The Photo Banter podcast interview

The Photo Banter with Alex Gagne · Glen E. Friedman

or watch me talk to Alex from my desk here:

Light Culture podcast I get interviewed by David Hershkovits

TEAM HUMAN: DOUGLAS RUSHKOFF AND RICHARD METZGER TALK COUNTERCULTURE (AND WHERE IT MIGHT BE HEADING)

from Dangerous Minds:

I [Richard Metzger] was on my old friend Douglas Rushkoff’s Team Human podcast. We taped this just before news of George Floyd’s murder became widely known, and talked for over four hours over the course of two long calls. The edited version is just under an hour. It’s always fun to have a conversation with him.

Playing for Team Human today, counterculture icon and Editor of Dangerous Minds, Richard Metzger. Metzger envisions what life might look like on the dole and what that means for the future of the counterculture.

Rushkoff and Metzger consider whether the ideals of yesterday’s counterculture were so successful that they’ve become the new over culture? And if so, who really are the new revolutionaries? They also consider the effect Covid-19 will have on a new generation’s financial prospects, and whether the underlying flaws in capitalism will finally be laid bare.

In his monologue, Rushkoff looks at the way our policing problems can only be solved if we fund and utilize other kinds of civil servants instead of just ones with weapons.

Read “Good Cops Don’t Need Grenade Launchers” by Douglas Rushkoff from Medium’s GEN.

RUMBLE # 10 with RALPH NADER

Michael Moore and Ralph Nader have a complicated relationship. So during his trip to D.C. to witness the impeachment of Donald Trump, Michael was surprised when he bumped into Ralph while visiting the office of Flint's representative in Congress. They ended up having their first real conversation in nearly 20 years. Ralph agreed to let Michael record it for this podcast.

*****************

Ralph Nader and Mark Green's new book "Fake President" is here:
https://www.indiebound.org/book/97815...

Read more about the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact here:
https://www.nationalpopularvote.com/

Follow Ralph here:
https://twitter.com/RalphNader

"Let Fury Have the Hour" film (2012) Sunday Sermon

if the window does not open, go here:
http://preprod.snagfilms.com/films/title/let_fury_have_the_hour

Happy New Year?

Let's start with Michael Moore's podcast....

This started about three weeks ago, but every night I will post the next episode until we are up to the day.

It's a great weekly series that so far has been almost daily as he's getting his bearings, I think it's always an incredible listen.

The "3.5% rule": How A Small Minority Can Change The World

from BBC Future Now:

Nonviolent protests are twice as likely to succeed as armed conflicts – and those engaging a threshold of 3.5% of the population have never failed to bring about change

In 1986, millions of Filipinos took to the streets of Manila in peaceful protest and prayer in the People Power movement. The Marcos regime folded on the fourth day.

In 2003, the people of Georgia ousted Eduard Shevardnadze through the bloodless Rose Revolution, in which protestors stormed the parliament building holding the flowers in their hands.

Earlier this year, the presidents of Sudan and Algeria both announced they would step aside after decades in office, thanks to peaceful campaigns of resistance.

In each case, civil resistance by ordinary members of the public trumped the political elite to achieve radical change.
There are, of course, many ethical reasons to use nonviolent strategies. But compelling research by Erica Chenoweth, a political scientist at Harvard University, confirms that civil disobedience is not only the moral choice; it is also the most powerful way of shaping world politics – by a long way.

Looking at hundreds of campaigns over the last century, Chenoweth found that nonviolent campaigns are twice as likely to achieve their goals as violent campaigns. And although the exact dynamics will depend on many factors, she has shown it takes around 3.5% of the population actively participating in the protests to ensure serious political change.

Chenoweth’s influence can be seen in the recent Extinction Rebellion protests, whose founders say they have been directly inspired by her findings. So just how did she come to these conclusions?

Needless to say, Chenoweth’s research builds on the philosophies of many influential figures throughout history. The African-American abolitionist Sojourner Truth, the suffrage campaigner Susan B Anthony, the Indian independence activist Mahatma Gandhi and the US civil rights campaigner Martin Luther King have all convincingly argued for the power of peaceful protest.

Yet Chenoweth admits that when she first began her research in the mid-2000s, she was initially rather cynical of the idea that nonviolent actions could be more powerful than armed conflict in most situations. As a PhD student at the University of Colorado, she had spent years studying the factors contributing to the rise of terrorism when she was asked to attend an academic workshop organised by the International Center of Nonviolent Conflict (ICNC), a non-profit organisation based in Washington DC. The workshop presented many compelling examples of peaceful protests bringing about lasting political change – including, for instance, the People Power protests in the Philippines.

But Chenoweth was surprised to find that no-one had comprehensively compared the success rates of nonviolent versus violent protests; perhaps the case studies were simply chosen through some kind of confirmation bias. “I was really motivated by some scepticism that nonviolent resistance could be an effective method for achieving major transformations in society,” she says.

Working with Maria Stephan, a researcher at the ICNC, Chenoweth performed an extensive review of the literature on civil resistance and social movements from 1900 to 2006 – a data set then corroborated with other experts in the field. They primarily considered attempts to bring about regime change. A movement was considered a success if it fully achieved its goals both within a year of its peak engagement and as a direct result of its activities. A regime change resulting from foreign military intervention would not be considered a success, for instance. A campaign was considered violent, meanwhile, if it involved bombings, kidnappings, the destruction of infrastructure – or any other physical harm to people or property.

