I cite

Google's Revolution Factory - Alliance of Youth Movements: Color Revolution 2.0

In 2008, the Alliance of Youth Movements held its inaugural summit in New York City. Attending this summit was a combination of State Department staff, Council on Foreign Relations members, former National Security staff, Department of Homeland Security advisers, and a myriad of representatives from American corporations and mass media organizations including AT&T, Google, Facebook, NBC, ABC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, and MTV.

http://allyoumov.3cdn.net/f734ac45131b2bbcdb_w6m6idptn.pdf

One might suspect such a meeting of representatives involved in US economic, domestic and foreign policy, along with the shapers of public opinion in the mass media would be convening to talk about America's future and how to facilitate it. Joining these policy makers, was an army of "grassroots" activists that would "help" this facilitation.

Among them was a then little known group called "April 6" from Egypt. These Facebook "savvy" Egyptians would later meet US International Crisis Group trustee Mohamed ElBaradei at the Cairo airport in Februrary 2010 and spend the next year campaigning and protesting on his behalf in his bid to overthrow the government of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.

The Alliance of Youth Movements mission statement claims it is a not-for-profit organization dedicated to helping grassroots activists to build their capacity and make a greater impact on the world. While this sounds fairly innocuous at first, even perhaps positive, upon examining those involved in "Movements.org," a dark agenda is revealed of such nefarious intent it is almost difficult to believe.

Movement.org is officially partnered with the US Department of State and Columbia Law School. Its corporate sponsors include Google, Pepsi, and the Omnicon Group, all listed as members of the globocrat Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). CBS News is a sponsor and listed on the globocrat Chatham House's corporate membership list. Other sponsors include Facebook, YouTube, Meetup, Howcast, National Geographic, MSNBC, GenNext, and the Edelman public relations firm.

Movement.org's "team" includes Co-Founder Jared Cohen, a CFR member, Director of Google Ideas, and a former State Department planning staff member under both Condoleezza Rice and Hilary Clinton.

Founding Movements.org with Cohen is Jason Liebman of Howcast Media which works with mega-corporate conglomerates like Proctor & Gamble, Kodak, Staples, Ford, and government agencies such as the US State Department and the US Defense Department, to create "custom branded entertainment, innovative social media, and tardeted rich-media campaigns." He was also with Google for 4 years where he worked to partner with Time Warner (CFR), News Corporation (FoxNews, CFR) Viacom, Warner Music, Sony Pictures, Reuters, the New York Times, and the Washington Post Company.

via www.globalresearch.ca

This is becoming more than just a fight over collective bargaining rights. - Democratic Underground

Not that the bargaining rights aren't important. They are. They're very important.

But this has become about more than just that. It's about the right of people to run their own country and to not have to be servile to those who won the birth lottery.

It's about making people who were born into wealth understand that they should have no more power politically than any one of us. And it's about taking that power away if they refuse that understanding.

The kind of "freedom" the Koch's are fighting for is not freedom for you and I. What they are fighting for is the least possible government interference in the dealings of large businesses. That may sound good in principle to some people. The problem is what it leads too.

Without anti-trust laws you end up with single parties controlling multiple industries. And controlling whatever parts of our lives depend on those industries. That is not freedom for us.

Without estate taxes you end up with dynasties stretching over generations and controlling more and more wealth and power. Power over the little guy. That is not freedom for us.

Without safety nets we all end up at the mercy of raw capitalism, where we can suddenly find ourselves with no income through no fault of our own. That is not freedom for us.

Without health care we can end up at the mercy of diseases that are no fault of our own. Diseases which will either kill us or bankrupt us. That is not freedom for us.

Without pollution laws you end up with the destruction of our lands and the pollution of our air and water. The fouling of things that at one time were pure and free for everyone. That is not freedom for us.

Without campaign finance laws you end up with the few ruling over the many. That is not freedom for us.

Without unions you have no protection from capricious firings and unsafe, unbearable working conditions. That is not freedom for us.

The freedom that people like the Kochs want is the freedom for themselves to become royalty in America. The freedom to tell the rest of us the way it will be.

THAT IS NOT FREEDOM FOR US!!!

via www.democraticunderground.com

melting city

With unpaid overtime, we're giving our employers £29bn worth of free labour | Richard Seymour | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

You're being exploited in more ways than you know. The TUC reports, not for the first time and surely not for the last, on a form of exploitation that rarely gets attention in the media. Workers are contributing £29bn worth of free labour to British employers every year simply by working unpaid overtime. This surplus is being squeezed out of workers through market discipline – the threat of unemployment or reduced prospects.

Employees will be used to the expectation that they demonstrate "flexibility" in working beyond their core hours. This requirement is foregrounded in job interviews and reinforced on a daily basis, the term "flexibility" implying that this unpaid tribute is a personality trait rather than a structural facet of today's labour market. Workers are often expected to sign a "working time" opt-out that excludes them from protection under the law from having to work longer than 48 hours a week. The result is that 4 million workers regularly work beyond the 48-hour barrier, while past government research has shown that one in six workers actually workers longer than 60 hours a week. It gets worse. The average person's commute is equivalent to 139 hours per year, approximately four working weeks.

The huge burden of unpaid labour is the fruit of a long-term trend. In 1988, a quarter of male employees worked unpaid overtime. By 1998, it had reached 41%. The rise for female employees is even more dramatic, increasing from 25% to 58%. The difference is in part due to different occupations inhabited by men and women – the TUC points out that public sector workers, who are disproportionately female, are more likely to be performing unpaid overtime.

Moreover, this is one aspect of a general lengthening of the working week that has taken place over the last generation or so. Officially, the statistics show a sharp decrease in the number of people working long hours since 1998. These sorts of statistics have been used by the government to justify continued opt-outs of working time directives, since they argue that the goal of reducing long working hours is being reached in practice. In fact, what the statistics really disclose is the increasing casualisation of work, registering a huge increase in part-time jobs.

The average working week for full-time employees is approximately 42 hours in the UK, above the EU average and certainly well above countries which retain comparatively strong welfare systems such as France or Denmark. The UK tends to be closer to extreme neoliberal economies created in the east of Europe after the collapse of the USSR than to relatively social democratic economies in the west of Europe.

via www.guardian.co.uk

Matt Stoller: The Liquidation of Society versus the Global Labor Revival « naked capitalism

Striking just isn’t in the collective memory of the American public anymore. This kind of highly politicized hybrid political protest/strike walks like an Egyptian these days, which is why Egyptians were sending Wisconsinites pizza and Madison protesters were holding signs lauding teachers, workers, and the new Egyptian flag. In fact, Madison may represent a new kind of American labor model, the melding of old school unions, Howard Dean-style internet-based organizing, Anonymous-style serious pranking, and social media reporting on protests and policy. There’s an anti-bailout class-based fervor here as well, with a simmering anger at Wall Street as subtext. It’s headless and global, though there is leadership. The most powerful moment so far in the Wisconsin conflict didn’t come from the actions of a labor leader, but from a prank call by alt-weekly “Buffalo Beast” editor Ian Murphy, who pretended to be billionaire American oligarch David Koch and had a frank 20 minute conversation with Governor Scott Walker. Murphy originally wanted to pose as Hosni Mubarak, but couldn’t pull off the accent.

Perversely, people may be so beaten down that they only want to side with institutions that are visibly and aggressively advocating for them. This might lead them to recognize that middle class interests are aligned with those of labor, which was the widespread view in the first generation after World War II. However, that also means that the de facto business unionism of the 1970s onward isn’t appealing. People might only like unions when they see strikes, otherwise all they hear about is backroom negotiations. Perhaps effectively striking is actually the way to force people to ask questions about what kind of country they want to live in. I haven’t seen this much labor coverage since, well, ever in my lifetime. There seems to be multiple feedback loops at work: political, global, and economic.

As commodity prices shoot up, and become more volatile, the pressure to liquidate America will only increase. These increases take the form of gifting public assets to oligarchs, taxing the middle class and poor, slashing social service budgets, and cutting wages through inflation and outright demotions (like the NYC sanitation workers that were demoted right before a giant blizzard). But civil unrest is intensifying it its most basic forms: protests and strikes, and in advanced forms, like the blowback at the national security state embodied in the HB Gary and WIkileaks fiasco.

via www.nakedcapitalism.com

A revolution against neoliberalism? - Opinion - Al Jazeera English

Two observations about Egypt’s history as a neoliberal state are in order. First, Mubarak’s Egypt was considered to be at the forefront of instituting neoliberal policies in the Middle East (not un-coincidentally, so was Ben Ali’s Tunisia). Secondly, the reality of Egypt’s political economy during the Mubarak era was very different than the rhetoric, as was the case in every other neoliberal state from Chile to Indonesia. Political scientist Timothy Mitchell published a revealing essay about Egypt’s brand of neoliberalism in his book Rule of Experts (the chapter titled "Dreamland" — named after a housing development built by Ahmad Bahgat, one of the Mubarak cronies now discredited by the fall of the regime). The gist of Mitchell’s portrait of Egyptian neoliberalism was that while Egypt was lauded by institutions such as the International Monetary Fund as a beacon of free-market success, the standard tools for measuring economies gave a grossly inadequate picture of the Egyptian economy. In reality the unfettering of markets and agenda of privatization were applied unevenly at best.

The only people for whom Egyptian neoliberalism worked "by the book" were the most vulnerable members of society, and their experience with neoliberalism was not a pretty picture. Organised labor was fiercely suppressed. The public education and the health care systems were gutted by a combination of neglect and privatization. Much of the population suffered stagnant or falling wages relative to inflation. Official unemployment was estimated at approximately 9.4% last year (and much higher for the youth who spearheaded the January 25th Revolution), and about 20% of the population is said to live below a poverty line defined as $2 per day per person.

For the wealthy, the rules were very different. Egypt did not so much shrink its public sector, as neoliberal doctrine would have it, as it reallocated public resources for the benefit of a small and already affluent elite. Privatization provided windfalls for politically well-connected individuals who could purchase state-owned assets for much less than their market value, or monopolise rents from such diverse sources as tourism and foreign aid. Huge proportions of the profits made by companies that supplied basic construction materials like steel and cement came from government contracts, a proportion of which in turn were related to aid from foreign governments.

via english.aljazeera.net

It's the Inequality, Stupid | Mother Jones

Eleven charts that explain everything that's wrong with America. 

here is one:

via motherjones.com

Gene Sharp: Author of the nonviolent revolution rulebook

Develop a strategy for winning freedom and a vision of the society you want

Overcome fear by small acts of resistance

Use colours and symbols to demonstrate unity of resistance

Learn from historical examples of the successes of non-violent movements

Use non-violent "weapons"

Identify the dictatorship's pillars of support and develop a strategy for undermining each

Use oppressive or brutal acts by the regime as a recruiting tool for your movement

Isolate or remove from the movement people who use or advocate violence

via www.bbc.co.uk

Programme: Taking Control (SOAS, March 12)

Conference to be held March 12th 2011.

Venue: Main Building, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London

09:00-09:30 Registration (Foyer)

09:30-10:45 Keynote Address (Lucas Lecture Theatre/G2)

Jodi Dean (Hobart and William Smith) – The Communist Horizon

Chair: Saul Newman

10:45-11:00 Break

11:00-12:30 Session 1

Panel A: Control and the Global (G50)

David Chandler (Wesminster) – The Problematic of Control in a Global World

Vassilis Fouskas (Richmond) – Deconstructing Hub and Spoke Imperialism

Stephen Chan (SOAS) – Discussant

Chair: Alexej Ulbricht

Panel B: Movements, Violence and Control (G51)

Phil Edwards (Manchester Met) – Terrible Beauty seeks Geometric Potency: arms and the law in the anni di plombo

Christian Garland – A Dual-power situation? Communization and the Materiality of Anti-power

Ben Whitham (Reading) – The Millbank Riot: A Step in the Direction of Control?

Chair: Luke Evans

12:30-14:00 Lunch break

14:00-15:30 Session 2

Panel C: Control and the State (G50)

Sumit Chakrabarti (Rabindra Bharati) – From ‘Corporation’ to ‘Crowd’: the rhetoric of control in the politics of West Bengal

Önder Çelik (École Normale Supérieure) – Decentralization as a possible way of struggling against late capitalism: the case of Turkish Kurdistan

Fabian Balardini (CUNY) - Taking Control and moving beyond the ‘extractivist’ model of development: socialist state-owned National Oil Companies and permanent profitability crisis in the global oil industry

Chair: Eleni Harlan

Panel D: Utopian Horizons (G51)

Mao Xin (Kings) – Ethically rethinking utopia in the contemporary world – from a Levinasian perspective

Michael Kimaid (Bowling Green State)– Toward a Resistance of Commodified Time and Space

Andreas Wittel (Nottingham Trent) – Towards a Higher Education Commons

Chair: Matt Mahon

15:30-16:00 Break

16:00-17:30 Closing Roundtable(Lucas Lecture Theatre/G2)

Peter Hallward (Kingston)

Alberto Toscano (Goldsmiths)

Paul Blackledge (Leeds Met)

David Graeber (Goldsmiths)

Bhaskar Mukhopadhyay (Goldsmiths)

Chair: Alexej Ulbricht

via takingcontrol2011.wordpress.com

Arab uprisings mark a turning point for the taking | Peter Hallward | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

The US and its allies have been discovering that it's a lot harder, these days, to lie about what this and other deceitful political processes involve – a difficulty that may soon also have consequences for the ongoing missions to stabilise Haiti, pacify Iraq, conquer Afghanistan, demonise Venezuela's Hugo Chávez, and so on. This is the second factor at issue here, dramatised most obviously in al-Jazeera's publication of the Palestine papers last month, following the WikiLeaks revelations last year. A combination of new technologies, new social media and new sources of information (not least al-Jazeera itself), enabling new forms of association and deliberation, are starting to make it more difficult for political elites to rely on a compliant press to set and limit the political agenda.

These new means of accessing and sharing information are also starting to have a transformative impact on the third and most important development: the extraordinary resurgence of popular mobilisation and solidarity – a renewal that began with the Bolivarian revolution in Venezuela and indigenous movements in Bolivia and Ecuador (and at work more recently, among other places, in Puerto Rico and Guadeloupe, in Iran, in China, across Europe), but that has now crossed a new threshold in Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain and Libya. As one Egyptian protester put it, very concisely: "I used to watch television, now television watches me." On the other side of the world, the tens of thousands of protesters who are mobilising to protect their unions in Wisconsin are among the many millions who have been watching and learning, and who see some similarities between their state governor and Egypt's deposed president. In the UK, students and workers gearing up for another round of direct confrontation with Cameron's government have been watching, too.

...

In each case, what's been at stake first and foremost is less a specific demand for objective change than a subjective process of self-empowerment. Every revolutionary sequence applies in practice a principle that every counter-revolutionary theory seeks to deny or disguise: there is indeed no deeper source of legitimacy than the active will of the people. A revolutionary sequence is one in which those people who set out to transform their situation find a way to clarify and mobilise the will of its people as a whole. Where it exists, the will of the people is sustained through the practice of those who compose and impose it in the collective interest – and who thereby invariably risk, at the hands of those few who oppose this interest, misrepresentation as criminals or outsiders.

As the philosopher Alain Badiou points out in a recent editorial, "once they cross a certain threshold of determination, persistence and courage, the people can indeed concentrate their existence in a public square or avenue, in a few factories, or in a university. In the wake of a transformative event, the people are composed of those who are able to resolve the problems posed by this event" – for instance, the problems involved in defending a square, or sustaining a strike, or confronting an army. Buoyed by the assertion of their hard-won power, the people of north Africa and the Middle East are currently inventing means of solving such problems at a rate that already defies any sort of historical comparison at all. Their priority now is clearly to consolidate and organise this power in the face of the many new and more daunting problems they will soon have to confront.

Needless to say, the struggle to come will again play out in different ways in different places. The consequences of even the most resounding victory are always uncertain, and it may take a long time for those of us who live in the more sheltered parts of the world to learn our own lessons from north Africa's example. The old neoliberal assault remains set to continue. Now everyone knows, however, that it will only prevail if we allow it to.

via www.guardian.co.uk