Largest Ever Low-Wage Worker Protest Sweeps United States

Thursday, April 16, 2015

by Common Dreams

'I Know We Will Win'

Day of action calling for a $15 minimum wage and the right to organize reached far beyond US borders

by Sarah Lazare, staff writer

"Fast-food workers are joining together and standing up for what’s right, and with students, #BlackLivesMatter activists, adjunct professors, home care, Walmart, child care, and airport services workers standing with us, we are stronger than ever," said Terrence Wise, fast food worker in Kansas City, Missouri.

In what is being called the largest low-wage worker protest the United States has ever seen, tens of thousands of fast food, laundry, home care, child care, retail, and education employees walked off the job or staged rallies on Wednesday in more than 200 cities across the country.

They were joined by workers in 35 countries on six continents, from New Zealand to Brazil to Japan.
The mobilization was part of the movement for a $15 dollar minimum wage in the U.S., which has touched off a nation-wide conversation about poverty and inequality since fast food workers began a series of rolling strikes and workplace actions more than three years ago.

"Fast-food workers are joining together and standing up for what’s right, and with students, #BlackLivesMatter activists, adjunct professors, home care, Walmart, child care, and airport services workers standing with us, we are stronger than ever," said Terrence Wise, a father of three who works at McDonald's and Burger King restaurants in Kansas City, Missouri, in a press statement. "I know we will win."

Backed by the Service Employees International Union, Wednesday's rallies were timed to coincide with Tax Day in the U.S., in a bid to highlight the fact that low-wage workers are forced to rely on public assistance to get by.

Under the banner "We are worth more," protesters are calling for living wages, as well as the right to organize in their workplaces without intimidation and retaliation.

In the streets on Wednesday, protesters made connections between social and economic justice. From Charleston, South Carolina to Ferguson, Missouri, protesters memorialized the lives of unarmed people of color killed by police and brought the message of the growing Black Lives Matter movement.

"We joined the Fight for $15 because, for us, racial justice is economic justice. We believe that Black workers have paid undeserved debts to greedy corporations for far too long," said Charlene Carruthers, national director for the Black Youth Project 100.

A report released on Monday by the National Employment Law Project finds that women and people of color are dramatically overrepresented in the underpaid work-force, with over 50 percent of African-American workers, and nearly 60 percent of Latino workers, making less than $15.

Wednesday's protests called for worker justice far beyond U.S. borders.

"The fast-food industry is dominated by a handful of multi-billion-dollar global companies, so we need to have a strong, global movement of workers pushing for better wages, better treatment and better rights," said Massimo Frattini, international coordinator for the International Union of Food workers in a press statement.
Participants say that this movement is a matter of urgency, amid rising inequality and plummeting wages in the U.S. and world-wide.

As Andrew Olson, McDonald's worker in Los Angeles put it in an interview with The LA Times, "Just because I work in fast food does that mean I should have to just scrape by in life?"

Looking to the future, journalist Rana Foroohar argued in Time that the Fight for $15 is proving a powerful force. "Politicians are going to have to grapple with this in the election cycle," wrote Foroohar, "because as the latest round of wage protests makes clear, the issue isn't going away anytime soon."

Are the Feds Preparing for a Civil War? Infographic

No pictures at protests? Police may block mobile devices via Apple

Apple Moves One Step Closer Toward Location-Based Camera Disabling

In June of last year, we reported on an unsettling patent filed by Apple that would allow certain infrared signals to remotely disable the camera on iPhones. It showed the potential downsides of bringing cameras into the world of wireless connectivity, which appears to be the next big thing in the camera industry. Now, a newly published patent is rekindling the fears of those who don’t want “Big Brother” controlling their devices.

U.S. Patent No. 8,254,902, published on Tuesday, is titled, “Apparatus and methods for enforcement of policies upon a wireless device.”

Here’s the short description:

Apparatus and methods for changing one or more functional or operational aspects of a wireless device, such as upon the occurrence of a certain event. In one embodiment, the event comprises detecting that the wireless device is within range of one or more other devices. In another variant, the event comprises the wireless device associating with a certain access point. In this manner, various aspects of device functionality may be enabled or restricted (device “policies”). This policy enforcement capability is useful for a variety of reasons, including for example to disable noise and/or light emanating from wireless devices (such as at a movie theater), for preventing wireless devices from communicating with other wireless devices (such as in academic settings), and for forcing certain electronic devices to enter “sleep mode” when entering a sensitive area.

If this type of technology became widely adopted and baked into cameras, photography could be prevented by simply setting a “geofence” around a particular location, whether it’s a movie theater, celebrity hangout spot, protest site, or the top secret rooms at 1 Infinite Loop, Cupertino, California.

++++++++++++

Apple has patented a piece of technology which would allow government and police to block transmission of information, including video and photographs, from any public gathering or venue they deem “sensitive”, and “protected from externalities.”

In other words, these powers will have control over what can and cannot be documented on wireless devices during any public event.

And while the company says the affected sites are to be mostly cinemas, theaters, concert grounds and similar locations, Apple Inc. also says “covert police or government operations may require complete ‘blackout’ conditions.”

“Additionally,” Apple says,” the wireless transmission of sensitive information to a remote source is one example of a threat to security. This sensitive information could be anything from classified government information to questions or answers to an examination administered in an academic setting.”

The statement led many to believe that authorities and police could now use the patented feature during protests or rallies to block the transmission of video footage and photographs from the scene, including those of police brutality, which at times of major events immediately flood news networks and video websites.

Apple patented the means to transmit an encoded signal to all wireless devices, commanding them to disable recording functions.

Those policies would be activated by GPS, and WiFi or mobile base-stations, which would ring-fence (“geofence”) around a building or a “sensitive area” to prevent phone cameras from taking pictures or recording video.

Apple may implement the technology, but it would not be Apple’s decision to activate the “feature” – it would be down governments, businesses and network owners to set such policies, analyzes ZDNet technology website.

Having invented one of the most sophisticated mobile devices, Apple now appears to be looking for ways to restrict its use.

“As wireless devices such as cellular telephones, pagers, personal media devices and smartphones become ubiquitous, more and more people are carrying these devices in various social and professional settings,” it explains in the patent. “The result is that these wireless devices can often annoy, frustrate, and even threaten people in sensitive venues.”

The company’s listed “sensitive” venues so far include mostly meetings, the presentation of movies, religious ceremonies, weddings, funerals, academic lectures, and test-taking environments.  ~ Banoosh

******

I wasn't going to get a smart phone anyway for various reasons, but this cements me ever reconsidering in the future. I have an older "dumb" phone with a camera that should work no matter where I am...if my battery would only keep a charge in it.--jef

U.S. military unveils ‘Active Denial’ heat ray weapon

By Agence France-Presse
Saturday, March 10, 2012

A sensation of unbearable, sudden heat seems to come out of nowhere — this wave, a strong electromagnetic beam, is the latest non-lethal weapon unveiled by the US military this week.

“You’re not gonna see it, you’re not gonna hear it, you’re not gonna smell it: you’re gonna feel it,” explained US Marine Colonel Tracy Taffola, director the Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Directorate, Marine Corps Base Quantico, at a demonstration for members of the media.

The effect is so repellant, the immediate instinct is to flee — and quickly, as experienced by AFP at the presentation.

Taffola is quick also to point out the “Active Denial System” beam, while powerful and long-range, some 1000 meters (0.6 miles), is the military’s “safest non-lethal capability” that has been developed over 15 years but never used in the field.

It was deployed briefly in Afghanistan in 2010, but never employed in an operation.

The technology has attracted safety concerns possibly because the beam is often confused with the microwaves commonly used by consumers to rapidly heat food.

“There are a lot of misperceptions out there,” lamented Taffola, saying the Pentagon was keen to make clear what the weapon is, and what it is not.

The frequency of the blast makes all the difference for actual injury as opposed to extreme discomfort, stressed Stephanie Miller, who measured the system’s radio frequency bioeffects at the Air Force Research Laboratory.

The system ray is 95 gigahertz, a frequency “absorbed very superficially,” said Miller.

The beam only goes 1/64th of an inch (0.4 millimeter), which “gives a lot more safety.”

“We have done over 11,000 exposures on people. In that time we’ve only had two injuries that required medical attention and in both cases injuries were fully recovered without complications,” she said.

In contrast, microwave frequency is around one gigahertz, which moves faster and penetrates deeper — which is how it can cook meat in an oven, said top researcher Diana Loree.

With the transmitter, a wave 100 times the power of a regular microwave oven cannot pop a bag of popcorn “because the radio frequency is not penetrating enough to heat enough to internally heat the material,” she stressed.

To be used in mob dispersal, checkpoint security, perimeter security, area denial, infrastructure protection, the US military envisions a wide array of uses.

And in a bid to avert accidents, Taffola said the operator’s trigger, in a truck far from the action, has an automatic shut-off after 3 seconds for safety.

“This provides the safest means and also provides the greatest range,” he said.

The Pentagon has not yet decided to order any of the ADS system, but Taffola said they would be ready if asked.

The Divine Right of Money

Is Western Democracy Real or a Facade?
by PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS

The United States government and its NATO puppets have been killing Muslim men, women and children for a decade in the name of bringing them democracy. But is the West itself a bastion of democracy?

