#ReOccupy
Tactical Briefing #8
Hey all you jazz players and re-occupiers out there,
Imagine this: It’s midnight, November 3rd. Every American’s fingernails are gnawed to the quick. Trump holds a razor-thin lead. If the counting stopped here, he’d eke out a win of the popular vote.
If Trump tries to steal the election, what will you do? What role are you prepared to play in this historic showdown?
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Adbusters #151
Siege on the White House
Find out more about the #WhiteHouseSiege in this landmark issue . . . and be a part of history.
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History Weeps: The Ugliness of Trump's America
The first presidential debate of the 2020 election was possibly the ugliest in the tradition's 60-year existence. It marked the latest of many low points on the sad descent into indecency, untruth, and the abandonment of the American people that began more than four years ago with Donald Trump's self-interested bid for the presidency. During last night's debate, the electorate was abused for 90 minutes as it witnessed a truly lamentable spectacle: what quickly became a schoolyard-fight between two vastly different men, each vying against the other not only for the highest of offices but for nearly polar-opposite visions of the country's future. It was a shameful occasion punctuating a shameful period in the United State's fraught history, marked foremost by a retreat from even the pretense of dignity into the shadows of iniquity. The Republic's 250-year rise to global hegemony is assuredly at a close; its rapid decline and fall is now underway. Behold the American experiment as it collapses under the weight of its own promise.
Big Corruption at the Big Banks
Between 1999 and 2017, the world's biggest banks filed over 2,000 "suspicious activity reports" with American federal regulators. The reports relate to the circulation of dirty money at the hands of drug traffickers, corrupt politicians, and suspected terrorists. But despite the reports, the banks — which include the likes of HSBC, JPMorgan Chase, and Donald Trump's main lender, Deutsche Bank — turned a blind eye, processing more than $2 trillion–worth of legally questionable transactions anyway. What was long suspected has now been shown to be true. It seems that financing crime, from fraud to drug peddling to terrorism, is a welcome interest, and its perpetrators are worthy customers at some of the most powerful financial institutions across the globe. But we won't have any kind of future on this planet unless we bring tax-evaders, corrupt bankers and dirty-money merchants to justice. It's time for big finance to sever its criminal ties . . . and render unto the People that which is rightly ours.
Pandemics and plagues have a way of shifting the course of history
... and not always in a manner immediately evident to the survivors. In the 14th Century, the Black Death killed close to half of Europe’s population. A scarcity of labor led to increased wages. Rising expectations culminated in the Peasants Revolt of 1381, an inflection point that marked the beginning of the end of the feudal order that had dominated medieval Europe for a thousand years.
The COVID pandemic will be remembered as such a moment in history, a seminal event whose significance will unfold only in the wake of the crisis. It will mark this era much as the 1914 assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, the stock market crash of 1929, and the 1933 ascent of Adolf Hitler became fundamental benchmarks of the last century, all harbingers of greater and more consequential outcomes.
BlackSpot Collective
Today we are 13,000 strong. Tomorrow we will be 100,000. The day after next, we could amass a billion people — enough to spark a world revolution in how we live, love and think.
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ADBUSTERS #151
Find out more about the #WhiteHouseSiege in this landmark issue . . . and be a part of history. It all starts on September 17th.
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Belarus
On Monday, masked men snatched Belarusian opposition figure Maria Kolesnikova off the streets of Minsk, stuffed her into an unmarked minivan, and drove her to the southern border. After arriving around 4am Tuesday morning, she ripped up her passport; as a result, border guards would not allow her to be sent across into Ukraine. Kolesnikova's kidnapping comes off the back of mass gatherings Sunday, when 100,000 marched through the streets of Minsk to President Lukashenko’s residence. Dressed in the nation's pre–Soviet era colors and waving flowers in the air, protestors have been disputing the legitimacy of last month's election for over four weeks. In place of striking journalists at Belarus' state news network, Putin has sent in personnel from Kremlin-funded broadcaster RT to prop up Lukashenko’s brutal regime. Brussels, London, Washington and Ottawa have made tepid calls for the preservation of democracy. The fate of the country hangs in the balance.
Circulating on social media:
"Footage of an Israeli soldier kneeling, George Floyd–style, on the neck of a Palestenian senior protesting in the West Bank."
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#BLM Street
I sensed then, and this belief would grow as the years went on, that the lifeblood of the movement was not going to be the spokesmen – the schooled, sophisticated, savvy upper crust who might be best at speechmaking and press conferences. They would be the leaders, naturally, but it was going to be the tens of thousands of faceless, nameless, anonymous men, women and children – men like my father, women like my mother, children like the boy I had been – who were going to rise like an irresistible army as this movement for civil rights took shape.
— John Lewis, from his autobiography, Walking with the Wind
David Graeber,
David Graeber, the anarchist intellectual whose early efforts in Zuccotti Park made Occupy Wall Street an era-defining movement, died Wednesday. He was 59.
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#WhiteHouseSiege Tactical Briefing #3
Trump is trying to steal the election . . . it’s got many of us pretty rattled . . . and things could turn very ugly very quickly as November 3rd approaches. Lawyers are already in court, mounting pre-emptive strikes and preparing for the scorched-earth scenarios likely to come.
Meanwhile white supremacists are waiting in the wings, spoiling for a violent showdown.
#WhiteHouseSiege Tactical Briefing #2
Time is short. Shall we rely on William Barr to interpret the law justly, in the interest of all Americans? On the police or military to drag Trump from the White House when he loses? On the grace and civility of the alt-right hordes and white supremacists? Of course not.
By now it’s clear that Trump and his sycophants will do anything to prevent Joe Biden from taking office, including crippling the Postal Service. There is no limit to their cynicism, no end to their corruption.
#WhiteHouseSiege Tactical Briefing #1
It’s been nine years since we set off the political earthquake of #OccupyWallStreet, laying siege to NYC’s Zuccotti Park and inspiring thousands of similar protests around the world.
The Occupy anniversary arrives September 17th, 2020. And it may be the perfect day to trigger another global big-bang moment — a massive collective action of the sweetest kind of disobedience.
You are Stuck.
Dear people of the Adbusters Media Foundation,
We are Afra van den Hoogen, Mila Vuckovic and Nick Verkroost; three first year students of the Audiovisual Media-studies at the University of the Arts in Utrecht, The Netherlands.
Last semester we followed a subject about 'culture jamming', for which we created a poster about this subject.
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Co-opted by Capitalism
Earth Day’s fiftieth anniversary, which fell on April 22, marked a strange celebration for climate-change deniers. Breitbart News, the notorious mouthpiece of the alt-right, published an article that day under the headline “Michael Moore–backed ‘Planet of the Humans’ Takes Apart the Left’s Green Energy Scams.” The following day James Delingpole, who once wrote in The Telegraph that “it would be nice to think one day that there would be a Climate Nuremberg” for any and all “who talked up the global warming scare,” tweeted that Moore was his “new hero.”
Read MoreFar-right media are after us. Here’s what we think of them.
The inevitable has happened: Adbusters has been caught up in the far-right’s hysterical, post-truth fantasia. To understand how the rabid right turns fact into fraud, abandoning even the pretense of truthfulness, read on. You are about to witness an example of how information is forced through the ideological meatgrinder, emerging out the other side as inflammatory delusion.
Read MoreDigital Hyper Abstraction
While earlier forms of money consisted of anything from sea shells to sheep, coins made of gold and silver gradually emerged as the most practical means of exchange and for the storing of value.
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