May 2012
68 posts
List of Recommended Documentaries (w/links)
Capitalism: A Love StoryMichael Moore documentary centering on the financial crisis of 2007–2010 and the recovery stimulus, while putting forward an indictment of the current economic order in the United States and capitalism in general.
Chicago 10 At the 1968 Democratic Convention, protestors, denied permits for demonstrations, repeatedly clashed with the Chicago Police Department, who waged a week-long terror campaign that resulted in riots witnessed live by a television audience of over 50 million.
Commanding Heights - The Battle for the World Economy – Episode 1, Episode 2, Episode 3PBS The purpose of this site is to promote better understanding of globalization, world trade and economic development, including the forces, values, events, and ideas
Enron: The Smartest Guys in the RoomA documentary about the Enron corporation, its faulty and corrupt business practices, and how they led to its fall.
FuelDirector Josh Tickell takes us along for his 11 year journey around the world to find solutions to America’s addiction to oil.
Food Inc The veil on our nation’s food industry is lifted, exposing the highly mechanized underbelly that’s been hidden from the American consumer with the consent of our government’s regulatory agencies, USDA and FDA.
The Future of FoodThe Future Of Food offers an in-depth investigation into the disturbing truth behind engineered foods that have quietly filled U.S. grocery store shelves for the past decade.
HomeIt shows the diversity of life on Earth and how humanity is threatening the ecological balance of the planet
Human Resources It’s a documentary about Social Control.
Occupation 101Award-winning documentary film on the root causes of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
If A Tree Falls Part 1, Part2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8A TREE FALLS: A STORY OF THE EARTH LIBERATION FRONT tells the remarkable story of the rise and fall of this ELF cell, by focusing on the transformation and radicalization of one of its members. (Incomplete)
Century of the Self (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4) The Century of the Self is an award winning British television documentary film. It focuses on how Sigmund Freud, Anna Freud, and Edward Bernays influenced the way corporations and governments have thought about, dealt with, and controlled people.
Workers Republic In December of 2008, laid-off Chicago factory workers occupied their vanishing workplace, Republic Windows & Doors, declaring they would not leave until the owners and creditors agreed to pay them the severance that they were owed. They held the factory for six days.
The TakeIn suburban Buenos Aires, thirty unemployed auto-parts workers walk into their idle factory, roll out sleeping mats, and refuse to leave.
The End of Poverty A feature length documentary film that asks why poverty still exists.
Frontline: The WarningLong before the meltdown, one woman tried to warn about a threat to the financial system
A Place Called Chiapas(Online Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10) documentary film of first-hand accounts of the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN) the (Zapatista Army of National Liberation or Zapatistas) and the lives of its soldiers and the people for whom they fight
Power and Terror: Noam Chomsky In Our Times (OnlinePart 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5)
Noam Chomsky Imperial Grand Strategy
Noam Chomsky Manufacturing Consent
Why We Fight (OnlinePart 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8) ‘Why We Fight’ is an unflinching look at the military industrial complex and the rise of the American Empire.
Taxi To The Dark Side-BBC Full Length Documentary Controversial death in custody of an Afghan taxi driver named Dilawar who was beaten to death by American soldiers while being held in extrajudicial detention at the Bagram Air Base. Taxi to the Dark Side also goes on to examine America’s policy on torture and interrogation in general, specifically the CIA’s use of torture and their research into sensory deprivation.
Weather Underground The rise and fall of the American radical organization The Weathermen, a radical group committed to overthrow the government
The World According to Monsanto
The Trials of Henry Kissinger ( Online Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8) This riveting documentary depicts former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger as a warmonger responsible for military cover-ups in Vietnam, Cambodia and East Timor, as well as the assassination of a Chilean leader in 1970.
Zeitgeist - The Federal Reserve Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4 , Part 5
ZEITGEIST: MOVING FORWARDA feature length documentary work which presents a case for a needed transition out of the current socioeconomic monetary paradigm which governs the entire world society. This subject matter will transcend the issues of cultural relativism and traditional ideology and move to relate the core, empirical “life ground” attributes of human and social survival, extrapolating those immutable natural laws into a new sustainable social paradigm called a “Resource-Based Economy”
Zeitgeist AddendumThe second documentary film, Zeitgeist: Addendum, attempts to locate the root causes of this pervasive social corruption, while offering a solution.
Wal Mart: The High Cost of Low Pricesa feature length documentary that uncovers a retail giant’s assault on families and American values.
Battle in Seattle (2007)Battle in Seattle is a 2007 film and the directorial debut of actor Stuart Townsend. It is based on the protest activity at the WTO Ministerial Conference of 1999
This is What Democracy Looks LikeThis film, shot by 100 amateur camera operators, tells the story of the enormous street protests in Seattle, Washington in November 1999, against the World Trade Organization summit being held there.
