Tag Archives: Protests & Civil Unrest
Marxists Explain Freedoms In Socialism To Former Soviet Citizen
Trotsky Fan Lectures Former Soviet Citizen on Wonders of “Socialist Alternatives” to Capitalism
***
***
Walmart Employees Threaten Black Friday Strike
It’s funny. I’m actually in Ukraine as an ex-pat. Many people in this country save money for years, and stand in lines for many hours to get permission to go to the US and work at Walmart-like jobs. When they succeed in doing so, they are grateful and their friends are envious.
How much do these clowns think they deserve for wrangling shopping carts and putting boxes onto shelves????
These guys are privileged, ungrateful and under-educated. Their rising political power makes me very happy to have chosen life as an ex-pat.
If you take almost any human being from any point in the history of man and put him in the middle of Walmart, and express the prices to him in terms of hours of unskilled, manual labor, he will think he arrived in heaven! But instead of praising this modern miracle of capitalism, we condemn it, because the people who CHOSE to work there want more money and better conditions.
***
At least they didn’t have one of the morbidly obese employees deliver the line about not having enough to eat:
Chinese Protesters Chant “Down With US Imperialists”, Attack Car Of US Ambassador In Beijing
Elsewhere, the US foreign department may have to promptly find an anti-Buddhist hate tape made in the US, because otherwise the attack of the US ambassador Gary Locke’s car in Beijing may have to be explained using good old fashioned simmering hatred and anti-American sentiment without an actual inflamatory event.
(Read more)
Police State in California
Expect more of this in the U.S.S.A.
***
Israeli Soldier Holds Hunger Strike in Solidarity With Palestinians in Detention
An Israeli Defense Forces soldier has begun a hunger strike to show solidarity with Palestinian administrative detainees.
The soldier, Yaniv Mazor, is currently in military prison for refusing to serve in part of an “occupation army.”
Ann Harrison of Amnesty International has said, “Israel has used its system of administrative detention – intended as an exceptional measure against people posing an extreme and imminent danger to security – to trample on the human rights of detainees for decades. It is a relic that should be put out to pasture.” (Read more)
Alice Walker rejects Israeli translation of book
American writer Alice Walker won’t let an Israeli publisher release a new Hebrew edition of her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, “The Color Purple,” saying she objects to Israel’s treatment of the Palestinian people.
Walker, an ardent pro-Palestinian activist, said in a letter to Yediot Books that Israel practices “apartheid” and must change its policies before her works can be published there.
“I would so like knowing my books are read by the people of your country, especially by the young and by the brave Israeli activists (Jewish and Palestinian) for justice and peace I have had the joy of working beside,” she wrote in the letter, obtained by The Associated Press. “I am hopeful that one day, maybe soon, this may happen. But now is not the time.” (Read more)
Shanghai Composite Index Reflects Tienanmen Square massacre – Censored by China
The Shanghai Composite Index was down 64.89 on the anniversary of the massacre, which occurred on June 4, 1989.
Written in the American style, the date of Tiananmen Square was 6/4/89.
The WSJ also notes that the days opening was 2,346.98, which seems to refer to 23, and the date reversed.
Predictably, of course, searches for Shanghai Composite Index were banned on Weibo within hours. (Read more)
China Forbids International Tourism to Tibet Indefinitely
In a matter of days, the number of expected foreign visitors to Tibet has gone from millions to zero.
Chinese authorities alerted foreign travel agencies Tuesday that they would no longer be issuing entry permits to Tibet, the latest in a series of regulations being put on travelers to Tibet. The announcement follows the self-immolation of two Tibetans last week.
Tibet is no stranger to Chinese interference in its tourism industry. Tibet’s failed rebellion in March 1959 and the event’s annual memorial on National Uprising Day has chronically put the region at odds with the People’s Republic of China. In 2008, protests after National Uprising Day turned into riots that were met with violence by PRC forces. The Chinese government temporarily closed Tibet to foreign visitors. That is a now-annual practice in March, and during other national events significant to the Chinese government. (Read more)
May Day “Protesters”
May Day Protester Wants More Government
Former Soviet Citizen Confronts OWS Socialists
Tibet Self-Immolation Wave Among History’s Biggest
Dozens of Tibetans have set themselves on fire over the past year to protest Chinese rule, sometimes drinking kerosene to make the flames explode from within, in one of the biggest waves of political self-immolations in recent history.
But the stunning protests are going largely unnoticed in the wider world – due in part to a smothering Chinese security crackdown in the region that prevents journalists from covering them. (Read more)
Growing Antitax Movement Shows Irish Stoicism Wearing Thin
Throughout the European financial crisis, Ireland has won plaudits for the way it has handled austerity. But growth has stalled here once again, and an incipient tax revolt is being taken as a sign that even this most stoic of nations is becoming fed up.
Urged on by promoters of a tax boycott, fully 85 percent of Irish homeowners have yet to pay a $130 property tax that is due March 31. The latest official figures show that just 225,000 property owners out of 1.6 million have paid a total of $29 million — well short of the more than $200 million the government was planning to raise to help support public services.
The government has so far dismissed talk that the boycott is gathering strength, saying the Irish are notorious procrastinators on money matters.
“The Irish people are law-abiding citizens and will pay the charge before March 31,” a government spokesman said. “We are ready to cope with a late surge — Irish people always tend to leave it to the last minute to pay their bills.”
The boycott’s organizers see it differently. (Read more)