Sitting in a wheel chair outside City Hall during a recent Occupy Los Angeles rally, 78-year-old Anastasia Stewart pumped her handmade sign in the air. She said, “We’ve become ‘of the corporations, by the corporations and for the corporations,’ instead of ‘of the people, for the people, by the people.’”
On July 1, 2002, US planes bombed an Afghan wedding in the small village of Deh Rawud. Located to the north of Kandahar, the village seemed fortified by the region’s many mountains. For a few hours, its people thought they were safe from a war they had never invited. They celebrated, and as customs go, fired intermittently into the air.
The joyous occasion however, turned into an orgy of blood that will define the collective memory of Deh Rawud for generations.
It was reported that the US air force used a B-52 bomber and an AC-130 helicopter gunship in a battle against imagined terrorists. According to Afghan authorities, 40 people were killed and 100 wounded (The Guardian, July 2, 2002). Expectedly, the US military refused to apologize.
Beginning on September 17th with Occupy Wall Street, a new and dynamic social movement has arrived and is capturing the imagination of millions of people in towns and cities around the world. This is real.
Source: Yes Magazine
Young people locking arms, facing arrest on a cold, wet Seattle street—it could have been the WTO protests that rocked the city more than ten years ago. Only this time, Seattle is just one of dozens of places where the movement for the 99 percent is taking hold.
And, unlike the WTO protests—whose motivation was unclear to many Americans—the demonstrations now spreading virally from Wall Street immediately strike a chord: we all know that neither our economy nor our government is working for the benefit of the 99 percent.
The untold story of the sources of the loot controlled by Paul "The Vulture" Singer, Ken Langone and the Kochs - and why they need to buy the White House.
The statistics are easy, the future is not. Up to 20 million Copts in Egypt, 10 per cent of the population, the largest Christian community in the region. But President Anwar Sadat once described himself as “a Muslim president for a Muslim people” and the Christians have not forgotten it.
Sure, the attack on the church in Aswan helped to stoke the fires, and the 26 dead are the largest number of Egyptian fatalities since the two worst days of the revolution which overthrew Sadat’s successor Hosni Mubarak. But Christian fears – stirred by “Amu Hosni” himself when he thought the throne was slipping from under him – meant the leadership of the Coptic church did not support the revolution until two days before Mubarak’s fall.
Copyright Toward Freedom 2019