The People's Record

An ongoing chronicle of communities of resistance around the world: anti-racism, anti-zionism, anti-imperialism, the Arab Spring, anti-austerity protests in Greece and across Europe, student movements all around the world, the Occupy Movement, anti-capitalist movements, anarchist movements, socialist movements, leftist communities and other relevant international news.

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Unions give lift to Turkish protest movement
June 18, 2013

Turkish labor groups fanned a wave of defiance against Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s authority, leading rallies and a one-day strike to support activists whose two-week standoff with the government has shaken the country’s secular democracy.

Riot police again deployed in Turkey’s two main cities, and authorities kept up their unyielding stance against the street demonstrations centering on Istanbul’s Taksim Square. But Monday’s police sweep was less forceful than in recent days, with only scattered firing of tear gas and water cannon on pockets ofprotesters.

After activists were ousted from their sit-in in adjacent Gezi Parkover the weekend, two labor confederations that represent some 330,000 workers picked up the slack Monday by calling a strike and demonstrations nationwide. Unionists turned up by the thousands in Ankara, Istanbul, coastal Izmir and elsewhere.

The turnout defied Turkey’s interior minister, Muammer Guler, who warned that anyone taking part in unlawful demonstrations would “bear the legal consequences.” But one analyst called the rallies a “legitimate and a lawful expression of constitutional rights.”

“People are raising their voices against the excessive use of police force,” said Koray Caliskan, a political science professor at Istanbul’s Bosphorus University. Demonstrators, he said, were showing they were no longer cowed by authorities, and “the fear threshold has been broken.”

In a sign that authorities were increasingly impatient, Deputy Prime Minister Bulent Arinc floated the prospect that authorities could call in troops to quash the protests.

Erdogan’s opponents have grown increasingly suspicious about what they call a gradual erosion of freedoms and secular values under his Islamic-rooted ruling party. It has passed new curbs on alcohol and tried, but later abandoned its plans, to limit women’s access to abortion.

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This should be the role of unions in movements - support, solidarity, militant organizing. 

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Hundreds of climate activists join hundreds of anti-capitalists (& certainly many/most are likely both) in Canary Wharf’s biggest protest
June 14, 2013

One of London’s key financial districts saw its biggest ever protest on Friday as an estimated 200 people occupied Canary Wharf to protest against public spending cuts and lack of action against climate change. Among the protesters were pensioners, children, people with disabilities, a brass band, musicians and a range of groups including Fuel Poverty Action, Disabled People Against Cuts, the Greater London Pensioners Association, No Dash for Gas and UK Uncut.

A spokeswoman for the event said: “We picked Canary Wharf because it’s a symbol of out-of-control neoliberal capitalism. It’s completely private property where protests have been outlawed. We’ve come here because we want to pull together anti-capitalist, climate and anti-austerity struggles.”

The owner of Canary Wharf has previously taken legal action and put in place security measures to prevent protests in home of some of Britain’s biggest banks. The action was part of a range of anti-G8 protests currently taking place, but unlike other events this one passed peacefully.

Protesters erected and scaled bamboo tripods – structures designed to prevent attempts to clear the area by force. An assembly, speeches and workshops were held, as well as creative activities, music and poetry performances and guerilla gardening. James Granger, of Fuel Poverty Action, who helped organize the event, said the banks and financial institutions in Canary Wharf are “bankrolling fossil fuel projects across the world which are causing climate change and fuel poverty”.

“The price of fossil fuels is increasing, which is leading to one-quarter of the UK population facing the choice between heating and eating,” he said. “I’m here to say that there is an alternative – renewable energy which is cheaper and cleaner, and an economy that works for the needs of people not the needs of profit.”

Betty Cottingham of the Greater London Pensioners Association said: “I’m here to protest along with the young and middle-aged people about what this lot are doing to our world. There’s going to be 3,000 extra deaths this winter because pensioners and other people daren’t turn the heating on.”

A Canary Wharf banker, who did not wish to be named, said he did not make the link between banking and the recession. “If it hadn’t been caused by banking it would have been caused but something else,” he said. “I think these people are here because they care about what’s going on out there and the recession has given them a justification to get out here and do this.”

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Come out to Gezi Gardens!
June 9, 2013

Formerly Hayes Valley Farm, now ‘Gezi Gardens’ in San Francisco (map here) is now an occupied space that needs your support.

