social revolution – Page 35

Punk Rock and Revolution- A Message to Persons Unknown – Margaret Killjoy

‘A revolution cannot be one thing for one group of people. It’s got to be woven together with many strands’.

by Margaret Killjoy at BirdsBeforetheStorm / Substack 11 comments on 23rd Feb 2025 via thefreeonline at https://wp.me/pIJl9-G82 Telegram https://t.me/thefreeonline/2364

When I was nineteen, I spent awhile squatting in the suburbs of Baltimore, in a town called Towson (now famous as the birthplace of Luigi). This isn’t where I’m from… I had met some crustpunks in philly and started traveling with them.

We wound up in Towson, living in abandoned buildings or crawl spaces or bushes. We organized against war and we dumpstered and we shoplifted and we got run off by the cops several times a day.

You Do Not Flee a Storm- . or: morale as a terrain of struggle

There’s this moment I remember clearly, despite the large quantity of malt liquor I’d likely consumed: I remember being in a basement in Baltimore itself, probably one of the Food Not Bombs houses, while punk bands played.

Everyone was wearing all black with white-ink patches on their clothes, sewn together with dental floss. Floor joists were perilously perched above our heads. We did ourselves some permanent hearing damage in that basement.

The punk band had two singers, both women. It was called 2AM Revolution. During the chorus, everyone sang along as the singer screamed about how if she saw a Nazi she would “break my fucking 40 on his motherfucking face!”

And just like that, in that basement screaming along, I understood punk.

Because the thing is, those of us in that basement meant what we said about revolution. Our venues were collective houses that doubled as mutual aid kitchens. The singers of the band marched alongside us at antiwar and alterglobalization protests.

When a bus load of Nazis passed through town, the local punks working with Anti-Racist Action partnered with local gangs to ambush the fascists, smashing out the bus windows, pepperspraying inside, and jumping every nazi as they emerged.

Then everyone disappeared back through the alleys into the Maryland night.

A car full of antifascists showed up late and were carted off to jail, and the punk scene raised the money for their criminal defense. We meant what we said in our lyrics.

But one band and their fans isn’t a movement.

Peasant communities under attack in Honduras By Palm Oil takeover

Via Freedom News.. from thefreeonline on 21st Feb 2025 By Roberto Latchford

Palm oil company Dinant accused of land theft and murder of local activists

In the Aguán Valley in northern Honduras, heavily armed men linked to organised crime have been employing intimidation and violence towards farmers, who have recovered their ancestral lands from the palm oil industry.

This month, peasant leaders José Luis Hernández Lobo and Suyapa Guillén were assassinated. January saw the murder of activist Arnulfo Díaz. On 24 December 2024, the Los Camarones cooperative was brutally evicted by armed groups.

Since then, more than 160 families have been living in extremely precarious conditions, without access to land or resources.

The conflict has taken the lives of more than 150 small farmers since 2010. The Dinant corporation, a palm oil producer, has come centre stage as the main claimant of the peasants’ lands as its property.

The company has been at the centre of controversy for more than a decade, accused of links to violence, murders and threats against peasant leaders and human rights defenders.

International organisations, such as the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, have denounced these abuses.

In February 2022 Honduran m Xiomara Casmtro promised to investigate and resolve the conflict through a tripartite commission, but no concrete action has been taken.

Palm oil monoculture has expanded across vast territories in Honduras, Guatemala and even Mexico, and is linked to massive deforestation, the destruction of vital ecosystems and soil degradation.

In Honduras it covers 200k hectares, over 18% of the country’s total available farming land. The case of Honduras points to the complicity between corporations and paramilitaries in this expansion.

Buyers’ boycott

In a statement, a group of thirty three environmental and human rights organisations has demanded that multinational companies such as ADM, Cargill, Pepsico and Nestlé, refrain from doing business with Dinant.

These transnationals are the main buyers of palm oil from Honduras and the rest of Latin America.

Dinant has used paramilitary and military forces to evict peasants who resist the expansion of plantations, using strategies ranging from “physical violence to the destruction of the livelihoods of families who have farmed the land for generations,” the statement said.

There have been reports of “land theft, intimidation, targeted persecution and murder of members of peasant and social organisations, as well as the use of violence by security forces and irregular armed groups, which are suspected of having links with Dinant”, the European activists write in the letter.

Following pressure from these international organisations, the companies BASF and Bunge have already suspended their commercial relations with Dinant, while Nestlé has announced its intention to eliminate the supplier from its supply chains.

Photo: Santiago Navarro F

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The DOGE Dividend Is A Trap

What the desperation of this bribe actually shows is that our combined power is working.
The DOGE Dividend Is A Trap

People need to realize with this dividend narrative, they’re essentially being bribed to stop complaining.

The latest polls show this administration’s actions are deeply unpopular across party lines.

What the desperation of this bribe actually shows is that our combined power is working.

This Republican administration is feeling the heat, and they are responding to the PR disaster in their own fucked up way.

That $5000 is cheap compared to the pricelessness of becoming self aware of and wielding that power consciously.

If we keep putting our power together we might get through this.

But if we fall for this cheap payout (and yes, it’s laughably cheap for what we’re losing in civil rights and democracy if they get away with it) then we deserve to wake up after a six month coke binge (or whatever you personally would do with that money) with nothing to show for it but a bloody nose and a one way ticket to guantanamo if you dare call it a robbery.

Just kidding, none of us deserve that. But most of us are struggling enough that a dollar amount that’s nothing to them sounds life changing.

