World Analysis Newswire Archive

As someone who has often defended black bloc tactics since I first encountered it at the Seattle WTO in 1999, I find myself searching for a greater critique, discussion and engagement around strategy and what really is the best approach to contributing to an effective movement that brings significant social, economic, and environmental change to this world. I have come to the conclusion that the typical narrative of the black bloc that has prevailed at mass actions in the U.S. has proven to be counter productive.

What we are seeing is a well-orchestrated clampdown on alternative culture. Again. By the Tories. Again.

We need to keep our eyes peeled.

Shift Magazine interview John Holloway, author of Change the World Without Taking Power and Crack Capitalism, about anti-capitalist politics, the state, and the recent uprisings across the world. Read the full text on the Shift website:  http://shiftmag.co.uk/?p=505

A Stop NATO feature in August provided an, admittedly incomplete, list of nations that NATO, actuated by its first Strategic Concept for the 21st century adopted at the bloc’s summit in Lisbon last November and its initial implementation in Libya this year, could attack or otherwise intervene in next: Algeria, Belarus, Bolivia, Central African Republic, Chad, Cuba, Democratic Republic of Congo, Cyprus, Ecuador, Eritrea, Iran, Lebanon, Madagascar, Mali, Moldova-Transdniester, Myanmar, Nicaragua, Niger, Nigeria, North Korea, Pakistan, Palestine, Somalia, the South Caucasus (Abkhazia, Nagorno-Karabakh, South Ossetia), Sudan-South Sudan, Suriname, Syria, Uganda, Venezuela, Western Sahara, Yemen and Zimbabwe.

The time is ripe and in fact long overdue for issuing a call for an international anti-NATO initiative addressed to individuals, organizations, political parties and governments to convene an extraordinary session of the United Nations General Assembly to demand the disbanding of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization as a – as the gravest – threat to world peace.

U.S. and NATO seem now in a race against time to preclude the implementation of the Syrian package of reforms, until the ruling regime is coerced into compliance to trade their support of these reforms for the current Syrian foreign policy agenda.

Lloyds List put 'The Crisis of Capitalism' into an email that had to be followed up but led an entirely different view.

BCfm’s weekly politics show presented by Tony Gosling
At five: discussing the big stories in Bristol, Britain and around the world
After six: straight talking and investigative reports with Martin Summers

Despite the respondents to its very own consultation overwhelmingly supporting squatting, the Government is still moving full steam ahead to criminalise a solution to emptiness. It's a farcical situation! But one which may have far-reaching consequences...

A small analysis as contribution to counter-information about the events of 20th October.

As yet more austerity measures pile on the agony for the Greek working class, a potentially revolutionary situation is developing. In this period, the real relationships of various political forces to the working class are ever more nakedly expressed. But still, they must be identified, if Greek workers are to go from being what Marx called a "class in itself" to a "class for itself", and organise society in their own interests. In this article, I will seek to explain the different battle lines and formations, as they were drawn yesterday.

We devote the whole show this week to a remarkable talk from 2011-09-11 by Michael Ruppert, who back in episode 95 became the first speaker on this show to question the events of Sep 11th. However, in this talk he says that 9/11 belongs to a 'bygone era' and he focuses instead on the urgent need to transition away from a paradigm of infinite growth and fiat currency.

This week we hear about three people who, unimpressed by technological 'progress', quit city life to live successfully off the land - all three of them remained active into their 90's. Although travelling widely, they remained rooted to their homestead farms. In our first hour, Masanobu Fukuoka, who researched no-till farming in Japan for decades before Bill Mollison and David Holmgren coined the word permaculture. In our second hour, an audio adaptation of a film on the life and death of US back-to-the-lander Helen Nearing, and her husband, Scott.

well the weather maybe rough in geordi land but that wont deter us
we are the 99%

Imagine Britain had been invaded and occupied by armed forces from another region of the world with China, for example, as a significant 'partner' in the 'coalition'. Imagine tens of thousands of Britons had been killed, and millions had fled as refugees. This is how the Chinese state broadcaster might report the invasion ten years hence:

'It's ten years this week since Chinese forces first became involved in Britain, and more than five years since they assumed responsibility for south-east England. So what's been achieved in that time?'

The show this week looks at the ideas of 'law' and 'rights'. As George Carlin says, if the government can take it away, it isn't a right, it's a privilege. A disturbing but important thought in these days in which governments worldwide are becoming more open about their subservience to expediency. We hear from a range of speakers, and our material ranges from the comic to the deadly serious.

This week we introduce a new author, Jacques Lusseyran. As a teenager, although completely blind, he organised some of the most effective French resistance to the Nazi occupation. We begin with a reading of Steve Talbott's Can Technology Make The Handicapped Whole? about techno-fixing human beings, which focuses on Lusseyran. Next, we read one of Lusseyran's essays, The Blind in Society. Finally, an interview with Laura Fogg, author of "Travelling Blind -- life lessons from unexpected places", on her experience of helping the blind to navigate.

In my opinion, it is very likely that the historians of the future will look upon tomorrow as the day a truly global anti-capitalist movement was born. Following the example of Occupy Wall Street, Los Angeles, Boston, and hundreds of US towns and cities, a huge number of small and large occupations will begin on every continent except Antarctica (see Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, North America, South America).

Anarchy in the Egyptian Revolution: a talk by three Egyptian Anarchists about Tahrir Square, the Arab Spring, and the Anti-Capitalist Struggle

A quote well-known among activists, variously attributed to Gandhi or US labor leader Nicholas Klein, says that “first they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” In the space of just the past several weeks, it’s possible to discern the first three steps of this progression in the response of the US political, economic, and media elite to the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement. This fact should be a great source of encouragement for all those brave and dedicated individuals who have helped build this movement.

The Occupy Wall Street movement and subsequent protests that are continuing across the United States have drawn world-wide attention. Our correspondent, a college freshman, participates in the first demonstration of his life. Here is his point-of-view of Occupy Wall Street.

Before I went to Occupy Wall Street, I did some research to see what I was protesting. I went to Occupywallst.org which told me the time and location of the occupation, but not much more. “The one thing we all have in common is that We Are The 99% that will no longer tolerate the greed and corruption of the 1%,” claimed the site. I felt like I could buy into this cause, so I got a couple of people from my college dorm just outside New York City to come with me to Manhattan to be stereotypical protesting college students. We were going to go down in history, just like the kids from the UC Berkeley Free Speech Movement, the Paris spring of 1968, and Tiananmen Square. Hopefully not just like Tiananmen Square.