Skeptics point out that President George W. Bush was put in office by the Supreme Court and that a number of other elections have been decided by electronic voting machines that leave no paper trail. Others note that elected officials represent the special interests that fund their campaigns and not the voters. The bailout of the banks arranged by Bush’s Treasury Secretary and former Goldman Sachs chairman, Henry Paulson, and Washington’s failure to indict any banksters for the fraud that contributed to the financial crisis, are evidence in support of the view that the US government represents money and not the voters.

Recent events in Greece and Italy have created more skepticism of the West’s claim to be democratic. Two elected European prime ministers, George Papandreou of Greece and Silvio Berlusconi of Italy, were forced to resign over the sovereign debt issue. Not even Berlusconi, a billionaire who continues to lead the largest Italian political party, could stand up to the pressure brought by private bankers and unelected European Union officials.

Papandreou lasted only 10 days after announcing on October 31, 2011, that he would let the Greek voters decide in a referendum whether or not to accept the austerity being imposed on the Greek people from the outside. Austerity is the price charged by the EU for lending the Greek government the money to pay to the banks. In other words, the question was austerity or default. However, the question was decided without the participation of the Greek people.

Consequently, Greeks have taken to the streets. The conditions accompanying the latest tranche of the bailout have again brought large numbers of Greeks into the streets of Athens and other cities. Citizens are protesting a 20 per cent cut both in the minimum wage and in pensions larger than 12,000 euros ($15,800) annually and more cuts in public sector jobs. Greek taxes were raised 2.3 billion euros last year and are scheduled to rise another 3.4 billion euros in 2013. The austerity is being imposed despite Greece’s unemployment rate of 21 per cent overall and 48 per cent for those under the age of 25.

One interpretation is that the banks, which were careless in their loans to governments, are forcing the people to save the banks from the consequences of their bad decisions.

Another interpretation is that the European Union is using the sovereign debt crisis to extend its power and control over the individual member states of the EU.

Some say that the EU is using the banks for the EU’s agenda, and others say the banks are using the EU for the banks’ agenda.

Indeed, they may be using each other. Regardless, democracy is not part of the process.

Greece’s appointed–not elected–prime minister is Lucas Papademos, He is a former governor of the Bank of Greece, a member of Rockefeller’s Trilateral Commission, and former vice president of the European Central Bank. In other words, he is a banker appointed to represent the banks.

On February 12 the appointed prime minister, whose job is to deliver Greece to the banks or to Brussels, failed to see the irony in his statement that “violence has no place in a democracy.” Neither did he see any irony in the fact that 40 elected representatives in the Greek parliament who rejected the bailout terms were expelled by the ruling coalition parties. Violence begets violence. Violence in the streets is a response to the economic violence being committed against the Greek people.

Italy has formed a second democratic government devoid of democracy. The appointed prime minister, Mario Monti, doesn’t have to face an election until April 2013. Moreover, according to news reports, his “technocratic cabinet” does not include a single elected politician. The banks are taking no chances: Monti is both prime minister and minister of economics and finance.

Monti’s background indicates that he represents both the EU and the banks. He is former European advisor to Goldman Sachs, European chairman of the Trilateral Commission, a member of the Bilderberg Group, a former EU Commissioner, and a founding member of the Spinelli Group, an organization launched in September 2010 to facilitate integration within the EU, that is, to advance central power over the member states.

There is little doubt that European governments, like Washington, have been financially improvident, living beyond their means and building up debt burdens on citizens. Something needed to be done. However, what is being done is extra-democratic. This is an indication that Western elites–the Trilateral Commission, the Council on Foreign Relations, Bilderberg Group, the EU, transnational corporations, oversized banks, and the mega-rich–no longer believe in democracy.

Perhaps future historians will conclude that democracy once served the interests of money in order to break free of the power of kings, aristocracy, and government predations, but as money established control over governments, democracy became a liability. Historians will speak of the transition from the divine right of kings to the divine right of money.

Punishing Protest, Policing Dissent: What is the Justice System For?

Sunday, February 12, 2012 by Common Dreams
by Erik Hoffner

This year promises to be another historic year of people calling for change worldwide. Citizens took to the streets for a wide variety of reasons, from the Wisconsin Capitol to D.C., which hosted many actions last year including the highly visible civil disobedience of activists seeking to halt the proposed Keystone XL Pipeline. The resulting mass arrests, totaling over 1,200 by early September, surely played a large role in President Obama’s decision to delay approval of that climate- and water supply-threatening project.

The climate justice movement also experienced a low point this year, though, when its most visible young leader, Tim DeChristopher, was sentenced to two years in prison for disrupting a Federal oil and gas lease auction by peaceful means. Even though the auction was later shown to be illegal, DeChristopher’s case proceeded in a manner that made it clear that the government’s prosecutor sought to make an example of an activist who showed no remorse.

For his part, Tim saw it as a necessary action to protect his future from runaway climate change, and seemed ready to prove that his movement is unafraid of such retribution when he refused to apologize or take a plea deal. As he told Terry Tempest Williams in Orion recently, “…it’s important to make sure that the government doesn’t win in their quest to intimidate people…They’re trying to make an example out of me to scare other people into obedience.” The punishing of protest is not unusual, and can result in long-term victories for those targeted, but that didn’t comfort Patrick Shea, DeChristopher’s lawyer, who said in a recent post that he’d witnessed “a miscarriage of justice, fairness, and what I believed America stood for.”

Occupiers, though, have racked up many more detentions, with 6,526 arrested in 110 U.S. cities so far, according to OccupyArrests.com. This wave of action and reaction has kept National Lawyers Guild (NLG) chapters and members very busy working to protect demonstrators’ constitutional rights. Founded 75 years ago to use the law to advance social justice and support progressive social movements, NLG coordinates attorneys, legal workers and law students, and provides legal briefing, case law research, legal strategy and tactical advice to activists. Over the past several months, its members have filed constitutional rights challenges, represented protesters in criminal court, trained and acted as Legal Observers®, and often provided ‘round-the-clock legal advice to Occupy encampments.

Their director, Heidi Boghosian, told me that guild members “…have probably pulled more all-nighters in the past few months than they did in all of college. But we hope that the Occupy movement continues, in as many creative incarnations as possible. For most of us, this kind of grassroots activism is what we live for.”

So I asked Boghosian this weekend how her view of the hierarchy of governmental threats to the exercise of political speech described in her 2007 book, Punishing Protest, has changed. She responded that two new significant trends are evident: “One, the use of high-technology and sophisticated military equipment, and two, cooperation between law enforcement and the private business sector, especially with regard to surveillance/spying and controlling media access to police actions.”

In some cities, such as New York, she said, “police are scanning irises of arrestees and are detaining those who refuse to be scanned. The stated purpose of the scans is to avoid mis-identifications in court, but this unregulated taking from those arrested for engaging in free speech activities is ominous; it would not be surprising if a database is being amassed of iris scans of political activists.”

In addition to police in Washington, D.C. using a truck with an infrared scanner to determine if individuals were sleeping at McPherson Square after they cleared tents from the Occupy encampment, other high-tech threats exist: “The federal government and local police agencies are using Predator drones with increasing frequency to spy on suspects domestically. The drones are equipped with high-resolution cameras, heat sensors and radar—it does not take much stretch of the imagination to see how the drones can be adapted for spying on political activists. These aircraft are capable of flying for up to 20 hours, making them more powerful than police airplanes or helicopters.”

Beside the high-tech threats, local governments preparing for large-scale protests before the political conventions are bolstering their standard toolbox with military equipment such as armed tanks. “The Tampa City Council voted to spend part of the federal grant money for the 2012 Republican National Convention— $50 million – for police “upgrades,” including a Lenco BearCat armored vehicle to supplement two older armored vehicles the city purchased through a military surplus program,” Boghosian said.

“Partnerships between law enforcement and corporations, including the news media, are cropping up with increasing frequency,” she continued. “Routinely, police shut down entire city blocks sweeping up everyone in sight, and control or prohibit credentialed journalists’ access during the process. That happened in New York when members of the press were kept away from a middle-of-the-night closing of Zuccotti Park, and in Los Angeles in late November when the LAPD shut down Occupy Los Angeles.” Boghosian noted in this case that, “Reports indicated that television news helicopters stopped sending images of officers marching toward City Hall because the news station entered into an agreement with the LAPD to not reveal their plans. The police imposed an air space blackout forbidding all but law enforcement helicopters to film above Solidarity Park.”

How much is the government reaction to Occupy changing how dissent is policed, I wondered? Boghosian answered that police have access to technology to monitor protesters in ways not previously possible. Besides facial recognition, Internet data mining, and even drones, “…a high technology facility is planned for lower Manhattan, where Wall Street businesses will cooperate with the New York Police Department in spying on citizens. NYPD Commissioner Raymond Kelly expressed the department’s commitment to implementing a security plan that will include a centralized coordination center with space for full-time representation from Goldman Sachs and other corporate partners.”

Then there’s the Manhattan District Attorney’s office, which issued a subpoena asking for three months of information from a Twitter account of a person arrested in the ‘trap-and-arrest’ of Occupy Wall Street marchers on the Brooklyn Bridge. The defense attorney, NLG member Martin Stolar, filed a motion to quash the subpoena contending that it was overbroad, was issued for an improper purpose, and constituted an abuse of the court process. He also wrote that the range of information requested suggested that the DA might be using the subpoena for investigative purposes rather than to provide evidence to uphold a charge of disorderly conduct.

