As a co-founder of the Yippies (Youth International Party) known for demonstrating against the Vietnam War at the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago–I find myself comparing and contrasting the Yippies and the Occupy Wall Street protesters.
We had to perform stunts to get media coverage of our cause, so a group of us went to the Stock Market, upstairs to the balcony, and threw $200 worth of singles onto the floor below, watching the gang of manic brokers suddenly morph from yelling “Pork Bellies” into “Diving for Dollars.” Then we held a press conference outside, explaining the connection between capitalism and the war.
Now, a particular placard, “Wall Street Is War Street,” gives me a sense of continuity. Another anonymous Occupier spokesperson carried a poster with a touch of dark humor: “I am an immigrant. I came here to take your job. But you don¹t have one.”
By the sheer power of numbers without the necessity of stunts, the Occupiers have broadened public awareness about the economic injustice perpetuated by corporations without compassion conspiring with government corruption resulting in immeasurable suffering.
As co-founder and CEO of Ben & Jerry¹s, I saw that big business has gobs of money, and yes, I believe they should pay their fair share. However, the bank accounts of Fortune 500 companies pale in comparison to the US Treasury. In order to defeat poverty and financial instability we need to examine the federal budget. There is enough money to solve our fiscal problems simply by shifting already existing funds.
You may think of me as an ice cream guy, but I also care about excessive military spending. To use one of my favorite analogies, let¹s say that one Oreo represents $10 billion and that the $700 billion Pentagon budget is a stack of 70 Oreos. In comparison, the federal government spends just
four-and-half Oreos on education, half an Oreo on alternative energy, and a fraction of an Oreo on Head Start. If you take just seven Oreos out of the Pentagon budget, you could provide health care for all kids who don¹t have
it, AND you could provide college scholarships for all qualified students who can¹t afford to go, AND in ten years you could eliminate our need for Mideast oil through energy efficiency, AND you could repair and rebuild all
of our public schools, AND you'd still have money left over. This is not rocket science. We have enough cookies.
R-SHIEF SHARES ITS #OCCUPY TWEETS IN A COLLECTIVE 3-DAY EFFORT TO #OCCUPYDATA
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
LOS ANGELES, October 26, 2011- 3 Days, 30 Twitter hashtags, and countless ways to understand the occupy movement. From 09 December 2011 to 11 December 2011, R-Shief, a lab that collects and analyzes Middle East content from the Internet, will hold its first hackathon with satellite locations throughout the world. The aim of this event is to give activists data collected from Twitter, as well as R-Shief’s machine learning analytics, in a collective effort to offer a public and shared repository for data and visualizations about the Occupy Movements.
Click on Image to Enlarge
In solidarity with protestors around the world, #OccupyData is meant to serve as an intervention by offering experts and activists means to work together and think critically about the movement, its messages, and goals. Register and receive open access to export four CSV files for each hashtag — (1) stats by day, (2) stats by hour (3) stats by minute and the (4) raw data itself. (These files are automatically updated hourly). We encourage all participants to post links or images of the work that comes out of this to R-Shief’s blog رشيف | Blog or Visualize It section رشيف | Data Visualizations. Reports from this event will also be featured in Jadaliyya.
Phi Beta Iota: The Occupy movement is very rapidly developing alternative forms of command, control, communication, computing, and intelligence (C4I), and the Autonomous Internet as well as real-time data sharing and sense-making are high on the priority list. Occupy is a new Republic emergent – a new form of direct democracy that will evolve by creating its own tools, its own culture, its own forms of money and social business. US Occupy is in alignment with international Occupy, and cross-fertilization is occuring with astonishing clarity, diversity, and integrity. This is a sustainable revolution that will be global in nature. It will define the 21st Century. That is a good thing.
Microtasking Advocacy and Humanitarian Response in Somalia
I’ve been working on bridging the gap between the technology innovation sector and the humanitarian & human rights communities for years now. One area that holds great promise is the use of microtasking for advocacy and humanitarian response. So I’d like to share two projects I’m spearheading with the support of several key colleagues. I hope these pilot projects will further demonstrate the value of mainstreaming microtasking. Both initiatives are focused on Somalia.
Phi Beta Iota: This scholar-practitioner is doing today what we wanted CIA to start doing in 1992 with the Open Source Intelligence Center that was killed when CIA accepted the MITRE lies about the Open Source Information System (OSIS) — all six sources — being “the answer.” Security idiocy and information technology idiocy continue to repress to the point of extinction any intellectual integrity that might rear its ugly head in the US secret world. From 1992 to date: just under 20 years of fraud, waste, and abuse across the modern Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) domain.
