November 30th Strike: A New Winter of Discontent?
Posted: December 9, 2011 Filed under: Politics | Tags: Discontent, protests Leave a comment »by Nina Power http://ilesxi.wordpress.com
November 30th saw two million UK public sector workers take strike action up and down the country. Schools and universities closed, hospitals cancelled non-urgent operations, 146,000 civil servants walked out and marches took place up and down the country. Picket lines formed outside public sector buildings everywhere and many people refused to cross picket lines in solidarity. A breakaway group from the main march organized by the Occupy group stormed Panton House (home of the FTSE mining group Xstrata and of the top-paid CEO, Mick Davies) and managed to get a banner to fly off the building, which read ‘All Power to the 99%’. The police responded quickly, perhaps to flex their muscles as part of their new ‘total policing’ strategy and arrested around twenty protesters; earlier in the day police had arrested around 35 people in outside a library in Hackney, for reasons that remain mysterious.
Clashes in front of Italian parliament after austerity vote
Posted: September 14, 2011 Filed under: Activism, Economy, EU, International, Politics | Tags: protests Leave a comment »At least 40 injured and Rome left billowing in smoke after anti-austerity protesters clash with riot police in front of Parliament for over two hours tonight.
By Jérôme E. Roos On September 15, 2011 http://roarmag.org
After weeks of dithering on the precipice of his own downfall, Silvio Berlusconi tonight survived a crucial vote of confidence, by one of the narrowest possible margins, allowing his government it to push through its proposed package of deeply unpopular austerity measures.
The cutbacks and tax hikes had been demanded by the European Central Bank in exchange for its buy-up of Italian bonds on secondary markets, after markets turned their sights on Italy last month, pushing the government’s borrowing costs close to the level where Greece had previously required an EU bailout.
But as Parliament prepared to vote on the austerity measures, violent clashesbroke out between protesters and riot police. Downtown Rome was left billowing in smoke and littered with debris as at least 40 protesters were injured by random rounds of police baton charges.
“The police displayed a disproportionate reaction,” one witness told La Repubblica. “They were hit with batons, even women. A mother, too, was pushed and fell to the ground.” Images on Italian TV showed several people with bleeding head wounds and other injuries. Read the rest of this entry »
Capitalist Rioters Don’t Wear Hoodies
Posted: August 23, 2011 Filed under: Activism, Society | Tags: protests Leave a comment »Author: Gaston Gordillo (Space and Politics)
The global media has been nervously covering two simultaneous forms of destruction: the obliteration of wealth in the financial markets and the destruction of property in the United Kingdom. This destruction involves different actors, objects, temporalities, and spatial scales. The looting by youths in the UK had a short-term temporality and has been territorially contained to one nation. But this destructive violence had a profound affective impact because of its power to temporarily wrest the streets from the control of the state and because it can be immediately represented, visually and live, on countless screens. The corporate media promptly mobilized these images of burning shops, burning police cars, or wounded passersby to scare and enrage the “normal citizens” and modulate their attachment to state authority through the image of looters in hoodies. Read the rest of this entry »
Violence at the Edge: Tottenham, Athens, Paris
Posted: August 23, 2011 Filed under: Activism, EU, Politics, Society | Tags: protests 1 Comment »
Author: Illan rua Wall
http://www.criticallegalthinking.com/?p=4142
Few are willing to make comparisons between this past year’s radical political activity – from the student protests to the major TUC demonstration – and the Tottenham riots. The reasons for this are fairly obvious: there is no unifying political goal of these ‘looters’, ‘hooligans’ and ‘thugs’. Theirs instead appears to be a ‘consumerism of the excluded’ – as someone quipped recently. But there is a common denominator – that is the role of the police in patrolling the fringes of ordered liberal society.
The response to every and any hint that the police might have behaved badly is remarkably similar in so many instances. Firstly, denial: ‘he shot first’, ‘he moved towards me’, ‘he was being restrained for his own safety’. Then, if the pressure is great enough and the evidence obvious enough: acceptance and repentance. This comes with promises that any bad apples will be sought out, plucked from the tree and binned. Then finally, when the fury has dissipated, charges and complaints are dropped, or one person takes the hit – rarely anything beyond a slap on the wrist. As Alex Wheatle says, no police officer has ever been convicted for the death of a black person in custody. This should not surprise us. The police will close ranks in an attempt to protect their own. The political and legal establishment will tolerate this to a certain extent. They recognise ‘the difficult job that officers do’. Yet, this type of reasoning misses the everyday and ordinary violence of the police, and by extension that of the state (and the law). A different way of looking at this emerges when we refuse to accept, for a moment, that police violence is automatically legitimate. Read the rest of this entry »
Daylight Robbery, Meet Nighttime Robbery
Posted: August 23, 2011 Filed under: Activism, EU, Politics | Tags: protests Leave a comment »I keep hearing comparisons between the London riots and riots in other European cities—window smashing in Athens or car bonfires in Paris. And there are parallels, to be sure: a spark set by police violence, a generation that feels forgotten.