The Shock DoctrineNaomi Klein explodes the myth that the global free market triumphed democratically.
The American Dream(30 minute animated short on the financial institutions and the Fed)
I Am Not Moving Occupy Wall Street
Right Here All Over (Occupy Wall St.)(Amazing behind the scenes look at OWS community)
Inside Job (2010)(Documents 2008 Financial crisis)
Bahrain: Shouting in the Darka television documentary produced by Qatar -based news channel Al Jazeera English about the 2011 Bahraini uprising.
Making a Killing: The Untold Story of Psychiatric Drugging
Confessions of an Economic Hitman Part 1, Part 2, Part 3
The Gunpowder Plot, Pt. 1 - Roman Catholic Jesuit Conspiracy Part 1, Part 2
BBC Guy Fawkes and The Gunpowder Plot, 1605 Part 1, Part 2
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Feel free to add your own and lets build a database of documentaries with streaming links to spread and educate ourselves. Share, spread, and contribute!!!
OSD may day pics coming soon, as well as more free streaming documentaries and free online reading material ;)
Play
April 2012
19 posts
Cal State students announce hunger strike at six campuses →
latimesblogs.latimes.com
Our 4 Demands
1. A 5 year moratorium on student fee hikes.
2. The elimination all 23 campus president’s housing and car allowances.
3. If cuts must be made, they should first and foremost be made to administrative and executive salaries reversing their salaries to 1999 levels.
4. The extension of freedom of speech areas to include entire campuses.
1. A 5 year moratorium on student fee hikes.
2. The elimination all 23 campus president’s housing and car allowances.
3. If cuts must be made, they should first and foremost be made to administrative and executive salaries reversing their salaries to 1999 levels.
4. The extension of freedom of speech areas to include entire campuses.
SDSU Community Ask for a Voice
Ana Ceballos
An open presentation for students to pose questions to university administratorsabout concerns regarding the current budget challenges was announced last Tuesday in an email to San Diego State students.
This email was in part sent as a response to a letter from student-activist organization Reclaim SDSU to arrange an open forum solely devoted to questions and concerns of students, faculty, staff and parents. The intent of Reclaim SDSU’s letter was to create an event for the campus community, instead of a lecture to select individuals by the administration, according to the organization.
“We just want to make sure the issues we are most concerned about are focused on,” Reclaim SDSU member Matt Blythe said. “We don’t want our questions to be pre-screened and not represent the actual concerns of the community.”
Before the open presentation for Associated Students was announced, the administration had sent Reclaim SDSU an email stating it would send a formal response with the time and location for the open forum. Yet, the formal response had the open presentation specifics enclosed, rather than those of the open forum.
While the subjects of the open presentation will pertain to the university’s budgeting process and fiscal outlook, student questions can be incorporated into the presentation if submitted no later than Friday. Some students felt this was a positive move on the part of the administration.
“I think it’s a good, different idea that AS is reaching out to the students not only to inform them as to the reasons behind the budget reduction, but also to see what our questions are as a student population,” theatre arts junior Liliana Silva said. “I hope the student body takes advantage of the opportunity to educate themselves since no one likes the idea of budget cuts. If we motivate ourselves to understand more about the fiscal state of the university and involve ourselves, we can come up with a stronger solution as students.”
According to a few members of Reclaim SDSU, an hour and a half is not much time to address students’ concerns, and devoting only a portion of that time to students’ questions is insufficient.
“We are disappointed that the new president of SDSU has chosen to give a lip service to our calls for a transparent dialogue, instead of honest and horizontal engagement of the SDSU community,” Blythe said.
“We asked for faculty, staff, parents and students to be involved and invited,” Reclaim SDSU member Elena Horvitz said. “We want everyone that is affected to be involved, so an open forum with only students would be unacceptable.”
Nevertheless, when 25 students were asked whether or not they had received the email, only eight confirmed to have received it.
“We want the format of the presentation to be more democratic and not some sort of dictatorship,” political science graduate student Amir Shoja said.
Parents are also welcome to attend the open presentation.
The announcement was sent to registered emails in enrollment services. According to Shoja, “Communication efforts have not been very quick or successful,” which is why he said the deadline for questions will be extended to next Friday.
Faculty members were not officially invited to the student budget open presentation because three sessions were held for budget faculty presentations last week.
According to the university administration, the reason the open forum was replaced by an open presentation was that the administration believes it would be more productive and more organized.
“If we receive the questions in advance, we can be more productive during the presentation,” chief of staff Andrea Rollins said. “If we get organized more information can be shared and there can be a better flow and logic to the information.”
“I would like to be involved in an open forum,” SDSU parent Jeff Horvitz said. “I would think most students are working as a team with parents to complete their college education, so parents should be involved.”
The presentation will be moderated by A.S. president and vice president, Cody Barbo and Krista Parker, and will be held from 2 to 3:30 p.m. on Thursday, May 3 in Arts and Letters 201.