“We were trying to apply a pretty hard test to nonviolent resistance as a strategy,” Chenoweth says. (The criteria were so strict that India’s independence movement was not considered as evidence in favour of nonviolent protest in Chenoweth and Stephan’s analysis – since Britain’s dwindling military resources were considered to have been a deciding factor, even if the protests themselves were also a huge influence.)

By the end of this process, they had collected data from 323 violent and nonviolent campaigns. And their results – which were published in their book Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict – were striking.
Strength in numbers

Overall, nonviolent campaigns were twice as likely to succeed as violent campaigns: they led to political change 53% of the time compared to 26% for the violent protests.

This was partly the result of strength in numbers. Chenoweth argues that nonviolent campaigns are more likely to succeed because they can recruit many more participants from a much broader demographic, which can cause severe disruption that paralyses normal urban life and the functioning of society.

In fact, of the 25 largest campaigns that they studied, 20 were nonviolent, and 14 of these were outright successes. Overall, the nonviolent campaigns attracted around four times as many participants (200,000) as the average violent campaign (50,000).

The People Power campaign against the Marcos regime in the Philippines, for instance, attracted two million participants at its height, while the Brazilian uprising in 1984 and 1985 attracted one million, and the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia in 1989 attracted 500,000 participants.

“Numbers really matter for building power in ways that can really pose a serious challenge or threat to entrenched authorities or occupations,” Chenoweth says – and nonviolent protest seems to be the best way to get that widespread support.

Once around 3.5% of the whole population has begun to participate actively, success appears to be inevitable.

Besides the People Power movement, the Singing Revolution in Estonia and the Rose Revolution in Georgia all reached the 3.5% threshold

“There weren’t any campaigns that had failed after they had achieved 3.5% participation during a peak event,” says Chenoweth – a phenomenon she has called the “3.5% rule”. Besides the People Power movement, that included the Singing Revolution in Estonia in the late 1980s and the Rose Revolution in Georgia in the early 2003.

Chenoweth admits that she was initially surprised by her results. But she now cites many reasons that nonviolent protests can garner such high levels of support. Perhaps most obviously, violent protests necessarily exclude people who abhor and fear bloodshed, whereas peaceful protesters maintain the moral high ground.

Chenoweth points out that nonviolent protests also have fewer physical barriers to participation. You do not need to be fit and healthy to engage in a strike, whereas violent campaigns tend to lean on the support of physically fit young men. And while many forms of nonviolent protests also carry serious risks – just think of China’s response in Tiananmen Square in 1989 – Chenoweth argues that nonviolent campaigns are generally easier to discuss openly, which means that news of their occurrence can reach a wider audience. Violent movements, on the other hand, require a supply of weapons, and tend to rely on more secretive underground operations that might struggle to reach the general population.

By engaging broad support across the population, nonviolent campaigns are also more likely to win support among the police and the military – the very groups that the government should be leaning on to bring about order.

During a peaceful street protest of millions of people, the members of the security forces may also be more likely to fear that their family members or friends are in the crowd – meaning that they fail to crack down on the movement. “Or when they’re looking at the [sheer] numbers of people involved, they may just come to the conclusion the ship has sailed, and they don’t want to go down with the ship,” Chenoweth says.

In terms of the specific strategies that are used, general strikes “are probably one of the most powerful, if not the most powerful, single method of nonviolent resistance”, Chenoweth says. But they do come at a personal cost, whereas other forms of protest can be completely anonymous. She points to the consumer boycotts in apartheid-era South Africa, in which many black citizens refused to buy products from companies with white owners. The result was an economic crisis among the country’s white elite that contributed to the end of segregation in the early 1990s.

“There are more options for engaging and nonviolent resistance that don’t place people in as much physical danger, particularly as the numbers grow, compared to armed activity,” Chenoweth says. “And the techniques of nonviolent resistance are often more visible, so that it's easier for people to find out how to participate directly, and how to coordinate their activities for maximum disruption.”

A magic number?

These are very general patterns, of course, and despite being twice as successful as the violent conflicts, peaceful resistance still failed 47% of the time. As Chenoweth and Stephan pointed out in their book, that’s sometimes because they never really gained enough support or momentum to “erode the power base of the adversary and maintain resilience in the face of repression”. But some relatively large nonviolent protests also failed, such as the protests against the communist party in East Germany in the 1950s, which attracted 400,000 members (around 2% of the population) at their peak, but still failed to bring about change.

In Chenoweth’s data set, it was only once the nonviolent protests had achieved that 3.5% threshold of active engagement that success seemed to be guaranteed – and raising even that level of support is no mean feat. In the UK it would amount to 2.3 million people actively engaging in a movement (roughly twice the size of Birmingham, the UK’s second largest city); in the US, it would involve 11 million citizens – more than the total population of New York City.

The fact remains, however, that nonviolent campaigns are the only reliable way of maintaining that kind of engagement.

Chenoweth and Stephan’s initial study was first published in 2011 and their findings have attracted a lot of attention since. “It’s hard to overstate how influential they have been to this body of research,” says Matthew Chandler, who researches civil resistance at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana.

Isabel Bramsen, who studies international conflict at the University of Copenhagen agrees that Chenoweth and Stephan’s results are compelling. “It’s [now] an established truth within the field that the nonviolent approaches are much more likely to succeed than violent ones,” she says.

Regarding the “3.5% rule”, she points out that while 3.5% is a small minority, such a level of active participation probably means many more people tacitly agree with the cause.

