ahead.

for the wild, Culture Jammers HQ

OccupyWallStreet.org / Tactical Briefing #25, #26, #27 and #28 / Check out Oakland occupier Mike King’s take on MoveOn’s 99% Spring

P.S. For Adbusters #102, we’re looking for intimate portraits of life inside art/activist/visionary communes worldwide. Also, a lucid, incisive critique of the continuing anti-Palestine bias at the NY Times. Plus inspiring, strategic takes on the future of Occupy. Send to editor@adbusters.org.

SHARE URL: http://www.adbusters.org/blogs/adbusters-blog/jump.html

Tatactical Briefing #27 – #laughriot (thefreeonline.wordpress.com)

Stop ecocide/genocide in Panama! (video)

Away from its busy capital city and famous canal, Panama is one of the world’s most ecologically diverse nations.

Yet huge new hydroelectric dam projects now underway are seeing pristine rivers damned and virgin rainforest flooded.
The government says it is vital for economic growth, big business is cashing in and even the UN has awarded carbon credits on the basis that the resultant energy will be ‘sustainably’ produced.

But for the indigenous Ngabe people – whose homes are vanishing under water – it is a catastrophe. So they have been fighting back. Filmmaker Glenn Elis went to Panama for People & Power to find out more.

Continue reading “Stop ecocide/genocide in Panama! (video)”

Spanish crash to bring down Banks??

All the pain in Spain… Millions refuse to lie down and see their lives smashed for the benefit of a few bankers, says Escobar.
Zaragoza, Spain – Make no mistake; the future of the euro is being played in Spain. The euro may win – but at a price; millions of Spaniards as “collateral damage”.

It took less than 100 days in power for the right-wing Popular Party (PP) government led by Mariano Rajoy to face its first general strike, on March 29.

The strike was mostly called by minority unions; the major ones, the opportunistic and bureaucratic CCOO and UGT, have been in bed with the powers that be for years.

The strike was a response to Rajoy’s EU-imposed labour market reforms that, according to Antonio Carretero from the CGT union, are “a counter-reformation that erases with a single stroke many labour and union rights acquired by the working class in decades and generations”. That includes extremely harsh cuts in health, education and social services.

Predictably, the spin war was relentless. Madrid insisted “only” 800,000 workers took part in over 100 demonstrations nationally. According to unions, 900,000 people marched in Madrid, 800,000 in Barcelona and hundreds of thousands more in 111 cities, especially Valencia and in the Basque country (the unionist vanguard in Spain). In Zaragoza, a city of 700,000, at least 150,000 people may have been in the streets; it certainly looked like it by late afternoon.

Spain strikes over austerity measures

The country virtually stopped – at a 77 per cent overall rate (much higher than the 18 per cent predicted by corporate media). In the manufacturing sector, it was 80 per cent; in mining and construction, a whopping 97 per cent. Only 30 per cent of the national transportation system was active. And even though scores of cities kept the streetlights on all day – or used other tricks to bump up the numbers – consumption of electricity in Catalunya, for instance, fell by 24 per cent.

Austerity ergo sum

The catalogue of Spain’s “austerity” is the usual catalogue of neoliberalism in trouble. A previous, nominally socialist and now an ultra-conservative government have furiously decimated unemployment, retirement and severance benefits; turned virtually all labour contracts into precariousness hell; steeply raised fees for education and transportation; vastly militarised the police; and spent fortunes to bail out banks.

Spain inevitably follows the post-modernist mantra that democracy controls protest and rebellion by managing it – sort of. That’s where the cooption of those unions, CCOO and UGT, fits in; as they had already tamed rebellion in exchange for funds from Madrid, they called the strike virtually at the last minute.

Corporate media – and Spain is a small market run by monopolies – also fit in with the usual script. There will be violence by “anarchists”. The strike will be bad for tourists. Everyone has the right to work. No one will show up for this strike.

In Zaragoza, repression was harsher in the dead of the night and in suburbs, with no cameras watching. Morning pickets concentrated on banks across its mini Wall Street, driven by Brazilian-style samba drums and demonstrators dressed up as bankers. That sparked an internal debate among the protesters; with many shouting that this was not a party, in the end the samba drums were sent packing.

By late afternoon, during the massive main demonstration that crisscrossed the city centre, everyone and his neighbour seemed to be there – immigrants, whole middle-class families, the unemployed, the precariously employed, anarchists, socialists, progressives, and every indignado in town.