How Swedes and Norwegians Broke the Power of the ‘1 Percent’
By George Lakey
While many of us are working to ensure that the Occupy movement will have a lasting impact, it’s worthwhile to consider other countries where masses of people succeeded in nonviolently bringing about a high degree of democracy and economic justice. Sweden and Norway, for example, both experienced a major power shift in the 1930s after prolonged nonviolent struggle. They “fired” the top 1 percent of people who set the direction for society and created the basis for something different.
Both countries had a history of horrendous poverty. When the 1 percent was in charge, hundreds of thousands of people emigrated to avoid starvation. Under the leadership of the working class, however, both countries built robust and successful economies that nearly eliminated poverty, expanded free university education, abolished slums, provided excellent health care available to all as a matter of right and created a system of full employment. Unlike the Norwegians, the Swedes didn’t find oil, but that didn’t stop them from building what the latest CIA World Factbook calls “an enviable standard of living.”
Neither country is a utopia, as readers of the crime novels by Stieg Larsson, Kurt Wallender and Jo Nesbro will know. Critical left-wing authors such as these try to push Sweden and Norway to continue on the path toward more fully just societies. However, as an American activist who first encountered Norway as a student in 1959 and learned some of its language and culture, the achievements I found amazed me. I remember, for example, bicycling for hours through a small industrial city, looking in vain for substandard housing. Sometimes resisting the evidence of my eyes, I made up stories that “accounted for” the differences I saw: “small country,” “homogeneous,” “a value consensus.” I finally gave up imposing my frameworks on these countries and learned the real reason: their own histories.
Then I began to learn that the Swedes and Norwegians paid a price for their standards of living through nonviolent struggle. There was a time when Scandinavian workers didn’t expect that the electoral arena could deliver the change they believed in. They realized that, with the 1 percent in charge, electoral “democracy” was stacked against them, so nonviolent direct action was needed to exert the power for change.
In both countries, the troops were called out to defend the 1 percent; people died. Award-winning Swedish filmmaker Bo Widerberg told the Swedish story vividly in Ådalen 31, which depicts the strikers killed in 1931 and the sparking of a nationwide general strike. (You can read more about this case in an entry by Max Rennebohm in the Global Nonviolent Action Database.)
The Norwegians had a harder time organizing a cohesive people’s movement because Norway’s small population—about three million—was spread out over a territory the size of Britain. People were divided by mountains and fjords, and they spoke regional dialects in isolated valleys. In the nineteenth century, Norway was ruled by Denmark and then by Sweden; in the context of Europe Norwegians were the “country rubes,” of little consequence. Not until 1905 did Norway finally become independent.
When workers formed unions in the early 1900s, they generally turned to Marxism, organizing for revolution as well as immediate gains. They were overjoyed by the overthrow of the czar in Russia, and the Norwegian Labor Party joined the Communist International organized by Lenin. Labor didn’t stay long, however. One way in which most Norwegians parted ways with Leninist strategy was on the role of violence: Norwegians wanted to win their revolution through collective nonviolent struggle, along with establishing co-ops and using the electoral arena.
In the 1920s strikes increased in intensity. The town of Hammerfest formed a commune in 1921, led by workers councils; the army intervened to crush it. The workers’ response verged toward a national general strike. The employers, backed by the state, beat back that strike, but workers erupted again in the ironworkers’ strike of 1923–24.
The Norwegian 1 percent decided not to rely simply on the army; in 1926 they formed a social movement called the Patriotic League, recruiting mainly from the middle class. By the 1930s, the League included as many as 100,000 people for armed protection of strike breakers—this in a country of only 3 million!
The Labor Party, in the meantime, opened its membership to anyone, whether or not in a unionized workplace. Middle-class Marxists and some reformers joined the party. Many rural farm workers joined the Labor Party, as well as some small landholders. Labor leadership understood that in a protracted struggle, constant outreach and organizing was needed to a nonviolent campaign. In the midst of the growing polarization, Norway’s workers launched another wave of strikes and boycotts in 1928.
The Depression hit bottom in 1931. More people were jobless there than in any other Nordic country. Unlike in the U.S., the Norwegian union movement kept the people thrown out of work as members, even though they couldn’t pay dues. This decision paid off in mass mobilizations. When the employers’ federation locked employees out of the factories to try to force a reduction of wages, the workers fought back with massive demonstrations.
Many people then found that their mortgages were in jeopardy. (Sound familiar?) The Depression continued, and farmers were unable to keep up payment on their debts. As turbulence hit the rural sector, crowds gathered nonviolently to prevent the eviction of families from their farms. The Agrarian Party, which included larger farmers and had previously been allied with the Conservative Party, began to distance itself from the 1 percent; some could see that the ability of the few to rule the many was in doubt.
