Connecting the Dots: The Great Reset & The Fourth Industrial Revolution

Chris Hedges in Times Square, October 15, 2011

On October 15th Occupy TVNY met with Pullitzer prize-winning author and journalist Chris Hedges in Times Square, New York City where tens of thousands of people assembled on a global day of action. Chris shares his feelings on where the Occupy movement has come from and where it is heading.

We are serfs & it's time for the serfs to revolt

An open letter to Wall Street

By William Rivers Pitt 

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House of detention

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- James Douglas Morrison

Before anything else, I would like to apologize for the mess outside your office. It's been three weeks since all those hippies and punk-rockers and students and union members and working mothers and single fathers and airline pilots and teachers and retail workers and military service members and foreclosure victims decided to camp out on your turf, and I'm sure it has been quite an inconvenience for you. How is a person supposed to spend their massive, virtually untaxed bonus money on a double latte and an eight-ball with all that rabble clogging the sidewalks, right?

Your friends at JP Morgan Chase just donated $4.6 million to the New York City Police Foundation, the largest donation ever given to the NYPD. You'd think that much cheese would buy a little crowd control, but no. Sure, one of the "white shirt" commanding NYPD officers on the scene hosed down some defenseless women with pepper spray the other day, and a few other protesters have been roughed up here and there, and having any kind of recording device has proven to be grounds for immediate arrest, but seriously...for $4.6 million, you'd think the cops would oblige you by bulldozing these troublemakers right into the Hudson River. Better yet, pave them over with yellow bricks, so you can walk over them every day on your way in to work.

That's what you do anyway, right? Every single day. I know it. You know it. We might as well be honest about it, and if some shiny golden bricks wind up serving as anonymous tombstones for your working-class doormats, well, that's just what they call in Wisconsin "hard cheese." You're a Master of the Universe, after all, and this recess(depress)ion hasn't touched you to any great degree. Sure, you have to shoulder your way through more homeless people these days, and damn if there aren't a lot more potholes to tax the undercarriage of your Audi R8 GT, but your money is making money at a fantastic rate, and paying taxes is for other people; I mean, come on, your accountant bursts out laughing whenever he hears the words "capital gains tax," so your egregious sense of entitlement is entirely understandable.

Now is the time to bone up on your coping skills, because three weeks is nothing. The people camped out on Wall Street are not leaving unless and until they are cleared out by force. They look all kinds of silly in their outfits, and some of their statements don't make a whole lot of sense to people like you, but they have put down roots, and you better get used to them. I'm sure the whole phenomenon is quite perplexing to you - really, why don't they just go home? Don't these people have jobs?

I hate to be the Irony Police, but that's pretty much the whole point. They can't, and they don't. Have homes and jobs, I mean. There was a guy out there a few days ago holding a sign in front of a mortgage-lending institution that read "These People Took My Parent's Home." There are all sorts of people walking around Wall Street yelling their lungs out at you because, well, they really would like the opportunity to find gainful employment, as well as a future, but that nifty shell game you and yours pulled off (on our dime) wound up immolating the economy of the common man/woman, and so the common man/woman has decided - in lieu of anything else better to do - to spend their you-created idle hours on your doorstep.

Let's face it: the mess outside your office is your doing. You and your friends bought this democracy wholesale - ah, yes, the irony of freedom is found in the way you were able to corrupt so many legislators with your money, always legally, because the legislators you bought are the ones writing the laws covering political contributions, and thus the wheel of corruption turns and turns - and now you want this democracy to do your bidding after the bill for your excess and fathomless greed has come due.

You are always taken care of - see the Citizens United decision, which unleashed you in a way not seen since the dregs of the Roman empire - but, still, there are those pesky protesters, exercising their freedom of expression in order to expose you for the brigands that you are.

They're staying put, with many more on the way - to New York as well as every major city from sea to shining sea - and none of them are going anywhere else until people like you are taken from your citadels in handcuffs and made to pay for the ongoing rape of what was once quaintly called the American Dream...a dream that used to be something other than a dated metaphor, and can be something true and real and genuine once again, but only after we pave you under, and walk over you, on our way to a better, brighter future.

http://www.truth-out.org/open-letter-wall-street/1317680703

Libya - the misunderstood revolution

The wedding that costs 48 million for the British taxpayer

Continued protests in the UK

By Channel 4

Gaddafi and the seven sons, blond mercenaries and X

By Alex Thomson

Channel 4 News

For pretty obvious reasons I can’t disclose my source’s identity and let’s just call him X.