Police also dealt a blow to using new media to cover protest actions when they raided the Brooklyn studio of  Globalrevolution.tv, a website that aggregates live streaming content on the Occupy movement and arrested six of its volunteers. “Police had delivered a notice to vacate prior to the raid. Authorities claimed that the conditions in the space were perilous to life,” Boghosian noted drily.

Combine these developments with the new National Defense Authorization Act, (a broad and likely unconstitutional new law described by Glenn Greenwald as “…the first time indefinite detention has been enshrined in law since the McCarthy era of the 1950s,”) and one sees a broad and robust reaction to what Time magazine dubbed “the year of the protester.”

To the NLG’s Boghosian, not only is the NDAA unconstitutional, but also immoral and inhumane. The provisions on indefinite detention clearly violate due process and it overall “turns international humanitarian law on its head by mocking the concept that prisoners of war may be detained only until the end of hostilities,” she said. “As propaganda about radical Islam replace communism in the United States government’s rubric of fear, the executive branch abrogates any semblance of democracy. It was important that Chris Hedges brough this legal challenge to hold our leaders accountable and to propel critical issues into the public forum. I hope that he has a chance at prevailing and urge more citizens to bring such challenges to unlawful government actions. They may not like to let on, but judges read the newspapers. The silver lining in this is that the NDAA formalizes the many illegal practices already occurring, allowing formal challenges to be brought against them.”

From the multiple Occupy encampments to the climate camps on mountaintops in Appalachia to the one outside the courthouse in Utah where Tim DeChristopher took his defiant stand, all of the developments in how dissent is policed forces one to wonder whether the U.S. Justice System is actually about justice. Louis Wolcher, Professor of Law at University of Washington School of Law, told me that the term ‘justice system’ actually “…conflates law with justice, whereas the word justice means far more than law, as does the word ethics.” NLG’s Boghosian added that justice is also about politics, in that politics trumps justice and laws in most cases. “It takes a brave judge, and morally courageous lawyers, to stand up and make the just and legal decision in the face of the dominant political paradigm.”

What the justice system is actually for is a huge question, one that must be answered by the legions of activists, lawyers, and citizens who want to ensure a more transparent, just, equitable, and sustainable society. In the absence of such a response, the exercise of free speech in the U.S. will be increasingly constrained.

Militarization of Law Enforcement: Is it Preparation for Civil War?

Article by David Z.


A century ago, the Federal government established armories throughout the country ostensibly for the purpose of “national security”, although it’s not abundantly clear what the real threat was at that time. These armories were probably most-often used to supply federal troops and private security brought in to put down popular movements like strikes and shutdowns. This was essentially a civil war, although it is never mentioned as such.

Today, we have the Department of Homeland Security doling out billions of dollars (a nice interactive map, here) to Everytown, USA, in order to supply them with battlefield-grade arms and armor, to fight hypothetical bogeymen and non-existent threats.

Just your ordinary small town police force, nothing to see here

Authorities in Fargo, ND (which has averaged 2 homicides per year over the last 5 years) spent $8 million buying state-of-the-art military grade weapons like the assault rifles which now come standard in every squad car, and the “$256,643 armored truck, complete with a rotating turret”.


Sadly, rather than being some unfortunate exception, Fargo is just another example in the trend to militarize local police departments (via Daily Beast).

• In Montgomery County, Texas, the sheriff’s department owns a $300,000 pilotless surveillance drone, like those used to hunt down al Qaeda terrorists in the remote tribal regions of Pakistan and Afghanistan.
• In Augusta, Maine, with fewer than 20,000 people and where an officer hasn’t died from gunfire in the line of duty in more than 125 years, police bought eight $1,500 tactical vests.
• Police in Des Moines, Iowa, bought two $180,000 bomb-disarming robots
• An Arizona sheriff is now the proud owner of a surplus Army tank.

To understand this trend, you have to understand a little bit about government appropriations. Generally the money is on the table and you have to use it or lose it. The logic is almost always that if you don’t spend the money, if you don’t pretend you need it, then you can get by with less, so they cut your budget. And government agencies are always in the business of preserving their power, whether it is just looking out for No. 1, or something more Machiavellian like amassing your own little fiefdom or mercenary force, the incentive structure in government always works the same way. Use it or lose it.


Also, follow the money:

One beneficiary of Homeland’s largesse are military contractors, who have found a new market for their wares

Warfare is big business and government contracts are essentially guaranteed profit. So the companies involved in this business can afford to spend lots of money (given to them in fulfillment of government contracts) lobbying the government to give them even more budget for larger contracts next year. It is a sick cycle that shows no signs of abating any time soon.


The article highlights some moral hazard of the hyper-militarization, which I would liken to “Field of Dreams”. If you build it, they will come. Well, if you give it to them, they will find a way to use it.

“With local law enforcement, their mission is to solve crimes after they’ve happened, and to ensure that people’s constitutional rights are protected in the process,” says Jesselyn McCurdy, senior legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union. “The military obviously has a mission where they are fighting an enemy. When you use military tactics in the context of law enforcement, the missions don’t match, and that’s when you see trouble with the overmilitarization of police.”

When the only tool you have is a hammer, sooner or later, everything starts to look like a nail. When you arm officers to the teeth, when you train them for war, when you hire a disproportionate amount of ex-soldiers, and when you bombard their psyche with warrior mentality training it is not really a surprise when they start putting that training in to practice, no matter if its warranted or not.  Over the last decade we’ve seen an increasing number of SWAT teams raiding teenage rave parties or serving routine drug warrants on non-violent offenders, creating volatility and chaos where there would never have been any had the police taken a more conventional approach.



Riot police attacking protestors


What will be the longer-term ramifications of increased militarization, especially in light of NDAA and the PATRIOT Act? I fear that these weapons will one day be turned on the people of this country. I fear that it is a matter of “when”, not “if”. We’re already seeing some of it in the deplorable way that local cops have handled several situations in the Occupy Movement, still in its infancy.


As government institutions always seek to preserve and expand their power even at the expense of their constituents’ liberties and livelihoods, there doesn’t need to be any evil villain, plotting and scheming, no Illuminati/New World Order tin-foil hat bullshit. All of the pieces are already falling in to place, the product of human action, not of human design. In other words, it doesn’t matter if they’re explicitly preparing for a civil war, everything they’re doing is inadvertently preparing for one, anyways.


A century ago, the Federal government’s armories were turned against its citizens, used to put down popular movements and general strikes.


Today, they’re shipping the munitions directly to what will eventually be the front lines.

Anonymous and Occupy: the Emergence of Counter-Corporations

Builds Upon: The Dark State


There is a single most common complaint I hear about the new wave of protestors that has emerged across America and the world.


“They don’t know what they’re protesting about!”


To the consternation of many, there’s no list of universal demands or theses.


When news reporters ask “Why are you protesting?” the answers they get describe a general feeling of resentment rather than a specific list of individuals or institutions.


This leads many people who would otherwise be sympathetic with the protestors to dismiss them.


So far, many have made the mistake of confusing these protests with past movements.


This time there is no charismatic leadership organizing everything and making speeches for the history books. 


There is no cadre of leaders that constitutes a ‘head’ that can easily be cut off.


It is a spontaneous manifestation of the internet—a continuation of the world wide wave of dissent that broke out earlier this year in Tunisia.


There never will be specific demands, just a brooding cloud of discontent.


And this will be not a weakness, but a great strength.


A concrete agenda might merely narrow a protest’s objectives and needlessly shorten its duration. It opens the protest to more sophisticated attack and criticism from its opponents.


A token concession or empty promise has the potential send everyone home.


Most importantly, the lack of a list of grievances sends an important implicit message: the onus is no longer on the people to formulate specific objections and argue for the legitimacy of their discontent.


They are no longer on the defensive as they always have been before.


The very open-endedness of these protests allows the protesters to take the initiative.


All that matters is that they are discontent. Until someone does something that makes them not discontent or simply shoots them all, they will do whatever it is they deem suitable to address the matter.


This approach allows no room for excuses. Either something is done to make people happy or the protests continue.


Elites suddenly find themselves in the situation of the typical employee: do your job in a way we like or you’re fired.


This is not primarily a statement of principle or a polite request and this is where many people are confused.
It is an ultimatum.


Just a few years ago, there was a primordial soup brewing on some imageboards.


The topics of discussion tended to focus on anime, porn, and anime-porn, but somehow this soup began to spontaneously evolve until there was a community that could act on collective goals without formal organization or leadership. In fact, none of these people even knew each other and it did not matter. They were all Anonymous.


What started out as one nameless person inviting an entire faceless community to prank call an asshole boss developed over the next couple of years into an untraceable internet military that’s capable of taking on corporations, governments, and religions.


There is an important principle that Anonymous shares with the current protests.


A school of fish coordinates its movement to strategically reduce risk for each individual. Thus, the school can behave in ways that would be far too risky for each individual, for the benefit of all.


Until widespread, reliable, high speed internet, people did not have the ability to pull off this level of group coordination and individual people, unless truly desperate, do not often risk themselves for a better society they will not live to see.