These researchers are now looking to further untangle the factors that may lead to a movement’s success or failure. Bramsen and Chandler, for instance, both emphasise the importance of unity among demonstrators.

As an example, Bramsen points to the failed uprising in Bahrain in 2011. The campaign initially engaged many protestors, but quickly split into competing factions. The resulting loss of cohesion, Bramsen thinks, ultimately prevented the movement from gaining enough momentum to bring about change.

Chenoweth’s interest has recently focused on protests closer to home – like the Black Lives Matter movement and the Women’s March in 2017. She is also interested in Extinction Rebellion, recently popularised by the involvement of the Swedish activist Greta Thunberg. “They are up against a lot of inertia,” she says. “But I think that they have an incredibly thoughtful and strategic core. And they seem to have all the right instincts about how to develop and teach through a nonviolent resistance campaigns.”

Ultimately, she would like our history books to pay greater attention to nonviolent campaigns rather than concentrating so heavily on warfare. “So many of the histories that we tell one another focus on violence – and even if it is a total disaster, we still find a way to find victories within it,” she says. Yet we tend to ignore the success of peaceful protest, she says.

“Ordinary people, all the time, are engaging in pretty heroic activities that are actually changing the way the world – and those deserve some notice and celebration as well.”

Please see the original BBC piece HERE with images.

A Message From the Future With Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

from The Intercept:

Sunday Sermon:America at War: Infographic Reveals How the U.S. Military Is Operating in 40% of the World’s Nations

from: OpenCulture

Earlier this month, NBC reporter and analyst William Arkin ended a 30-year career as a journalist, announcing in a “scathing letter,” Democracy Now! reports, that “he would be leaving the network. Arkin accuses “the media of warmongering while ignoring the, quote, ‘creeping fascism of homeland security.’” He does not equivocate in a follow-up interview with Amy Goodman. “The generals and the national security leadership" are also now, he says, “the commentators and the analysts who populate the news media” (Arkin himself is a former Army intelligence officer).

The problem isn’t only NBC, in his estimation, and it isn’t only supposed journalists cheerleading for war. Most of the conflicts the country is currently engaged in are un- or under-reported in major sources. His letter “applies to all of the mainstream networks, applies to CNN and Fox, as well…. We’ve just become so shallow that we’re not really able even to see the truth, which is that we’re at war right now in nine countries around the world where we’re bombing, and we hardly report any of it on a day-to-day basis.”

This isn’t the case with independent media organizations like Democracy Now!, The Intercept, or Airwars. Secular and religious refugee relief organizations like the International Rescue Committee, World Relief, or Muslim Global Relief are paying attention. Many of these organizations are non-U.S.-based or connected to the “civilian experts” Arkin says once appeared regularly in the national media and represented opposing views, “people who might be university professors or activists… or experts who were associated with think tanks.”

Airwars, affiliated with the Department of Media and Communications at Goldsmiths, University of London, has monitored conflicts around the world since 2014, with extensive coverage and records of alleged civilian deaths, military reports, and the names of victims. For a comparable U.S.-focused deep dive, see the Costs of War Project at Brown University’s Watson Institute of International & Public Affairs. The project’s website not only tracks the enormous economic costs of wars in the Middle East and Africa since 9/11; it also tracks “the human toll,” as you can see in the video below.

At the top of the post, see a map (view in a larger format here) from the Cost of War Project’s Stephanie Savell, 5W Infographics, and the Smithsonian of all the regions where the U.S. is “combatting terrorism.” While most of the media orgs and non-profits mentioned above would probably dispute the use of that term in some or all of the conflict zones, Savell sticks with the official language to describe the situation—one in which the nation “is now operating in 40 percent of the world’s nations," as she writes at Smithsonian.com.

Maybe no one needs an editorial to imagine the enormous toll this level of military engagement has taken over the course of 17 years since the inception of the “Global War on Terror.” The map covers the past two, illustrating “80 countries, engaged through 40 U.S. military bases,” and conducting training, exercises, active combat, and air and drone strikes on six continents. The selections, writes Savell, are “conservative,” and sourced from both independent and mainstream media outlets and international government and military sources.

“The most comprehensive depiction in civilian circles of U.S. military and government antiterrorist actions overseas,” the America at War map provides information we don't often get in our daily—or hourly, or by-the-minute—diet of news. "Contrary to what most Americans believe, the war on terror is not winding down.” It is expanding. Given the country’s history of sustained mass movements against legally suspect, grossly expensive wars with high civilian casualties, disease epidemics, starvation, and refugee crises, one would think that a sizable segment of the population would want to know what their country's military and civilian defense contractors are doing around the world.

via Smithsonian.com

click here for original article with further LINKS and RESOURCES,

Ocasio-Cortez outrages Republicans by refusing to respect their ignorance

from The Guardian:

The young congresswoman has turned the tables on the Wall Street Journal after it accused her of taking ‘pride in ignorance’

by Arwa Mahdawi

AOC is ignorant, ungrateful and coming for your meat
Large swaths of America appear to be suffering from a debilitating condition known as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Derangement Syndrome (AOCDS). Symptoms include bouts of extreme condescension, an inability to stop sputtering the word “socialist”, and overwhelming anger that a young woman of colour is unapologetically succeeding.

The latest conservative to succumb to AOCDS is Grace-Marie Turner, the president of a non-profit devoted to “counter[ing] the march towards toward government-controlled medicine”. (Can we just pause for a moment and contemplate what sort of person spends their life trying to ensure there will never be affordable healthcare in the United States?)

