It was a vivid autumn evening. Americans were still grieving from the stun of 9/11, and the only entity that dared punctuate the eerily quiet streets of New York were the lurid faces of the missing, plastered across a thousand white pages on everything that could still stand in lower Manhattan. It was under this tense and mournful atmosphere that first lady, Laura Bush, took to the airwaves. It would be the first solitary address of any president’s wife in U.S. history, and Mrs. Bush would use her airtime to bolster her husband’s military campaign, Operation Enduring Freedom. Just six weeks after the US invasion of Afghanistan, Mrs. Bush spoke with confidence and pride as she described the rejoicing felt across Afghanistan with the fall of the Taliban. ?

Strauss Group, the Israeli company that co-owns the Sabra Hummus brand, softened language on its website relating to its support of the Israeli Defense Force elite unit, the Golani Brigade.  The Jerusalem Post reported last week that Strauss support for Golani had been deleted entirely from its English site (but kept up in Hebrew) in response to pressure from the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) Movement (http://www.jpost.com/International/Article.aspx?id=195963).    This stirred up a maelstrom of controversy for Strauss, with boycott threats from Zionists in and out of Israel, furious that Israel’s second largest food and beverage company would bow to the global BDS movement.

An Interview with Athens Anti-Authoritarian Movement Comrades

This August I interviewed three comrades from the Athens section of the Anti-Authoritarian Movement of Greece (Alpha Kappa/AK in the Greek acronym). The folks I interviewed live in Exarhia, a neighborhood with a massive anarchist population in central Athens where the December 2008 Greek Uprising began, around which 200 police maintain a permanent security perimeter.

After 10 years of tactical begging, cajoling, harassing and embarassing DC politicians to pass the Local Community Radio Act, the Prometheus Radio Project took to desperate hip oscillating measures in their quest for community radio. Targetting the National Association of Broadcasters (nab), whose own lobbying efforts upheld the bill's passage, Prometheus and other low power radio extremists took out their hula hoops in protest.

Take Back the Land:
Land, Gentrification and the Umoja Village Shantytown
by Max Rameau
Nia Press, 2008

Review by Alex Knight, endofcapitalism.com

I first heard about a group called Take Back the Land, which was illegally moving homeless families into empty homes in Miami, in a study group about the Civil Rights movement and the grassroots organizing that made it so powerful. The reference was highly appropriate. In many ways, Take Back the Land is a direct heir of that bottom-up, Black self-empowerment, civil disobedient, movement-building tradition, and is one of the most inspiring examples of a group renewing and developing that tradition today.

It's finally happened. In September, SugarHouse Casino opened its doors in the Fishtown area of Philadelphia to the dismay and continuing protests of community activists.

Last year, 14 demonstrators from Casino-Free Philadelphia were arrested for blocking access to the construction site. The group has continued to hold vigils up until the casino's opening day. Though it has now been open just three months, there have already been reports of violent casino-related crimes. In November, three women were robbed as they left the SugarHouse parking lot. One of them was treated at the hospital for injuries from being pistol-whipped in the head.

Riots in Greece, militant student mobilizations in Great Britain, general strikes in Portugal and Spain, Ireland on the edge of financial collapse: this is the emerging face of Europe under the threat of economic crisis.  And in France over the past few months, millions of workers and students took to the streets to protest the French government’s proposed pension reform bill, disrupting transit and nearly crippling its oil industry.  Battles around pensions in France have erupted at key moments over the last 15 years, often resulting in the withdrawal of proposed reforms.

Tell me if you’ve heard this one: An FBI agent infiltrates an actual, figurative or virtual mosque, finds the most gullible and angry dork around, encourages him to get even, plots out some dubious plan, gives him bombs that don’t quite work, then arrests this dupe to much fanfare.

In September 1909, Emma Goldman, a well-known anarchist orator, traveled to Philadelphia to deliver a speech entitled "Anarchism: What it Really Means" at the Odd Fellow's Temple. City officials announced their plans to prevent her from speaking, following the decade’s increasingly-organized government suppression of free expression by anarchist and other radicals. Additionally, Philly's own "Broad Street Riot" of 1907, when immigrant workers and anarchists marched on City Hall, was still fresh in the public's memory.

As I stare off into the distance of the Walmart parking lot for the 5th time this week I easily think to myself, “I spend a lot of time alone.” No, I'm not reproducing some sort of Cagney and Lacey utopia. I'm spying on the boondockers.

I had always seen people who park their recreational vehicles in the Columbus Blvd, Pier 70 parking lot, but I had no idea why. I saw them as gypsies and they always looked like they were having a very good time at life.