However, this ‘school’ form of organization has reduced individual risk while increasing individual effectiveness in collective action to the point where participation is far more attractive than it once was.
Result: society’s established powers can’t ask as much or get away with as much as they used to. The balance of power is shifting towards the ruled and the rulers, understandably are reluctant to accept this.


For a few hundred years now, elites have had their own version of Anonymous that has helped them to accomplish their goals. It’s called a corporation.


Shareholders come together to in order to mitigate risk and allow them do things that would ordinarily be too risky. By acting collectively, they can do away with individual accountability.


These elites failed to understand what would happen if technology sufficiently improved the ability of the peasantry to communicate and coordinate their actions.


The result is effectively a counter-corporation.


The incarnation of these protests as of the writing of this article is known as ‘Occupy.’ These particular public actions may soon cease or they may not. It does not matter.


Authorities do not yet understand that an intelligent collective of peasants, just like a corporation of the wealthy is extremely resourceful and adaptable.


Sending some campers home from public parks accomplishes little. New forms of opposition will soon emerge taking advantage of every possible systemic weakness. The game has changed.

"The Odd Thing about Assassins..."

Occupiers Target Chicago 'Mayor 1%' Emanuel's Anti-Protest Ordinance

Monday, January 9, 2012 by CommonDreams.org
Occupy Rogers Park, Occupy the South Side campaign against Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel's NATO/G-8 ordinance; "This measure is a permanent attack on public protest in the City of Chicago."

Last month, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel introduced anti-protester legislation for the upcoming NATO and G-8 summits in Chicago.

Chicago's WBEZ reported:

"During the summits, which could draw thousands of protesters, Emanuel wants to increase the minimum fine from $25 to $200 and double the maximum fine to $1,000. His proposed ordinance would also close parks, playgrounds and beaches overnight for longer periods of time."

This past Tuesday, Emanuel clarified that these measures would in fact be permanent, and not just during the time of the summits. From WBEZ:

In fact, Emanuel said his proposal to dramatically increase fines for protesters who resist arrest - even passively - should be permanent. Some of the other sweeping powers the mayor is seeking - one would allow his office to unilaterally approve some city contracts - would expire once the May summits are over, he said.

This morning, Occupy Chicago reacted harshly to Emanuel's plan, which they call the 'Sit Down and Shut Up' ordinance. From the Occupy Chicago website:

This ordinance consists of a host of bureaucratic tools created by and for the 1% to relegate, abridge, fine, arrest, and silence our speech. It is an attempt to bully and intimidate with increased police power and fines the brave working people who demand the ability to participate democratically in the organizing of our society. It is an attempt, by the 1%, to restrict and regulate the voice of the people when it upsets the structure that put them in power. The timing of the ordinance demonstrates that it has nothing to do with public safety but that its sole purpose is to stifle the voice and trample upon the constitutional liberties of all the people of Chicago. It is the blatant criminalizing of any public assembly that does not serve the interest of the 1%. It is the handcuffing of democracy. Occupy Chicago condemns this ordinance and demands that they be revoked. Those who are on the side of the democracy of the 99% will stand with us.

This morning, Occupy the South Side and Occupy Rogers Park delivered a warning to all of the city's aldermen, indicating that if they supported the mayor's resolution, they should expext strong resistance.

From their letter to the aldermen:

As you are no doubt aware, Mayor Emanuel sponsored this ordinance and has promoted it in the media as a "temporary" measure aimed at controlling protesters during specified events taking place later this year. As you've surely read, the Mayor has since been forced to retract his claim that these changes were ever meant to be temporary. Another blatant inconsistency is that the ordinance applies to the entire city, while the NATO and G8 summits occur only downtown. Other inconsistencies in the presentation of this ordinance are similarly problematic.

Given what the ordinance actually says, it cannot be construed as an effort to protect the integrity of G8 and NATO conferences. This measure is a permanent attack on public protest in the City of Chicago. The consequences of this attack will be far reaching, and will be felt by protesters throughout the city, most of whom will never have any connection to the protests associated with these events.

As you are also aware, we celebrate the legacy of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. on January 16, 2012. Dr. King's legacy is not one of obedience to municipal authorities, but rather the inspiring story of a man who led a community that was willing to face down oppressive lawmakers by violating exactly the type of ordinance the Mayor is asking you to support.

It is difficult to overstate the contrast between celebrating the life and work of Dr. King on Monday, and codifying the suppression of dissent on Wednesday.

Occupy Chicago intends to keep the campaign up until January 18th, when the vote on the ordinances is scheduled.

The Golden Age of Tycoons

by JOHN FEFFER - Counterpunch - 01/09/12

John F. Kennedy essentially bought his way into politics. His father, the wealthy Joseph Kennedy, picked out a nice congressional seat in Massachusetts and basically paid the occupant of the position to step down and run instead for the Boston mayoralty. JFK’s father then tried to pay off the Democratic frontrunner to drop out of the race, and when that didn’t work, persuaded William Randolph Hearst not to run any of the candidate’s ads or pictures in Hearst-owned newspapers. Joe Kennedy even paid a janitor named Joseph Russo to run in the race in order to dilute support for another leading candidate named Joseph Russo. Recognizing the importance of PR, the Kennedy family contributed $600,000 – an enormous sum in 1946 – for a children’s hospital in the district where JFK was running for office.

It would be reassuring if this interpenetration of wealth and politics were simply part of the old style of American politics where deals were brokered in Tammany Hall back rooms and dead men voted in Chicago. But money is still king in U.S. politics. In the 2010 elections, the most expensive in history, winning a congressional seat cost about $1.4 million, and each Senate seat set the winners back by $9.8 million. In 2008, Barack Obama broke fundraising records in his presidential bid when he took in $750 million, and he’s on track to break the record again in 2012.

Sometimes candidates rely on their rich fathers. But if not born to wealth, they quickly mature into 1 percenters. Nearly half of the members of Congress are millionaires. While the median net worth of all Americans dropped by 8 percentfrom 2004 to 2010, the net worth of our elected representatives climbed over the same period by 15 percent. It’s still the best Congress that money can buy, and it’s only going to get worse, thanks to the Supreme Court and its 5-4 Citizens United decision. The wealthy can now spend unlimited amounts of money to influence the 2012 elections.

Money has full-spectrum dominance of U.S. politics, from the “street money” that party machines hand out at the community level for get-out-the-vote campaigns to the immense contributions from a financial sector that has already chosen Mitt Romney as the Republican candidate. Then there’s the perfectly legal “revolving door” by which retiring politicians leverage their invaluable political connections to amass great wealth in the private sector. The stock reason for retirement – “I want to spend more time with my family” – should really be “I want to spend more time with my financial advisor.”

We don’t call any of this corruption. We reserve that term for dolts like former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich, who recently received a 16-year sentence for trying to sell a Senate seat, or former Prince George’s County executive Jack Johnson, who is getting a seven-year sentence for taking as much as $1 million in bribes. These abuses are the exception, rather than the rule, or so we would prefer to believe. But that’s only because we write the rules to permit the rich to run our democracy.

Corruption, after all, is what happens in other countries, particularly those that rank below the United States (at number 24) in Transparency International’s 2011 Corruption Index. One of those countries is Russia, which registers at a dismal 143rd place in the index, tied with Nigeria.

Russians recently went to the polls to elect a new parliament (Duma). United Russia, the party of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and President Dmitry Medvedev, saw a major slip in support in the December 3 elections, though it will still remain the largest parliamentary faction. Even this poor showing, Russian observers allege, was inflated by fraud.

“The Russian election-observer Golos identified 5,300 allegations of electoral violations,” writes Foreign Policy In Focus (FPIF) contributor Dimitar Indzhov in Russians United against United Russia. “International observers also judged the elections fraudulent. Concerned citizens took 18 videos of people stuffing ballot boxes with votes for United Russia and uploaded them onto YouTube. These are pretty stark images of unfairness. But Russian people have put up with United Russia for some time, despite its autocratic tendencies.”

This time, however, Russians did not simply grumble into their vodka. They poured into the streets on December 10 and then again on December 24, despite freezing temperatures in Moscow.

The explicit protest has been around voting irregularities. But the complaints run deep and implicate the role that money plays in Russian politics. After all, United Russia is in bed with the most profitable and powerful industries in Russia – oil, gas, timber. “Under President Vladimir Putin’s watch, the Russian state has turned into something like Russia Inc., with top Kremlin staffers and senior ministers sitting on the boards of various state-owned corporations and taking an active interest in their progress and profits,” Dmitri Trenin wrote several years ago inWashington Quarterly.

The most obvious example is Gazprom, the largest Russian company and the largest extractor of natural gas in the world. It is a state within a state, administering a series of towns along its pipeline from Siberia westward. It runs a TV station, maintains 26 cultural centers, and promotes its operations with this catchy music video (with the chorus “Let’s drink to you, let’s drink to us, let’s drink to all the Russian gas”). Dmitry Medvedev served as the head of the board of directors at Gazprom when he was first vice prime minister, relinquishing the job only when he became president. The company has received the lowest rating from Transparency International.

Russia’s heavy reliance on energy exports and the widening gap between its rich and poor demonstrate that, thanks to Gazprom, the country is suffering from the “resource curse.” Instead of using the revenues from its natural gas exports to diversify its economy and raise the living standards of all, the Russian leadership has merely consolidated its power and its support among the wealthy. Corruption has settled upon the land like a toxic cloud. Russia has become Nigeria with nukes.

