How #OccupyWallStreet Is Evolving and Gaining Power ACTIVISTS & HEROES, ANNOTATED NEWS Comments Off Oct 062011 October 5, 2011 / Mark Engler #OccupyWallStreet is evolving. Now in its third week, the protest movement not only continues to grow—it is maturing and becoming stronger in impressive ways. What started as a few hundred independent activists gathering for a protest on Wall Street, and a few dozen having the resolve to extend their demonstration by camping out in Manhattan’s financial district, has become something much bigger. It has become the embodiment of longstanding progressive hopes that Americans who have been hit hard by the economic crisis—those left jobless, in debt, underemployed, foreclosed, or insecure—would finally get mad enough to publicly vent their outrage at the oligarchs who have for too long perverted our democratic politics and created gross inequality in our country. Continue reading » Did you like this? Share it:
ARCHIVES: The Great Bi-Partisan Deception ANNOTATED NEWS, CLASS STRUGGLE, Healthcare struggle, Obama Comments Off Oct 062011 February 17, 2010 Articles you should have read the first time around, but missed.By Shamus Cooke Some cancer is too aggressive even for chemotherapy. The US political system is infected with such a disease; and we may be witnessing the first death spasms. In a country ravaged by war and economic crisis, with tens of millions of people suffering, politicians are capable of doing absolutely nothing to help ordinary people. The only two “achievements” of the Democrat’s super majority in the Senate — over the course of five months — were an ineffectual stimulus package and a “surge” of troops in Afghanistan. Continue reading » Did you like this? Share it:
OBAMA TAXES THE RICH FOR THE WRONG REASON ANNOTATED NEWS, CLASS STRUGGLE Comments Off Oct 062011 Shamus Cooke, Workers’ ActionObama is achieving the destruction of Medicare like no Republican before him. September 23, 2011 President Obama may have opened Pandora’s box with his latest tax-the-rich rhetoric, but he’ll try to keep the lid half-shut. Truly informing the public about just how rich the rich are — and just how much their taxes have been lowered over the decades — would certainly cause working people to demand much more from the wealthy than Obama is. Equally important to what is being demanded is where the new tax money is to go. Working people would prefer that Obama put the deficit on the back burner and use the new revenue to create jobs and to save Medicare and Medicaid, both of which the President plans to cut substantially. The deficit does not represent a social crisis the way that massive unemployment does; the President is thus proposing to tax the rich at too low a rate and for the wrong reasons. Continue reading » Did you like this? Share it:
Saudi Arabia cracks down on protesters ACTIVISTS & HEROES, ANNOTATED NEWS Comments Off Oct 062011 By Niall Green, WSWS.ORG, a socialist organizationLive and learn: tactics and methods of repression Given the tyrannical and often brutal rule of the Saudi monarchy, protests are extremely rare. Saudi Arabian security forces cracked down on demonstrators in the country’s Eastern Province Tuesday. The protest, near the coastal city of Qatif, appears to have been in response to a raid by Saudi security forces on Monday, in which two local men were abducted from their homes. The men, both in their seventies, were seized by police in the Qatif suburb of Al-Awamiya. There are reports that they are being held in an effort to force their sons, who are accused of taking part in earlier anti-government protests, to give themselves up to the authorities. Continue reading » Did you like this? Share it:
#OccupyWS issues a historical document ACTIVISTS & HEROES, CITIZEN TOOLS, CLASS STRUGGLE Comments Off Oct 062011 To ponder, share, and remember—Declaration of the Occupation of New York City Posted on September 30, 2011 by NYCGA THIS DOCUMENT WAS ACCEPTED BY THE NYC GENERAL ASSEMBLY ON SEPTEMBER 29, 2011 AS WE GATHER TOGETHER IN SOLIDARITY to express a feeling of mass injustice, we must not lose sight of what brought us together. We write so that all people who feel wronged by the corporate forces of the world can know that we are your allies. As one people, united, we acknowledge the reality: that the future of the human race requires the cooperation of its members; that our system must protect our rights, and upon corruption of that system, it is up to the individuals to protect their own rights, and those of their neighbors; that a democratic government derives its just power from the people, but corporations do not seek consent to extract wealth from the people and the Earth; and that no true democracy is attainable when the process is determined by economic power. We come to you at a time when corporations, which place profit over people, self-interest over justice, and oppression over equality, run our governments. We have peaceably assembled here, as is our right, to let these facts be known. Continue reading » Did you like this? Share it:
