July 2020 Honduras Coup Update (tags)
This July 2020 in Honduras we saw many killings and disappearances against activists and we saw many COVID-19 deaths including of a political prisoner, an organiser, health care workers and jorunalists. Living under a dictatorship regime where global and national capital, together with regime leaders, continue to profit through laundering and exploiting the people and the land – when you put a pandemic into that equation it’s a disaster, as we can see in Honduras. Government offers no protection for its poor majority, the money officially designated for healthcare doesn’t translate into actual healthcare, and there is no welfare to enable people to stay home, but the military is controlling the streets and spreading the illness. Communities and organisations continue to campaign for the ‘Where is the money?’ campaign, with voices reverberating from zoom conferences, to managing to stage large letters across highways, printing the question on roads for drivers to see, and on walls for passers-by – people must have found holes in the militarisation. They paint their pained words about losing increasing numbers of fellow Hondurans to death from COVID-19, lives lost due to government’s greed and lies. This July 2020 we saw many attacks against people and organisers, and we continue to see that on the other hand, big businesses that don’t even have environmental permits are free to move around, operate, and act in ways that are harmful to people and environment. And similar to discourse familiar to all of us worldwide about balancing the economy over staying home, this regime, like others, is broadcasting that the nation only has a chance of surviving the pandemic, if ‘development (mega) projects’ of mining, logging, energy etc go ahead and if people also put up with low wages (not to mention threats, killings, and arrests to impose opposed projects) so that large profits can be made from them. International development finance organisations also continue to ignore the violence meted out by capital and by the regime and fuel this fire, passing loans to the regime and ignoring cries from communities who dream of a different kind of ‘development’. https://sydneywithhonduras.wordpress.com/2020/08/30/july-2020-honduras-coup-and-pandemic-update/
Imagining the Post-Occupy Social Movement (tags)
If one were to honestly assess Occupy's current strengths and weaknesses as a movement, confusion must be the inevitable result.
Jrnal of Aesthetics & Protest- editorial towards occupying everything (tags)
Issue 8 of the Journal of Aesthetics & Protest is out. Our forward, recently written but conceived in the afterglow of the 2009/2010 UC occupations looks into the broad strategy of occupying everything.
A Brief Explanation of the CPE, the November riots, and French politics in general (tags)
The riots in French suburbs have always been detonated by police violence. The first of these riots happened in Lyon's suburbs, in Vaulx-en-Velin, a working class hub with Renault factories. Monstrous urbanisation, tens of thousands of workers who became jobless after corporate downsizing in the 1970s, inexistent public infrastructures, stigmatisation against people of foreign origin, schools that only proposed dead ends, heroin for the young and alcohol for their parents; voila the situation of this peripheral city forgotten by all until police violence led to the death of a young man. Police violence triggered this riot in 1990, and those that followed, all the way up to those of November 2005...