By 1935, Norway was on the brink. The Conservative-led government was losing legitimacy daily; the 1 percent became increasingly desperate as militancy grew among workers and farmers. A complete overthrow might be just a couple years away, radical workers thought. However, the misery of the poor became more urgent daily, and the Labor Party felt increasing pressure from its members to alleviate their suffering, which it could do only if it took charge of the government in a compromise agreement with the other side.
This it did. In a compromise that allowed owners to retain the right to own and manage their firms, Labor in 1935 took the reins of government in coalition with the Agrarian Party. They expanded the economy and started public works projects to head toward a policy of full employment that became the keystone of Norwegian economic policy. Labor’s success and the continued militancy of workers enabled steady inroads against the privileges of the 1 percent, to the point that majority ownership of all large firms was taken by the public interest. (There is an entry on this case as well at the Global Nonviolent Action Database.)
The 1 percent thereby lost its historic power to dominate the economy and society. Not until three decades later could the Conservatives return to a governing coalition, having by then accepted the new rules of the game, including a high degree of public ownership of the means of production, extremely progressive taxation, strong business regulation for the public good and the virtual abolition of poverty. When Conservatives eventually tried a fling with neoliberal policies, the economy generated a bubble and headed for disaster. (Sound familiar?)
Labor stepped in, seized the three largest banks, fired the top management, left the stockholders without a dime and refused to bail out any of the smaller banks. The well-purged Norwegian financial sector was not one of those countries that lurched into crisis in 2008; carefully regulated and much of it publicly owned, the sector was solid.
Although Norwegians may not tell you about this the first time you meet them, the fact remains that their society’s high level of freedom and broadly-shared prosperity began when workers and farmers, along with middle class allies, waged a nonviolent struggle that empowered the people to govern for the common good.
This article was published at NationofChange at: http://www.nationofchange.org/how-swedes-and-norwegians-broke-power-1-percent-1327762223. All rights are reserved.
Save the Children's Garden
From the World Beat Center “Greetings Global Family, March 23rd we received a certified letter stating that WorldBeat Center’s Children’s Garden was an unauthorized encroachment on Park Property and that it could be removed within 30 days if WBC did not comply with the Park Codes. WBC has followed these codes for years and has had insurance to cover this area for over 4 years now. This area now the Children’s Garden was once a dirt area known to be a haven for drug and alcohol abusers. With this Children’s Garden, WBC cleaned up the area and made it a positive and refreshing place for San Diegans and visitors. This Garden was in the Master Plan for Balboa Park and WBC has maintained it for 15 years without any support from this City or Park. WBC Staff and the kids planted it in 1998. WBC has been given the approval from the former Park & Rec director but the current administration has been uncooperative. The Park Administration has promised a Right of Entry for years now but has left this promise unfulfilled. Having contacted our City Council for advice and support, WBC has been informed that the Garden in not in danger of removal, however this has yet to be addressed in a formalized letter. We ask for the public to continue to call and to write to our city council and mayors office to ask for the 25 year lease including the Children’s Garden. Your support has helped to slow down the removal of the Children’s Garden. Thank you family! Don’t give up the fight…” Learn about the World Beat Center at http://www.worldbeatcenter.org/ Upcoming Programs to support the Garden. >WEEKLY DRUM CIRCLES >POETRY CIRCLE >MORENGA PLANT SALES >GARDENING CLASSES >SOLAR WORKSHOPS >INTRODUCTION TO SOLAR COOKING >CHILDRENS SUMMER CAMP >CHILDREN STORY TELLING #wbc#world beat center#san diego#culture#balboa park
Build It Solar: Renewable Energy For Do It Yourselfers →
builditsolar.com
Free plans and information on: Conservation, water, solar homes, solar space heating, solar water heating, passive cooling techniques, solar sunspaces and greenhouses, solar pool heating, solar electricity (PV), wind generated electricity, micro hydro, biofuels, methane generators, solar cooking, solar food drying, solar and efficient vehicles, solar water pumping, solar engines, and solar wood drying.
Occupy San Diego: The Community Vs. WalMart Saga Continues... →
occupy-sandiego.tumblr.com
Unfortunately, a judge has ruled in favor of WalMart at this time. Here is a write up from the action, followed by an article on the judge’s ruling to deny the TRO requested by the Coalition for Safe and Healthy Economic Progress. This also comes after a major story that just broke regarding WalMart bribing Mexican officials to build the supercenters, rather than going through the proper process to obtain building permits. Guess where Mexico isn’t too far from… (hint: starts with S and ends in “an Diego”).