And I guess it is – but in exactly the opposite way as we all deserve. For me, it’s a no.

My freedom has no dollar amount, I am not selling myself into permanent fash enslavement for $5000.

I’m marking my calendar for the no buy day on February 28 and looking forward to flexing our collective power even more.

Fuck these people and their weird dark techbro fantasies.

If they want brain implants and gulags and drone cops and thought police they can go buy themself an island and die there alone.

The answer is no.

Next week, Amazon is stripping away your ability to download your ebooks.

But don’t worry about reading The Free- still a free download in PDF, EPub, format etc click HERE

by Literary Hub on 20 Feb 2025 via thefreeonline at https://wp.me/pIJl9-G7u

Starting next Wednesday, February 26th, Amazon isn’t going to let users download the ebooks they’ve purchased, forcing users to keep everything within the corporation’s proprietary ecosystem.

As covered in The Verge, the mega-corporation is removing a feature that lets ebook readers do what they want with their purchases, including back-up their books, or convert them to different formats, or transfer them to a non-Amazon e-reader. There are a lot of reasons why you may want to download your ebooks, but the basic argument for it is simple: if you buy something, you should be able to do what you want with it.

Amazon’s downloading process has always been a little obscure, requiring a lot of clicks. And if you want to move books to non-Kindle devices, you have to convert the books out of Amazon’s proprietary file type, which can also be tricky. But even this too-onerous process is giving away too much to its customers for Amazon.

And if you’re looking for some inspiring, anti-Amazon, anti-tech oligarchy reading, check out Brian Merchant’s Blood In The Machine

This move isn’t terribly surprising coming from Amazon, a bad company that’s getting worse, and being led by a fascist-fascinated billionaire who looks like Mr. Clean’s uncle — the one who is no longer invited to Thanksgiving. This isn’t just an issue of forcing users to cede ownership and keep everything within Amazon systems — Amazon has demonstrated in the past that it’s not a trustworthy librarian.

The company has deleted books that it said were offered for sale by mistake or replaced books with new versions without alerting readers. Amazon’s also not interested in selling their ebooks or audiobooks to libraries, keeping a monopolistic hold on some titles. This is most egregiously the case for “Audible Exclusive” audiobooks, which won’t be available to borrow from libraries or to purchase from other services.

Tech companies selling books, music, and movies have long treated digital purchases more like rental agreements, which is nice for saving space on shelves and hard drives, but means that you’re locked in a strange, almost feudal relationship. The solution is to not give them your business — services like Bookshop.org and Libro.fm not only let you download your own, non-DRM-locked copies of what you buy, but also let you support independent bookstores with your purchases.

If you’ve already bought ebooks from Amazon, you’ve got a week to back them up before the feature disappears. The process seems like it involves a lot of clicking, especially if you have a larger library, but writer Craig Mod shared a tool that apparently helps automate things a bit:

and Tim Wu’s The Curse of Bigness — both available as ebooks you can download.

What We Can Learn From South Koreans Who Stopped an Authoritarian Power-Grab

South Koreans reversed a martial law decree in just six hours, showing how we can take fast action to protect rights

via Wikimedia Commons By Jungmin Choin. Via thefreeonline

Stop Authoritarian Power-Grabs

As Elon Musk and his DOGE team set about dismantling Civil Rights many US Americans expected a strong response from Congressional Democrats. Instead, party leaders offered weak statements and little resistance to being refused entry to the very agencies they are tasked with overseeing.

Of course Políticans nowadays are the playthings of the Corporations, Billionaires, Deep State and Israelís who sponsor them.

This lack of urgency amid what’s being called an administrative coup stoked a wave of angry calls to “do more.

In their outrage on social media, many pointed to decisive action taken by politicians in other countries facing crisis.

For example, someone on BlueSky noted that “South Korean politicians were literally scaling fences to protect their government,” while “our senators are sending out pre-scheduled tweets about the Super Bowl.”

South Korea is a particularly apt example in this context. After all, something incredible happened there two months ago, and it could be just the kind of inspiration US Americans need to turn the tide on the Trump administration’s dangerous power-grab.

On Dec. 3, at 10:23 p.m., South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol unexpectedly declared nationwide martial law, citing the need to eliminate pro-North Korean elements and anti-state forces.

He then established martial law command, mobilized troops and stripped citizens of their fundamental political and social rights.

This included prohibiting all political activities by the National Assembly and political parties, control over all press and publication freedoms, a ban on strikes, slowdowns and assemblies, and the ability to arrest and detain anyone without judicial procedures or warrants.

The martial law situation came to an abrupt end when the National Assembly passed a resolution demanding its withdrawal on Dec. 4 at 1:01 a.m.

In response, martial law forces gradually withdrew from the National Assembly building. The Presidential Office announced the lifting of martial law at 4:26 a.m., and it was formally rescinded through a cabinet council resolution four minutes later, effectively terminating the entire episode within about six hours.

Subsequently, a nationwide movement demanding both the Yoon Suk Yeol administration’s resignation and comprehensive social reform was initiated.

President Yoon is currently under detention and indictment while simultaneously facing impeachment proceedings.

Many high-ranking officials from the Yoon administration have either resigned or been impeached, and numerous general-grade officers involved in the incident have been detained.

Raw Video: Tear Gas in South Korean Parliament

There were many reasons that the self-coup failed, including command confusion due to the extremely small number of personnel involved in planning the attempt

However, none of these factors could have halted the coup without civilian action. Here are four key lessons from this movement that contributed to their victory.

1. Take action commensurate with the threat and move quickly