As a nurse, a human being, and an anarchist, I was horrified to see the trauma enacted on people in Boston. [1] I was further saddened because I know that in our sick society tragedy breeds tragedy. Sadly, and predictably, the tragic Boston bombing has provided an opportunity for unprincipled people to go after opponents, to construct new political and cultural boogeymen, and for tabloid...
As a perpetual emotion machine -- producing and guzzling its own political fuel -- the “war on terror” continues to normalize itself as a thoroughly American way of life and death. Ongoing warfare has become a matter of default routine, pushed along by mainline media and the leadership of both parties in Washington. Without a clear and effective upsurge of opposition from the...
Nine thousand heavily armed police including SWAT teams were deployed in a manhunt to capture a 19 year old student at U-Mass, after his brother Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the alleged Boston Marathon terror mastermind was shot dead by police allegedly after a car chase and shoot out with police. Prior to the conduct of a police investigation, the 19 year old student has already been designated as...
Image : FBI's latest entrapped patsy, Abdella Ahmad Tounisi, a U.S. citizen, attempted to join Al Qaeda's Syrian franchise, Jabhat al-Nusra. The irony is, as Tounisi is charged with attempting to provide material support to a foreign terrorist organization, the US State Department has announced an additional $123 million in military aid to these very same terrorists. April...
If emerging victorious after being down 3-0 to the Yankees in the 2004 playoffs should have taught us anything, it’s that the people of Boston are tough as hell and never lose faith. After Monday’s bombing of the Boston Marathon and the following days under lockdown, we are already seeing that resilience emerge. Already, people in the city are talking about how the Marathon next...
Power is not to be conquered, it is to be destroyed. It is tyrannical by nature, whether exercised by a king, a dictator or an elected president. The only difference with the parliamentarian ‘democracy’ is that the modern slave has the illusion of choosing the master he will obey. The vote has made him an accomplice to the tyranny that oppresses him. He is not a slave because...
Imagine a country in which the government pays convicted con artists and criminals to scour minority religious communities for disgruntled, financially desperate, or mentally ill patsies who can be talked into joining fake terror plots, even if only for money. Imagine that the country's government then busts its patsies with great fanfare to justify ever-increasing authority and...
Amidst the White House and congressional theatrics surrounding the so-called fiscal-cliff negotiations, a number of bills were signed into law by President Barack Obama that renew some of the worst excesses of the Bush years. Largely ignored by the media, these laws further entrench odious policies like indefinite detention, warrantless wiretapping and the continued operation of the U.S. gulag...
It was more sophisticated than we had imagined: new documents show that the violent crackdown on Occupy last fall – so mystifying at the time – was not just coordinated at the level of the FBI , the Department of Homeland Security, and local police. The crackdown, which involved, as you may recall, violent arrests, group disruption, canister missiles to the skulls of protesters...
BREAKING UPDATE 5:15PM: According to blockaders on the ground, several arrests have been made at the Tree Blockade. We are awaiting details but it has been confirmed two tree-sitters have been arrested. Monday I was arrested at the site of Tar Sands Blockade’s tree blockade in Winnsboro, TX. Though some people attend an action of that size with the intention of being arrested...
Today Leah Plante will again appear before a federal grand jury in Seattle, Washington, for the third time, and refuse to testify about her political beliefs and political associations. It is likely that she will be imprisoned for her principled stance against what she calls a witch hunt against local anarchists. The grand jury is investigating anarchists in the Northwest, following FBI and...
Nine activists have committed themselves to blockading construction by TransCanada of the Keystone XL pipeline project through Texas to the Gulf of Mexico. The activists have established a position in trees that TransCanada must cut down in order to build the pipeline. They have decided to engage in nonviolent direct action to stop TransCanada from destroying land for the tar sands pipeline...
We wanted a Tahrir moment , an American Spring, a new vision of the future, and they attacked us in Zuccotti Park on November 15, 2011 in the dead of the night with military precision. The surprise raid began with a media blackout. Our movement's founding encampment was surrounded by riot police, credentialed mainstream journalists who tried to enter were pushed back or arrested, and the...
In the early morning hours Monday, Occupy Wall Street activists marked the first anniversary of the movement by protesting in the financial district. Hundreds gathered on Water Street and hundreds more in Zuccotti Park, the birth place of the movement, before marching through Lower Manhattan, occasionally pausing to occupy intersections and protest financial institutions like Chase and Bank of...
It finally happened. After months of anarchists howling over journalist Chris Hedges’s controversial article “The Cancer Within Occupy,” the author debated the subject of non-violence and the diversity of tactics in the Occupy Wall Street movement with Brian Traven, representing CrimethInc, an anarchist group sympathetic to the Black Bloc tactics Hedges denounced in the...
Last weekend, news cameras zoomed in on a theater in Aurora, where many moviegoers were shot down, apparently by a gunman trying to act out a crazed fantasy. While the mass killing reignited a nationwide debate on gun control, a different, but similar, tragedy unfolded not too far away in Anaheim, California. The difference was that this time, the cops did the shooting. And while the victims...