Hayes Valley Farm was started as a permaculture project. It flourished beautifully, and became a tool for those in the community who wanted to learn about permaculture and sustainable gardening (pictures here). Among the projects the group was able to build in the space: a bee-farm, a seed library, tours for school students explaining how to engage in permaculture, etc. But when it was recently sold to developers to build luxury condos (and maybe later some low-income housing too, the developers claim), the permaculture group who had been building the permaculture space for years was forced to leave. They’ve gone on to continue their permaculture sharing vision through 49farms. 

Meanwhile community activists, squatters, occupiers, neighborhood supporters & the like have begun emerging at the old permaculture space. They appropriately named the space ‘Gezi Gardens’ in solidarity with environmental activists in Turkey whose movement started under a similar context. The group has done amazing work in terms of replanting, and rebuilding the space. There are about half-a-dozen tree houses with tree sitters as well, and that number is growing everyday. Many people from bay area occupations are in the space. Among other objectives, the group hopes to build structures (and has begun that process) that can delay construction and provide housing for the homeless in the area. 

They’ve been served eviction notices three days in a row now and are now at risk for police invasion/eviction any day. They need people who can sleep in the space, to hold it down for as long as possible…ideally forever, even.

The post-eviction plan that was collectively decided yesterday (through consensus) was that autonomous defensive actions will take place immediately after eviction and activists are to gather at 5PM the day after eviction at Patricia’s Green & the space WILL be retaken. 

We’ll be sleeping out there for a few nights at least, so let us know if you’re coming out that way and we can meet up! Needs include the usual flashlights, cameras, generators etc. Come support the right to community space, direct action, and environmental sustainability. Crops, not condos!

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Toward a Global Spring we hope is unlike anything humanity has ever seen before!
June 5, 2013

Athens. Barcelona. Tunis. Cairo. Tripoli. Sana’a. Santiago. Bahrain. Wisconsin. #YoSoy132. Indignados. Red Square. #OccupyWallStreet. Pussy Riot. Blockupy. Damascus. #IdleNoMore. #NoKXL. Istanbul. & so many unmentioned movements that have birthed a new generation of socially/politically conscious democracy fighters & has facilitated our finding each other! In this time, history is being written every day & important events are constantly unfolding. They’re laying ground work that can be built upon amidst social conditions that humanity has never experienced before.

What can we learn from the beating heart of Gezi Park, the blood soaked Taksim concrete, the barricades of Beşiktaş? One thing: the dream of a Global Spring is not dead. It is still in its infancy, kicking and screaming.

Look around! This is what democracy looks like. The future is being built as we speak. What will it be? Singularity, or Nightfall? A sane sustainable future or a 1000 year Dark Age?

Dare to dance without knowing the next step. And then take that step with others. Beijing, maybe you’re next. Or London, Moscow, Delhi, Ottawa. Then… we take New York like never before.

As the second anniversary of Occupy approaches, the indignation, the precarity — the gnawing feeling that life under modern capitalism is a dead-end, and that the future it leads to does not compute — is culminating in some kind of global big bang. The world as we know it must burst. The call is out for a new way of being… and it is being heard. A chain reaction of refusal against capitalism is underway. The global insurrectionary pulse is going steady, and now we’re racing forward. Think in a historical context – this time is mesmerizingly active.

There’s little room for bystanders at this point in the game. Let’s all get off our asses, do what we can and pitch in to build this new world.

Here at Culture Jammer HQ, we’re just about to toss another mindbomb into the mix. After many months of hard work from our Spanish translator team, we are thrilled to announce the official launch of Adbusters en español into cyberspace!

Using our independent Spanish App for iOS, you can immediately access a high-res, English-less version of Adbusters, and peruse through volumes like the Big Ideas of 2013 and the Mental Breakdown of a Nation issue and the first installment of our Epic Human Journey series.

When the revolutionary spark settles in your fingertips, submit all your reflections, mind-bombs and ideas de rebelión en español to barbara@adbusters.org — make the radical Spanish and Latin American voices a rising tide that can’t be quelled!

Meanwhile, we’re composing Part 3 of the Epic Human Journey and ordering new Corporate America flags in preparation of July 4 in the USA, where everyone deserves to be reminded of the corporations that stand behind the blinding, glittering stars. We’re also mining the cybersphere for the next generation of #Killcap players, campus-borne meme warriors, and the latest edgy jams — like this one in the UK.

We won’t stop doing what we do until our current global system heaves… Are you with us?

Time to play jazz.

For the wild,
Culture Jammers HQ

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Changed some of the original language & added a few things. I can always count on AdBusters to either make my heart sing or my head ache. This time it was the former.  

