Multiple reliable sources in three continents are all now reporting that a major breakthrough in the financial logjam is imminent. We can confirm from our own sources (including MI6 and Japanese military intelligence) that a large delegation descended on Washington last week and read the riot act to the Washington D.C. establishment.
They have been informed the Federal Reserve Board must be shut down immediately and the new financial system must be implemented or else the United States would be totally cut off from the world. The military is also close to open revolt with more than half of the military supporting a total clean up of Washington D.C., according to a CIA source. The Washington establishment therefore faces a choice between stepping aside and facing a truth commission or else arrest, civil war, chaos and eventual death for all members of the ruling cabal. We believe that sane minds will prevail in such a situation and that a peaceful resolution is imminent. However, it is not over until it is over.
Susan Lindauer, Former CIA Back Channel to Iraq at the United Nations
Most Americans are astonished to discover that right up to 9/11, the CIA was developing a “Real Politik” vision of Iraq that recognized the fast approaching collapse of U.N. Sanctions. The CIA was preparing for Peace—with a ruthless determination that the United States would capture the lion's share of spoils from Iraqi Reconstruction contracts in any post-sanctions period.
German pilots transporting medical supplies and doctors into Baghdad International Airport at the end of the Clinton Administration had blasted the myth of invincibility surrounding sanctions. To this day, those pilots are anonymous—but they changed the equation in total. Their courage honoring the Berlin Airlifts in the Cold War was quickly copied. Across Europe and the Arab world, activists began to organize humanitarian flights into Baghdad. On the Security Council, France and Russia argued strenuously that the ban on air travel had been self imposed, and the no-fly zone could not prohibit humanitarian flights.
By this time, UN sanctions had killed over 1.7 million Iraqis; wiped out literacy in a single generation; and created artificial starvation in the world's second most oil-rich nation. Iraq's world class hospitals that once rivaled London and New York had been ravaged. Sick of the misery, the global community refused to stay silent any longer.
The CIA saw the writing on the wall. International loathing for “genocide by sanctions” had reached such a peak of outrage that there was no possibility of re-crafting the hated policy. Secretary of State Colin Powell's vision of “smart sanctions” had come too late.
The CIA was determined to control the agenda for the advantage of the United States, however. And so quietly through my back channel, we undertook a proactive, covert dialogue over exactly what concessions Iraq would offer the United States, in exchange for lifting the sanctions. As a long-time opponent of sanctions myself, I was eager to get results.
Build Power & Show Power through Mass Participatory Bold Action
To show our power, on May 1st, 2012, we will be organizing for such a mass participatory and bold collective action: a national general strike, mass boycott, student strike/ walk-out and mass day of action. We will be organizing within our unions- or informal workplace organizations where there’s no union or the union isn’t supportive- to hold a one-day general strike. Where a strike is not possible, we will be organizing people to call in sick, or take a personal day, as part of a coordinated “sick-out”. Those who are students will be walking-out of their schools (or not showing up in the first place). In the community, we will be holding a mass boycott and refusing to make any purchase on that day.
We, the 99%, will build our power and show our power until we've occupied our workplaces, our communities, our schools, our lives, our world… until we've occupied everything!
IN 1984, after serving three terms in the House of Representatives, Ron Paul was defeated by Phil Gramm in Texas’s Republican Senate primary. Paul left Congress, and a few years later he left the Republican Party entirely to run for president on the Libertarian line. In the 1988 election, after a campaign that Texas Monthly compared to something “out of Robert Altman’s movie ‘Nashville,’ ” he took home just 0.47 percent of the popular vote.
Thus marginalized by the public, the former congressman proceeded to marginalize himself. Through the various newsletters that bore his name — most notably the Ron Paul Political Report and the Ron Paul Survival Report — he spent the early 1990s as a peddler of far-right paranoia. In an exhaustive 2008 piece for Reason magazine, Dave Weigel and Julian Sanchez argued that the most abhorrent language in Paul’s eponymous newsletters — the claims that the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. “seduced under-age girls and boys,” that AIDS sufferers “enjoy the attention and pity,” and so on — weren’t actually written by the man himself. But the fact that they had Paul’s imprimatur suggests that the former congressman had grown comfortable way out on the xenophobic fringe.