Walmart Battle in Sherman/Logan Reaches New Heights as Community Members Get Involved
Posted by walmarttruth
In case you haven’t been paying attention, there is something big brewing in Sherman Heights, a small tight-knit and predominately Latino community just east of downtown San Diego. On Tuesday afternoon, community members driving by the historic Farmers Market building were shocked to see a huge chunk of the building demolished in preparation for a controversial proposed Walmart neighborhood market to be built in the location. As more community members rushed to the scene, construction of the building was put on halt and workers were sent home for the day.
Local community members and other concerned citizens and activist groups took to the scene the following day at 6:00 AM in an effort to prevent further demolition of the historic building and to demand that a stop-work order be issued until the permits could be assessed and the local community whose voice up to this point had been largely ignored. 40 community members armed with signs reading “We deserve better, Walmart says no!” in English and Spanish protested the demolition at the entrance to the construction zone while contractors and police watched in the vicinity.
Continue reading at WalMartTruth
KPBS reports on today’s ruling:
Judge Will Not Stop Walmart Construction In Sherman Heights
Monday, April 23, 2012
By CITY NEWS SERVICE
A judge today denied a bid for a temporary restraining order that would have stopped demolition work at the site of a Wal-Mart store in a landmark building in Sherman Heights.
Enlarge this image
Photo by Adrian Florido
Above: Bulldozers took to the historic Farmer’s Market building on Imperial Avenue in San Diego six weeks after Walmart announced it would convert it into one of its stores.
Members of neighborhood and labor-affiliated groups claimed that Wal-Mart began demolishing the iconic Farmers Market building before issuing proper notice. They went to court last week in a bid to get the project shut down.
The retailer’s lawyers said it had the necessary permits to begin work on its future Wal-Mart Neighborhood Market, which will be smaller than the typical big-box store and focus mainly on groceries. The site is in a building that has a tower that dominates the skyline east of Interstate 5 near downtown.
A city permit calls for seismic retrofits of the structure, including the removal of the north wall, windows, roof and floor.
In his ruling, Judge Joel Pressman said the work was consistent with city-approved plans that call for maintaining the facade. He also said the building, in its current condition, was a safety hazard, so the plaintiffs - the Coalition for Safe and Healthy Economic Progress - should have acted sooner.
Continue reading at KPBS.org
Everyone To The Streets: Communiques and Texts from the Streets and Occupations, Greece 2008 →
zinelibrary.info
The good people at the 56a Infoshop in London have released “Everyone To The Streets: Communiques and Texts from the Streets and Occupations”. The book is 150 pages long (!) and contains an introduction by the 56a collective, two chronologies from Athens and Thessaloniki, 15+ texts and communiques from the streets and occupations plus analysis from Greek group TPTG and afterword. It costs £5 and is available from 56a Infoshop, 56 Crampton St, London SE17 3AE UK (opening hours Wed 3-7, Thu 2-8, Fri 3-7 and Sat 2-6pm. For mail order, check Active Distribution (www.activedistribution.org)
Wal Mart's Demolition of Farmers Market in Sherman Heights
Monday at 9:00am Hall of Justice 330 W Broadway San Diego, Ca 92101 “We just heard that the hearing is schedule for this coming Monday at 9am, same location as today the Hall of Justice building, 330 w. Broadway, dept. 66, we hope you can join us. Also, I want to clarify that what was agreed upon today was to have the demolition stopped till Monday. What this means is that construction crew is NOT allowed to tear down any more wall till the case is heard. But the crew is allowed to do other work if needed, they are also allowed on site.” URGENT RALLY! Walmart has completely disrespected the Sherman/Logan community! Walmart promised that they would keep Farmer’s Market building intact from the outside…THEY LIED! The demolition has started! We will not stand for that!
December 2011
15 posts
Chomsky to Occupy: move to the next stage →
portland.thephoenix.com
Noam Chomsky has advice for the Occupy movement, whose encampments all over the country are being swept away by police. The occupations were a “brilliant” idea, he says, but now it’s time to “move on to the next stage” in tactics. He suggests political organizing in the neighborhoods.
The Occupy camps have shown people how “to break out of this conception that we’re isolated.” But “just occupying” has “lived its life,” says the man who is the most revered radical critic of American politics and capitalist economics.
Chomsky gave his counsel answering questions in a small group after a speech Monday evening, December 12, in the 1000-seat Westbrook Middle School auditorium (a/k/a Westbrook Performing Arts Center), which was filled to capacity. The speech was sponsored by the University of New England’s Center for Global Humanities.
The Occupy movement’s repression, which Chomsky decried, has a saving grace, he said: the opportunity for it to expand more into “the 99 percent” by engaging people “face to face.”
“Don’t be obsessed with tactics but with purpose,” he suggested. “Tactics have a half life.”