“At its core,” writes David Remnick in The New Yorker, “Putin’s Russia is not a democracy, sovereign or otherwise. Rather, power for power’s sake and the accumulation of vast wealth in the hands of various ‘clans’ and friends of the Kremlin are at the center of things. Very few owners of the mansions outside Moscow were able to buy those properties, and hold onto them, without close connections, and complete fealty, to the regime.”

The collapse of the Soviet Union produced a Gilded Age of tycoons and their political supporters. Such a Gilded Age might have given way, through the influence of Russian trust-busters and civil society watchdogs, to a political economy that was corrupt in the more conventional U.S. sense of everyday influence peddling. But when Putin took over in 2000, he further consolidated state power and punished any dissenting tycoons. U.S. corruption is legitimated by the market; Russian corruption is legitimated by the state.

The backlash happening today in Moscow is a combination of the tea party movement and Occupy Wall Street. Anarchists stand side-by-side with great-power nationalists; libertarians and old-style communists protest in rough unison. There is tremendous resentment toward the small group of people – politicians and tycoons – that has profited from both privatization and nationalization. What will emerge from this confrontation between Putin and the people is hard to forecast. But it will certainly be nationalist in orientation, for that seems to be the strongest unifying force in Russia today. In a recent poll, 59 percent of Russians approved of the ominous slogan “Russia for Russians.” As Alexei Navalny, the most prominent blogger-critic of Putin, explains of this sentiment, ”We have a huge number of migrants whose behavior and cultural code is way out of joint with the cultural codes of those living here, the Russians.”

Millions of people have thronged the streets of cities all over the world this last year to protest the influence of money on power – the corruption in Mubarak’s Egypt and Ben Ali’s Tunisia, the malign effects of Wall Street and other financial institutions, the power elite in Russia. It is truly galling when the wealthy and powerful steal elections, whether JFK in 1946 or Vladimir Putin in 2011.

Democracy must not be yet another method by which the rich stay rich. In the United States as in Russia, democracy must serve the people, particularly those not already helped by the market or the state.

TIME Magazine's Person of the Year: The Protester

(OMG, I've never been a person of the year, before!--jef)

Naturally this has the right wingers over at Fox terribly upset with everyone from the crew at Fox & Friends, to Megyn Kelly and her guest Chris Plante and Eric Bolling during their show that filled Glenn Beck's former time slot, The Five going on the attack and using the opportunity to call the protesters every name in the book.

It was nice seeing Jesse LaGreca (on the Ed Schultz Show on MSNBC) have another opportunity to push back against the media narrative we've seen from the likes of Fox and their protection of the richest among us and to weigh in on what he thought the exposure from Time Magazine might mean for the movement and how they've managed to change the narrative in the country for the most part where income disparity is now a part of our national conversation. ~ Crooks & Liars

~*~*~*~

The Protester
Wednesday, Dec. 14, 2011

By Kurt Andersen

Once upon a time, when major news events were chronicled strictly by professionals and printed on paper or transmitted through the air by the few for the masses, protesters were prime makers of history. Back then, when citizen multitudes took to the streets without weapons to declare themselves opposed, it was the very definition of news — vivid, important, often consequential. In the 1960s in America they marched for civil rights and against the Vietnam War; in the '70s, they rose up in Iran and Portugal; in the '80s, they spoke out against nuclear weapons in the U.S. and Europe, against Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, against communist tyranny in Tiananmen Square and Eastern Europe. Protest was the natural continuation of politics by other means.

And then came the End of History, summed up by Francis Fukuyama's influential 1989 essay declaring that mankind had arrived at the "end point of ... ideological evolution" in globally triumphant "Western liberalism." The two decades beginning in 1991 witnessed the greatest rise in living standards that the world has ever known. Credit was easy, complacency and apathy were rife, and street protests looked like pointless emotional sideshows — obsolete, quaint, the equivalent of cavalry to mid-20th-century war. The rare large demonstrations in the rich world seemed ineffectual and irrelevant.

There were a few exceptions, like the protests that, along with sanctions, helped end apartheid in South Africa in 1994. But for young people, radical critiques and protests against the system were mostly confined to pop-culture fantasy: Public Enemy's "Fight the Power" was a song on a platinum-selling album, Rage Against the Machine was a platinum-selling band, and the beloved brave rebels fighting the all-encompassing global oppressors were just a bunch of characters in The Matrix.

"Massive and effective street protest" was a global oxymoron until — suddenly, shockingly — starting exactly a year ago, it became the defining trope of our times. And the protester once again became a maker of history.

Prelude to the Revolutions

It began in Tunisia, where the dictator's power grabbing and high living crossed a line of shamelessness, and a commonplace bit of government callousness against an ordinary citizen — a 26-year-old street vendor named Mohamed Bouazizi — became the final straw. Bouazizi lived in the charmless Tunisian town of Sidi Bouzid, 125 miles south of Tunis. On a Friday morning almost exactly a year ago, he set out for work, selling produce from a cart. Police had hassled Bouazizi routinely for years, his family says, fining him, making him jump through bureaucratic hoops. On Dec. 17, 2010, a cop started giving him grief yet again. She confiscated his scale and allegedly slapped him. He walked straight to the provincial-capital building to complain and got no response. At the gate, he drenched himself in paint thinner and lit a match.

"My son set himself on fire for dignity," Mannoubia Bouazizi told me when I visited her.

"In Tunisia," added her 16-year-old daughter Basma, "dignity is more important than bread."

In Egypt the incitements were a preposterously fraudulent 2010 national election and, as in Tunisia, a not uncommon act of unforgivable brutality by security agents. In the U.S., three acute and overlapping money crises — tanked economy, systemic financial recklessness, gigantic public debt — along with ongoing revelations of double dealing by banks, new state laws making certain public-employee-union demands illegal and the refusal of Congress to consider even slightly higher taxes on the very highest incomes mobilized Occupy Wall Street and its millions of supporters. In Russia it was the realization that another six (or 12) years of Vladimir Putin might not lead to greater prosperity and democratic normality.

In Sidi Bouzid and Tunis, in Alexandria and Cairo; in Arab cities and towns across the 6,000 miles from the Persian Gulf to the Atlantic Ocean; in Madrid and Athens and London and Tel Aviv; in Mexico and India and Chile, where citizens mobilized against crime and corruption; in New York and Moscow and dozens of other U.S. and Russian cities, the loathing and anger at governments and their cronies became uncontainable and fed on itself.

The stakes are very different in different places. In North America and most of Europe, there are no dictators, and dissidents don't get tortured. Any day that Tunisians, Egyptians or Syrians occupy streets and squares, they know that some of them might be beaten or shot, not just pepper-sprayed or flex-cuffed. The protesters in the Middle East and North Africa are literally dying to get political systems that roughly resemble the ones that seem intolerably undemocratic to protesters in Madrid, Athens, London and New York City. "I think other parts of the world," says Frank Castro, 53, a Teamster who drives a cement mixer for a living and helped occupy Oakland, Calif., "have more balls than we do."

In Egypt and Tunisia, I talked with revolutionaries who were M.B.A.s, physicians and filmmakers as well as the young daughters of a provincial olive picker and a supergeeky 29-year-old Muslim Brotherhood member carrying a Tigger notebook. The Occupy movement in the U.S. was set in motion by a couple of magazine editors — a 69-year-old Canadian, a 29-year-old African American — and a 50-year-old anthropologist, but airline pilots and grandmas and shop clerks and dishwashers have been part of the throngs.

It's remarkable how much the protest vanguards share. Everywhere they are disproportionately young, middle class and educated. Almost all the protests this year began as independent affairs, without much encouragement from or endorsement by existing political parties or opposition bigwigs. All over the world, the protesters of 2011 share a belief that their countries' political systems and economies have grown dysfunctional and corrupt — sham democracies rigged to favor the rich and powerful and prevent significant change. They are fervent small-d democrats. Two decades after the final failure and abandonment of communism, they believe they're experiencing the failure of hell-bent megascaled crony hypercapitalism and pine for some third way, a new social contract.

During the bubble years, perhaps, there was enough money trickling down to keep them happyish, but now the unending financial crisis and economic stagnation make them feel like suckers. This year, instead of plugging in the headphones, entering an Internet-induced fugue state and quietly giving in to hopelessness, they used the Internet to find one another and take to the streets to insist on fairness and (in the Arab world) freedom.

All over the world they are criticized by old-schoolers for lacking prefab ideological consistency, which the protesters in turn see as a feature rather than a bug. Miral Brinjy, a 27-year-old blogger and TV-news producer who grew up in Saudi Arabia and arrived in Tahrir Square on the first day of protests 11 months ago, doesn't presume to have a precise picture of the new Egyptian government and society she envisions, but as she told me in Cairo last month, "I know what I don't want."

In each place, discontent that had been simmering for years got turned up to a boil. There were foreshadowings. In the U.S., the Obama campaign was in part a feel-good protest movement that galvanized young people, and then its shocking success and the Wall Street bailout produced an angry and shockingly successful populist protest movement in the Tea Party, which has far outlasted its expected shelf life. In 2009, after the regime in Tehran denied the antiregime election results, millions of Iranians, especially young ones, protested for weeks. The Web and social media were key tactical tools in all three instances. But they seemed at the time to be one-offs, not prefaces to an epochal turn of history's wheel.