To the Residents of Anaheim, I am one of the outsiders who's coming to your city today to protest the cowardly shooting of Manuel Diaz, the five other fatal police shootings this year alone, and the police incursion into a neighborhood protest with guns and dogs. Before I arrive, I want to thank you for your welcome and hospitality. Just as the police are uniting in nationwide and...
The U.S. military has unveiled its newest approach to crowd control, the Active Denial System, a heat ray that sends out a high-frequency electromagnetic ray. People hit with the ray feel an intense, unbearable heat. The military touts the ray's "far-ranging" capabilities and is looking at "many different applications" for its possible use. Marine Col. Tracy Taffola said at the public...
Attorneys Carl J. Mayer and Bruce I. Afran filed a complaint Friday in the Southern U.S. District Court in New York City on my behalf as a plaintiff against Barack Obama and Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta to challenge the legality of the Authorization for Use of Military Force as embedded in the latest version of the National Defense Authorization Act, signed by the president Dec. 31. The...
President Obama signed the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) today, allowing indefinite detention to be codified into law. As you know, the White House had threatened to veto an earlier version of the NDAA but reversed course shortly before Congress voted on the final bill . While President Obama issued a signing statement saying he had “serious reservations” about the...
One of the most entertaining yet unsurprising aspects of Occupy Wall St has been the response from traditional media. Whether intentionally playing dumb or genuinely clueless, the mainstream media has failed to inform the public and substantially address the key issues. But why did tens of thousands of people risk arrest all over the world to set up encampments and protest the status quo?...
The history of activism is a cat-and-mouse game of surprising tactical innovations that spark an insurrectionary situation and the counterstrategies developed to put down the revolt. In 1848, the invention of the barricade toppled the King of France and sparked a Europe-wide people's uprising. In 1999, the unique mixture of a carnivalesque mood with human lockboxes disrupted the World Trade...
Last night, in what seems to be part of a coordinated crackdown on occupations across the country, Zuccotti Park was raided. Thousands of us who had subscribed to the text alert system, or who got emails or phone calls or panicked Twitter messages, went to Wall Street. But we could not get near the camp. Two blocks south of Liberty Plaza on Broadway, blocked by a police barricade that circled...
Last night, after one of the most remarkable days of resistance in recent history, some of us within Occupy Oakland took an important next step: we extended the occupation to an unused building near Oscar Grant Plaza. We did this, first off, in order to secure the shelter and space from which to continue organizing during the coming winter months. But we also hoped to use the national...
A week ago, police fired rubber bullets, bean bags, and canisters into the crowd of protesters in Oakland. Their brutality almost cost Marine veteran Scott Olsen his life. And it turns out, the police used tactics that aren’t even allowed to be used in war zones. A former Marine with special operations in crowd control says that what the police did in Oakland last week is something...
To all those in the United States currently occupying parks, squares and other spaces, your comrades in Cairo are watching you in solidarity. Having received so much advice from you about transitioning to democracy, we thought it’s our turn to pass on some advice. Indeed, we are now in many ways involved in the same struggle. What most pundits call “The Arab Spring” has its...
What began as the gathering of just a few US Marines has now become a major organized movement to get Marines and military personnell of all branches to Occupy America nationwide. You can thank Marine Sgt. Shamar Thomas for that. His actions last week have inspired service men and women across the country to take a stand for the American people and join the Occupy protests. Sgt. Thomas, as...
Starting with the occupation of a park next to Wall Street on September 17, a new movement is spreading across the country in which people gather in public spaces in protest against social inequalities. We’ll present a full analysis of this phenomenon here shortly; in the meantime, here’s an open letter to the occupation movement, engaging with some of the issues that have...
Something is wrong, and the signs of it are everywhere. Somebody flies a plane into an IRS tax office in Texas, and millions of people around the country cheer, while the media speak of a “senseless attack.” In a black neighborhood in the slums of Hartford, someone opens fire on a SWAT team that has busted down their door, and people in the gathered crowd of neighbors whisper...
On Thursday, September 8, 2011, the CIA issued legal threats against producers Ray Nowosielski and John Duffy on their discovery of the identities of the two key CIA analysts who executed the Tenet-Black-Blee cover-up in the case of two key 9/11 hijackers. The analysts were referred to only by first names initially, but were going to be fully named in a follow up segment. Nowosielski and...
Since last Saturday, a situation has escalated around the UK, with eruptions of long-repressed anger in most major cities. Whilst this anger may have certainly, at times, taken on forms that we disapprove of, we all know where this anger comes from. We are all suffering at the moment. Trying to make ends meet can be a living nightmare – benefits, jobs and healthcare going down the drain...
Could the Pentagon be responsible for your death? The military's marching orders to the jihadist world. ut what follows in the category of paragraphs no one noticed that should have made the nation's hair stand on end. This particular paragraph should also have sent chills through the body politic, launched warning flares, and left the people's representatives in Congress shouting...
