From the open publishing newswire: A desolate parking lot became vibrant food carts two decades ago! Building a 35-story 5-star hotel is an out-of-scale monstrosity that will disable downtown for years. Elected leaders are responsible to house and feed. Trump should resign gracefully like Nixon. City councils should resist Trump's cutting everything but the military! FDR built 170K public buildings, social security, and minimum wage? Have we fallen asleep? Are we being entertained to death?


Building a 35-story 5-star hotel is an out-of-scale monstrosity that will disable downtown for years. Similarly, building a baseball stadium on the Fremont bridge would turn driving and traffic into a nightmare. This would lead to epic traffic jams and people cursing baseball.

On the positive side, Portland could lead in resisting the Trump attacks on the poor, seniors, the disabled, children and students. The funds should be returned to HUD, Meals-on-Wheels, WIC, The Legal Corporation, Pell Grants, Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security and the Departments of Education and the EPA. The Great Unraveling provokes the Great Refusal. [...]

From the open publishing newswire: Challenging the Both Sides Narrative: Difference Between Fascist & Antifa Movements in the Trump Era with Dr. Stanislav Vysotsky

Apr 4th 7pm
Cider Riot!
807 NE Couch

His research on the militant antifascist movement and the relationship between threat, space, subculture, and social movement activism has been published in journals such as Interface: A Journal for and about Social Movements, Critical Criminology, and the book Inside Antifa: The Tactics, Culture, and Practice of Militant Antifascism (forthcoming, Routledge).

From the open publishing newswire: As Anarchist Radio Berlin we documented a CrimethInc presentation on "To Change Everything", recorded at the anarchist bookfair in Prague, Czech Republic.

Length: 57:39 min

You can find other English and Spanish language audios here.

You can contact us at aradio-berlin/at/riseup(dot)net!

From the open publishing newswire: "Crisis children" can't find a job despite study, four foreign languages and four hundred applications. They are the house cleaners, hair stylists and nurses without their own health insurance who earn one-thousandth what atop manager rakes in. Youth unemployment has reached unbearable levels in Greece and Spain. The top one percent of Americans earns a quarter of the total income and owns half of all securities and national wealth.

POLITICAL DISOBEDIENCE
Rage Grows with its Challenges [...]

THE IDIOTS WITHDRAW INTO THEIR SHELLS
The danger is withdrawal into the private, not falling voter turnout [...]

[translated from the German on the Internet.]

From the open publishing newswire: Organized Snitch programs like Tip Submit and Community Alerts are manipulating communities to target progressive writers and Activists.

In the new millennium, we have seen trends in group behavior: Flash mobs, Smart mobs, Zombie races, Zombie this, that and whatever. (One has to wonder about the popularity of the Zombie, a creature who cannot think, but only destroy.) These trends appeal to people's desire to be accepted and have fun as a group, but also show their desire to conform. We have seen many follow group behavior in a fun and entertaining way, however, a very negative form of group behavior has evolved over the last ten years. [...]

Even real Law Enforcement can be manipulated by an angry mob who constantly call in to report on someone they have been manipulated into hating. The Tip Submit Program to anonymously report on someone can be used against innocent people by the unscrupulous or even by an overzealous Neighborhood Watch. In 2005 a female colleague (a very bad bully) bragged to me that she had reported on me to some high-ranking security official, but refused to tell me what she had said. I never saw her again after that and have no idea about the accusation.

This organized snitch system is horribly wrong. Also, the snitches appear to be hounding innocent people. They don't question anything. They do not ask the person if whatever has been said, is true. Instead, they merely follow. Simon says, "Don't ask questions." [...]

From the open publishing newswire: Sylvain Timsit shows how society is influenced and what information is deemed relevant. Since information always leads to perception and perception is the basis of all action, information also explains the social reality and the change of social reality. Society can be manipulated without a critical mass of people realizing this. link to libyaagainstsuperpowermedia.org

"10 STRATEGIES OF MANIPULATION" REVISITED

How whole populations can be guided

By Jascha Jaworski

[This article published on 8/10/2013 is translated abridged from the German on the Internet,  http://www.heise.de/tp/druck/mb/artikel/39/39675/1.html.]