The Iranian regime's suppression of the Green Revolution must have reassured the dictators and monarchs in the Arab Middle East and North Africa and, you'd think, dispirited would-be democratic freedom fighters in those countries. The global spread of liberty hit a plateau a dozen years earlier, according to the international monitoring organization Freedom House. And the Middle East and North Africa remained the world's tyranny belt: at the end of 2010, Freedom House declared three-fourths of the Arab countries "not free" — including Tunisia and Egypt. In Arab countries, the prosperity of the past decade — Egypt's economy grew by 5% and more, even during the recession — was not widely shared; rising expectations that go unfulfilled are sociology's classic explanation for protest. For a critical mass of people from Cairo to Madrid to Oakland, prospects for personal success — for the good life at the End of History that they'd been promised — suddenly looked very grim. They were fed up, and the frustration and anger exploded after the regimes overreached.

In short, 2011 was unlike any year since 1989 — but more extraordinary, more global, more democratic, since in '89 the regime disintegrations were all the result of a single disintegration at headquarters, one big switch pulled in Moscow that cut off the power throughout the system. So 2011 was unlike any year since 1968 — but more consequential because more protesters have more skin in the game. Their protests weren't part of a countercultural pageant, as in '68, and rapidly morphed into full-fledged rebellions, bringing down regimes and immediately changing the course of history. It was, in other words, unlike anything in any of our lifetimes, probably unlike any year since 1848, when one street protest in Paris blossomed into a three-day revolution that turned a monarchy into a republican democracy and then — within weeks, thanks in part to new technologies (telegraphy, railroads, rotary printing presses) — inspired an unstoppable cascade of protest and insurrection in Munich, Berlin, Vienna, Milan, Venice and dozens of other places across Europe, as well as a huge peaceful demonstration of democratic solidarity in New York that marched down Broadway and occupied a public park a few blocks north of Wall Street. How perfect that the German word Zeitgeist was transplanted into English in that unprecedented, uncanny year of insurrection.

During the battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954, just as the French colonialists were about to lose to the communist revolutionaries and leave Indochina, President Dwight Eisenhower held a news conference. "You have a row of dominoes set up," he said, positing Vietnam as the domino between fallen China and North Korea and the rest of Asia. "You knock over the first one, and what will happen to the last one is the certainty that it will go over very quickly." But in 1975, after the communists won in Vietnam and Cambodia, no other countries followed, and the domino theory of contagious national-liberation movements was discredited forever.

Forever, until now. This is how the dominoes fell in 2011 — and these are some of the people who pushed them.

The Year of Protests

The fire didn't kill Mohamed Bouazizi right away. Passersby doused the flames and took him to the hospital. He was still alive, barely.

That afternoon, other produce sellers and townspeople joined the Bouazizis in protest outside the governorate. A cousin posted a video of the demonstration. Word spread thanks to al-Jazeera and the Internet — a third of all Tunisians use the Internet, and three-quarters of those have Facebook accounts — inspiring protests in other towns and cities. After Bouazizi died on Jan. 4, the protests reached a critical mass, and more than a dozen protesters around the country were killed by police. "I'd watch TV," Basma Bouazizi told me, "and say, 'God, the Tunisian people have woken up!' "

Spontaneous protests? In 2011? In an Arab police state? Heroic, hopeless, doomed. Three weeks in, the nearly universal presumption about the protests' implications was summed up in the Economist's first report: "Tunisia's troubles are unlikely to unseat the 74-year-old president or even to jolt his model of autocracy."

Lina Ben Mhenni, 28, a linguistics teacher at Tunis University, had been blogging for a few years about Tunisian censorship and election rigging under the name "A Tunisian Girl." She went to the town of Regueb, 25 miles from Sidi Bouzid, to photograph a young protester who had been shot dead and uploaded the image. "On that day I lost my fear completely," she says. "I was ready for anything, even death." By the end of the week, she was back in Tunis, protesting outside the old white stucco casbah that served as the seat of government. So was Hilme al-Manahe, 23, an unemployed baker. His mother, Sayda al-Manahe, says Bouazizi's self-immolation had galvanized Hilme. "He used to say, 'This poor man — I can understand why he did that. He just wanted to earn a living. His story is like my story, which is like my friend's story.'"

"I would tell him," Sayda says, "Be quiet, sit down, and don't even think about getting involved in this." But on Jan. 13 he went to the demonstration in Tunis. He had just recorded a friend with his cell phone when a bullet, presumably fired by a police sniper, pierced his heart.

The next morning, Majdi Calboussi, a middle-class 29-year-old software developer and antiregime blogger, was there recording the protests and the police with his BlackBerry. "People started to say, 'Ben Ali, dégage' " ("Get out, Ben Ali"). He uploaded his video to Twitter, and it got half a million views in a day. Hours later, President Zine el Abidine Ben Ali flew to exile in Saudi Arabia. After just four weeks, the protesters had won. And the next domino was struck.

Among all the Egyptians I met, there is absolute agreement about one thing: Tunisia was the spark of their revolution. "It wouldn't have happened without them," says Shady el-Ghazali Harb, a 32-year-old surgeon who was one of 13 main leaders in Tahrir Square. The lessons of Tunisia weren't just inspirational; they were practical. "This was like a user's manual in how to topple a regime peacefully," says Wael Nawara, 50, a Web entrepreneur and longtime opposition political activist. In January, Tunisians "sent us a lot of information," says Ahmed Maher, a Cairo civil engineer and one of Egypt's most prominent activists, "like use vinegar and onion" — near one's face, for the tear gas — "and how to stop a tank. They sent us this advice, and we used it."

The Egyptians had their own Mohamed Bouazizi: an underemployed middle-class 28-year-old named Khaled Said. One day last year, after apparently hacking a police officer's cell phone and lifting a video of officers displaying drugs and stacks of cash, he was arrested and beaten to death. Wael Ghonim, then a 29-year-old Google executive, created a Facebook page called We Are All Khaled Said to memorialize him. It went viral, and in January, Ghonim returned from Dubai to Egypt to help plan a protest set for Jan. 25: a "day of rage" in Tahrir Square. Maher and other activists were invited to collaborate. They met online and face to face to work out the details. Brinjy told me she "was terrified. I thought we'd try but run away if necessary. Then we ran into huge crowds heading to Tahrir, and I knew it was going to be big."

"From the start I thought it would succeed," 29-year-old filmmaker Mohammed Ramadan says. "In my whole life I'd never seen protests like that. Girls! Some wore hijabs, some didn't, Christians, Muslims — I'd never seen that." The Muslim Brotherhood hadn't endorsed the protest, but Khaled Tantawy, a 34-year-old Brotherhood apparatchik, came anyway. He also was struck by the diversity. "I saw all these different and surprising kinds of people protesting and thought, Wow, this can happen."

That night it happened. "The surprise," according to Mohamed el-Beltagy, a member of the Brotherhood who went to Tahrir unofficially, "was that there was a new generation who could break the fear barrier. At midnight, when the [police's] violent clearing of the square happened and the protesters didn't run away and go home, I knew it was a revolution."

The regime's violent response surprised no one. As in Tunisia, when the crackdown escalated — from tear gas to rubber bullets to real bullets, to Ghonim's detention for the duration, to a nationwide shutdown of Internet connections, to armed camel riders rampaging through Tahrir — so did the number of protesters in Cairo and all over the country. At least 4.5 million Egyptians protested during those three weeks — in other words, 8% of the population over 14.

Hisham Kassem, a prominent 52-year-old independent journalist and publisher, had never been part of a street protest before. He is bracingly clear-eyed, a stiff-necked curmudgeon. On Jan. 28 he was teargassed and, he told me, still sounding amazed 10 months later, threw rocks at police. "I saw people shot next to me." When he returned on "the day of the camel attack, it was war — I almost got mauled to death by the thugs." And another day when he arrived at Tahrir, "This kid asked for my ID: 'Whose side are you on?' I said, 'What the hell do you mean?' " But then and there on the edge of Liberation Square, he had an epiphany: he may have been a longtime pro-democracy VIP, but this was now democracy. "I felt a strange acceptance," he says. "I didn't begrudge them."

By then the army had announced, "Your armed forces, who are aware of the legitimacy of your demands ... will not resort to use of force." President Hosni Mubarak was finished — "Please go," a Tahrir protest sign urged, "because I want to take a shower" — but it took 11 more days for Mubarak to pass through denial, anger, bargaining and presumably depression to arrive at the acceptance stage. "The day Mubarak stepped down," says Abdo Kassem, 25, an unemployed Cairene who'd never been politically active until he followed the Facebook protest instructions last January, "I was crying. For me, that was like bringing down a fake god."

Millions protest. Armies stand down. Dictators leave. Impossible fantasies two months earlier — now they were coming true. The "days of rage" meme and democratic dream had achieved breathtaking momentum, spreading not just to the softer monarchical dictatorships — Jordan, Bahrain, Morocco — but also to Yemen, Algeria and the hardcore police states Syria and Libya.

In the spring, they spread to Europe. On May 15, tens of thousands marched to Madrid's Puerta del Sol plaza, along with tens of thousands more in dozens of other cities, united by slogans like "We are not goods in the hands of politicians and bankers." They were frustrated by unemployment, a lack of opportunity and politics headed nowhere. They called themselves Los Indignados, the Outraged.