A judge is allowing an Army veteran who says he was imprisoned unjustly and tortured by the U.S. military in Iraq to sue former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld personally for damages. The veteran's identity is withheld in court filings, but he worked for an American contracting company as a translator for the Marines in the volatile Anbar province before being detained for nine months...
Traditionally, young people have energized democratic movements. So it is a major coup for the ruling elite to have created societal institutions that have subdued young Americans and broken their spirit of resistance to domination. Young Americans—even more so than older Americans—appear to have acquiesced to the idea that the corporatocracy can completely screw them and that...
The US government’s bin Laden story was so poorly crafted that it did not last 48 hours before being fundamentally altered. Indeed, the new story put out on Tuesday by White House press secretary Jay Carney bears little resemblance to the original Sunday evening story. The fierce firefight did not occur. Osama bin Laden did not hide behind a woman. Indeed, bin Laden, Carney said...
Many of us believe the Internet to be open and free for us to explore all known information. Indeed, it is true that we currently can surf to any active website with our browser, and we can start a website or blog on any topic we wish to discuss. And it is quite a profound concept that everyone with a smart phone literally has all of the world's knowledge in the palm of their hand. Ben...
Unless we come up with some better solutions Klein says, "this crisis will be exploited to militarize our societies, to create fortress continents." AMY GOODMAN: Our guest for the hour is Naomi Klein, journalist and author. Her latest book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism . She’s writing a new book on climate change and the climate change deniers. Naomi, take it...
The King hearings have been compared to McCarthyism, but McCarthy went after political ideology not racial and ethnic groups, that was Hitler. New York Republican Senator Peter King is using tax dollars to go on an Islamophobic witch hunt in the United Sates. Peter King supported by the right wing will go down in history with the infamous like Goebels and McCarthy The narrative in the...
And he continues to kick our asses posthumously. That’s right, he’s been dead for eleven fucking years and we’re still on orange alert. After years of dialysis and a less than comfortable lifestyle, despite his wealth, in December 2001 Osama bin Laden died in the mountains of Tora Bora and was buried in an unmarked grave, according to Arabic-language news network Al Jazeera...
These days, with Facebook and Twitter and social media galore, it can be increasingly hard to tell who your "friends" are. But after this, Internet users would be well advised to ask another question entirely: Are my "friends" even real people? In the continuing saga of data security firm HBGary, a new caveat has come to light: not only did they plot to help destroy secrets outlet...
The official position of the US Secretary of State is that countries around the world should respect their citizens' rights to free speech, free expression and free assembly -- and that's precisely what Sec. Hillary Clinton said during a Tuesday speech at George Washington University. Unfortunately, as she spoke, not 15 feet in front of her, a series of events unfolded that utterly...
Andre Bulatov reached out, looking for help with his situation. I am doing the same. I want to help him tell his story and I ask that others out there will do the same and help share this. I am reaching out for help in writing this article. What I am presenting is what was told to me through letters from Andre Bulatov and Mikhail Bulatov. Not all the details are currently available, but we...
The riots of 2010 are over and a new year is upon us. It has been over seven months since the convergence against the G20, which saw grassroots organisations and anti-authoritarians mobilize in a groundswell of active resistance, only to face a brutal counterattack by the state. And while we have suffered the loss of our comrades’ daily presence to the grasp of the state’s...
Follow the revolution live here Egypt's 30 years under President Hosni Mubarak ended to thunderous cries of revolution on Friday, after millions of pro-democracy protesters who'd occupied the country's largest cities for days threatened a "Day of Martyrs" if he did not leave. Mubarak had vowed to remain in the presidency, but after 17 days of intense protest and violent outbursts, he...
An American trends analyst told a Russian news service recently that in 2011, young people from industrial societies around the world will unite on the Internet to overthrow increasingly ineffective elements of globalism that have driven their economies into depression. In a wide-ranging interview with Russia Today (RT) on Monday, Gerald Celente made the bold prediction along with a raft of...
This is an audio podcast of clips relating to Wikileaks. Act 1: The campaign to ruin Julian Assange – The Progressive Song 1: And So It Goes – The Essential Billy Joel Act 2: Assange released from jail – The Bugle Song 2:
Bradley Manning, the 22-year-old U.S. Army Private accused of leaking classified documents to WikiLeaks, has never been convicted of that crime, nor of any other crime. Despite that, he has been detained at the U.S. Marine brig in Quantico, Virginia for five months -- and for two months before that in a military jail in Kuwait -- under conditions that constitute cruel and inhumane treatment...
The FBI caught another homegrown terrorist this week, except like many recent plots the agency has “uncovered,” the attack was a plant, a plan concocted by the FBI itself. It’s the latest in a growing number of terrorism plots that the FBI stirs up by infiltrating communities and helping to devise attack plans. The practice raises serious questions about the...
The food industry is no longer a free market. In fact, I'd go as far as saying it's becoming the most glaring example of corporate-government fascism in America. Actual monopolies fully control the basic building blocks of the food that makes up the majority of the American diet -- and no one seems to care. Simply put, those who control the corn, wheat, and soybeans control all food, since...