Every day the demos are getting bigger, pickets become gigantic and merge into marches and rioting.
It’s not just a case of changing Prime Minister, half the government are implicated in mass bribery. If Rajoy goes others and the maybe the whole government will fall.
Then the ‘Troika’ program of closing all public services, schools, hospitals, pensions.. plus 500 mortgage evictions a day and general unemployment.. may grind to an halt.
Hacker makes public all accounts showing the corruption of the PP between 1990 and 2011.
(translated from Kaos. en castellano abajo)
Files with all accounting PP since 1990-2011 are hosted on a website file hosting service. They were uploaded by a hacker and announced through the Anonymous network.
The prime minister Rajoy is specifically listed as taking ”commissions” but his party (PP) say he wont even have to explain himself in Congress
In Spain hundreds of thousands of people have been evicted from their homes after the capitalist property speculation bubble popped and they were left paying impossible mortgages. Evictions have been running at over 500 a day!.
Under Spanish law you not only lose the house but have to go on paying literally forever.There was a spate of victims committing suicide and a new law to change all this was proposed by a peoples coalition (PAH) wth more than a million supporters (organised locally without leaders). Continue reading “Squatted Bank wins reprieve after Fierce Campaign”
“We will counterattack three corporations for their worldwide terrorism in the next six months.” So declares the eco-anarchist group “The East” near the beginning of Zal Batmanglij’s new film of the same name. With this politically tinged suspense and action film, Batmangilij seeks to break the mold of the usual formulaic summer blockbusters. The director of earlier sci-fi inflected dramas, Batmanglij appears to want to surf the frenzy of Occupy Wall Street and the Tar Sands Blockade that grabbed headlines. The film delves into questions around justice, violence, community, commitment, and ultimately asks the viewer, Which side are you on?
This provocative film is one part espionage thriller, one part love story, and all anarchy. Batmanglij tells the story of undercover corporate spy and ex-FBI agent Sarah Moss (Brit Marling, who also gets a co-writer credit) tasked with infiltrating an eco-anarchist group called “The East.” The collective, fronted by Benji (Alexander Skarsgård) and Izzy (Ellen Page), is wanted for executing covert attacks upon major corporations.
The corporate bad guys have never looked so bad. And the depiction isn’t just caricature: the director drew the film’s corporate misdeeds from real stories of corporate crime.
From oil companies spilling billions of gallons of oil into pristine eco-systems, to a pharmaceutical giant putting bad meds on the market, to a chemical company poisoning local watersheds and children, we’re given the sense that The East’s actions are justified. A private security honcho named Sharon (Patricia Clarkson) is especially vile. When, early in her undercover operation, Sarah discovers The East will be poisoning a Big Pharma cocktail party with dirty meds, Sharon orders her to let them proceed – since the party goers aren’t her clients, she doesn’t care wh
at happens to them.
But, for me at least, the verisimilitude breaks down when it comes to its depictions of the eco-warriors at the heart of the film. As a self-identified anarchist and activist, I just wasn’t buying it. Not that Batmanglij and Marling didn’t try to get it right. The writers spent the summer of 2009 traveling through the North American anarchist scene researching the film.
To their credit, they depict the anarchist activists as smart, strategic operators – not as dumb, naïve kids duped into some plot, the usual script for the mainstream media. While two months is enough to get a tone and feel for the North American anarchist subculture, it’s not enough to really understand the real meaning of its politics or its inhabitants. In the end, The East’s portrait of anarchists falls flat, seeping some of the movie’s punch.
Like Stuart Townsend’s Battle in Seattle, the film depicts the activists as privileged children damaged by the system or, worse, crippled with “daddy issues” and lashing out with anger and hate. In The East a supporting character, Doc (Toby Kebbell), has dropped out of mainstream society because of the death of his sister at the hands of a pharmaceutical giant.
Benji began his rebellion after the death of his parents in a boating accident and the insult of his remaining family trying to buy off
his grief with money. Izzy has such poison in her heart for her corporate executive father that she kidnaps him and his boss and forces them to jump into a lake poisoned by their company’s chemical waste. In the end (spoiler alert!), the father willingly jumps in to show his love for his estranged daughter – proving to the audience he has more compassion than his supposedly world-saving daughter. (omg who wrote this script!!)
While not as absurd as Woody Harrelson’s cop in Battle in Seattle apologizing to jailed protestor Martin Henderson after beating the shit out of him (or 2002’s Anarchist Cookbook in which anarchist Puck turns his friends into the police before taking off to marry his Republican girlfriend) the twist at the ending is pushing ridiculous. (Second spoiler alert!) Benji tries to convince Sarah to run off with him and join the resistance. While love is always a wild card, it’s difficult to believe that any anarchist would try and convince an exposed informant to run off into the sunset. Cue face to palm.
