CIO HEROES!!
Edward Snowden!
Edward Snowden is an American hero who has significantly raised public awareness about the United States' government's threat to global freedom by using extreme and illegal measures of surveillance.
Time Magazine Dec 5 2011 issue: Will be Censored in the United States.
Posted in CAPITALISM, CENSORSHIP, EVIL CORPORATIONS, MEDIA
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Electronic Frontier Foundation
One cannot deny that movements around the world are being shaped by the use of technology.
Do you realize how many activists put their lives on the line using social media and technology to point out the injustices of Governments and Corporations around the world? And the fact that giant technology corporations (such as Microsoft) are in cahoots with certain Governments around the world in order to weed out the outspoken? (WikiLeaks?)
So the story goes (and I cannot name names) A feminist activist making strides in attempting to abolish the injustices of women and girls in Burma, putting her life on the line daily and being watched by the government, comes to the Bay Area. She comes to the Bay Area to present the work she’s doing on the ground there in Burma and to gather support here in the states. Feminist activist happens to connect with techie geek who believes in privacy and does not trust huge tech corps and certain foreign governments. She uses her gmail account to send a message. Techie traces the route of her message. Sure enough – her message goes directly to China – before it reaches the destination. Believable? yes. I wouldn’t doubt each one of us (CIO core group) are being monitored due to the nature of information being shared on this blog/site.
This is where EFF comes in. Continue reading
Posted in CENSORSHIP, DEMOCRACY, EVIL CORPORATIONS, HUMAN RIGHTS ABUSES, Technology
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Thrive!
Since CIO! launched this website in July 2010 we’ve pretty much used our “blog” as an archive of posts from other sources. However, beginning this week we’re trying something different – we’re actually going to blog! So please be forewarned – this might be a little rickety to start … but at least we’re trying.
I finally watched this movie Thrive last weekend. It has a super cheesy interface – reminds me of The Secret – but I found some of its analysis interesting – I think it’s worth checking out, at least for its cult value!
I was hoping to write something more in depth …. but it’s getting late … next week.
Posted in ARTISTS/ACTIONS, CAPITALISM
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Judith Butler on OWS
Composite Remarks, by Judith Butler
Occupy Wall Street and Occupy Washington Square, October 23, 2011
I came here to lend support and offer my solidarity for this unprecedented display of popular and democratic will. People have asked, so what are the demands that all these people are making? Either, they say, there are no demands, and that leaves your critics confused. Or they say: that demands for social equality and economic justice are impossible demands. And impossible demands are just not “practical.” But we disagree. If hope is an impossible demand, then we demand the impossible. If the right to shelter, food, and employment are impossible demands, then we demand the impossible. If it is impossible to demand that those who profit from the recession redistibute their wealth and cease their greed, then yes, we demand the impossible. Of course the list of demands is long. We object to the monopolization of wealth, we object to making working populations disposable, we object to the privatization of education when education is a public good, when we support the right to education. We oppose the billions spent on wars, we oppose the expanding number of the poor, we rage against the banks that push people out of their homes, the lack of health care for increasing numbers of people; we object to economic racism, and call for its end. None of these demands are up for arbitration.
It matters that as bodies we arrive together in public, that we are assembling in public; we are coming together as bodies in alliance in the street and in the square. As bodies we suffer, we require shelter and food, and as bodies we require one another and desire one another. So this is a politics of the public body, the requirements of the body, its movement and voice. We would not be here if elected officials were representing the popular will. We stand apart from the electoral process and its complicities with exploitation. We sit and stand and move and speak, as we can, as the popular will, the one that electoral democracy has forgotten and abandoned. But we are here, and remain here, enacting the phrase, “we the people.”
Time Banking: an alternate solution?
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Time Banking: An Idea Whose Time Has Come?
Why let the availability of money determine the range of the possible? Time banks are taking off, in ways you never expected.
by Edgar Cahn
posted Nov 17, 2011
Photo courtesy of Michigan Municipal League
original article can be found here: yesmagazine
Ten years ago, Susan Dentzler of NPR was retained by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to investigate whether time banking (a system that lets people swap time and skill instead of money) was “a concept whose time was coming—or merely a fringe idea.” Her response:
“[T]ime dollars could be to long-term care what windmills and solar panels are to the nation’s energy supply: a small, unconventional, even noble way of serving the few, but nothing to be relied upon to meet the needs of the masses.”
Ten years later, though solar panels and windmills have moved far from the fringe, time banking has remained a relatively small-scale endeavor. But for a number of reasons, the idea may be poised to become more mainstream.
Why Time Banks?
Twenty-five years ago, we started the first experiments with a different kind of money that provided a new way to link untapped community capacity to unmet needs. Because the market fails to value or reward many types of critical work—the work of raising healthy children, building strong families, revitalizing neighborhoods, preserving the environment, advancing social justice and democracy—we felt there should be other ways than market price to place a value on people’s time. There had to be a way to honor, record, and reward that kind of work.
Long before the Occupy Wall Street movement, the Time Bank movement represented a determination to take a stand for a more equitable, inclusive economic order. We wanted to demonstrate that a different kind of money could exist alongside the dollar, generating a different set of exchange transactions. We believed it could generate positive community-building efforts that might remedy or prevent the negative externalities created by the relentless pursuit of monetary profit.