In powerhouse Barcelona, there were riots but mainly sparked by people’s rage against infiltrated cops [SP], some of them chased down and beaten up.

Significantly, more people in Barcelona took part in a spontaneous protest in landmark Catalunya square than in the official union protest. In Barcelona, and to some extent in Zaragoza as well, it was clear that the strike was not a union thing, but a collective effort of a loose network; neighbourhood assemblies; workers’ assemblies; smaller anti-authoritarian unions like the CNT and CGT; groups that sprang up out of the indignados movement – the precursor of Occupy Wall Street.

In Zaragoza and Barcelona, there were flyers, posters and stickers all over town. Neighbourhood assemblies and average workers went door to door – and shop to shop – to talk about the strike; and crucially, there was as much criticism of the major unions as criticism of the government………
“Your debt – we won’t pay it.” The mood during the March 29 Spanish general strike [Al Jazeera/Pepe Escobar]

The Harpies are coming to get you

The destruction of Greece may eventually be seen as an Aristophanes comedy compared to the Sophocles tragedy in store for Spain. Spain is the fourth largest economy in the eurozone. If it goes down, the EU goes down.

The infernal mechanism is the same; more “austerity” is followed by steeper Wall Street-engineered interests rates on Spain’s debt so every single euro in budget cutting is diverted to higher interest payments – and then some.

Of course Madrid will never have the guts to tell Spaniards that this budget-cut hysteria has less than zero chances of improving their lives. For 2012, Madrid has budgeted a whopping 29 billion euros for interest payments alone; that’s 30 per cent more than in 2011.

On top of it Rajoy offered an “amnesty” for major tax cheaters – thus encouraging future tax cheating.

And this in a country with a staggering 6 million unemployed. The official unemployment rate is 24 per cent – higher than Greece and the highest in Europe. In reality it’s more like 30 per cent. Among young people, it’s between 45 per cent and 50 per cent. An extra 600,000 Spaniards will definitely lose their jobs in 2012.
…..

The US has a budget deficit of 10 per cent of GDP. Its colossal $4 trillion-plus national debt is already 100 per cent of GDP. Compare it with Spain a few points above the EU’s debt ceiling of 3 per cent of GDP, and a national debt of 79.8 per cent of GDP. Of course, if you are Washington/Wall Street you can get away with anything.

But even if Spain is now a barely disguised protectorate, still elections, strikes and a powerful concept of citizenship are kept alive. There’s serious talk of organising a European general strike. After all, the indignados started their movement in Spain, in May 2011 – the inspiration for Occupy Wall Street, a new, self-organised push for a global solidarity culture, way beyond the old, tired institutions of the organised Left, and the washed-up categories of Left and Right, East and West, North and South.

The future may be grim, but a global ola of rebellion may still be at hand. As I left Barcelona’s airport back to Asia I couldn’t help erase the verse of a classic Echo and the Bunnymen song ringing in my head: “See you in the barricades, babe.”

Pepe Escobar is the roving correspondent for Asia Times. His latest book is Obama Does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009).

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/04/20124712153186201.html Full article HERE

Spain’s credit rating downgraded (guardian.co.uk)
Spanish Workers, Students Mass in General Strike (2012indyinfo.com)
| Corporate bailouts backfire as violence flares in Spain! (truthaholics.wordpress.com)
Spanish Unemployment Hits 24.4% !!! (senseoncents.com)

Upcoming Riot in Berlin 1st May

per (A) Berlin 1st May 2012 – 25 years of hope for a different life On the 1st of May in 1987 the district Kreuzberg in Berlin exploded because of rage against the state and the cops, who defend violently the capitalist system.
Since then there are every year demonstrations and clashes against the metropolis of the rich and oppressor, against Germany, war and fascism.

In the last 25 years these violent clashes have become a ritual. Sometimes the cops get the upper hand, but very often also we achieved to be out of control.
Street battles are risky at the 1st of May in Berlin, because the cops here are one of the most effective ones in Europe. But there is a big amount of stones everywhere.
To the 25th time this year´s 1st of May symbolises the hope of going one step further to the end of the ruling form of society.
Everybody has to come to Berlin – between 30th April and 2. May it´s getting hot!!!
Against state and capital, against the state of the murderous pigs!!!

A very hot riot happened 1st May 1989: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqeOferbqcs