http://www.16beavergroup.org/mtarchive/ en-us 2011-04-10T13:01:20-05:00 http://www.16beavergroup.org/mtarchive/archives/003273.php Slavoj Zizek: “Neoliberalism is in Crisis” Interview, Slavoj Zizek | Philosopher and Critical theorist Slavoj Zizek, says he’s not an optimist when it comes to Europe and the broad political and ideological struggle in the continent and the world. But he salutes the demonstration of the British workers last Saturday (26 March 2011) and the awackening “of some kind of authentic left” as the only hope in defense of the European values. Greek Left Review met Slavoj Zizek and prof. Costas Douzinas at Birkbeck college in the center of London on Saturday morning. While according to the Guardian 400.000 workers were marching towards Hyde Park, Slavoj Zizek emphasized that social mobilization and the emergence of European solidarity amorng workers is the only way to break out of the vicious cycle that neoliberal technocrats and religious fundamentalists are driving the continent. GLR: Today we’re witnessing in Britain the largest march since the Iraqi war. After a year of unrest in many European countries an image of possible solidarity appears. Is there anything to be gained by European solidarity and is this solidarity even possible? What is the European project about today? SZ. Το paraphrase this quote from May 68: It’s not possible, but it’s necessary. If by saying Europe we mean what is worth fighting for like egalitarian legacy, the idea of solidarity, welfare state and so on, then, maybe it’s the only thing that can give us, some hope. Europe, not only, cannot realize its project but it cannot even see what this project is. What makes me happy in this protest today is that it gives me the pleasure to correct my previous analysis which was that today in Europe you only have two choices: On the one hand the pro-capitalist liberal parties which can at the same time be progressive in issues like human rights, abortion and so on and on the other – the only moment of true passionate politics – right-wing anti-immigrant formations. My claim is that this would be a dead end if these were the only choices. It’s a great hope for Europe that some kind of radical or authentic left is awakening. Neoliberalism rene 2011-04-10T13:01:20-05:00 http://www.16beavergroup.org/mtarchive/archives/003237.php Via Al Jazeera A revolution against neoliberalism? If rebellion results in a retrenchment of neoliberalism, millions will feel cheated. 'Abu Atris' Ahmed Ezz, one of several NDP officials arrested since Egypt's revolution began [EPA] On February 16th I read a comment was posted on the wall of the Kullina Khalid Saed ("We are all Khaled Said") Facebook page administered by the now very famous Wael Ghonim. By that time it had been there for about 21 hours. The comment referred to a news item reporting that European governments were under pressure to freeze bank accounts of recently deposed members of the Mubarak regime. The comment said: "Excellent news … we do not want to take revenge on anyone … it is the right of all of us to hold to account any person who has wronged this nation. By law we want the nation’s money that has been stolen … because this is the money of Egyptians, 40% of whom live below the poverty line." Neoliberalism rene 2011-02-25T11:44:48-05:00 http://www.16beavergroup.org/mtarchive/archives/003235.php The US bank and the secret plan to destroy WikiLeaks By Jerome Taylor http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/the-us-bank-and-the-secret-plan-to-destroy-wikileaks-2215059.html Tuesday, 15 February 2011 WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is preparing to release information on Bank of America The computer hackers' collective Anonymous has uncovered a proposal by a consortium of private contractors to attack and discredit WikiLeaks. Last week Anonymous volunteers broke into the servers of HB Gary Federal, a security company that sells investigative services to companies, and posted thousands of the firm's emails on to the internet. The attack was in revenge for claims by the company's chief executive Aaron Barr that he had successfully infiltrated the shadowy cyber protest network and discovered details of its leadership and structure. Hacktivists, journalists and bloggers have since pored over the emails and discovered what appears to be a proposal that was intended to be pitched to the Bank of America to sabotage WikiLeaks and discredit journalists who are sympathetic to the whistle-blowing website. The PowerPoint presentation claims that a trio of internet security companies - HB Gary Federal, Palantir Technologies and Berico Technologies - are already prepared to attack WikiLeaks which is rumoured to be getting ready to release a cache of potentially embarrassing information on the Bank of America. The presentation, which has been seen by The Independent, recommends a multi-pronged assault on WikiLeaks including deliberately submitting false documents to the website to undermine its credibility, pioneering cyber attacks to expose who Wikileaks rene 2011-02-23T15:52:42-05:00 http://www.16beavergroup.org/mtarchive/archives/003233.php The Bang That Ends Qaddafi's Revolution? The Libyan Labyrinth By VIJAY PRASHAD In 1969, Colonel Muammar al-Qaddafi (age 27) surprised the aged King Idris, then in Turkey for medical treatment. Inspired by the Free Officers in Egypt, Qaddafi and his fellow Colonels force-marched the fragile Libyan State and even more fragile Libyan society into socialism. Libya’s main product was its oil, and by the time Idris was deposed the country exported three million barrels of oil per day. Scandalously, it received the lowest rent per barrel in the world. Idris feasted on the rents, and the people suffered immeasurably. It is the reason why there was barely any opposition to Qaddafi’s coup. Qaddafi’s regime pushed forward a series of radical developments to transform Libyan society. Libya had the misfortune of being a distant outpost of both the Ottoman Empire and the Italian colonial adventures. It wanted for the most basic social development. Over the first decade of the Qaddafi regime, the state took charge of the oil fields and raised their rents. That money was then diverted toward social welfare, mainly an increase in housing and health care. Over the second decade (1978-1988), the regime constrained private enterprise and encouraged workers to take over control of about two hundred firms. Redistribution of land on the Jefara plain west of Tripoli was the rural cognate. The State stepped in to manage all macro-economic functions, at the same time as the Central Bank redistributed wealth by putting a ceiling on bank account holdings. Libya rene 2011-02-22T21:12:56-05:00 http://www.16beavergroup.org/mtarchive/archives/003232.php From Al Jazeera English: In search of an African revolution International media is following protests across the 'Arab world' but ignoring those in Africa. Azad Essa Must a revolt be filmed and photographed to succeed? [EPA] Demonstrations are continuing across the Middle East, interrupted only by the call for prayer when protesters fall to their knees on cheap carpets and straw mats and the riot police take a tea break. Egypt, in particular, with its scenes of unrelenting protesters staying put in Tahrir Square, playing guitars, singfing, treating the injured and generally making Gandhi’s famous salt march of the 1940s look like an act of terror, captured the imagination of an international media and audience more familiar with the stereotype of Muslim youth blowing themselves and others up. A non-violent revolution was turning the nation full circle, much to the admiration of the rest of the world. Africa rene 2011-02-21T14:08:30-05:00 http://www.16beavergroup.org/mtarchive/archives/003231.php “Democracy Uprising” in the U.S.A.? AMY GOODMAN: This month is the 15th anniversary of Democracy Now! on the air, and it’s a real privilege to have MIT professor, analyst, world-renowned political dissident, linguist, Noam Chomsky with us. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan Gonzalez, and we’ve been together for this whole 15 years, Juan. It’s really been quite an amazing journey. As we talk about this revolution that’s rolling across the Middle East, we put out to our listeners and viewers on Facebook last night that, Noam, you were going to be in. And so, people were sending in their comments and questions. We asked, on Facebook and Twitter, to send us questions. Here is one of the questions. RYAN ADSERIAS: Hello, Professor Chomsky. My name is Ryan Adserias, and I’m a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and also the child of a long line of working-class union folks. I don’t know if you’ve been noticing, but we’ve been holding a lot of protests and rallies here in our capital to protest Governor Scott Walker’s attempt to break collective bargaining rights that Wisconsin workers worked hard for over 50 years ago and have enjoyed ever since. We closed all the schools around here for tomorrow—today and tomorrow, actually. The teaching assistants here at the university are staging teach-outs. The undergraduates are walking out of class to show solidarity. And all of this is because our governor and governors all around the country are proposing legislation that’s going to end collective bargaining and really break the unions. I’ve also been noticing that there’s not a whole lot of national representation of our struggle and our movement, and it’s really been troubling me. So my question to you is, how exactly is it that we can get the attention of our national Democratic and progressive leaders to speak out against these measures and to help end union busting here in the United States? AMY GOODMAN: That was a question from Ryan Adserias in Madison, Wisconsin, where more than 10,000—some say tens of thousands of people, teachers, students, are protesting in the Capitol building, schools closed, as Ryan said. So, from Manama to Madison, from Manama, Bahrain, to Madison, Wisconsin, Noam Chomsky? Resistance? rene 2011-02-21T14:05:06-05:00 http://www.16beavergroup.org/mtarchive/archives/003230.php Anatomy of Egypt's Revolution How Democracy Could be Hijacked By ESAM AL-AMIN “After climbing a great hill, one only finds that there are many more hills to climb.” --Nelson Mandela January 25 was the date the Egyptian youth decided to launch their revolution. As the fear barrier was broken, Egyptians throughout the country and from all walks of life joined the protests by the millions. Their main chant for eighteen continuous days was ‘The people want the fall of the regime.’ On February 11 that demand was met in a twenty second address by the recently appointed Vice President Omar Suleiman. Appearing on state television, he declared that Hosni Mubarak had resigned from his thirty-year position, transferring his authority to a military council called the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF). His brief statement epitomized the end of an era marked by vicious repression and corruption as well as the inauguration of a new era that all Egyptians have since been celebrating in the streets. Egypt rene 2011-02-21T13:58:05-05:00 http://www.16beavergroup.org/mtarchive/archives/003228.php After Egypt Adam Shatz You are invited to read this free essay from the London Review of Books. Subscribe now to access every article from every fortnightly issue of the London Review of Books, including the entire archive of 12,574 essays. After the battle for Tahrir Square, the conceptual grid that Western officials have used to divide the Islamic world into friends and enemies, moderates and radicals, good Muslims and bad Muslims has never looked more inadequate, or more irrelevant. A ‘moderate’ and ‘stable’ Arab government, a pillar of US strategy in the Middle East, has been overthrown by a nationwide protest movement demanding democratic reform, transparent governance, freedom of assembly, a more equitable distribution of the country’s resources and a foreign policy more reflective of popular opinion. It has sent other Arab governments into a panic while raising the hopes of their young, frustrated populations. If the revolution in Egypt succeeds, it will have swept away not only a corrupt and autocratic regime, but the vocabulary, and the patterns of thought, that have underpinned Western policy in the greater Middle East for more than a half century. Egypt rene 2011-02-20T23:17:19-05:00 http://www.16beavergroup.org/mtarchive/archives/003227.php Posted on Nettime Nettime friends, first chance to sit down and record the happenings from this week. Basics: Governor Scott Walker, a Tea Party-backed politician of huge ambition, has proposed a budget bill that strips public workers of their right to collectively bargain while doing very little to actually address the state budget deficit. Also in the bill are power grab provisions that have nothing to do with the budget whatsoever, that rewrite executive authority to alter regulatory guidelines, but that would expire in four years, disallowing the next governor to undo the wreckage. The resistance has grown everyday, now the battle in the US is here, in Madison. Dissent? rene 2011-02-19T17:54:41-05:00 http://www.16beavergroup.org/mtarchive/archives/003225.php By JIM DWYER NYT, February 15, 2011 http://tinyurl.com/6yhyjft On Tuesday afternoon, as Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton spoke in Washington about the Internet and human liberty, a Columbia law professor in Manhattan, Eben Moglen, was putting together a shopping list to rebuild the Internet — this time, without governments and big companies able to watch every twitch of our fingers. The list begins with “cheap, small, low-power plug servers,” Mr. Moglen said. “A small device the size of a cellphone charger, running on a low- power chip. You plug it into the wall and forget about it.” Almost anyone could have one of these tiny servers, which are now produced for limited purposes but could be adapted to a full range of Internet applications, he said. Internet rene 2011-02-19T17:46:16-05:00 http://www.16beavergroup.org/mtarchive/archives/003222.php Independent.co.uk Robert Fisk: Dark humour in a time of dictatorship Saturday, 19 February 2011 In an old and rather tatty gift shop in the Zamalek district of Cairo this week, I asked the owner if he had a photograph of Saad Zaghloul for sale. No sooner said than done. Out from a paper bag at the back of the shop came a portrait of the great man, father of Egypt's real independence struggle, hero of 1919 when the Egyptian people – secular and religious, Muslim and Copt, men and women together – rose up in street demonstrations and industrial strikes to demand their freedom from Britain. It sounds familiar. It should. Here is a quotation from Mohammed Rifaat's Awakening of Modern Egypt which could have been written by any of us these past three weeks. Egypt rene 2011-02-19T00:22:22-05:00 http://www.16beavergroup.org/mtarchive/archives/003221.php Independent.co.uk Robert Fisk: Three weeks in Egypt show the power of brutality – and its limits As he leaves Cairo, our writer reflects on the lessons of an extraordinary uprising for protesters and police alike Wednesday, 16 February 2011 After three weeks of watching the greatest Arab nation hurling a preposterous old man from power, I'm struck by something very odd. We have been informing the world that the infection of Tunisia's revolution spread to Egypt – and that near-identical democracy protests have broken out in Yemen, Bahrain and in Algeria – but we've all missed the most salient contamination of all: that the state security police who prop up the power of the Arab world's autocrats have used the same hopeless tactics of savagery to crush demonstrators in Sanaa, Bahrain and Algiers as the Tunisian and Egyptian dictators tried so vainly to employ against their own pro-democracy protestors. Just as the non-violent millions in Cairo learnt from Al-Jazeera and from their opposite numbers in Tunis – even down to the emails from Tunisia urging Egyptians to cut lemons in half and eat them to avoid the effects of tear-gas – so the state security thugs in Egypt, presumably watching the same programmes, have used precisely the same brutality against the crowds as their colleagues in Tunis. Incredible, when you come to think about it. The cops in Cairo saw the cops in Tunis bludgeoning government opponents to a bloody mess and – totally ignoring the fact that this led to Ben Ali's downfall – went into copy-cat mode. Egypt rene 2011-02-19T00:15:28-05:00 http://www.16beavergroup.org/mtarchive/archives/003220.php As we talk or speak about the revolutionary processes in the middle east, and look toward the experiments in Latin America which have been taking place over the last decade, we should recall that these developments are not without their tensions between top down processes and bottom up processes. It would appear, in this letter, that even the most idealized top-down processes, like those of Evo Morales's government in Bolivia are not without their hypocrisy. -rg Open Letter to Evo Morales and Álvaro García Against the Gasolinazo and for the Self Governance of Our People The People Come First, not Numbers nor Statistics By Oscar Olivera Foronda, Marcelo Rojas, Abraham Grandydier, Aniceto Hinojosa Vásquez and Carlos Oropeza Republished from The Narco News Bulletin Cochabamba (La Llajta), Bolivia December 30, 2010 Sirs; Evo Morales Ayma and Alvaro García Linera La Paz.- We speak to you through this open letter although it probably won't be read because you don't hear of it or because it doesn't interest you. However, although you may ignore it, although it may not exist, we want to tell you how we, like many of our people, feel today. We tell you, Sirs, because years ago you ceased being our brothers and compañeros, you distanced yourselves from the people, and thus you don't know what happens down here, below. Your defects - and not your virtues - that we know have multiplied ten times in a worrisome, indignant and sad manner. Oscar Olivera (wearing baseball cap, interviewed by reporters) with Evo Morales (in the green shirt, to the right of Oscar) during the 2000 "Water War" in Cochabamba. Bolivia rene 2011-02-18T23:59:29-05:00 http://www.16beavergroup.org/mtarchive/archives/003219.php U.S. Justice v. the world BY GLENN GREENWALD In March, 2002, American citizen Jose Padilla was arrested in Chicago and publicly accused by then-Attorney-General John Ashcroft of being "The Dirty Bomber." Shortly thereafter, he was transferred to a military brig in South Carolina, where he was held for almost two years completely incommunicado (charged with no crime and denied all access to the outside world, including even a lawyer) and was brutally tortured, both physically and psychologically. All of this -- including the torture -- was carried out pursuant to orders from President Bush, Secretary Rumsfeld and other high-ranking officials. Just as the Supreme Court was about to hear Padilla's plea to be charged or released -- and thus finally decide if the President has the power to imprison American citizens on U.S. soil with no charges of any kind -- the Government indicted him in a federal court on charges far less serious than Ashcroft had touted years earlier, causing the Supreme Court to dismiss Padilla's arguments as "moot"; Padilla was then convicted and sentenced to 17 years in prison. Torture rene 2011-02-18T23:31:25-05:00 http://www.16beavergroup.org/mtarchive/archives/003218.php The moderate obstacle Paula Rosine Long, The Electronic Intifada, 16 February 2011 Martin Luther King, Jr (Marion S. Trikosko) This past Friday, US President Barack Obama's speech celebrating the morality and commitment to justice of the Egyptian protesters was inadvertently humorous to those with a penchant for irony. Just days before, the White House was still supporting Mubarak's dictatorial regime. US envoy Frank Wisner argued that Mubarak should remain in office so as to enact the changes he had proposed, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton backed Mubarak's plan to stay in power until September. At every step, the Obama administration stressed gradual reform and remained committed to the status quo, a hypocritical and amnesiac stance that insults the proud history of the civil rights movement in the US. Martin Luther King, Jr wrote in his much-lauded 1963 Letter from Birmingham jail that the greatest obstacle to a movement for equality was not the extremist but the white moderate: Egypt rene 2011-02-18T23:14:50-05:00