Noam Chomsky: “10 Strategies of Manipulation” by the Media →
elige.tumblr.com
Renowned critic and always MIT linguist Noam Chomsky, one of the classic voices of intellectual dissent in the last decade, has compiled a list of the ten most common and effective strategies resorted to by the agendas “hidden” to establish a manipulation of the population through the media.Historically the media have proven highly efficient to mold public opinion. Thanks to the media paraphernalia and propaganda, have been created or destroyed social movements, justified wars, tempered financial crisis, spurred on some other ideological currents, and even given the phenomenon of media as producers of reality within the collective psyche. But how to detect the most common strategies for understanding these psychosocial tools which, surely, we participate? Fortunately Chomsky has been given the task of synthesizing and expose these practices, some more obvious and more sophisticated, but apparently all equally effective and, from a certain point of view, demeaning. Encourage stupidity, promote a sense of guilt, promote distraction, or construct artificial problems and then magically, solve them, are just some of these tactics.
1. The strategy of distraction
The primary element of social control is the strategy of distraction which is to divert public attention from important issues and changes determined by the political and economic elites, by the technique of flood or flooding continuous distractions and insignificant information. distraction strategy is also essential to prevent the public interest in the essential knowledge in the area of the science, economics, psychology, neurobiology and cybernetics. “Maintaining public attention diverted away from the real social problems, captivated by matters of no real importance. Keep the public busy, busy, busy, no time to think, back to farm and other animals (quote from text Silent Weapons for Quiet War ).”
2. Create problems, then offer solutions
This method is also called “problem -reaction- solution. “It creates a problem, a “situation” referred to cause some reaction in the audience, so this is the principal of the steps that you want to accept. For example: let it unfold and intensify urban violence, or arrange for bloody attacks in order that the public is the applicant‟s security laws and policies to the detriment of freedom. Or: create an economic crisis to accept as a necessary evil retreat of social rights and the dismantling of public services.
3. The gradual strategy
acceptance to an unacceptable degree, just apply it gradually, dropper, for consecutive years. That is how they radically new socioeconomic conditions ( neoliberalism ) were imposed during the 1980s and 1990s: the minimal state, privatization, precariousness, flexibility, massive unemployment, wages, and do not guarantee a decent income, so many changes that have brought about a revolution if they had been applied once.
4. The strategy of deferring
Another way to accept an unpopular decision is to present it as “painful and necessary”, gaining public acceptance, at the time for future application. It is easier to accept that a future sacrifice of immediate slaughter. First, because the effort is not used immediately. Then, because the public, masses, is always the tendency to expect naively that “everything will be better tomorrow” and that the sacrifice required may be avoided. This gives the public more time to get used to the idea of change and accept it with resignation when the time comes.
5. Go to the public as a little child
Most of the advertising to the general public uses speech, argument, people and particularly children‟s intonation, often close to the weakness, as if the viewer were a little child or a mentally deficient. The harder one tries to deceive the viewer look, the more it tends to adopt a tone infantilising. Why? “If one goes to a person as if she had the age of 12 years or less, then, because of suggestion, she tends with a certain probability that a response or reaction also devoid of a critical sense as a person 12 years or younger (see Silent Weapons for Quiet War ).”
6. Use the emotional side more than the reflection
Making use of the emotional aspect is a classic technique for causing a short circuit on rational analysis , and finally to the critical sense of the individual. Furthermore, the use of emotional register to open the door to the unconscious for implantation or grafting ideas , desires, fears and anxieties , compulsions, or induce behaviors …
7. Keep the public in ignorance and mediocrity
Making the public incapable of understanding the technologies and methods used to control and enslavement. “The quality of education given to the lower social classes must be the poor and mediocre as possible so that the gap of ignorance it plans among the lower classes and upper classes is and remains impossible to attain for the lower classes (See „ Silent Weapons for Quiet War ).”
8. To encourage the public to be complacent with mediocrity
Promote the public to believe that the fact is fashionable to be stupid, vulgar and uneducated…
9. Self-blame Strengthen
To let individual blame for their misfortune, because of the failure of their intelligence, their abilities, or their efforts. So, instead of rebelling against the economic system, the individual autodesvalida and guilt, which creates a depression, one of whose effects is to inhibit its action. And, without action, there is no revolution!
10. Getting to know the individuals better than they know themselves
Over the past 50 years, advances of accelerated science has generated a growing gap between public knowledge and those owned and operated by dominant elites. Thanks to biology, neurobiology and applied psychology, the “system” has enjoyed a sophisticated understanding of human beings, both physically and psychologically. The system has gotten better acquainted with the common man more than he knows himself. This means that, in most cases, the system exerts greater control and great power over individuals, greater than that of individuals about themselves.
Whack A Mole Revolution: A guide to Pop Up Occupations →
scottrossi.tumblr.com
Whack A Mole Revolution: A guide to Pop Up Occupations
Version 1.0 12/1/11 OccupySF Committee of Correspondence and 101 Tribe Affinity Group
In the past few months, we have seen our Occupations rise and fall in the face of police raids and eviction actions. The political environment has become increasingly hostile to our presence, even as we gain support and new members from the 99%. This generally translates into the removal of our Occupations as a permanent presence, the mass arrest of dozens of Occupiers and the confiscation and destruction of much of our personal property. Setting aside debates and questions on the legality and constitutional backing for our actions, this requires a change in tactics.