Beyond the unbelievable theatrics of the script, there’s a bigger problem with the film’s premise: Its depiction of political activism is a false choice. The film sets up two options for responding to corporate crimes: either violent counter-attack or fuzzy idealism that the system itself will make its own corrections. The filmmakers seem to have ignored (or misunderstood) the lessons from recent successful social movements. We live in a time in which Tunisians and Egyptians have thrown out dictators, Greeks and Spaniards are fighting austerity via strikes and sit-ins, and the occupation of a small park in lower Manhattan sparked a new anti-corporate consciousness in the American mainstream. (but nothing has changed, on the contrary!)
From students in Montreal stopping privatization of their schools to Bolivians kicking Bechtel out of El Alto, popular movements and mass organizing are the real game changers in today’s political system. But watching The East, you get the sense that violent counter-attack is the only way to strike back against environmental destruction and social injustice.
In the end, Sarah undergoes a radical transformation from law enforcement careerist to whistle-blower. She launches a campaign to expose the corporate criminals by turning them in to government agencies. To me, trusting in the system to function correctly seems a naïve solution to environmental problems. The reality is the revolving door between industry and government make it nearly impossible to distinguish the regulators from those they are supposed to be regulating. Also, it’s sometimes the whistle-blowers who end up being persecuted. This film seems oblivious of the fact that the government usually acts in the interests of the one-percent-ers.
Batmanglij hopes The East will be a conversation-starter not just for anarchists and radicals, but for grandmothers and ordinary summertime moviegoers. Despite my quibbles about the film, I hope he’s right. We need more pop culture offerings that can spark discussions about the resistance to business as usual.
The history of art and insurrection is encouraging. You wouldn’t have had a civil rights movement without Langston Hughes and the Harlem Renaissance. You wouldn’t have had Students for a Democratic Society and massive anti-Vietnam War protests without Allen Ginsberg and the Beats waxing poetically about inherit flaws in the American system ten years earlier. Likewise, stories of a new vibrant environmental movement are gaining in pop culture despite the country being governed by a center-right party (Democrats) and far right party (Republicans). Whether it’s the other-wordly eco-rebellion of Avatar, the animal revolt of Rise of the Planet of the Apes, the proletarian uprising of the Hunger Games, or critically acclaimed documentaries like If A Tree Falls and Gasland, the movie theater has become one of the most important places for exploring environmental politics. Those films and others prove that you can cut all the flowers, but you can’t stop the spring.
Back in the Real World…. support our heroes in prison!
Eric McDavid was arrested in January 2006 after being entrapped by a paid government informant – “Anna” – and was charged with a single count of conspiracy. Eric – who never carried out any actions and was accused of what amounts to “thought crime” – refused to cooperate with the state and took his case to trial. 
After a trial fraught with errors, the jury convicted Eric. He was subsequently sentenced to almost 20 years in prison. More information on Eric’s case can be found at www.supporteric.org
Marie Mason was arrested in March 2008 after her former partner – Frank Ambrose – turned informant for the FBI. Facing a life sentence if she went to trial, Marie accepted a plea bargain in September 2008, admitting her involvement in the burning of an office connected to GMO research and the destruction of a piece of logging equipment. 
At her sentencing in February the following year, she received a sentence of almost 22 years. More information on Marie’s case can be found at www.supportmariemason.org
Marie Mason and Eric McDavid share the unfortunate distinction of having the longest standing sentences of any environmental prisoners in the United States. Please join us in an international day of solidarity with Marie Mason, Eric McDavid, and other long-term anarchist prisoners on every June 11th AND ANY OTHER DAY!.
This is a time to remember our friends who are in prison – who are continuing their struggles on the inside.
Athens: more than 6,000 march in solidarity with Kostas Sakkas
On June 29 a solidarity demonstration with Kostas Sakkas, took place in Athen. Sakkas is an anarchist who has been imprisoned for 2,5 years without a trial (when the legal maximum is 18 months) and has been on hunger strike since June 4. The demonstration saw a participation of 6,000+, starting from Monastiraki and crossing through most of central Athens. Continue reading “6000 shout FREE KOSTAS SAKKAS, now 1 month on hungerstrike”
EGYPT will once again take centre stage in the dramatic global uprising against neoliberal tyranny this weekend.
Opponents of the US-backed Morsi regime will be taking to the streets on Sunday #June30 to call for a second revolution – a year after the increasingly unpopular and despotic leader came to power.
There were already chaotic scenes in Alexandria on Friday, as revolutionaries were attacked by government supporters, with reports of at least three deaths and many injured. Continue reading “#June30 – towards a real Revolution in Egypt!”
As the death toll reaches 100,000 in Syria all sides and their allies are pouring arms into the fire and the US industrial/war machine is desperate to start the bombing. The final logic of crisis capitalism is permanent spreading WAR. Now may be our last chance to protest.
The West’s escalation of the war will not bring peace, but death, chaos and destruction on a scale that will dwarf previous ‘interventions’ in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya.
Whenever the Quartet’s ‘Peace Envoy’ Tony Blair makes any pronouncement on the great issues in the Middle East, you can always guarantee that the missile silos are being readied for action. Continue reading “STOP NOW: All sides Pour arms on Syrian War”
The Free 