He can still recall the area of Green Square last Sunday (Liberty Square of pre-Gaddafi days) where he stood as the protesters gathered telling The Colonel it was time to go.

“The police were cool,” he says in fluent English,”the people were handingout sweets.”

And cool it stayed into the night; Green Square becoming to Tripoli what Tahrir Square was to Cairo?

Well no, says X, who watched what happened.

“This is Libya. We could never be Egypt, never Tunisia. We have no teargas in Libya. No rubber-coated bullets. It is straight to lead in Libya.”

It was.

It was dawn when X says “armoured vehicles approached the Square. They opened fire on the unarmed protesters. “They had big calibre guns – like anti-aircraft guns. You could see the shells bouncing off the streets.”

He saw, with his own eyes he says, scores of people mown down. Mention the estimate of dead given by Human Rights Watch at this point of around 270 dead and he simply laughs in a tired way: “We all saw that figure on the TV – we just laughed.”

From then, he says Tripoli has essentially shut down. No businesses, shops or schools function. Colonel Gaddafi has the army here, armed civilian militias on the streets. “There are mercenaries fighting for Gaddafi for sure. You see them, black guys, sub Saharan. But I also saw guys with blond hair and blue eyes in central Tripoli. They were controlling the technical side. They were speaking Russian or Ukrainian. You don’t get near these guys – not ever.”

Anyone who is anyone is in fear of “the call”. And they can come any time of day or night. When they do come they will be armed, pistrols at the very least. “They’ll say ‘are you for us or against us?’ and of course there is only one answer to this question. I know this. It has happened to so many people. Many, many people. That was why I had to leave yesterday. They would call for me. You see?” He takes a pause, a long drag on his cigarette.

“So you say of course and they take you off in their car and you help them. You are told you will use your influence to help the regime however they want.”

“And if you hesitate at all when they come?”

“That’s it. You are also into the car. But it is over.”

“You get shot? ” I ask.

“Wasteground, an underground carpark. Whatever. You don’t come home.”

Since the fighting at Green Square he says the protesters have retreated to their neighbourhoods. Barricades have been attempted but mostly people just stay at home. To go out is to risk being shot on sight, he says, possible during daylight – a near certainty at night.

He says he personally witnessed helicopters firing down on the city on several occasions since that Sunday. He also tells how he watched ‘big helicopters’ with visible guns heading west from the capital.

X is adamant that many Libyans would certainly get out if they could, but it is far from easy. That explains why so few are coming over the official crossing points too.

You’ll appreciate why X can’t give names and locations as he describes a long, nerve-jangling odyssey taking most of the day to cross the 150 miles or so from Tripoli to Tunisia. It’s all about friends, family, safehouse, wait, new vehicle, safehouse, wait and so on.

“If you reach a checkpoint you are in very big trouble. No main roads. Just small roads and tracks. You cross the border miles away from the road. Out in the desert there is no border.” And Gaddafi? Is there any strategy?

Like the people, he cannot go back now. Tripoli is the last stand. He has nowhere. He cannot go anywhere. Even abroad? No – not now.”

“Could he leave Tripoli?”

“His home town, Sirt, is nothing. Just a shell. A concrete jungle. Empty palaces for foreign leaders to meet him. Nobody lives there. He has the army but only in Tripoli.”

Yet there is a strategy. Gadaffi still has arms and support in the capital, it is true. Around it, to the west, the military plan appears to be to allow the rebels to hold towns like Zuara on the coast, but then to isolate them, cut them off, and attack them.

X’s view of the regime’s apparent plans, borne out be what’s happened in the past 24 hours: Zuara calm yesterday but reports of gunfire – the town of Zaweya attacked by forces loyal to the regime yesterday.

Yet the attacks failed. X paints a graphic picture of Gaddafi’s seven sons at odds, with bitter in-fighting: “The eldest is not even considered a real son you know. Each if them ran parts if the country – security, defence, economy – it was just cronyism – or like mafia, a mafia family but with billions from the oil.”