Spain's one-day march turned into a months-long self-governing encampment — one of the new defining characteristics of 2011's brand of communal resistance. Throughout the country, about 6 million out of a population of 46 million participated in Indignados protests. Among those in Madrid was Olmo Gálvez, 31, an Internet entrepreneur just back from three years working in China and new to politics. He'd helped set up social-media networks for the protest. "It was marvelous to see people become the actors in their own lives," he says. "You could watch them breaking out of their passivity."

Ten days after the Madrid protests began, the contagion spread to Greece. George Anastasopoulos, 36, has a Ph.D. in sociology but earns his living as a DJ. "That first Sunday when we saw 100,000 people show up, we were overwhelmed," he says of the Athenians' camp in Syntagma Square, in sight of Parliament. "And then the second Sunday, 500,000 people showed up. That enthused us so much, and we started dreaming really big."

"Our protests," says Christina Lardikou, a 31-year-old Athenian who works in fashion, "all started from the Indignados." But they drew from other inspirations too. Among the chants in the birthplace of democracy last spring were "Yes we can!" And Anastasopoulos has kept a banner reading "Let freedom ring" — that is, a quote from Martin Luther King Jr. quoting "My Country 'Tis of Thee."

The Greek protests continued for more than a month, until just about the time 150 young Israeli protesters started pitching tents in the median of Rothschild Boulevard in Tel Aviv. The grievance package was familiar: good jobs too scarce, cost of living too high, politicians corrupt, only the well-connected rich getting richer. Soon there were 100 such encampments all over Israel, in working-class towns as well as yuppievilles. For a finale in early September, an estimated 400,000 of the country's 7.7 million citizens marched, chanting, "The people demand social justice!" When the Egyptian revolutionary leader el-Ghazali Harb told me how pleased he was that Tahrir Square had inspired copycat protests all over the world, I asked if his pride extended to Israel. He laughed and said, "I will say we were happy about that as well."

In early August, after police in London shot and killed a young black man they were arresting, riots broke out all over England. Naturally, the rioters' instantly resorting to violence attracted little sympathy. Yet a new, three-month study by the Guardian and the London School of Economics concluded that these rioters were also protesters, motivated by anger about poverty, unemployment and inequality as well as overaggressive policing.

Back in Madrid, the protesters recognized the diminishing returns of this protest phase and started to decamp. By July, Gálvez says, they heard that Occupy Wall Street was going to happen. Online, the Indignados started explaining to the Americans how it's done.

Since 1989 the earnest, zany little bimonthly Adbusters — "an ad-free international magazine for activists fighting to change the way information flows and meaning is produced in our society" — had been preaching to its choir. In July the editors ran a full-page photo-illustration of a barefoot ballerina posed atop Wall Street's Charging Bull statue — in the background were gas-masked insurgents in a tear-gas fog — along with four lines of copy: "What is our one demand? #occupywallstreet September 17th. Bring tent." Adbusters also sent out an e-mail — "America needs its own Tahrir" — and on Independence Day urged on its smallish cadre of Twitter followers:

"Dear Americans, this July 4th dream of insurrection against corporate rule."

If you tweet it, they will come.

At the end of July, in an office in New York's financial district, the proto-Occupiers met with some veterans of the protests in Spain, Greece and North Africa. To figure out what "Occupy Wall Street" might mean, they reconvened two days later at a come-one-come-all meeting — outdoors, for hours, in a park near that charging bronze bull, amid the thousands of unwitting passersby on an ordinary Wall Street workday.

David Graeber, 50, a prominent anthropology scholar and soft-spoken pro-anarchism activist, showed up. Some standard leftists were pushing for a standard rally making a standard demand — no cutbacks in government social spending. Slowly but surely, Graeber and a pal, 32-year-old Greek émigré artist Georgia Sagri, nudged the group to a fresh vision: a long-term encampment in a public space, an improvised democratic protest village without preappointed leaders, committed to a general critique — the U.S. economy is broken, politics is corrupted by big money — but with no immediate call for specific legislative or executive action. It was also Graeber, a lifelong hater of corporate smoke and mirrors, who coined the movement's ingenious slogan, "We are the 99%."

Until late September, 99% of New Yorkers had never heard of Zuccotti Park, a privately owned public plaza tucked between the Federal Reserve Bank and the World Trade Center site. On the last Saturday of the summer — sunny, mid-60s, perfect — a couple thousand people showed up, a hundred slept overnight, and the occupation was on. It seemed as though the world would little note nor long remember it. On the third day, the first arrests — of protesters wearing Guy Fawkes masks in violation of an antique New York anti-insurrection statute — got scant attention.

It was through my Twitter feed that I started noticing that something was going on in my city. The following weekend, I watched the YouTube video of a New York police deputy inspector casually pepper-spraying some random female protesters. A few days later, my 24-year-old nephew, Daniel Thorson, e-mailed from his small town in western New York: he was coming down to occupy Wall Street, and could he stay with us in Brooklyn?

At Hobart and William Smith Colleges, Daniel was a philosophy major, lived in a frat house, volunteered for the Obama campaign and co-founded his campus's chapter of the nonpartisan Americans for Informed Democracy. Since graduating, he's held various minimum-wage and unpaid jobs and has grown deeply disappointed by how little the Obama Administration has been able to accomplish. In September he was stunned by the breadth and depth of the chatter on his Twitter and Facebook feeds about Occupy Wall Street and decided he wanted to be part of it.

As soon as he arrived at Zuccotti Park, he went to the information desk. "It was staffed by someone who wasn't very articulate," he told me, "who wasn't the face of what I thought this should be." He offered to pitch in and thus became a member of the information working group. He helped guide the general assemblies, OWS's daily town meetings, reveling in the process of debating and deciding. To me it sounded like being a facilitator at a corporate management retreat — except outdoors, with everyone voting by means of kooky hand signals and making sure the anarchists are heard. Even if I were a 24-year-old idealist, I told Daniel, I would have zero patience for the process. He'd get annoyed from time to time by "craziness, by a sense of entitlement, anger, resentment," he said. "But there are jerks in every organization, no matter how 'pure' the organization."

After my wife and I kicked him out of our house — three weeks seemed like a fulfillment of avuncular duty — Daniel slept at the park most nights. At around 1 a.m. on the final night of the encampment in November, he was at a friend's apartment when he got a text message — police en route, eviction imminent. He rushed downtown, but new police barricades kept him and other protesters a block away up Broadway. They were ordered to scram, most of them refused, the pepper spray came out, and the police announced they'd be arrested if they didn't leave the sidewalk. Daniel spent 38 hours in custody, charged with resisting arrest, disorderly conduct and obstructing governmental administration.

I found out about his arrest and release — via e-mail and a Facebook status update — in Cairo, as I walked through Tahrir Square during the first of the recent, huge anti-junta protests. My interpreter, a young Jordanian immigrant to Egypt, was excited about Occupy Wall Street. "It's going viral," he said. "I know it's now like in 80 countries."

And in cities all over the U.S., of course, with all kinds of people protesting. Among the thousands occupying Oakland was Arthur Chen, 60, a family-practice physician. For him, "the expression of outrage was very on target with our current economic crisis and the way it's impacting the 99%," especially his low-income and uninsured patients. During his first day occupying Oakland, Chen remembers, "one of the announcers said, 'You're going to hear some things that you may totally disagree with.' I chuckled, and then I thought, 'This generation really is about inclusiveness and transparency.' It was very moving."

In Cairo, meanwhile, there was Ahmed Harara, 31, a dentist who lost sight in both eyes to rubber bullets in Tahrir on two separate occasions — in January and November, when he returned for the anti-junta protests. What was the most memorable day of his whole annus mirabilis cum horribilis? "Actually," he said, "there are two days — the 28th of January here in Egypt and the day when Americans occupied Wall Street. Because here in Egypt, we raised the slogan of social justice, and I see that Americans need it and did that too."

The Beginning of History

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,

But to be young was very heaven!—Oh!

times,

In which the meagre, stale, forbidding

ways

Of custom, law, and statute, took at once

The attraction of a country in romance!

—William Wordsworth, "The French Revolution as It Appeared to Enthusiasts at Its Commencement"

Aftermaths are never as splendid as uprisings. Solidarity has a short half-life. Democracy is messy and hard, and votes may not go your way. Freedom doesn't appear all at once. Just off Tahrir, when a couple of us were taking pictures of a graffiti about a blogger the army had imprisoned, a scowling secret policeman appeared and waved us away. We were unwanted tourists at the revolution.

Globalization and going viral have been the catchphrases of the networked 21st century. But until now the former has mainly referred to a fluid worldwide economy managed by important people, and the latter has mostly meant cute-animal videos and songs by nobodies. This year, do-it-yourself democratic politics became globalized, and real live protest went massively viral. But as they've rejuvenated and enlarged the idea of democracy, the protesters, and the rest of us, are discovering that democracy is difficult and sometimes a little scary. Because deciding what you don't want is a lot easier than deciding and implementing what you do want, and once everybody has a say, everybody has a say. No one knows how the revolutions will play out: A bumpy road to stable democracy, as in America two centuries ago? Radicals' taking over, as in France just after the bliss and very heaven? Or quick counterrevolution, as in France 60 years later? The mostly liberal, secular young people who made the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt last winter have been subordinated, if not sidelined, by better-disciplined political organizations. And they all agree it's partly their own fault, a function of naiveté about the realities of democratic politics.