Maintaining a presence and offering educational and outreach experiences is extremely vital in this stage of our movement. We in OccupySF, specifically an affinity group known as the “101 Tribe”, have come up with a novel and fun tactic we want to share with Occupiers everywhere. We call this the “Pop Up Occupation”.
The idea of a Pop Up Occupation, is centered around several core concepts: mobility, visibility, novelty, and creativity. Pop Ups are mobile and are a barebones Occupation, with a tiny kitchen (mostly sandwiches and snacks), mobile library, info table and a first aid kit (unless you’re lucky enough to have a street medic in your affinity group). The mobile and small nature of the Pop Up allows you to be present in high traffic areas where it wouldn’t typically be possible to have a presence aside from a few members of your Outreach team or on the occasion of larger protest actions. The final two core concepts go hand in hand: novelty and creativity. The response to the OccupySF Pop Up Occupation has been overwhelmingly positive. People see a bunch of happy, motivated, passionate and informed protesters with fun signs and chalk drawings on the sidewalk and they approach with a smile, buy us coffee, and most importantly, have great conversations that they can take home to their friends and families and coworkers.
Pop Ups present a great face to the world for your Occupation and the movement as a whole, without vilifying or detracting from the main site. They also throw the police departments off balance, especially if there’s more than one Pop Up in action. Generally, we’re expected to have a permanent encampment and settle in an area and start erecting tents and other structures, and then satellite encampments. This throws a monkey wrench into their assumptions and response plans, as it’s just a table, some storage bins, and a bunch of sleeping bags and blankets at night, and we change spaces every few days to a new protest site. Aside from educating the public at large, it also serves to educate Occupiers on the predations and abuses of the various banks and corporations we find in our communities.
The following page is a reproduction of the 101 Tribe’s “Tips on How to Start and Maintain a ‘Pop Up’ Occupation/Affinity Group” sheet that was passed out today at the OccupySF General Assembly. Please read, reproduce and distribute this information to Occupations everywhere! This is part of the #O2 Occupy 2.0 movement. Love and Solidarity!
101 Tribe’s Tips on How to Start and Maintain a “Pop Up” Occupation/Affinity Group
Foster trust between people in your affinity group.
a) Take the time to personally get to know each other and build trust
b) Build trust by proving reliability and communicating with each other
Come together and establish a working set of guidelines that all adhere to and consent upon
a) These guidelines are naturally unspoken rules and ideals that everyone in the affinity group follows on a daily basis, but discussing and writing them down is helpful in maintaining order and welcoming and integrating new Occupiers.
i. for example: the 101 Tribe created and consensed on guidelines in one meeting. The three guidelines are:
1. When present, all Occupiers in this affinity group with participate and engage in a minimum amount of protesting (flying, making signs, manning the info table, engaging the public through think tank discussions, cleaning, etc)
2. maintaining a tolerable level of hygiene (if you can smell yourself, we probably can too!)
3. No drugs or alcohol on site and no sloppy behavior
Know your 1st Amendment Rights to assemble and free speech
a) Groups are allowed a non wooden table for information
b) Signs and sign making materials are freedom of speech
c) Vandalism of property is different than chalk and signs
d) Be aware of site lie law and what police can choose to enforce
Civil Disobedience
a) 101 Tribe recommends being as mobile as possible, which involves keeping belongings in sight and keeping on site storage to a minimum.
b) Different affinity groups may have different goals as far as specific occupation site stability but be aware that if tents are erected, police will most likely commandeer property and area.
Have established daily or nightly meetings with your affinity group
a) set a time that works best for the majority of the group and discuss long term and short term plans.
Establish and set a mission and goals
a) Be realistic about goals when setting concrete long and short term goals
b) Affinity groups should be in line with Occupation goals, but can be focused on a specific mission.
Dealing with violence
a) All affinity groups should declare with redundant accessibility that NON- VIOLENCE is of the primary values of this Occupation movement. Likewise, all and any members of an affinity group displaying any violent temperament or aggressive behavioral patterns, should be reminded by those not exhibiting such characteristics, that violence and aggression are not believed to be the best, or even favorable mode for addressing issues. While also reminding any such individuals displaying such behavior that they hold the ultimate dictate of their current state of able self maintenance as well that groups and people exist who specialize in aiding such self development. Should no responsive progress in their behavioral patterns be apparent, the next suggested action is to remind such people that all who hold contrast to such contexts are fully willing to expose such behavior. The next step is getting peacekeepers involved.