Then X lowers his voice and leans in, even though it’s so late the bar staff have gone to bed: “But f*** the oil. It doesn’t matter now. Blair and then Bush in 2003 they supported this murderer. But there is no going back now for the people here. No going back.”

The end of Gaddafi’s regime and the end of his sons’ kleptocracy would, says X, always be bloody. But he says be prepared – the ousting of the Italians cost thousands of lives.

It is after 2am. A cleaner is sweeping up at the other side of the bar, X makes to leave, then turns, his voice echoing in the empty bar:

“Life post-Gadaffi will not be easy. But this is our chance. We have to take it. We have to go for it. We will not get it again.”

Behind the Arab revolt is a world we dare not speak

By John Pilger

Shortly after the invasion of Iraq in 2003, I interviewed Ray McGovern, one of an elite group of CIA officers who prepared the President’s daily intelligence brief. McGovern was at the apex of the “national security” monolith that is American power and had retired with presidential plaudits. On the eve of the invasion, he and 45 other senior officers of the CIA and other intelligence agencies wrote to President George W. Bush that the “drumbeat for war” was based not on intelligence, but lies. 

“It was 95 per cent charade,” McGovern told me.

“How did they get away with it?”

“The press allowed the crazies to get away with it.”

“Who are the crazies?”

“The people running the [Bush] administration have a set of beliefs a lot like those expressed in Mein Kampf... these are the same people who were referred to in the circles in which I moved, at the top, as ‘the crazies’.”

I said, “Norman Mailer has written that that he believes America has entered a pre-fascist state. What’s your view of that?”

“Well... I hope he’s right, because there are others saying we are already in a fascist mode.”

On 22 January, Ray McGovern emailed me to express his disgust at the Obama administration’s barbaric treatment of the alleged whistleblower Bradley Manning and its pursuit of WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange. “Way back when George and Tony decided it might be fun to attack Iraq,” he wrote, “I said something to the effect that fascism had already begun here. I have to admit I did not think it would get this bad this quickly.”

On 16 February, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gave a speech at George Washington University in which she condemned governments that arrested protestors and crushed free expression. She lauded the liberating power of the internet while failing to mention that her government was planning to close down those parts of the internet that encouraged dissent and truth-telling.  It was a speech of spectacular hypocrisy, and Ray McGovern was in the audience. Outraged, he rose from his chair and silently turned his back on Clinton. He was immediately seized by police and a security goon and beaten to the floor, dragged out and thrown into jail, bleeding. He has sent me photographs of his injuries. He is 71. During the assault, which was clearly visible to Clinton, she did not pause in her remarks.

Fascism is a difficult word, because it comes with an iconography that touches the Nazi nerve and is abused as propaganda against America’s official enemies and to promote the West’s foreign adventures with a moral vocabulary written in the struggle against Hitler. And yet fascism and imperialism are twins. In the aftermath of world war two, those in the imperial states who had made respectable the racial and cultural superiority of “western civilisation”, found that Hitler and fascism had claimed the same, employing strikingly similar methods. Thereafter, the very notion of American imperialism was swept from the textbooks and popular culture of an imperial nation forged on the genocidal conquest of its native people. And a war on social justice and democracy became “US foreign policy”. 

As the Washington historian William Blum has documented, since 1945, the US has destroyed or subverted more than 50 governments, many of them democracies, and used mass murderers like Suharto, Mobutu and Pinochet to dominate by proxy.  In the Middle East, every dictatorship and pseudo-monarchy has been sustained by America. In “Operation Cyclone”, the CIA and MI6 secretly fostered and bank-rolled Islamic extremism. The object was to smash or deter nationalism and democracy. The victims of this western state terrorism have been mostly Muslims. The courageous people gunned down last week in Bahrain and Libya, the latter a “priority UK market”, according to Britain’s official arms “procurers”, join those children blown to bits in Gaza by the latest American F-16 aircraft.

The revolt in the Arab world is not merely against a resident dictator but a worldwide economic tyranny designed by the US Treasury and imposed by the US Agency for International Development, the IMF and World Bank, which have ensured that rich countries like Egypt are reduced to vast sweatshops, with half the population earning less than $2 a day. The people’s triumph in Cairo was the first blow against what Benito Mussolini called corporatism, a word that appears in his definition of fascism. 