On Tuesday Turner ranted in the Wall Street Journal that Ocasio-Cortez “has little regard for the system that made it possible for her to be elected to Congress”. Turner also lamented that the congresswoman “leads a generation of young people to take pride in their ignorance – of the laws of nature, of history, of the Constitution, of the eternal battle for freedom – and still succeed”.

As you can imagine, the congresswoman had a few words to say in response to this, tweeting on Thursday that: “I guess WSJ Editorial Page takes pride in their ignorance of our nation’s history of slavery, Jim Crow, & mass incarceration; willful doubt on the decades of science on climate change; targeting of indigenous peoples, and the classist, punitive agenda targeting working families.”

Ocasio-Cortez hit the bigoted nail on the head with that. After all, what Turner was essentially saying in her op-ed was that minorities should respect a system that doesn’t respect them. That Ocasio-Cortez, who “doesn’t come from a rich and powerful family”, doesn’t have an Ivy League education, and has Puerto Rican heritage, should be grateful she is allowed to exist in America, let alone succeed. And that AOC certainly shouldn’t mess with the laws of nature and history that mean rich white men, and a few rich white women, are our leaders and superiors. Turner, and conservatives like her, are terrified by Ocasio-Cortez because she symbolizes a new generation who aren’t going to shut up and be grateful, but are intent on changing an unequal system.

If you need any more evidence of how panicked conservatives are about the young congresswoman, just take a look at this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference, which features heavy doses of Ocasio-Cortez scaremongering. Perhaps the most ridiculous examples of this was Sebastian Gorka, a former Trump official, announcing to the crowd that democratic socialists like Ocasio-Cortez “want to rebuild your home … [and] take away your hamburgers. This is what Stalin dreamt about but never achieved.” Republican men are clearly terrified AOC is coming for their meat.

Serena Williams says ‘Dream Crazier’
“Crazy” and “hysterical” are gendered insults that have been used to belittle women for centuries. A new Nike ad featuring Serena Williams takes on the C-word, with Williams saying: “If we show emotion, we’re called dramatic … if we dream of equal opportunity, we’re delusional … And if we get angry, we’re hysterical, irrational, or just being crazy.” It’s a powerful ad and Williams, who has been relentlessly vilified as an Angry Black Woman, is the perfect person to narrate it. However, before we start applauding Nike, it’s worth remembering that the company is currently in the middle of a class-action lawsuit accusing it of gender discrimination. So while it’s great that big companies are taking on important issues in their advertising, let’s not forget that it is much easier to make feelgood ads than it is actually walk the walk and implement equality in your workplace.

Female leaders warn women’s rights are being eroded
Dozens of female leaders have signed an open letter warning that populist movements around the world threaten gender equality. Susana Malcorra, the former Argentinian foreign minister, told the Guardian that women’s rights are particularly threatened in countries that have seen the rise of “a macho-type strongman”, such as Brazil, the Philippines and Italy.

Only six countries give men and women equal legal rights
According to a new report by the World Bank the only countries in the world where men and women have equal legal work rights are Belgium, Denmark, France, Latvia, Luxembourg and Sweden.

Running while Muslim and female
Decathlon, a French sports retailer, has cancelled its plans to sell a runner’s hijab after backlash. The budget minister, Gérald Darmanin, was one of the many politicians who spoke out about the hijab: “I value women’s freedom more than commercial freedom,” he told French radio station Europe 1. Look, everyone’s entitled to their opinion on the hijab. But speaking out against a product that would lead to more Muslim women going out running because you “value women’s freedom” is disingenuous to say the least. Just say you’re Islamophobic and get it over with, mate.

‘Give women their names’
Tabitha King is an author and an autonomous human being – but is usually referred to in the media as “Stephen King’s wife”. King recently spoke out about being treated as an appendage in a series of messages shared on her husband’s Twitter account. “Wife is a relationship or status. It is not an identity,” she wrote. “You might consider the unconscious condescension in your style book, and give women their names.”

America celebrates Women’s History Month
Speaking of giving women their names, Happy Women’s History Month. Why not kick it off by reading about Shirley Chisholm, the first black congresswoman. Her campaign slogan was “unbought and unbossed” and one imagines Grace-Marie Turner would not have liked her at all.

Sunday Sermon:AOC Is Making C-SPAN Fun

from Jacobin:

The internal workings of American politics are usually boring as hell. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is making them compulsively watchable — and going after billionaires’ control of our political system in the process.

What might politics look like if elected officials — instead of being what too often seems like a collection of dead-eyed, factory-made automatons who speak from the same snooze-inducing, flavorless script — actually appeared passionate, engaged, and interested in looking after the interests of the people they represent?

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez may be showing us.

One of the refreshing things about Ocasio-Cortez’s time in the national spotlight has been not just the fact that she talks about the issues facing the US in a direct, easy to understand, even entertaining way, but that she does it in the service of taking on the rigid power structures that control people’s lives.

She did this before she was even sworn in to Congress, famously tweeting about the way she and other freshmen are marched around during their orientation to be lectured by lobbyists and CEOs. What was apparently an unseemly but accepted norm in Washington’s political culture was suddenly outed to the rest of us because someone in the political class finally realized how creepy the whole thing was.

Ocasio-Cortez appears to be doing something similar with her newly won position on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, which yesterday held a hearing on H.R.1, the House Democrats’ expansive anti-corruption and voting rights package. Watch this clip from yesterday’s session, in which Ocasio-Cortez plays a “lightning-round game” with the witnesses, in which she pretends to be a “bad guy” (“which I’m sure half the room would agree with anyway,” she adds with a smile) who’s trying to “get away with as much bad things as possible, ideally to enrich myself and advance my interests.”

