Subjects Archives: Movements

  India’s Union Home Minister P Chidambaram, West Bengal Chief Minister (also in charge of the province’s home affairs) Mamata Banerjee, Union Home Secretary R K Singh, and the top bosses of the security forces involved in the operation have all been bent on establishing one point: that the alleged encounter in the Burishol forest […]

The Egyptian Federation of Independent Trade Unions and all its 139 affiliated unions, with their collective membership of 1,670,000, call on the Egyptian people (youth, workers and peasants) to block any attempts to prevent the implementation of the demands of the revolution through the recreation of the old regime by its criminal tools. Therefore the […]

“The people’ democratic struggle and the struggle for the environment should be intimately tied together.” — Fred Magdoff Fred Magdoff is professor emeritus of plant and soil science at the University of Vermont and adjunct professor of crop and soil science at Cornell University.  He is a co-author of What Every Environmentalist Needs to Know […]

  General strikes were common in Europe and in the U.S. towards the end of the nineteenth century and in the first decades of the twentieth century.  They provoked great debates within the labor movement and within the revolutionary parties and movements (anarchist, communist, socialist). Much discussed were the importance of the general strike in […]

  We are in the midst of a decisive battle in the face of a potentially terminal crackdown.  Over the past 72 hours the army has launched a ceaseless assault on revolutionaries in Tahrir Square and squares across Egypt.  Over 2000 of us have been injured.  More than 30 of us have been murdered.  Just […]

  “As God is my witness, I will never vote for the lesser evil again.” Emma Gascó (from Sevilla, Spain) is a journalist and cartoonist.  She is a co-blogger (with Martín Cúneo) of Los Movimientos Contraatacan.  Translation by Yoshie Furuhashi (@yoshiefuruhashi | yoshie.furuhashi [at] gmail.com). | Print  

Thirty years before the birth of the Occupy Wall Street movement, President Reagan fired enough striking air traffic controllers to fill a protest march across the Brooklyn Bridge (11, 345 PATCO members, to be exact).  And in the three decades since Reagan famously said “if they do not report for work within 48 hours, they […]

The Occupy Wall Street uprising has taken the nation by storm, beginning in the Financial District in Manhattan and then spreading to cities and towns in every part of the country and around the world.  The anger over growing inequality and the political power of the rich that has been bubbling under the surface for […]

All over Syria, 13 November 2011 Cf. “There were massive demonstrations in Syria in support of the lousy regime, but they were totally ignored in the Arabic and Western press.  It does not fit the agenda” (As’ad AbuKhalil, “Demonstrations in Syria,” Angry Arab News Service, 13 November 2011); “Confirmed: Biggest rallies in #Syria‘s history.  A […]

A series of crimes and tragedies in the Occupy movement — a rape in Philadelphia, drug overdoses in Portland and Vancouver, a suicide in Burlington — have led the media to scrutinize our movement more closely and have led the authorities in several cities to use such developments as an attempt to shut it down. […]

  For his first post-election trip, Rached Ghannouchi, the leader of the Ennahdha party, visited the Emir of Qatar.  No surprise — he has to thank his sponsors and reassure them on their investments. This visit is worrisome, since Ennahdha is now the leading political force in Tunisia.  It is clear that the party is […]

This is a reconstruction from notes of a keynote address delivered to the Power Shift West Conference, Eugene, Oregon, November 5, 2011. All of us here today, along with countless others around the world, are currently engaged in the collective struggle to save the planet as a place of habitation for humanity and innumerable other […]

ON Sunday, November 6, 72 hours ago, there was a general election in which Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega and the FSLN won an overwhelming victory. Perhaps by chance, the following day was the 94th anniversary of the glorious Soviet Socialist Revolution. Indelible pages of history were written by Russian workers, peasants and soldiers, and the name […]

Over 10,000 demonstrators marched on the streets of Nice on the first of November, to denounce the illegitimacy of G20 and the injustice of economic policies that it advocates.  Indignant Spaniards and others, Wall Street occupiers, Greek and Senegalese rebels, Tunisian and Egyptian revolutionaries, Latin American, Italian, English, German, and French alterglobalization activists — all […]

A letter from Cairo to the Occupy/Decolonize movements & other solidarity movements. After three decades of living under a dictatorship, Egyptians started a revolution demanding bread, freedom and social justice.  After a nearly utopian occupation of Tahrir Square lasting eighteen days, we rid ourselves of Mubarak and began the second, harder, task of removing his […]

  Clarence Thomas is a former officer and long-time labor activist with ILWU Local 10.  I spoke with him about the prospect of a shutdown of the Port of Oakland this evening — a goal of Occupy Oakland demonstrators who called a general strike today. Clarence Thomas: “One of the reasons why they are doing […]

Tomorrow the G-20 Meeting begins, that is the meeting of the most developed and wealthy countries on the planet: the United States, Canada, Germany, Great Britain, France, Italy and the European Union as a separate entity but with the right to participate; they are the fundamental bastions of NATO plus its allies Japan, South Korea, […]

  Demonstrators in downtown Oakland protesting the bank-driven economic crisis were brutally attacked by police from 18 Bay Area agencies on Tuesday Oct. 25.  Mayor Quan, who was supported by ILWU Local 10 in the recent elections, ordered this bloody assault.  Cops used potentially lethal weapons to break up the occupation of Frank Ogawa (now […]

  “In 1969, a group of black and Puerto Rican students occupied City College demanding the integration of CUNY, which at the time had an overwhelmingly white student body.  The occupation spread to other CUNY campuses, forcing the Board of Trustees to implement a ground-breaking new admissions policy.” Such occupations also occurred in the 1980s […]

  Below is the proposal passed by the Occupy Oakland General Assembly on Wednesday October 26, 2011 in reclaimed Oscar Grant Plaza.  1607 people voted.  1484 voted in favor of the resolution, 77 abstained and 46 voted against it, passing the proposal at 96.9%.  The General Assembly operates on a modified consensus process that passes […]