How did such extremism take hold in the liberal West? “It is necessary to destroy hope, idealism, solidarity, and concern for the poor and oppressed,” observed Noam Chomsky a generation ago, “[and] to replace these dangerous feelings with self-centred egoism, a pervasive cynicism that holds that [an order of] inequities and oppression is the best that can be achieved. In fact, a great international propaganda campaign is under way to convince people – particularly young people – that this not only is what they should feel but that it’s what they do feel.”

Like the European revolutions of 1848 and the uprising against Stalinism in 1989, the Arab revolt has rejected fear. An insurrection of suppressed ideas, hope and solidarity has begun. In the United States, where 45 per cent of young African-Americans have no jobs and the top hedge fund managers are paid, on average, a billion dollars a year, mass protests against cuts in services and jobs have spread to heartland states like Wisconsin. In Britain, the fastest-growing modern protest movement, UK Uncut, is about to take direct action against tax avoiders and rapacious banks. Something has changed that cannot be unchanged. The enemy has a name now.

Watch Algeria, it may be next

Five Arab countries that the "Jasmine Revolution" may spread to next

By Zaid Jilani

Think Progress

Last month, the world was shocked as the Tunisian autocrat Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, who had ruled his country for 23 years, was overthrown in a protest movement that lasted only 29 days. The event was soon dubbed the “Jasmine Revolution,” a symbolic reference to a blooming flower. While manydoubted that this revolution would spread, it was only days later that massive protests rocked Cairo, resulting in the resignation of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, who had been in power for more than 30 years. While the fate of both countries is still unresolved, one thing is clear: the people are demanding democracy, and they have forced massive changes in their government to get it.

Now, many are wondering if this pro-democracy movement that swept Tunisia and Egypt will spread throughout the rest of the Arab world. ThinkProgress has assembled a short list of other autocratic regimes in the region that are facing protests, particularly today, and which may soon be the next to go in the Middle East’s next “Jasmine Revolution”:

ALGERIA: Algeria has been in the iron grip of a military government since 1991, when the regime cancelled elections after an Islamist party won the first round. This set off abloody civil war in the country, which peaked in violence between 1993 and 1997. In recent days, Algerians, inspired by their Tunisian and Egyptian neighbors, have organized large protest marches demanding democratic reforms. Saturday, despite officials outlawing the protest, nearly 10,000 people marched in Algiers anyway, facing off with three times as many riot police. Perhaps fearing that they will be the targets of the next revolution, Algerian officials recently announced that they will be lifting the country’s own emergency law — which has been in place for decades — in the “very near future.”

JORDAN: Likely also fearing a Tunisian-style revolution, Jordan’s King Abdullah sacked his government and appointed a new Prime Minister at the beginning of this month. Yet some of the largest protests in modern history have rocked the nation in recent weeks, indicating that Jordanians do not see the concessions as enough. In perhaps a sign of the regime’s weakness, President Obama dispatched Adm. Mike Mullen, the head of Joint Chiefs of Staff, to meet with Abdullah this weekend.

SYRIA: Earlier this month, protesters planned a “day of rage” where they would protest their grievances against the unelected president Basher al-Assad. While the protesters ended up being few in number, the regime did deploy its security services in increased numbers across the country, visibly fearful of a protest movement like the ones in Egypt and Tunisia. The government also lifted a five-year ban on Facebook, in a move widely seen as appeasing a nascent protest movement.

YEMEN: The president of Yemen, “one of America’s foremost allies” in the region, promised to step down in 2013, as his people began to demonstrate against the ruling elite. Today, thousands of pro-regime demonstrators attacked anti-government demonstrators with clubs and knives, an eery parallel to an Egyptian tactic that failed to quell protests and destroyed the regime’s public reputation and international support.

BAHRAIN: Bahrain’s Sunni leader, King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa, has long oppressed his country’s Shi’a-majority population. Last August, his ruling party arrested hundreds of Shi’a activists and shut down the main opposition party’s websites right before the parliamentary election, fearing that it may lose its grip on power. Yet recent events in the Middle East have the king fearing for his rule, too. He has ordered “a hike in food subsidies and reinstated welfare support for low-income families to compensate for inflation,” and plans to deliver a speech today where he will offer further concessions. Additionally, Bahrain’s government announced that it will begiving $2,650 to each Bahraini family yesterday. Yet pro-democracy activists plan to march Monday anyway, demanding real reforms in the country.

