Display until June 1, 2012
$8.95 May/June 2012 Vol.20 No.3
Regime Change in America
(A1) Front Cover US.indd 2
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Janine Gordon
(B1) Intro.indd 4
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MOVE YOUR MONEY PLAY KILLCAP
THE SENSELESS BEAUTY OF REBELLION
OCCUPY MEDIA, MEGACORPS, CAMPUSES, BANKS
MAY 18 GLOBAL #LAUGHRIOT
SWARM CHICAGO AND RETAKE THE SQUARES
OCCUPY SQUADS OCCUPY YOURSELF
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12-03-16 3:09 PM
Celsa Dockstader from Inside Out | Occupy Oakland
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Looking out upon the withered American Dream, many of us feel a deep sense of betrayal. Unemployment, financial insecurity, and lifelong enslavement to debt are just the tip of the iceberg. We don't want to merely fix the growth machine and bring profit and product to every corner of the earth. We want to fundamentally change the course of civilization. The American Dream betrayed even those who achieved it, lonely in their overtime careers and their McMansions, narcotized to the ongoing ruination of nature and culture but aching because of it, endlessly consuming and accumulating to quell the insistent voice: “I wasn't put here on Earth to sell product.” “I wasn't put here on Earth to increase market share.” “I wasn't put here on Earth to make numbers grow.”
We protest not only at our exclusion from the American Dream; we protest at its bleakness. If it cannot include everyone on Earth, every ecosystem and bioregion, every people and culture in its richness; if the wealth of one must be the debt of another; if it entails sweatshops and underclasses and fracking and all the rest of the ugliness our system has created, then we want none of it. No one deserves to live in a world built upon the degradation of human beings, forests, waters, and the rest of our living planet. Speaking to our brethren on Wall Street: No one deserves to spend their lives playing with numbers while the world burns. Ultimately, we are protesting not only on behalf of the 99% left behind but on behalf of the 1% as well. We have no enemies. We want everyone to wake up to the beauty of what we can create. Charles Eisenstein
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12-03-19 5:46 PM
Celsa Dockstader from Inside Out | Occupy Oakland
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THE POWER OF AUTONOMOUS SPACES Occupy catalyzed a global movement by creating autonomous spaces in hundreds of cities. This tactic of resistance was new to many North American activists, but it has a long history that hints at the movement’s next steps.
Christian Weber, Adoration, from the series Speak + Spell
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Perhaps the most notable example in history of autonomous spaces is the self-governing Paris Commune of 1871, which was forcibly broken up after only a few months. In the Paris of 1968 a section of the city was occupied by students and renamed the Heroic Vietnam Quarter. A contemporary example can be seen in the Chiapas region of Mexico – where the Zapatistas have established autonomous communities, in turn acting as a continuous inspiration to activists across the world.
An important example of the use of autonomous space in Britain began in February 1992, when a group of gypsies decided to pitch tents on the proposed site of a new motorway. They were soon joined by environmental activists. Together they remained there for the next ten months. When campaigners began making preparations for a similar initiative at another site in the south of England the government got scared and announced that their planned road project there would not be going ahead. Compelled by that momentum, campaigners kept building the movement and organized protest camps elsewhere. Tacticians borrowed ideas from anti-logging activists in North America and Australia such as lock-ons, ecotage and tripods (three poles attached together with a person at the top), and fused them with homegrown tactics suggested by parts of the climbing community to stretch both the wits and the budgets of the authorities in their efforts to remove them. Due to the heightened publicity and expense, the roads project became untenable. In 1996 the government decided to abandon its plans and ax plans for 77 new roads. The protesters’ efforts had paid off. Once again a feature of this movement was the autonomous spaces of the protest camps.
For two months in 1871, the working classes of Paris seized the city and established the Paris Commune.
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Reuters
Hot weather brings crowds to a swimming pool in Daying county of Suining.
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What does freedom of the individual mean in a country with 1.3 billion individuals? What does it mean to have human rights in a sea of humanity like that? Will China follow our model of democracy and adopt the kind of personal freedom agenda that we in the West have chased since the Enlightenment? And what about Planet Earth? What is a workable balance between collective stability and individual freedom in a world with seven billion and soon ten billion souls running around looking for salvation?
Reuters (C1) Versus.indd 19
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... Jammers, whatever we do this Spring, let’s float like butterflies and sting like bees! Let’s bend the G8 and NATO to our will with shock tactics and audacious culture jams that capture the imagination of the world. We may be far closer to a Global Spring than any of us has so far dared to imagine … for the wild, Culture Jammers HQ
Nick Whalen, nickwhalen.com
(E1) Occupy Harvard.indd 10
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from Touching 1000 People, Vancouver, 2003 by Diane Borsato Photo by Jessie Birch and Kim Munro for Recorder
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“A few people start breaking their old patterns, embracing what they love (and in the process discovering what they hate), daydreaming, questioning, rebelling. What happens naturally then, according to the revolutionary past, is a groundswell of support for this new way of being, with more and more people empowered to perform new gestures ‘unencumbered by history.’” Kalle Lasn, Culture Jam
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MAY 18
#LAUGHRIOT adbusters.org
(H1) Back Cover.indd 2
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