But those events were marked by mass destruction; the looting was minor. There have, however, been other mass lootings in recent years, and perhaps we should talk about them too. There was Baghdad in the aftermath of the US invasion—a frenzy of arson and looting that emptied libraries and museums. The factories got hit too. In 2004 I visited one that used to make refrigerators. Its workers had stripped it of everything valuable, then torched it so thoroughly that the warehouse was a sculpture of buckled sheet metal.
Back then the people on cable news thought looting was highly political. They said this is what happens when a regime has no legitimacy in the eyes of the people. After watching for so long as Saddam and his sons helped themselves to whatever and whomever they wanted, many regular Iraqis felt they had earned the right to take a few things for themselves. But London isn’t Baghdad, and British Prime Minister David Cameron is hardly Saddam, so surely there is nothing to learn there. Read the rest of this entry »
Democracy is born in the squares
Posted: June 15, 2011 Filed under: Activism, Economy, EU, International, Politics | Tags: protests Leave a comment »By Christos Giovanopoulos
There may be no better proof of the rupture that is brought about by the “movement of the squares” other than its open, participatory, directly democratic way of organising and functioning. Within a single week it has given birth to a political culture of a different type, one that literally overcomes all known models of organising and struggle to date. Even if the issue of its procedures is incomplete, it comes up again and again and comprises the most important legacy already left to the political and social life of the country. This does not mean there are no issues with disorganisation, inefficiency, delays. Taking into account however the explosive rhythm of its development, the lack of previous experience on the side of those who created it, along with the need to compile, step by step, heterogeneous and different opinions of all participants through open procedures, all this is to be expected. Even if time-consuming, its procedures are flexible and are altered by the day; they are self-criticised, adjusted according to mistakes, comments and suggestions deriving from them being tested in practice. The open, egalitarian and participatory character of the procedures and ways of organising derives from the will to find such procedures that can unite all who are affected by the crisis and dissatisfied with the current political system. Read the rest of this entry »
Spanish protests spread across Europe — in videos
Posted: May 25, 2011 Filed under: Activism, Economy, EU, International, Politics | Tags: protests Leave a comment »by Jérôme E. Roos on May 22, 2011
http://roarmag.org/2011/05/spanish-revolution-protests-spread-europe-videos-democracia-real-ya/
An unprecedented wave of spontaneous protest is washing across Europe as outraged Spanish protesters seek to export their nascent revolution.
Something incredible is happening in Europe right now: the M-15 movement that was born in Spain last week, with the Democracia Real Ya protests on May 15, is rapidly spreading across the continent as young people everywhere take to the streets to demand real democracy now.
Below are some of the most inspiring videos from the wave of protests that is washing over the continent. Please let me know in a comment if you have any other footage that I could put up. And make sure to find a protest near you and join the global solidarity movement!
Madrid protesters defy ban
Posted: May 19, 2011 Filed under: Activism, EU, Politics, Uncategorized | Tags: protests Leave a comment »http://vastminority.blogspot.com/2011/05/madrid-protesters-defy-ban.html
http://vastminority.blogspot.com/2011/05/madrid-protesters-defy-ban.htmlTHOUSANDS of people defied both the protest ban and heavy rain to again occupy la Puerta del Sol in the centre of Madrid over Wednesday night.
Workers, unemployed people and pensioners joined young people in calling for an end to neoliberal ‘austerity’ measures and a democratic system based on the needs of people, rather than economics.
Spanish newspaper El Mundo explained that when the majority of protesters left the square at midnight, hundreds of young people again stayed on throughout the night, in a powerful gesture echoing the Tahrir Square occupation in Cairo.
Food was distributed free to anyone who wanted it and, while the weather put paid to the planned general assembly, debates were held on the future of the May 15 Movement for real democracy.
El Pais said that the protests had taken a big step forward. Whereas on Monday and Tuesday they had attracted younger people via social networking sites, on Wednesday older people arrived, having heard about the movement through traditional media.
The newspaper described a sense of ‘indignation’ in the air and thought it unlikely that the protests, which have also been happening across the country, would disappear before Sunday, which is a day of local elections.
The protests have also been featured on Fox News Latino.
The site reports: “Chanting a cry of resistance from Spain’s 1936-1939 civil war, thousands of mainly young people thronged this capital’s emblematic Puerta del Sol square Wednesday night in defiance of a ban on demonstrations ahead of weekend regional and municipal elections.
“Demonstrators also shouted slogans expressing disgust with both the governing Socialists and the main opposition conservative Popular Party.
“Police, who forcibly evicted some 150 protesters from the area early Tuesday, stood by as the activists vowed to resist peacefully if authorities tried to dislodge them.”