A list of "10 Strategies of Manipulation" [1] circulates on the Internet. These are strategies for steering whole populations. Sylvain Timsit is named in several places. Elsewhere a search ends with the French-speaking interdisciplinary journal Les cahiers psychologie politique [2] and Noam Chomsky is wrongly identified as the author. [...]

From the open publishing newswire: The fourth Annual Law and Disorder Conference will take place May 10th-12th, at Portland State University and will feature a panel discussion on the recent grand jury raids in the northwest.

We are excited to announce the Fourth Annual Law and Disorder Conference, May 10-12th 2013, at Portland State University. This year's conference features a special panel about grand jury resistance with members of the Committee to Stop FBI Repression and the Committee Against Political Repression. A special keynote will be given by former political prisoner Jihad Abdulmumit, co-chair for the Jericho Movement, as well as his highly acclaimed theatrical performance "Political Incarcerations". Other special presentations will be given by Sacramento Prisoner Support, David Hill (American Indian Movement), Portland Rising Tide, Portland Central America Solidarity Committee, Right 2 Survive and Portland Industrial Workers of the World, as well as many other local organizations.

L&D was founded in 2010 by members of the NW Student Coalition, a consortium of radical student groups in the Pacific Northwest from PSU, Mt. Hood Community College, Reed College and Washington State University-Vancouver in the aftermath of the police murders of Aaron Campbell and Keaton Otis in Portland and Oscar Grant in the Bay Area. The general theme of the conference has been to bridge the gap between different traditions of radical politics. The first and foremost goal has been to raise the issues of U.S.-held political prisoners, their existence contrary to denial on the part of the state, and practical discussions regarding their support and amnesty. Secondly, we engage in a critical dialogue about political repression, from the historical targeting and incarceration of activists in the FBI's counterintelligence program (COINTELPRO) in the second half of the 20th century to the most recent manifestations such as the PATRIOT ACT and Homeland Security. The third theme is the abolition of the Prison- Industrial Complex and finding community alternatives to the police.

This conference calls for people, movements, organizations and collectives to present alternative accounts to the political dimensions of civic engagement, mutual aid and revolution as they relate to economics, politics, invention, technology, work, artistic and cultural production, the body, pedagogy and social change. [...]

Website:  http://lawandisorder.wordpress.com
Facebook: Law and Disorder Conference

From the open publishing newswire: Please join us for The Portland Women's Movement, Part I: Origins, History of Social Justice Organizing's first program for 2013. The panel will feature Maureen Gray Hudson, Kathleen Saadat and Susan Stoner. Sandy Polishuk will moderate.

Find us in room 328 Smith Center at Portland State University, 1825 SW Broadway on Thursday, January 24 at 7pm. The program will be free as usual.

History of Social Justice Organizing is an ongoing series of presentations by activists and scholars on a wide variety of social justice organizing both in Portland and elsewhere. A program of Occupy History

Find upcoming programs at historyofsocialjustice.wordpress.com and
www.facebook.com/historyofsocialjustice

From the open publishing newswire: In recent weeks, a showdown has loomed on U.S. docks between the shipping bosses and port workers that has rattled the capitalist ruling class. On the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts, the International Longshoreman's Association prepared to strike container shipping while the employers threatened to lock out 14,500 ILA members. On the West Coast, the grain shippers been demanding a giveback contract from the International Longshore Workers Union (ILWU), which would effectively bypass the union hiring hall, slash workers' vital safety protections and gut union power. Yet in the midst of the Northwest grain battle, an Occupy activist, Peter Little, publishes an article vociferously arguing against the call to defend the ILWU. While posing as ultra-left, this policy if actually carried out would aid the employers who are hell-bent on destroying ILWU union power on the waterfront. Blaming sellouts on the nature of unions lets the bureaucrats off the hook. We in the Internationalist Group say: All those who stand with the exploited and oppressed must come to the defense of the ILWU in this fight. And that defense includes forthrightly opposing the capitulations and betrayals by the labor bureaucracy which sells out vital union gains in the vain hope of an impossible "cooperation" with capital, endangering the workers organizations they preside over.

Read the article at the Internationalist Group website:  http://www.internationalist.org/whywedefendilwu1301.html.