THE FUTURE IS A KIND OF HISTORY THAT HASN'T HAPPENED YET
“He’s the legendary Cyberpunk Guru. He roams our postmodern planet, from the polychrome tinsel of Los Angeles to the chicken-fried cyberculture of Austin… From the heretical Communist slums of gritty Belgrade to the Gothic industrial castles of artsy Torino… always whipping that slider-bar between the unthinkable and the unimaginable.
“He’s a Californian design visionary. He’s an European electronic-art curator. He’s a Swiss professor of media philosophy. He’s a Prophet of Augmented Reality, even. He’s an author, journalist, editor, critic, theorist, futurist, and blogger. Obviously he’s pretty much anything that he can get his hands on.
Amazon Page
“And he never stops typing. This sixth collection of his fantastic stories is a comic arsenal of dark euphoria. It’s even weirder, harsher and more twisted than the scary decade that inspired it. Boy, that’s saying something.”
“There have been many resistance movements throughout history which have made use of the occupation tactic. In the United States, the unemployed Coxey’s Army, which marched across the country decrying injustice and unemployment in 1894, camped out throughout the summer as they converged upon Washington. In the summer of 1932, tens of thousands of WWI veterans and their families occupied parks, military bases and a number of public buildings in Washington D.C., demanding the immediate cash payment of their service certificates, referred to as a ‘bonus’. These ‘Bonus Marchers’ shut down much of the city, and faced the police in camp evictions similar to those we saw this year. In the Depression, many Hoovervilles—the shanty towns of tents and temporary structures built by the homeless–had serious political content, as portrayed in Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, that is often washed out of the history books. Though a less-favored tactic in the 60s, many university buildings–most famously at Berkeley, Columbia and University of Wisconsin, but occurring all over the country–were occupied at the height of the anti-war movement. At the time of his assassination, Martin Luther King, Jr. was planning a tent-city occupation of Washington D.C as the first step of his Poor People’s Campaign. Fellow organizers went ahead with the plan, and ‘Resurrection City’ took over the Mall for more then a month in May-June of 1968.
In the last thirty years, occupation has been a key tactic in many of the anti-globalization struggles throughout the world. Started in the eighties, but truly gaining momentum and size throughout the nineties, the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem Terra (The Landless Workers Movement) in Brazil redistributes farmlands through occupation. Sem Terra gives strategic and material support to landless tenant farmers. From dozens to thousands of itinerant farmers and their families will occupy fallow or abandoned land and build a farming community there. Often facing eviction by police, political repression or violence from (negligent) land owners, these occupations have been largely successful at redistributing land, and 1.5 million Brazilians are associated with the movement, which is still a vibrant political force in Brazil today. Sem Terra, which is organized on a non-hierarchical consensus model, is the largest social movement in the world, giving lie to the claim made by many liberals that consensus and horizontal organization cannot scale.
In 2001 in Argentina, facing the results of major economic crisis, a number of businesses, predominantly factories but also a hotel and several retail businesses, were occupied by their workers, who restarted their machines and brought them back into productivity without management. These businesses were worker-owned and -managed, with total profit and decision sharing, and usually proved to be more efficient and productive per capita, while paying out a much higher wage. Many of these ‘recovered’ businesses continue to this day. And though not part of the anti-globalization movement, the massacre in Tiananmen square in 1989 came after seven weeks of continuous occupation by students and intellectuals demanding liberalization and modernization of the Communist Party.
The occupation is a powerful tactic for a number of reasons: it foregrounds the political issues of everyday life and public space, it produces a positive communitarian solution to the problems it critiques, it is highly visible and struggle is continuous in a way that radicalizes its participants. It has been used throughout history in fights for social justice, peace, and revolution, but now its moment has truly arrived, and there are many more occupations to come.”