In less than five minutes, and with the witnesses replying with barely more than a “yes” or “no,” Ocasio-Cortez gets across to the viewer:

- just how openly corrupt the current political system is (“you’re going to help me legally get away with all of this”);

- the lack of meaningful safeguards against corporate capture (“Is there any hard limit that I have in terms of what legislation I’m allowed to touch … based on the special interest funds that I accepted?” “There’s no limits”)

- how vulnerable the office of the president is in particular to moneyed influence (“Every person in this body is being held to a higher ethical standard than the president of the United States”)

- and that the very people serving with her on this august committee are most probably compromised by these interests too (“We have these influences existing in this body, which means that these influences are here in this committee shaping the questions that being asked of you all”)

That she does it all through the medium of a classroom game and with a sense of fun makes the whole thing even more remarkable to watch.

‘We have a system that is fundamentally broken.’ — Rep. @AOC is explaining just how f*cked campaign finance laws really are pic.twitter.com/sCwpkRzcHB

— NowThis (@nowthisnews) February 8, 2019

There are many reasons behind today’s widespread political disengagement, not least the suspicion that most of the people the public votes for aren’t really fighting for them. But even when politicians genuinely are fighting for their voters’ interests, they do so in the same, deathly boring, “serious” fashion that one can appreciate in the abstract, but few would willingly subject themselves to. Televising congressional proceedings was an important democratizing victory, but it was undercut by the fact that, short of salacious events like the Kavanaugh hearings, no one really wants to watch most of these people do their jobs. There’s a reason the public has gravitated to figures like Trump, despite the terrible goods they sell; meanwhile, even a charismatic figure like Obama was dull as chalk when he wasn’t giving a major speech.

Ocasio-Cortez has shown she can bring the style that’s made her a force of nature on social media to a committee hearing and, more importantly, do it in a way that makes clear to the public just how easy it is for the rich — or “bad guys,” to use her words — to control the political system. Here’s hoping someday she’ll get a chance to do the same on an issue like climate change, too.

BY
BRANKO MARCETIC

How to create a leaderless revolution and win lasting political change

from The Guardian:

O p i n i o n
by Carne Ross
In an age of insurgency, from gilets jaunes to Extinction Rebellion,
non-violence is key to harnessing the energy of protest

The gilets jaunes movement in France is a leaderless political uprising. It isn’t the first and it won’t be the last. Occupy, the Arab spring and #MeToo are other recent examples of this new politics. Some of it is good. Some of it is not: a leaderless movement, self-organised on Reddit, helped elect Donald Trump. But leaderless movements are spreading, and we need to understand where they come from, what is legitimate action and, if you want to start one, what works and what doesn’t.

The Arab spring began with the self-immolation of one despairing young man in Tunisia; the revolt rapidly spread across the region, just as protests have proliferated in France. In highly connected complex systems, such as the world today, the action of a single agent can suddenly trigger what complexity theorists call a “phase shift” across the entire system.

We cannot predict which agent or what event might be that trigger. But we already know that the multiplying connections of our world offer an unprecedented opportunity for the rise and spread of leaderless movements.

Leaderless movements spring from frustration with conventional top-down politics, a frustration shared by many, not only those on the streets. Polls suggest the gilets jaunes are supported by a large majority of the French public. Who believes that writing to your MP, or signing a petition to No 10 makes any difference to problems such as inequality, the chronic housing shortage or the emerging climate disaster? Even voting feels like a feeble response to these deep-seated problems that are functions not only of government policies but more of the economic system itself.

What such movements oppose is usually clear, but what they propose is inevitably less so: that is their nature. The serial popular uprisings of the Arab spring all rejected authoritarian rule, whether in Tunisia, Egypt or Syria. But in most places there was no agreement about what kind of government should replace the dictators. In Eygpt, the Tahrir Square protests failed to create an organised democratic political party that could win an election. Instead, the Muslim Brotherhood, long highly organised and thus prepared for such a moment, stepped into the political vacuum. In turn, this provoked further mass protest, which eventually brought to power another dictatorship as repressive as Hosni Mubarak’s.

When the demand is for change in social relations– norms more than laws – such as the end of sexual harassment, the results can be as rapid but also more enduring and positive. The #MeToo movement has provoked questioning of gender relations across the world. The British deputy prime minister, Damian Green, was forced to resign; in India, a cabinet minister. The effects are uneven, and far from universal, but sexual harassers have been outed and ousted from positions of power in the media, NGOs and governments.

Some mass action has required leadership. The race discrimination that confronted the US civil rights movement was deeply entrenched in both American society and its laws. Martin Luther King and other leaders paid exquisite attention to strategy, switching tactics according to what worked and what didn’t. King correctly judged, however, that real and lasting equality required the reform of capitalism – a change in the system itself. In a sense, his objective went from the singular to the plural. And that is where his campaign hit the rocks. Momentum dissipated when King started to talk about economic equality: there was no agreement on the diagnosis, or the solution.

The Occupy movement faced a similar problem. It succeeded in inserting inequality and economic injustice into the mainstream political conversation – politicians had avoided the topic before. But Occupy couldn’t articulate a specific political programme to reform the system. I was in Zuccotti Park in New York City, where the protest movement began, when the “general assembly” invited the participants to pin notes listing their demands on to trees. Ideas were soon plastered up, from petitioning Washington DC to replacing the dollar – many of which, of course, were irreconcilable with each other.