The National Gang Intelligence Center (NGIC) prepared the 2011 National Gang Threat Assessment (NGTA) to examine emerging gang trends and threats posed by criminal gangs to communities throughout the United States. The 2011 NGTA enhances and builds on the gang-related trends and criminal threats identified in the 2009 assessment. It supports US Department of Justice strategic objectives 2.2 (to reduce the threat, incidence, and prevalence of violent crime) and 2.4 (to reduce the threat, trafficking, use, and related violence of illegal drugs). The assessment is based on federal, state, local, and tribal law enforcement and corrections agency intelligence, including information and data provided by the National Drug Intelligence Center (NDIC) and the National Gang Center. Additionally, this assessment is supplemented by information retrieved from open source documents and data collected through April 2011.
Phi Beta Iota: Located in the same complex as the Cow Shit Into Spinach National Intelligence Center, this 2005 organization takes co-located butts in seats to a new level of ineffectiveness — well-intentioned ineffectiveness. Like the CIA, the FBI still does not compute “eight tribes,” or “M4IS2,” or even – gasp – open everything. One day we will have a brilliant Director of National Intelligence (DNI) able to both explain cause and effect to loosely-educated politicians; and provide opportunity decision-support for coherent, ethical whole of government policy and budget harmonization.
Once again, Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya peels away the veneer of legitimacy and deception enveloping the U.S./NATO genocide currently taking place in Libya. In his first article, Nazemroaya makes it clear that there never was any evidence given to the United Nations or the International Criminal Court to warrant or justify United Nations Resolutions 1970 and 1973 or current U.S./NATO operations inside Libya.
In his second article detailing this very sad story, Nazemroaya exposes the relationships between the major Libyan protagonists/NATO collaborators and the U.S. Congress-funded National Endowment for Democracy. Incredibly, when leading Members of Congress publicly proclaimed repeatedly that they did not know who the Libyan “rebel” NATO collaborators were, select so-called rebel leaders were political intimates with stakeholders at the National Endowment for Democracy. Nazemroaya also exposes that, despite its Global War on Terror, the U.S. government actually financed Libyan terrorists and criminals wanted by INTERPOL.
In his third installment, Nazemroaya removes the U.S./NATO fig leaf that attempts to cover the cynical machinations of the pro-Israel Lobby and its objective of balkanizing African and Asian states, especially those whose populations are largely Muslim. Nazemroaya makes the essential point: “An attempt to separate the merging point of an Arab and African identity is underway.” The Voice of America has exposed the psychological aspects of its brutal intervention and hints at the mindset of the U.S./NATO Libyan pawns; several stories suggest that the “new” Libya will turn more toward its Arab identity than its African identity. While Muammar Qaddafi drove home to all Libyans that Libya, as its geography dictates, is an African country, Nazemroaya shows how this fact is not a policy objective shared by the US, NATO, Israel, or their Libyan allies.
Finally, in this last of the four-part series, Nazemroaya shows the ultimate perfidy of the U.S./NATO Libyan allies, especially Mahmoud Jibril, in the pre-emptive strike against the Jamahirya Wealth Redistribution Project. The Libyan people are now fighting the world's most powerful militaries to save their Jamahirya. No matter how many times NATO-inspired media lie to their publics, the lies will never become the truth. Hauntingly, Nazemroaya ends by telling us that the Libyan National Transitional Council has already recognized the Syrian Transitional Council as the legitimate government of Syria. Meanwhile, Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, now reputed to be the leader of Al Qaeda and reportedly rewarded with U.S. citizenship after fighting for the CIA in Bosnia, just called for the people of Algeria to oust their President. President Obama's policy of flying drones and dropping bombs over Africa, and invading the Continent with US troops, means that any country that resists an AFRICOM base, as Colonel Qaddafi's wife tells us he did, or expects to exercise its right of self-determination, can expect the kind of treatment we are witnessing now in Libya. We, in the US, must resist these policies for ourselves and and on behalf of the Africans who deserve better than this from the United States of America.
Cynthia McKinney, 25 October 2011
4 of 4: Who Was Muammar Qaddafi? Libya's Wealth Redistribution Project by Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya – 2011-10-27. In 2008, Qaddafi announced his plans for a Wealth Redistribution Program. Washington was intent upon undermining this project through military intervention and regime change.
1 of 4: America's Conquest of Africa: The Roles of France and Israel – by Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya, Julien Teil – 2011-10-06. Terrorists not only fight for Washington on the ground, they also act as frontmen for regime change through so-called human rights organizations that promote democracy. Introduction by Cynthia McKinney
Most of the time, if you ask someone about their agenda, it turns out that it involves doing what's on someone else's agenda.
I need to do this for my boss, this for my husband, that for the PTSA and this other thing for the kids. As soon as you turn over your agenda to others, you're giving up one of the biggest opportunities you have to contribute. Setting an agenda is often as important as checking the boxes.
Obviously, you can't be part of any system without engaging with other people and their agendas.
But perhaps we've absorbed that habit so completely that we've ceded all responsibility and in fact don't even have an agenda any longer…