"The only good thing Mubarak did," activist Mahmoud Adel Elhetta told me, "was unite us." Mahmoud Salem, 30, who blogs and tweets under the name Sandmonkey — and who has an American B.A. and M.B.A. and works in business development for clients like Coca-Cola — told me he "had the hubris of youth. It was utopia that immediately descended into chaos." He lost his election for a parliamentary seat representing a wealthy Cairo district two weeks ago. "We failed," says el-Ghazali Harb, the surgeon-revolutionary. "What made the revolution happen is the youth. We handed it back to the seniors. We didn't trust ourselves."

In both Egypt and Tunisia, the freely elected new parliaments will be dominated by Islamists — sweet-talking moderates who secularists worry won't stay that way. But as Tantawy of the Muslim Brotherhood told me, "It's not just liberals vs. the Brotherhood now. The Islamists disagree among themselves." To me, the mainstream Islamist parties in Egypt and Tunisia don't appear much more fanatically religious than, say, Pat Robertson–esque Evangelicals in the U.S., and unlike the Republican hard-liners, they sound committed to a national consensus that includes secular liberals. "Democracy is a new culture, and we have to get used to it," says Abdelhamid Jlassi, a Tunisian Islamist leader who spent 17 years as a political prisoner. "Now we have to get used to being hit by eggs."

And the secular revolutionaries remain hopeful that they will not turn out to have been useful idiots to new oppressors. Shadi Taha is a U.S.-educated civil engineer and major liberal Egyptian party official who's running for parliament on a coalition slate with Muslim Brothers. "I don't agree with some of their things," he told me, "but in the 1980s, before they got into politics, they were as crazy as the Salafis" — the fundamentalists who are winning a quarter of the current parliamentary vote. He thinks democratic politics has an inherently moderating effect. Even Tunis University professor Dalenda Largueche, a feminist who could barely contain her horror at ascendant Islamism when we spoke, can eke out some hope. "They want to change Tunisia according to their vision," she says, "but Tunisia will change them." The secularists have a founding-fathers-and-mothers faith in freedom and democracy that is stirring: there's no going back to tyranny, they're sure. "In the end," Wael Nawara says, "things will turn out all right, because the relationship between people and authority in Egypt has changed forever. People discovered that they can change and stop authority from going too far. That self-discovery changes everything. They learned they can replace a ruler. That's the revolution."

Yet there is, for now, a self-sabotaging catch-22 operating among protesters all over the world. All the protests have been against systemic status quos. That has been their great strength. "If it was politicians who had led the movement," Jlassi says of the Tunisian revolution, "it wouldn't have succeeded, whereas the youths, who were unaffiliated, could appeal to everyone." But because even free politics can be inherently unclean, the youth and other liberals don't yet have the stomach for democratic hardball. Will the moral high ground keep working for them? It would be pretty to think so. U.S. Occupiers lack faith in the occupant of the Oval Office and aren't entirely thrilled with their labor-union allies, and the indie generations' need for absolute consensus can devolve into a feckless Bartlebyism — passive resistance, preferring not to.

Ditto in Europe and the Arab countries. In Tunisia, says Lina Ben Mhenni, "we didn't complete the revolution. We got rid of the dictator. Maybe the mistake that we made was that most of us rejected the idea of entering political life." Absent dictatorships to overthrow, idealistic purity can carry a high political price, and if you leave the dull but essential business of governing to the squares and grownups, you lose.

On the other hand, one of the unequivocal generational virtues of these movements has been their use of the Internet and social media. Two years ago, scholars Nicholas Christakis (Harvard) and James Fowler (University of California, San Diego) published Connected, a groundbreaking study of social networks, which they summarize as "how your friends' friends' friends affect everything you feel, think and do." The protests of the past 12 months look like a spectacular worldwide confirmation of those findings.

Calling the Arab uprisings Facebook and YouTube and Twitter revolutions is not, it turns out, just glib, wishful American overstatement. In the Middle East and North Africa, in Spain and Greece and New York, social media and smart phones did not replace face-to-face social bonds and confrontation but helped enable and turbocharge them, allowing protesters to mobilize more nimbly and communicate with one another and the wider world more effectively than ever before. And in police states with high Internet penetration — Ben Ali's Tunisia, Mubarak's Egypt, Bashar Assad's Syria — a critical mass of cell-phone video recorders plus YouTube plus Facebook plus Twitter really did become an indigenous free press. Throughout the Middle East and North Africa, new media and blogger are now quasi synonyms for protest and protester.

And then there was the Arab Spring's other essential, not-quite-as-new media form — independent 24-hour TV news. When I asked the Islamist Jlassi why the revolution had not happened a decade earlier in Tunisia, he instantly answered, "Al-Jazeera and the Internet were the differences, especially al-Jazeera — everybody watches TV."

So America's great 21st century contribution to fomenting freedom abroad was not imposing it militarily but enabling it technologically, as an epiphenomenon of globalization. And for a second act, globalization returned the favor, turning democratic uprisings in developing countries into inspirational exports for the rich world. "We were on the receiving side," Egyptian presidential candidate Amr Moussa told me, "and now we are on the sending side. We have contributed to this global movement for change. There's a new spirit. The grassroots are revolting — young people on Wall Street and young people in Europe."

Ever since modern republican democracy was invented, astonishing protests and uprisings have spiked and spread once every half-century or so: the revolutions in America and France and Haiti; the revolutions of 1848; the revolutions of the 1910s (Russia, Germany, Ireland, Turkey, Egypt, Mexico); the postwar wave of worldwide revolt (the movements toward decolonization, Cuba, Hungary, American civil rights, countercultural militancy in America and Europe). It happens almost like clockwork, yet each time people are freshly shocked and bedoozled. So here we are again. History isn't a very precise guide to how long it might persist this time. In 1848 the revolutionary moment was explosive but lasted only a year, extinguished by both dictatorial and democratic counterrevolutions. The revolutionary dream hatched around 1960, however, was still powerfully contagious a decade later.

The nonleader leaders of Occupy are using the winter to build an organization and enlist new protesters for the next phase. They have shifted the national conversation. As Politico recently reported, the Nexis news-media database now registers almost 500 mentions of "inequality" each week; the week before Occupy Wall Street started, there were only 91. But what would count, a few years hence, as success? According to gung-ho Adbusters editors Kalle Lasn and Micah White, it's already "the greatest social-justice movement to emerge in the United States since the civil rights era." Yet it took a decade to get from the Montgomery bus boycott to the federal civil rights acts, which were just the end of the beginning.

The wisest Occupiers understand that these are very early days. But as long as government in Washington — like government in Europe — remains paralyzed, I don't see the Occupiers and Indignados giving up or losing traction or protest ceasing to be the defining political mode. After all, the Tea Party protests subsided only after Tea Partyers achieved real power in 2010 by becoming the tail wagging the Republican Party dog. When radical populist movements achieve big-time momentum and attention, they don't tend to stand down until they get some satisfaction.

Protesters are ready to rumble in Egypt and Tunisia if democracy and freedom seem too compromised. Emboldened protesters may yet sweep away regimes in places like Jordan and Yemen. In Libya, a bloody revolution, assisted by NATO, brought down the 42-year-old regime of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi. The protorevolution is still under way in Syria, where thousands of protesters have been killed.

And in Russia, the recipe for surprising protest circa 2011 — pseudodemocratic-regime overreach, high Internet use, robust new media and suddenly galvanized middle-class youth — is being baked and served. On Dec. 5, after Putin's party, United Russia, did badly in parliamentary elections despite apparent ballot-box stuffing, more than 5,000 Muscovites gathered to chant, "Russia without Putin!" and called for his arrest. It was the largest Russian antiregime protest of the 21st century — and just as in Tunis and Madrid and New York City, nobody saw it coming.

These Russian protesters are a new breed, not just nostalgic old communist grandmas or bullyboy nationalists but yuppies, students, the best and brightest. "So this is what they look like," said Oleg Orlov, the 58-year-old head of Russia's main human-rights organization, as he scanned the square at Chistye Prudy the night of Dec. 5. "I've never seen them at rallies before, at least not in such enormous numbers. It's incredible."

Alexei Navalny, the blogger who coined a new United Russia moniker — "the party of crooks and thieves" — addressed the protesters. "They can laugh and call us microbloggers. They can call us the hamsters of the Internet. Fine. I am an Internet hamster. But I know they are afraid of us." The protesters cheered. And then 300 of them and Navalny were arrested. The next night in Triumfalnaya Square, protesters returned, and 600 were arrested. A Putin spokesman declared that "unsanctioned demonstrations must be stopped."

On Dec. 10, five days after the first protest, tens of thousands gathered in Moscow in the largest demonstration since just after the fall of communism. There were simultaneous protests in dozens of other cities all over Russia. A letter written by Navalny from his Moscow jail cell was read to the crowd. "It's impossible to beat and arrest hundreds of thousands, millions. We are not cattle or slaves. We have voices and votes, and we have the power to uphold them." An even bigger protest is scheduled for Dec. 24.

They are protesting corruption and the lack of real freedom and true democracy. Because Russia, like most of the world, has not quite totally arrived at the end of history.