- Here you will find hundreds of radical zines ready to print. You can also upload zines to the site ( zines with file sizes bigger than 7mb can be uploaded to http://indymedia.org and linked here). Feel free to comment and contribute.
Many categories, quite a resource for resistance thinking and doing.
As Haitian families search for survivors and relief rolls in, Haiti is still staggering under $1 billion in old debts racked up by unscrupulous lenders and unelected governments of the past.
But in recent days, a worldwide outcry has grown to cancel Haiti’s debt — and while some key lenders are rumoured to be holding out, the IMF and some key governments have indicated that debt relief could be within reach.
More pressure is needed. The petition below will be delivered to the IMF and G7 finance ministers at their crucial meetings in coming days — sign and spread the word:
Petition to Finance Ministers, IMF, World Bank, IADB, and bilateral creditors:
As Haiti rebuilds from this disaster, please work to secure the immediate cancellation of Haiti’s $1 billion debt and ensure that any emergency earthquake assistance is provided in the form of grants, not debt-incurring loans.
SIGN THE PETITION.
The Net as a medium is not for anything in particular — not for making calls, sending videos, etc. It also works at every scale, from one to one to many to many. This makes it highly unusual as a medium. In fact, we generally don’t treat it as a medium but as a world, rich with connections, persistent, and social. Because everything we encounter in this world is something that we as humans made (albeit sometimes indirectly), it feels like it’s ours. Obviously it’s not ours in the property sense. Rather, it’s ours in the way that our government is ours and our culture is ours. There aren’t too many other things that are ours in that way. If we allow others to make decisions about what the Net is for — preferring some content and services to others — the Net won’t feel like it’s ours, and we’ll lose some of the enthusiasm (= love) that drives our participation, innovation, and collaborative efforts. So, if we’re going to talk about the value of the open Internet, we have to ask what the opposite of “open” is. No one is proposing a closed Internet. When it comes to the Internet, the opposite of “open” is “theirs.
Going through the wrong door shuts down massive airport terminal at JFK for hours. Tactics of failure work amazingly well. Imagine 5 simultaneous wrong way entries and wrong door exits at multiple airports. Imagine a hundred. It’d be a national alert resulting tens of thousands of hours of delays (cumulative per passenger) and tens of millions in losses. The result, if they do catch them, is an arrest for criminal trespass? Is it scalable as a strategy? Could this be converted into a new form of civil disobedience via a flash mob? Just having fun with the concept.
- ROME — More than a thousand African workers were put aboard buses and trains in the southern Italian region of Calabria over the weekend and shipped out to immigrant detention centers, following some of the country’s worst riots in years.
- The clashes began Thursday night in Rosarno, a working-class city amid citrus groves in Calabria, the toe of Italy’s boot, after a legal immigrant from Togo was lightly wounded in a pellet-gun attack in a nearby city. It is not clear who pulled the trigger — the authorities said they were investigating whether organized crime had provoked the riots — but the consequences were severe.
- Blaming racism for the attack, dozens of immigrants burned cars and smashed shop windows in Rosarno in two days of riots, throwing rocks at local residents and fighting with the police. More than 50 immigrants and police officers were wounded, none seriously, and 10 immigrants and locals were arrested before the authorities began sending the immigrants to detention centers elsewhere in southern Italy on Saturday.
- The images emerging from Calabria over the weekend — of torched cars and angry African immigrants hurling rocks — were the most vivid example of the growing racial tensions in Italy, which have been exacerbated by an economic crisis whose depth has only recently been acknowledged in the national dialogue. Both the official and underground economies increasingly rely on immigrants, while Italy remains torn between acceptance and xenophobia.
- The riots also shone a bright light on a side of the country rarely seen in tourist itineraries. On Sunday, the authorities began bulldozing the makeshift encampments outside Rosarno where hundreds of immigrants live in what human rights groups describe as subhuman conditions. They are often paid less than $30 a day picking fruit, a job that many Italians see as beneath them. Organized crime syndicates are known to have a strong grip on every level of the Calabrian economy.
- “This event pulled the lid off something that we who work in the sector know well but no one talks about: That many Italian economic realities are based on the exploitation of low-cost foreign labor, living in subhuman conditions, without human rights,” said Flavio Di Giacomo, the spokesman for the International Organization for Migration in Italy.
- In recent years, the center-right government of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has issued strong anti-immigrant statements. Mr. Berlusconi, who is recovering after being struck in the face with a statuette of the Milan cathedral by a mentally unstable man last month, has not commented on the riots.
(Berlusconi’s silence is deafening. A horrible situation altogether. I recommend reading the whole article as it gives a good indication of the level of institutionalized racism in Italy.)
*Digital revolutionizes this, digital revolutionizes that… Yeah, it’s been quite a spectacle, but after watching it so long, it’s become kind of obvious to me that digital is actually best at revolutionizing digital. The Revolution Eats Its Young. Digital is always attacking, disrupting, and disintermediating itself faster than digital ever changes anything else.
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Bruce Sterling: State of the World 2010
One of my many favorite quotes from Bruce’s annual state of the world. Bloggers/tweeters of the world take heed, if you think you are changing the world with your computer…get over yourself. It’s not enough.
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Riots for University of California’s just announced 32% Tuition Increase.
- In a case that raises questions about online journalism and privacy rights, the U.S. Department of Justice sent a formal request to an independent news site ordering it to provide details of all reader visits on a certain day.
- The grand jury subpoena also required the Philadelphia-based Indymedia.us Web site “not to disclose the existence of this request” unless authorized by the Justice Department, a gag order that presents an unusual quandary for any news organization.
- Kristina Clair, a 34-year old Linux administrator living in Philadelphia who provides free server space for Indymedia.us, said she was shocked to receive the Justice Department’s subpoena. The Independent Media Center is a left-of-center amalgamation of journalists and advocates that – according to their principles of unity and mission statement – work toward “promoting social and economic justice” and “social change.”
(Who needs social change anyways?!?! Everything is all right, get back to work.)
Washing one’s hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful.
- MILAN — An Italian judge says he has convicted 23 Americans of the 2003 kidnapping of an Egyptian cleric from a Milan street in a CIA extraordinary rendition.
- Citing diplomatic immunity, Judge Oscar Magi told the Milan courtroom Wednesday that he was acquitting three other Americans.
- Twenty-two of the convicted Americans were immediately sentenced to five years in jail at the end of the nearly three-year trial. The other convicted American, Milan CIA station chief Robert Seldon Lady, was given the stiffest sentence, eight years in prison.
- Magi said he was acquitting five Italian defendants because Italy withheld evidence, contending it was classified information.
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The American suspects — all but one identified by prosecutors as CIA agents — are being tried in absentia and are considered fugitives. Their lawyers, most of whom have had no contact with their clients, have entered innocent pleas on their behalf and argued for their acquittals.
- The Americans are accused of kidnapping Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr, also known as Abu Omar, on Feb. 17, 2003, from a street in Milan, then transferring him by van to the Aviano Air Base in northern Italy, where he was put on a plane and taken to Ramstein Air Base in southern Germany. He was then moved to Egypt, where he says he was tortured. He has since been released, but has not been permitted to leave Egypt to attend the trial.
- The trial is the first by any government to scrutinize the CIA’s extraordinary rendition program, which human rights advocates charge was the CIA’s way to outsource the torture of prisoners to countries where it is practiced.
(Wow, a step forward but still not enough.)