Note: it is 4:16am and i should have gone to bed hours ago. i’ve been at OccupySF all day and most of the night. please forgive any spelling/punctuation/grammar errors. we’re sans scanner, so the second half of this was typed word for word via hard copy.
WikiLeaks’ Spy Files reveal the frightening scale and ambition of the industry now devoted to surveillance of all our daily lives →
guardian.co.uk
cultureofresistance:
WikiLeaks’ Spy Files reveal the frightening scale and ambition of the industry now devoted to surveillance of all our daily livesWe live digital lives now, flitting from Facebook to YouTube, checking our iPhones and BlackBerries, and chatting with our loved ones on Skype. Very few of us worry too much about tweeting our personal opinions on politics or chatting with a new social network “friend” on the other side of the world, whom we barely know and often forget in a matter of a few hours or days.
Yet all these interactions have become fodder for a new industry that secretly vacuums up the data and preserves it forever on high-end servers that hold many petabytes (a million gigabytes) of information. This industry offers new tools to search that data and reconstruct our past, and even our real-time movements via our mobile phones, in a way that could well come back to haunt us.
WikiLeaks has just released the Spy Files – a trove of almost 300 documents from these companies that shine a light into this industry. At the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, where I work, we trawled through these documents, and tracked down yet more material which our research team – Matthew Wrigley, David Pegg, Christian Jensen and Jamie Thunder – used to create an online database that will soon cover over 160 companies in some 25 countries.
It’s worth spending some time browsing through this material because what this new industry offers to do is nothing short of Orwellian.
“We all aware of traditional spy stories of intelligence agencies like MI5 bugging the phones of one or two people,” Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, told the Bureau. He continued:
“In the last ten years, something else has happened. We now see mass surveillance, where computer systems of an entire country are infected by surveillance programs, where the entire phone calls of a nation can be and are recorded by a company.
“Previously, we had all thought, why would the government be interested in me, my brother? My business is not interesting; I am not a criminal. Now these companies sell to state intelligence agencies the ability to spy on the entire population at once and keep that information permanently. In five or six years’ time, if your brother or someone becomes of interest to that company or the government, they can go back in time and look to see what you said or what you emailed.”
For example Glimmerglass, a company in Hayward, California, offers “non-intrusive intercepts of any fiber asset” such as “submarine landing stations”, which this slide presentation demonstrates. Eric King, a human rights adviser to Privacy International, told me that means that Glimmerglass equipment can help government agencies secretly tap into the undersea cables that convey all the data and phone traffic between continents.
WikiLeaks also released a brochure from SS8 of Milpitas, California, touting its Intellego product that allows security forces to “see what they see, in real time” including a “target’s draft-only emails, attached files, pictures and videos”.
Yet others, like Blue Coat of Sunnyvale, California, sell web filtering tools that allow countries to block websites ”to meet cultural and regulatory requirements” – a tool much sought after by authoritarian governments to make sure that citizens do not access dissident sites. Not too long ago, Syria bought some Bluecoat machines via a reseller in Dubai. (The company is not allowed to sell directly to Syria because of US sanctions.)
Government authorities and the makers of these products argue that there is an urgent need for these tools – to track down criminals and terrorists, to block child pornography and computer viruses – a practice known as “lawful interception”. This is big business for i2, a company based in McLean, Virginia, which sells two major products – CopLink and Analyst’s Notebook – software that allows law enforcement to make sense of reams of data. Government Computer News ran a story earlier this week about the “Digital Dragnet” – extolling the benefits of data analysis.
The magazine quoted Bob Griffin, the CEO of i2: “When we started this more than ten years ago, we talked about things like information-sharing and gathering as much data as you could,” Griffin said. “In those days, people would look at you like you’re a green banana. Why would I want to share information? Why would I want to bring information from business licenses or hunting and fishing licenses into the policing environment?”
Police authorities are excited about the potential: Jason Scheiss, analytical services division manager at the Durham police department in North Carolina, told Government Computer News that they were hoping to expand the data-collecting to include data on water and sewage billing, visitor logs from parks and recreation facilities and correlate it with the daily jail list. “So we could say, ‘Hey, look here. All of these crimes only occur when this one guy’s not in jail,’” he told the magazine.
Therein lies the rub: apart from the massive violation of individualprivacy, or the risk of abuse by corrupt officials, these tools could easily allow security agencies to jump to the wrong conclusion. Indeed, these tools have the potential to make computer cables as dangerous as police batons.
“What we are seeing is the militarisation of cyberspace. It’s like having a tank in your front garden,” says Assange.
You have been warned and you have a choice: you can avoid the wonderful world of the internet (unlikely, since you are reading this online) and digital data (virtually impossible if you pay for electricity or go camping) – or you can join the movement to say there need to be limits to how government authorities use our information against us. And if you choose the latter, check out WikiLeaks and Privacy International.