From the open publishing newswire: Well, by now everyone in the Occupy movement is hotly debating "nonviolence" vs. "diversity of tactics", as recently so in, "Chris Hedges and Kristof Lopaur of Occupy Oakland debate black bloc, militancy and tactics," February 8, 2012, on KPFA in Berkeley, California.

Both Lopaur and Hedges made some critically weak, flawed, at times somewhat disingenuous or self-contradictory and, in Lopaur's case, often specious arguments in their radio debate. This so, even though I politically agree with Hedges, and although Hedges' recent commentary, "The Cancer in Occupy," seemed poorly supported journalistically. But, Hedges is dead on about, 'Go do violence under your own name, not the Occupy movement's.'

Read more: daveyd.com | hiphopandpolitics.wordpress.com

[ Related: | How violence protects the State | On The Nature of Violence and Nonviolence | Organized Non-violent Civil Disobedience vs. OWS ]

From the open publishing newswire: The 'Occupy' movement is one of several in American history to be based on anarchist principles.
London, UK - Almost every time I'm interviewed by a mainstream journalist about Occupy Wall Street I get some variation of the same lecture:

"How are you going to get anywhere if you refuse to create a leadership structure or make a practical list of demands? And what's with all this anarchist nonsense - the consensus, the sparkly fingers? Don't you realise all this radical language is going to alienate people? You're never going to be able to reach regular, mainstream Americans with this sort of thing!"

If one were compiling a scrapbook of worst advice ever given, this sort of thing might well merit an honourable place. After all, since the financial crash of 2007, there have been dozens of attempts to kick-off a national movement against the depredations of the United States' financial elites taking the approach such journalists recommended. All failed. It was only on August 2, when a small group of anarchists and other anti-authoritarians showed up at a meeting called by one such group and effectively wooed everyone away from the planned march and rally to create a genuine democratic assembly, on basically anarchist principles, that the stage was set for a movement that Americans from Portland to Tuscaloosa were willing to embrace. [...]

From the open publishing newswire: The Occupy Movement couldn't have come along at a worse time, from the viewpoint of the Democrats. Election season is just getting started and Occupy has thrown a giant wrench into the political machinery. Some labor leaders too are sensing "politics as usual" shifting under their feet; the "get out the vote" for the Democrats may elicit blank stares from the rank and file.

Occupy has the potential to create earthquakes within the labor movement and labor's relationship to the Democrats, if it approaches the subject intelligently. This seismic shift could permanently change politics in the United States, much for the better. Many commentators have noted that the Occupy Movement can be only poison for the Democrats. Unlike the Republicans, who benefited from the corporate sponsored far-right Tea Party, the Democrats have no intention of moving - or even flirting - with an independent movement to its left. Long before the corporate Presidency of Bill Clinton, the Democrats have moved only to the right, with the leftist talk reserved strictly for election campaigns. This evolution is now to the point where President Obama stands to the right of President and arch-Conservative Richard Nixon on most economic and social issues. Times have certainly changed.

 http://www.workerscompass.org

From the open publishing newswire: As anarchists, we often say that the freedoms in bourgeois society are a sham. Most of the time, non-anarchists can easily just laugh this off as the delusions of nutty radicals. Not so much right now. Not when "democracy" after "democracy" is chasing their site out of their borders, for doing nothing more than non-violently refusing to stay silent while the worlds' elites conspire to kill, torture, and oppress.

Not when Julian Assange is being dragged into what is a quite obviously dragged into a politically-motivated trial. Not when Assange will probably end up being killed in the next year. Not when both "left" and "right" governments are cooperating in the effort to muzzle Wikileaks. It's the bourgeois concept of freedom: we'll let you have freedoms only so long as you agree not to use them for anything truly meaningful. Then we'll revoke them from you. Are these the hallmarks of the sort of system that can be changed peacefully and non-disruptively from within? It is, I think, an ideal time to make these points to our friends who are not currently radicals.

| WikiLeaks Mirrors =>leaks.be | wikileaks.at | wikileaks.de| 213.251.145.96| wikileaks.pl | wikileaks.eu| wikileaks.fi| wikileaks.2600.com | wikileaks.indymedia.org