This is why a leaderless response to the climate change disaster is tricky. It’s striking that in Emmanuel Macron’s fuel tax rises the gilets jaunes opposed the very thing demanded by Extinction Rebellion, Britain’s newly minted leaderless movement: aggressive policies to reduce carbon emissions to net zero. Macron’s proposals would have hit the poorest hardest, illustrating that resolving the crises of the environment and inequality requires a more comprehensive, carefully wrought solution to both. But leaderless movements have largely proved incapable of such complicated decision-making, as anyone at Zuccotti Park will attest.

Conventional party politicians, reasserting their own claim to legitimacy, insist that such problems can only be arbitrated by imposing more top-down policy. But when most feel powerless about the things that matter, this may only provoke further protests.

Ultimately, to address profound systemic challenges, we shall need new participatory and inclusive decision-making structures to negotiate the difficult choices. An example of these forums has emerged in parts of Syria, of all places. Rightly, this is precisely what the Extinction Rebellion is also demanding.

Inevitably, leaderless movements face questions about their legitimacy. One answer lies in their methods. The Macron government has exploited the violence seen in Paris and elsewhere to claim that the gilets jaunes movement is illegitimate and anti-democratic. Mahatma Gandhi, and later King, realised that nonviolent action – such as the satyagraha salt march or the Montgomery bus boycott – denies the authorities this line of attack. On the contrary, the violence used by those authorities – the British colonial government or the police of the southern US states – against nonviolent protestors helped build their own legitimacy and attracted global attention.

Complexity science tells us something else important. System-wide shifts happen when the system is primed for change, at so-called criticality. In the Middle East there was almost universal anger at the existing political status quo, so it took only one match to light the fire of revolt. Meeting people in colleges and towns across the UK but also in the US (where I lived until recently) you can hear the mounting frustration with a political and economic system that is totally unresponsive to the needs of the 99%, and offers no credible answer to the climate emergency.

There will be more leaderless movements to express this frustration, just as there will be more rightwing demagogues, like Trump or Boris Johnson, who seek to exploit it to their own advantage. For the right ones to prevail, we must insist on nonviolence as well as commitment to dialogue with – and not denunciation of – those who disagree. Messily, a new form of politics is upon us, and we must ensure that it peacefully and democratically produces deep systematic reform, not the counter-reaction of the authoritarians. Get ready.

• Carne Ross is a former British diplomat and author of The Leaderless Revolution

Public Enemy "YO! Bum Rush the Show! A little bit on the classic LP cover from the ARTÉ TV series "Total Records"

Noam Chomsky on Pittsburgh Attack: Revival of Hate Is Encouraged by Trump’s Rhetoric

The nation is continuing to grieve the 11 Jewish worshipers who were gunned down at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh Saturday in what is being described as the worst anti-Semitic attack in U.S. history. Funerals were held Thursday for three more victims of the shooting: husband and wife Sylvan and Bernice Simon, and Richard Gottfried. Robert Bowers, who is accused of the mass shooting, pleaded not guilty Thursday. Bowers is charged with 44 counts, including murder and hate crimes. We speak with Noam Chomsky, the world-renowned professor, linguist and dissident, about the synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh and other recent white supremacist and right-wing attacks.

Deaths From Gun Violence: How The U.S. Compares With The Rest Of The World

from NPR.org

Every fall the University of Washington produces a report comparing the past year's rate of gun violence in the United States to the rates in other countries.

The timing of this year's report couldn't be more apt — or more grim. The statistics were released on Thursday just as Americans were waking up to the news that a gunman had opened fire the night before at the Borderline Bar and Grill in Thousand Oaks, Calif. He killed 12 people and was found dead at the scene.

The attack came just 11 days after the fatal shooting that claimed 11 lives at Pittsburgh's Tree of Life synagogue. Eight months before that, a gunman shot 17 people dead at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla. And just over a year ago a gunman massacred 58 people at a music festival in Las Vegas.

As in previous years, the University of Washington's latest data indicate that this level of gun violence in a well-off country is a particularly American phenomenon.

When you consider countries with the top indicators of socioeconomic success — income per person and average education level, for instance — the United States is bested by just 18 nations, including Denmark, the Netherlands, Canada and Japan.

Those countries all also enjoy low rates of gun violence. But the U.S. has the 28th-highest rate in the world: 4.43 deaths due to gun violence per 100,000 people in 2017. That was nine times as high as the rate in Canada, which had 0.47 deaths per 100,000 people — and 29 times as high as in Denmark, which had 0.15 deaths per 100,000.

The numbers come from a massive database maintained by the University's Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, which tracks lives lost in every country, in every year, by every possible cause of death. The 2017 figures paint a fairly rosy picture for much of the world, with deaths due to gun violence rare even in many countries that are extremely poor — such as Bangladesh, which saw 0.07 deaths per 100,000 people.

Prosperous Asian countries such as Singapore and Japan boast the absolute lowest rates, though the United Kingdom and Germany are in almost as good shape.

"It is a little surprising that a country like ours should have this level of gun violence," Ali Mokdad, a professor of global health and epidemiology at the IHME, told NPR in an interview last year. "If you compare us to other well-off countries, we really stand out."



