Searching for Occupy

In January of this year I took off to search for Occupy. I truly did not know what I would find, and must admit to a gnawing fear that I was going to return home to report that Occupy was, in fact, dead. As it turned out, that was most definitely not what I discovered.

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Berta Cáceres Is Still Alive: Indigenous Resistance Against Transnational Plunder in Honduras

Source: Foreign Policy in Focus

Honduran authorities want Berta Cáceres in prison. Even more, they want her dead.

Berta, as she is fondly known by her many friends in Honduras and beyond, is a Lenca indigenous woman, and one of the founding directors of the National Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras (COPINH). She is now the face of social movement resistance in Honduras, which in recent months has seen an escalation of state repression against social movement leaders, indigenous peoples’ organizations, environmentalists, and political dissenters. She went into hiding on September 20. read more

A Corporate Coup of a Different Order: The Growing Resistance to the Trans-Pacific Partnership

In February, Obama claimed his to be “the most transparent administration in history.” Perhaps the least publicized example of that statement’s dishonesty is the White House’s efforts to negotiate the biggest trade agreement since the mid 1990s in near-total secrecy. The Trans-Pacific Partnership, or TPP, has been in negotiations since 2007. In November 2009 the Obama administration made it a centerpiece of the United States Trade Representative’s work.

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Israel-Palestine: Waiting at the Checkpoint

Source: The New Internationalist

Hours of queuing is the lot of Palestinian workers traveling to their jobs on the other side of Israel’s separation wall.

At 3 o’clock this morning, many Palestinian men were already awake and dressed, standing in a queue at Gilo checkpoint in Bethlehem in order to work on the other side of the separation wall. Approximately 4,000 people – mostly men between the age of 18 and 45 – have passed through this checkpoint every day, all year round, to get to their jobs in East Jerusalem or Israel since the construction of the wall began in 2002. Gilo checkpoint is just one of 500 roadblocks and checkpoints in the West Bank. read more