In late 2010, political activist John Perry Barlow tweeted: “The first serious info-war is now engaged. The field of battle is WikiLeaks. You are the troops.” In the last four years, new insurgencies have arisen from cyberspace to participate in the battle against government corruption and secrecy.
“The violence is not a new thing,” says Jose-Pablo Buerba about Mexico’s civil unrest and protest in recent weeks. An international political economist from Mexico City, Buerba works with heads of state around the world on matters economic. He is a native of Mexico City, where he has lived and worked these last few months.
By the time the officer (pictured below) said “OK, everyone here is under arrest!” it was too late. Encircled on three sides by the police and on one side by a tall brick wall, there was seemingly no place to go and nowhere to hide. We were, as they say in protester argot, completely kettled-in. I had been at the protest for about an hour, had committed no crime, and yet there I was: trapped on the corner of 29th and Telegraph in Oakland.
On December 10, International Human Rights Day, federal Magistrate Matt Whitworth sentenced me to three months in prison for having crossed the line at a military base that wages drone warfare. The punishment for our attempt to speak on behalf of trapped and desperate people, abroad, will be an opportunity to speak with people trapped by prisons and impoverishment here in the U.S.
Let’s Be Honest
Despite the seeming popularity of environmental and social justice work in the modern world, we’re not winning. We’re losing. In fact, we’re losing really badly.1
Why is that?
a whole lot of writing going on, but no more shaking . . . rattling the cages
I’ll get to the school and the yard and the fights in a minute. But . . . .
Okay, a guest on the “alternative radio show” in Portland, KBOO-FM.
Taxation for what, for whom, for them, for gutted and eviscerated communities via nihilism vis-a-vis the entire casino capitalism and its banksters …?
NPR rarely hits it right, but while working at my “other” job with developmentally disabled adults, I heard this piece on a singer-doctor-multilingual social justice thinker. It was okay, for NPR, but the interview accidentally culled a piece around new urbanism, the poor, the greenie weenie, Coder creeps I rail against ALL the time.
I’ll flip the classroom on this post, putting down my response to another middling post from that middling thing called, Inside Higher Education, this on-line blog advertising sheet, DC-based (first problem) and one that is just a hotbed of behind-the-times (second knock against it) and failing to really know the on-the-ground (third, knock) reality of school, community, real faculty and, well, the non-dominant white male/female perspectives (4th knock), the ones bred and enabled on that east coast (another knock) where we have seen a galaxy of pain put upon us, the 80 percent, by
Who’s in charge? Certainly not the bought-and-paid-for-moderates that Washington and the EU hoped to install as the new government of Ukraine. The agreement that the Washington and EU supported opposition concluded with President Yanukovich to end the crisis did not last an hour. Even the former boxing champion, Vitaly Klitschko, who was riding high as an opposition leader until a few hours ago has been booed by the rioters and shoved aside.
As the dramatic events in the Ukraine are unfolding the topic of what President Yanukovich can, or can not do, regularly comes up and I think that this is a good time to go back to basics and look at what a government — any government, regardless of its political orientation — can and even must do when confronted with an urban armed insurrection.