Posted in RESOURCES, SOLUTIONS, Time Banking
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Occupy Everywhere: Michael Moore, Naomi Klein on Next Steps for the Movement Against Corporate Power
Posted in CAPITALISM, MEDIA, OCCUPY ALL STREETS!, PROTESTS, SOLUTIONS
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Naomi Wolf’s ‘Shocking Truth’ About the ‘Occupy Crackdowns’ Offers Anything but the Truth
By Joshua Holland
AlterNet
There has been a flurry of speculation surrounding various reports suggesting that a “coordinated,” nationwide crack-down on the Occupy Movement is underway. The problem with these stories lies in the fact that the word “coordinated” is too vague to offer any analytic value.
The difference between local officials talking to each other — or federal law enforcement agencies advising them on what they see as “best practices” for evicting local occupations — and some unseen hand directing, incentivizing or coercing municipalities to do so when they would not otherwise be so inclined is not a minor one. It’s not a matter of semantics or a distinction without difference. As I wrote recently, “if federal authorities were ordering cities to crack down on their local occupations in a concerted effort to wipe out a movement that has spread like wildfire across the country, that would indeed be a huge, and hugely troubling story. In the United States, policing protests is a local matter, and law enforcement agencies must remain accountable for their actions to local officials. Local government’s autonomy in this regard is an important principle.”
Posted in CAPITALISM, MEDIA
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The shocking truth about the crackdown on Occupy
By Naomi Wolf
The Guardian
The violent police assaults across the US are no coincidence. Occupy has touched the third rail of our political class’s venality.
US citizens of all political persuasions are still reeling from images of unparallelled police brutality in a coordinated crackdown against peaceful OWS protesters in cities across the nation this past week. An elderly woman was pepper-sprayed in the face; the scene of unresisting, supine students at UC Davis being pepper-sprayed by phalanxes of riot police went viral online; images proliferated of young women – targeted seemingly for their gender – screaming, dragged by the hair by police in riot gear; and the pictures of a young man, stunned and bleeding profusely from the head, emerged in the record of the middle-of-the-night clearing of Zuccotti Park.
But just when Americans thought we had the picture – was this crazy police and mayoral overkill, on a municipal level, in many different cities? – the picture darkened. The National Union of Journalists and the Committee to Protect Journalists issued a Freedom of Information Act request to investigate possible federal involvement with law enforcement practices that appeared to target journalists. The New York Times reported that “New York cops have arrested, punched, whacked, shoved to the ground and tossed a barrier at reporters and photographers” covering protests. Reporters were asked by NYPD to raise their hands to prove they had credentials: when many dutifully did so, they were taken, upon threat of arrest, away from the story they were covering, and penned far from the site in which the news was unfolding. Other reporters wearing press passes were arrested and roughed up by cops, after being – falsely – informed by police that “It is illegal to take pictures on the sidewalk.”
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99% Project by Megan Wilson
Hey folks – this is a new project I’ve launched. Please help spread the word! I’ll be starting a Kickstarter soon to raise funds to support the 99% and put some unemployed artists & sign painters back to work. Also, if you have additional languages that you could provide translation for – it would be super appreciated!
Big THANKS to translators and translator connectors: Eliza Barrios, Carolyn Castaño, Sarita Ahuja, Andre Ambrus, Srinivas Kuruganti, Kevin Chen, Violeta Krasnić, Peter Haas, Taraneh Hemami, Juan Caguicla, Nano Warsono, Christine Ahn, Ramon Murrillo, and Jake Thompson.
99%
99% is a public art/street art project that speaks to the need for a fundamental shift in the status quo approach to current economic models, labor, the environment, human rights, and the health and wellbeing of all. In support of the OCCUPY! movement, I am making a series of hand painted signs (1000 to start) with the statement “We Are The 99%” in different languages (so far I have English, Spanish, Chinese, Korean, Arabic, Farsi, Hindi, Gujarati, Telugu, Hebrew, Hungarian, German, Roma, Serbian/ Bosnian/ Croatian, Russian, Tagalog, Bahasa Indonesian, Thai, Japanese, French, Italian, Czech, Slovakian, Polish, Dutch, Danish, Yiddish, Haitian, Swahili, Georgian, Norwegian, Swedish, Finnish, Greek, Turkish, Vietnamese, Tamil, Armenian, Urdu, Estonian, Khmer, Burmese, Shoshone, Cherokee, and Sioux).
The signs all have bold black text on a color background painted on ¼” plywood in varying sizes. These are being distributed initially in San Francisco and Oakland to:
1. OccupySF and Occupy Oakland participants to be used at marches and protests – participants will be asked to display the signs in their home windows and/or tents when not in use.
2. Folks who might not have time to participate in the actual occupation, but want to lend support – to place in their windows in solidarity of the movement.
3. Small businesses to place in their windows in support and solidarity of the movement.
I am working to raise the funds to employ assistants (artists/sign painters who are currently unemployed) at $20/hour (a livable wage in the Bay Area) to help create and distribute the signs.
If the project is successful in the Bay Area, I will work to expand it to additional cities around the county and ultimately around the globe.
Until our voices are heard, the call for revolution will grow louder!
WE ARE THE 99% ARTISTS!
Posted in ARTISTS/ACTIONS, CAPITALISM, SOLUTIONS, WE ARE THE 99%
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