In Rome this week, thousands hit the streets against state-enforced austerity and for “home, income, dignity for all!” This cartoon is in solidarity with the thousands who braved horrific police violence, and in particular with the youth whose hand was blown off by a firecracker during a battle with police.
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Apparently, some kind of Worldwide Wave Of Action started last week, billed as a rekindling of the Occupy movement. Having covered at least half a dozen previous “international days of action”, my well-honed cynicism kicked into gear as I remembered how all the previous “worldwide” action days drew hundreds of thousands in cities outside the US — while inside the US, the turnouts could be generously described as pathetic.
The current “worldwide” Wave Of Action was no different, judging from what I was seeing on my Twitter feed. Cities in the UK and Europe turned out healthy numbers while in the meantime, in the US, I saw the usual sad smattering of thin, weak protests, with small veterans’ contingents and others gathering in places like the NYC Vietnam War Memorial and Zucotti Park, only to be chased off or arrested by police.
I was also somewhat less than inspired by the vagueness of their rhetoric and sloganeering. On Twitter I saw pronouncements like “movement of movements” and “bring your own goals”, with no mention of any specific issues, such as war and militarization, unemployment, state-enforced economic austerity, the destruction of civil liberties, or the US-instigated “revolution” in the Ukraine — just lots of lofty faux revolutionary hype and empty poetic slogans.
I won’t speak for the rest of the world, but in the US, the “Wave Of Action” was more like a “ripple of action”.
Oh, yeah — and, cupcakes.
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For the record, I own a smartphone; I have a grand total of one third-party app — Twitter — don’t let Facebook anywhere near my phone, and I sure as hell don’t waste time playing Angry Birds. So, I wasn’t exactly surprised to discover that the NSA was slurping smartphone users’ private information by taking advantage of the vulnerabilities of “leaky” apps, and that Angry Birds was apparently the worst offender of the lot.
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The past couple of weeks have seen many memorable moments in all the pomp and ceremony marking the passing of Nelson Mandela, but none as memorable as this indelible image of three world leaders keeping it classy at the Mandela memorial service last week.
And now, Mandela has finally been laid to rest in his ancestral village — and not a moment too soon, as I don’t know if I could’ve stood much more of the hypocritical spewage from the leaders of the nations who funded and armed the apartheid regime and conspired to keep Mandela imprisoned for nearly three decades.
Some of the most breathtaking spewage had to have come from that inimitable mass murderer and concentration camp operator, our very own Barack “Dronemeister” Obama:
“We will not likely see the likes of Nelson Mandela again. So it falls to us as best we can to forward the example that he set…”
President Sparkle Pony has actually said something truthful here, if only by accident. If the likes of Mandela were emerging today, he’d likely have made it onto Obama’s “Disposition Matrix” if he hasn’t already been smeared in a drone strike while he attended a friend’s wedding. Either that, or he might be rotting in Guantanamo right now.
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