To be sure, there are quite a few countries where gun violence is a substantially larger problem than in the United States — particularly in Central America and the Caribbean. Mokdad said a major driver is the large presence of gangs and drug trafficking. "The gangs and drug traffickers fight among themselves to get more territory, and they fight the police," said Mokdad. And citizens who are not involved are often caught in the crossfire. Another country with widespread gun violence is Venezuela, which has been grappling with political unrest and an economic meltdown.

Mokdad said drug trafficking may also be a driving factor in two Asian countries that have unusually high rates of violent gun deaths for their region, the Philippines and Thailand.

With the casualties due to armed conflicts factored out, even in conflict-ridden regions such as the Middle East, the U.S. rate is worse.

The U.S. gun violence death rate is also higher than in nearly all countries in sub-Saharan Africa, including many that are among the world's poorest.

One more way to consider these data: The institute also estimates what it would expect a country's rate of gun violence deaths to be based solely on its socioeconomic status. By that measure, the U.S. should be seeing only 0.46 deaths per 100,000 people. Instead, its actual rate of 4.43 deaths per 100,000 is almost 10 times as high.

please go to the original article to see more of the graphs.

Jon Stewart, Dave Chappelle talk

Carl Reiner political comment

What is on my mind will be coming out of my mouth as you watch this: pic.twitter.com/fZkyGg8rlU

— carl reiner (@carlreiner) October 30, 2018

I’m suing the U.S. government for causing the climate change crisis #YouthVGov

from Boing Boing:

My name is Kelsey Juliana and I’m suing the United States government for causing and accelerating the climate change crisis. I’m 22 years old and I’ve been a climate advocate for more than half of my life.

The constitution guarantees all Americans the right to life, liberty, and property. But how is anyone supposed to live a life of freedom amid a climate crisis? My own government is violating my constitutional rights by its ongoing and deliberate actions that cause climate change and it’s not right.

I, along with 20 other young people from around the country, filed a lawsuit against the federal government in 2015, called Juliana v. United States



We’re not asking for money. Instead, we’re asking the Court to order the government to develop and implement a National Climate Recovery Plan based on the best available science.

This plan should end the reign of fossil fuels and quickly decarbonize our atmosphere so that we can stabilize our climate system before it’s too late.

The longer we go without climate recovery, the more we risk allowing our climate to spiral completely out of control.



All of the expert witnesses in our lawsuit say that we are currently—already—in the “danger zone” and an “emergency situation” with only 1°C of planetary heating. Allowing the planet to heat up any more is not safe for our species, as well as so many others. And according to the Trump administration’s most recent environmental impact statement, the planet could heat as much as 7°F before the end of this century.

We cannot allow this to happen because we simply will not survive.

We originally filed our lawsuit against the Obama administration. That administration tried to have the case dismissed, but the judge ruled in our favor and found that we should be allowed to go to trial.

In 2017, the Trump administration inherited the lawsuit and it has done everything in its power, employing every conceivable tactic, to deny my fellow plaintiffs and me our right to present our case in court. This administration is so fiercely attempting to silence our voices.

At this point, every level of the federal judiciary—the U.S. District Court, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, and the Supreme Court—has denied the Trump administration’s efforts to have the case thrown out. Yet it will not halt its efforts to avoid standard legal procedures and confront us, the nation’s youth, in court.

Just last week the Trump administration asked the United States Supreme Court to again circumvent the ordinary procedures of federal litigation and stop our case from going to trial.

Our trial is officially scheduled to begin on October 29, 2018 in Eugene, Oregon, but it is currently on hold while the Supreme Court considers the Trump administration’s new request.

What we’re asking for could change everything.

My fellow plaintiffs and I want you with us as we fight for our right to be heard at trial to confront the United States government for knowingly violating our constitutional rights. Supporters will hold rallies in every state around the country on October 29, so if you can’t be with us in Eugene, find your local rally here.

Get regular updates by following @youthvgov on social media.

You can learn more about this case and get regular trial updates by tuning in to the No Ordinary Lawsuit podcast here.

Lastly, if you have the means, click here to make a donation to Our Children’s Trust, the nonprofit organization that supports our lawsuit and many others like it around the country.

America, Compromised: ... corruption in words small enough for the Supreme Court to understand

from Boing Boing:

Lawrence Lessig was once best-known as the special master in the Microsoft Antitrust Case, then he was best known as the co-founder of Creative Commons, then as a fire-breathing corruption fighter: in America, Compromised, a long essay (or short nonfiction book), Lessig proposes as lucid and devastating a theory of corruption as you'll ever find, a theory whose explanatory power makes today's terrifying news cycle make sense -- and a theory that demands action.

For decades, America has been undoing the great work of history's anti-corruption movements, allowing the wealthy to intervene directly in politics, creating political outcomes that increase their wealth -- lather, rinse repeat.

The courts and their ideological backers -- the Chicago School economists who used shitty math to prove that greed is good and that corruption consists solely of direct quid-pro-quo bribery -- have served as enablers and even cheerleaders for this new Gilded Age, celebrating anonymous political cash contributions as a form of speech protected under the First Amendment and arguing that the Framers of the Constitution would have agreed wholeheartedly with them.

Lessig walks a fine line between academic and activist as he rebuts this argument, drawing on the research produced by the fellows at the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, an interdisciplinary corruption-study center he founded at Harvard and then turning to the rhetoric that made him such an inspirational figure in the Free Culture movement.

Lessig lays out the historic case for the Framers' understanding of corruption as a systemic phenomenon, in which the structure of institutions demand that even the best, most moral people sacrifice their principles to thrive (or just survive) -- a conception at long odds with the Chicago School orthodoxy and the think tanks and ruling elites that back it.