This list is far from comprehensive, as movements are being organized in a number of other countries such as Saudi Arabia and Oman. Whether these movements will ultimately be successful is unknown, but they symbolize a growing grassroots call for democracy that has been virtually unseen in the region. Given that the United States is a sponsor of many of the intelligence and military apparatuses of these countries and a close ally to their governments, we have not just an opportunity but a responsibility to work with the people towards a more democratic future.

Comments and video.

Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in talks with the government

From Channel 4 News

Egypt: Starvation and revolution

Mohamed ElBaradei: "If not now, when?"

By Robert Naiman

If Western leaders, who have backed the dictator Mubarak for 30 years, cannot stand before the Egyptian people today and say unequivocally, "we support your right of national self-determination," when can they do it?

That's the question that Egyptian democracy leader and Nobel laureate Mohamed ElBaradei has put before Western leaders today.

Speaking to The Guardian UK in Cairo, before the planned protests today, ElBaradei stepped up his calls for Western leaders to explicitly condemn Mubarak, who, as The Guardian noted, has been a close ally of the US:

"The international community must understand we are being denied every human right day by day," he said. "Egypt today is one big prison. If the international community does not speak out it will have a lot of implications. We are fighting for universal values here. If the west is not going to speak out now, then when?"

Giving forceful illustration to ElBaradei's words that "Egypt today is one big prison," Egyptian police later doused ElBaradei with a water cannon and beat supporters who tried to shield him, AP reported, then trapped ElBaradei in a mosque by surrounding it with tear gas:

Police fired water cannons at one of the country's leading pro-democracy advocates, Mohamed ElBaradei, and his supporters as they joined the latest wave of protests after noon prayers. They used batons to beat some of ElBaradei's supporters, who surrounded him to protect him.

A soaking wet ElBaradei was trapped inside a mosque while hundreds of riot police laid siege to it, firing tear gas in the streets around so no one could leave.

As I can attest from personal experience, having been under "hotel arrest" in Egypt during the Gaza Freedom March a year ago, this is a standard tactic of Egyptian police - prevent you from participating in a demonstration by detaining you where you are.

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What does it say that ElBaradei, a Nobel Prize winner, the former head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, a former assistant to the Egyptian foreign minister, not to mention a 68-year-old man - is not allowed to peacefully raise his voice in protest against the Egyptian government?

Some folks in Washington still seem to be laboring under the illusion that the US can wash its hands of this matter, like Pontius Pilate.

If the Egyptian government were not one of the largest recipients of US "foreign aid," largely military "aid," it might be a different story. If the protesters in Egypt weren't painfully aware that the US has long backed Mubarak to the hilt, it might be a different story.

But that's not the world in which we live. The world in which we live is the one in which people in Egypt know that the US has backed Mubarak to the hilt. FDR famously said of the Nicaraguan dictator Somoza, "He may be a son of a bitch, but he's our son of a bitch." But FDR didn't say that in 2011. The world has changed. Expectations have been raised. US leaders today have to meet a higher standard today. "Our son of a bitch" isn't going to wash on the streets of Cairo.

ElBaradei told CNN on Tuesday:

"I was stunned to hear Secretary Clinton saying that the Egyptian government is 'stable,' and I asked myself at what price stability. Is it on the basis of 29 years of martial law? ... Is it on the basis of rigged elections? That's not stability. That's living on borrowed time. Stability is when you have a government that is elected on a free and fair basis. And we have seen how elections have been rigged in Egypt, we have seen how people have been tortured. And when you see today over 100,000 young people, getting desperate, going to the street, asking for their basic freedoms, I expected to hear from Secretary Clinton ... democracy, human rights, freedom."

In cities across Egypt today, thousands of people, young and old, secularists and Islamists, Muslims and Christians, workers, lawyers, students and professors, have placed their bodies on the line. Their willingness to sacrifice forces us to consider ElBaradei's question: if not now, when? As Rabbi Hillel said,

If I am not for myself, who will be for me?

If I am only for myself, what am I?

If not now, when?

Original article with comments.

Egyptian unrest continues