Punishing Youth

by Henry Giroux, CounterPunch, 11 August 2012

There is by now an overwhelming catalogue of evidence revealing the depth and breadth of the state sponsored assault being waged against young people across the globe, and especially in the United States. What is no longer a hidden order of politics is that American  society is at war with its children, and that the use of such violence against young people is a disturbing index of a society in the midst of a deep moral and political crisis.  Beyond exposing the moral depravity of a nation that fails to protect its youth, the violence used against American youth speaks to nothing less than a perverse death-wish, especially in light of the fact that As Alain Badiou argues, we live in an era in which there is zero tolerance for poor minority youth and youthful protesters and “infinite tolerance for the crimes of bankers and government embezzlers which affect the lives of millions.” 

On the Return of the Political

by Richard Pithouse, SACSIS 

When the African National Congress was founded in Bloemfontein in 1912 Sol Plaatje, then a newspaper editor, was elected as its first Secretary General. Plaatje, along with some other mission educated African intellectuals, had been optimistic about the new country that had come into being with the Union of South Africa in 1910. But within a year it was clear that segregation was going to be at the heart of the union, the white union, that followed the Boer war, its concentration camps and the English success in seizing control of the gold-fields.

Decentralized people power: what OWS can learn from South Africa’s United Democratic Front

by Grace Davie, Waging Non-Violence, January 2012

At an Occupy Wall Street meeting in midtown Manhattan on December 20th, a debate broke out about the general assemblies (hereafter, GAs)—the core decision-making forums of the movement and its most visible embodiment of direct democracy. The meeting was the second of its kind devoted to exploring the idea of a city-wide general assembly. About 80 people attended, including members of several OWS working groups and GAs across the city, of which there are now about a dozen. While some people seemed dissatisfied with the GAs, and perhaps even ready to dispense with them, others appeared intent on popularizing them even more. The discussion reminded me that this movement is growing and deepening its ties with local neighborhoods—yet as it does, it is encountering the challenge of how to accommodate new communities and support existing organizations that share its goals. While this challenge is still fairly new for OWS, it is one that has been faced and overcome by other movements before.

Peter Linebaugh at Occupy Ypsi, December 10, 2011

It's time to occupy, my friends

by Niren Tolsi, Mail & Guardian

The wind is blowing from downtown Manhattan towards the Brooklyn Bridge. From Thomas Paine Park, named after the author of Rights of Man, the clouds moving past the United States Courthouse across the road create the illusion that its 30-storey tower is falling, keeling over, as if deaf to the inscription on the New York County Supreme Court next door that reads: "The administration of justice is the firmest pillar of good governance."

Armoured Cities

by Chris McMichael, Mahlala

The last few weeks have shown how quickly a global police state can be mobilized when people stop listening to rulers and attempt to reclaim public space. Hundreds of protesters In Tahir Square demanding an end to the military generals’ highjacking of the Egyptian revolution were shot dead with US-manufactured weapons and dosed with chemical agents. Meanwhile, in a clampdown co-ordinated through the Department of Homeland Security, police departments in 18 US cities attempted to shut down the Occupations with pepper spray and sonic weapons. In the UK, the government announced a blanket ban on protests during the Olympics next year and have proposed a massive increase in their power of ‘pre-emptive arrest’; an attempt to institute legal clampdowns on dissent under the guise of securing the sporting spectacle.

Occupy has the power to effect change

by Peter Hallward, The Guardian

Occupy movements in the US went on the offensive last week, a few days after police forcibly cleared tents in cities from New York to Oakland. In addition to holding their ground in the face of violent intimidation, they began to interrupt business as usual. Rejecting the logic that compels the poor to bail out the rich, they restricted access to New York's stock exchange, they marched on bridges and subway stations, they targeted banks and corporations, they overwhelmed university campuses. Meanwhile, in defiance of an eviction order, Occupy London undertook a "public repossession" of an abandoned office building and began its conversion into a "bank of ideas"; in its first couple of days, this new variation on a public university has already arranged a full schedule of meetings and talks about privatisation, tax havens, globalisation, direct democracy, the Tobin tax, photography and contemporary fiction. More forceful protests against neoliberal austerity measures and other forms of tyranny, meanwhile, have continued in Tahrir Square and in cities across Europe and the Middle East.

The Coming War on the Occupy Movement

by George Ciccariello-Maher, CounterPunch 

As I begin to write this, Occupy Oakland circulates in a by-now familiar pattern: forced from the camp at the break of day, the occupiers reconvened as they have done before on the steps of the Public Library. Later, they will attempt to close a repeating circuit that stretches a short six blocks along 14^th Street between City Hall and the Library.

On the Wall Street Occupation

by Richard Pithouse, CounterPunch

In The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck's novel about the Great Depression, Tom Joad, the novel's central character, a man who has been made poor and who is on the run from the law, tells his mother in the climactic scene that: “I been thinking about us, too, about our people living like pigs and good rich land layin' fallow. Or maybe one guy with a million acres and a hundred thousand farmers starvin'. And I been wonderin' if all our folks got together....”

Arundhati Roy on Naxals, Occupy Wall Street

Download program audio (mp3, 43.67 Mbytes), Against the Grain

There is a war going on in the tribal heartland of central and eastern India between the Naxalite Maoists and the Indian state, in which -- Arundhati Roy believes -- much is at stake. The award-winning writer  discusses her time accompanying a group of Maoists in the forests, and the brutal counterinsurgency effort mounted against them by the Indian government. She also talks about the Occupy Wall Street movement and anticapitalism.