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Tiananmen Square Massacre Anniversary: Chinese activists call on people to wear black as government censors online searches
June 4, 2013

Activists in China are taking to social media to urge the public to wear black on the 24th anniversary of the bloody military crackdown on protesters who had camped out for weeks on Tiananmen Square.

The crackdown on pro-democracy protesters on June 4, 1989, killed hundreds, possibly more. The Chinese government has never fully disclosed what happened on that day and branded the protests a “counterrevolutionary riot.” It remains a taboo topic inside the country, but the growing use of Twitter-like sites known as Weibo and other social media – although largely censored – has made it difficult for authorities to control all information about the Tiananmen crackdown.

Beijing-based rights activist Hu Jia said he had been appealing online for people to wear black T-shirts on Tuesday or light a candle at home on Monday evening to remember the event.

“Thanks to the role of Weibo, there are now more people than any other time in the past 24 years that have come to know and think about the incident,” he said.

While protests in mainland China are off-limits, tens of thousands have gathered to mark the anniversary in past years in Hong Kong’s Victoria Park. The territory – returned by the British in 1997 – operates under a separate political system that promises freedom of speech and other Western-style civil liberties.

“When the spreading of information gains momentum, sooner or later, one day a torch will be relayed from Victoria Park in Hong Kong to Tiananmen Square in Beijing,” Hu said.

Because of restrictions placed on him as an activist, Hu will be unable to leave his home to mark the anniversary. He said controls placed on him for this year’s event – the first since Xi Jinping became leader – were tighter than before.

An academic from Guangzhou, Ai Xiaoming, said she was answering an artist’s call on Google Plus for people to send photos of themselves wearing black for an online photo collection to mark the anniversary.

“More and more people would like to know the truth about the incident, which makes the authorities more nervous,” she said. “Although it’s difficult for people to get access to publications in China, they are able to get information through channels such as social media. People face suppression, detention, arrest and even conviction, but the information can’t be completely blocked. People have never stopped remembering the incident.”

Full article

Chinese police also blocked the gate of a cemetery holding the remains of victims of the Tiananmen crackdown ahead of a vigil that expected to see 150,000 people gather in Hong Kong earlier today.

Along with “today”, other censored searches on China’s most popular microblog site Sina Weibo include “tomorrow,” “that year,” “special day,” and many number combinations that could refer to 4 June 1989, such as 6-4, 64, 63+1, 65-1, and 35 (shorthand for May 35th).

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Chicago fast food, retail workers strike today - workers walk out at some McDonald’s, Dunkin’ Donuts, Macy’s in push for higher wages, union
April 24, 2013

Community organizers said they expect hundreds of fast food and retail workers in Chicago to walk off the job Wednesday in a campaign to push for higher wages.

The Fight for $15 campaign, named for its goal of securing $15 an hour for workers, said it expects McDonald’s, Subway, Dunkin Donuts, Macy’s, Sears and Victoria’s Secret store in the Loop and Magnificent Mile to be affected.

The rolling strikes began at 5:30 a.m. as workers walked off the job at some McDonald’s restaurants and Dunkin’ Donuts. Strikes are expected later this morning at some retailers. A rally is planned for 4 p.m. at the St. James Cathedral near Huron and Rush streets. A McDonald’s spokeswoman said that while the company believes “a few workers may have walked off the job,” it was “not a high number at all.” Basically, they are daring you to boycott them and daring their workers to strike because they feel like they can do anything they want to their workers and have no consequences. Let’s call their bluff.

“Our downtown restaurants remain open, and it remains business as usual for us,” she said.

Representatives for Dunkin Donuts and Subway said that hourly wages are set at the discretion of franchisees who operate their restaurants.

“Fight for 15, seeks to put money back in the pockets of the 275,000 men and women who work hard in the city’s fast food and retail outlets, but still can’t afford basic necessities,” the group said in a release. “If workers were paid more, they’d spend more, helping to get Chicago’s economy moving again.”

Wednesday’s action follows a nationwide Black Friday strike by Walmart workers and comes just weeks after 400 fast-food workers walked off their jobs in New York City.

“Fast food and retail workers bring more than $4 billion a year into the cash registers of the Magnificent Mile and the Loop, yet most of these workers earn Illinois’ minimum wage of $8.25, or just above it,” the group said.

In addition to higher pay, Fight for 15 says it is pushing to organize a union for workers. Among those participating will be Aimee Crawford, 56, who said she has worked for 14 months at a downtown Protein Bar restaurant for $8.75 an hour.

“I’m using my retirement funds and my savings to bridge the gap between what I bring home and what I need to survive,” Crawford said.

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Ecosocialist Conference Supporting Organizations

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