From this historic perspective, Lessig painstakingly builds up an argument about how inequality has fueled corruption, which has fueled inequality -- and how the bankrupt ideology of the Chicago School corrupted every institution, forcing each of us to make one tiny compromise after another, until we arrive at the present moment.

Lessig's use of case-studies alternated with broad statistical and political analysis flips back and forth from the microcosmic to the macrocosmic, from individuals and institutions to the whole society and back again, in a story that is as compelling as it is infuriating.

Lessig is well-known for having formulated the "four forces" theory of social change: that the world is moved by markets (what is profitable), norms (what is considered ethical), code (what is technically possible) and laws (what is legal). In his final section, he presents a set of prescriptions touching on all four factors, from the discussions we need to have with one another about these issues (norms) to the tools that would help us hold the powerful to account (code) to the policies that would reverse the damage (laws) to the kinds of businesses and nonprofits that could help us make a better world (markets). In a moment when the monopolism of Big Tech is replicating itself in every sector from energy to aviation to prisons to finance, these prescriptions are both reasonable and compelling.

This is a short book, but it's full of very big ideas. Lessig's dual identities of "scholar" and "activist" have never been so perfectly merged.

America, Compromised [Lawrence Lessig/University of Chicago]

MY RULES comment

View this post on Instagram

In November of 1982 i published MY RULES, this "photozine" myself, they call it D.I.Y. now, but truth is thats the only choice we had then, and in the end we are all much better for it. We had to teach ourselves how to do things and make things happen on our own. None of the lazy ass slacker, type it in google to figure it out bull shit (not that that can't be put to good use, because of course it can, but its so damn easy, and any neuroscientist will tell you, easy shit doesn't stimulate the brain the way difficult things do... Jus sayin'). By actually talking to people not texting or speaking on message boards, by socializing FACE TO FACE motherfuckers, making phone calls and having conversations in REAL TIME WHEN SPOKEN TO not at your leisure when you feel like it or have the time to think of something witty to say, i think of it as LIVING IN REAL TIME, getting shit done, takin' care of business, workin' your hustle... No one had printers in there homes, NO ONE, you'd have to create pages on graph paper (thats an actual sheet of paper with lines preprinted on it), make "half-tones" of photographs and art, paste them on a page, titles would been hand glued or waxed onto a page one letter at a time, text would be taken from a typewriter or sent out to a typesetter who would let you pick one of a few fonts for a price, and if you wanted "different" fonts you'd pay a lot more and have to find a type house that did it even... Luckily for printing i was able to call on my bro's at Thrasher who i figured owed me a favor pr two, bringing them some credibility coming from "SkateBoarder" after "Action Now" folded... Anyway, i got ad's from a few friends who had record companies to help pay for the printing, Thrasher got thier ad in trade for letting me use their facilities up in the San Fransisco ship yard where they operated from all the years i worked with them. SST didnt pay for theirs in cash, Black Flag's Van is what travelled with me and roadie Davo over 500 miles to bring the 10,000 zines back to my room at my moms house just south of Olympic blvd., stacked more than six feet high they filled up most of my room in boxes of 200 copies. Continued on next post...

A post shared by glen E. friedman Ⓥ (@glenefriedman) on Feb 15, 2016 at 9:28am PST

This is part 2/3:
Before i went to print i told everyone that this would be "The One and Only Issue". Flipside said they were printing around 4000 at the time, and Maximum Rock'N'Roll said they were printing between 2,500 and 3,500 at the time (they were by far the biggest Punk Fanzines at the time), Thrasher, which at that moment was the ONLY national skateboard magazine (but only B&W photos) told me the were doing 20,000... So i figured, being a one time thing, it'd be cool if i did 10,000, i had confidence the national & worldwide punk scene (there were pockets of punks all over the globe in major cities) would be into it. It wasn't until we were at the bindery, getting the zines all cut, trimmed, collated, & stapled together, that i found out the truth regarding Thrashers numbers by accident... The binder, whom Thrasher put me on to, asked me, "how many copies total you got here?" I said "half of what Thrasher does" he said "this looks like a lot more than that!" And then he told me they usually printed only around 6,000 copies a month, HAAAAA! I couldn't believe it, and here i am with 10,000, more than they ever did! Oh well... It cost me about .30¢ each to print, i wholesaled them for $1.00 to record distributors and magazine stands and record stores, the cover price was $2.00 the ads paid for about half the printing and the other $1500. was outa my own savings account, (no fucking kickstarter bullshit, its DIY!) i shipped them via UPS & USPO as well as drove many to distributors & records stores myself, and made all the calls to sell & collect myself. Every dot on every page i put there on purpose or by accident, myself or by Kevin Thatcher (Thrasher original Editor who gave me invaluable assistance in creating & cutting & pasting all my photos & ideas onto the page. My first solo homemade publication! Sold 8,000 copies in the first two years all over the country and mail orders came to me from over a dozen countries world wide, Yugoslavia and Chile being two of the farthest and most impressive to me, the currency sent in envelops from all over, much of it i would never trade in (some i still have & put in the collage in the MY RULES book endsheets)..

This is part three of three of the story...
The last two thousand trickled out over the following 8 years or so, and now a days some of my last few N.O.S. go for over $300 a pop, on eBay you can find them at different times for as little as $30 and as much as $399 just depends on the timing... Anyway, theres my day off sermon, hope you liked it