Spain's 'Indignados' and the Globalization of Dissent

Picture: Kasama Project Video Before Adbusters called on activists to Occupy Wall Street, thousands of Spaniards set up camp in Madrid’s iconic Puerta del Sol, and in public squares across the country. Now, as the occupy movement around the U.S. sets its sights on the longer term struggle for social and economic justice with movements like Take Back the Land and Occupy Our Homes, the Spanish experience has valuable lessons to offer what is now a globalized popular front. © The Real News Network.

The World War on Democracy

Picture: reunion.la1ere.fr John Pilger - Lisette Talate died the other day. I remember a wiry, fiercely intelligent woman who masked her grief with a determination that was a presence. She was the embodiment of people's resistance to the war on democracy. I first glimpsed her in a 1950s Colonial Office film about the Chagos islanders, a tiny creole nation located midway between Africa and Asia in the Indian Ocean. The camera panned across thriving villages, a church, a school, a hospital, set in a phenomenon of natural beauty and...

From Davos to Dystopia

Picture: blog.livemint.com Ben Zala - Not long ago the World Economic Forum (WEF) found itself in the sights of the global economic justice movement. At the turn of the last century, before anyone was “occupying” public spaces in protest at the growing inequalities between the top strata of society and the rest, a broad global coalition of environment, development, and peace activists were targeting the public meetings of major institutions such as the WTO, the IMF, and the G8. In September 2000, activists shut down...

Time for South Africans to Take the BDS Campaign Seriously

Picture: Takver/Flickr Anna Majavu - The launch of a new handbook containing details of Israeli companies to be targeted as part of a boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) campaign has sent ripples of excitement through the global Palestine solidarity movement. “Targeting Israeli Apartheid”, published by Corporate Watch is a mammoth piece of research detailing most Israeli companies operating anywhere in the world, and how trade with those companies supports the state of Israel. The BDS movement became a...

'Internet Censorship Affects Everybody': The Global Struggle for Online Freedom

Picture: Democracy Now! Video On Wednesday 18 January 2012, Wikipedia and many other prominent websites are shutting down for the day in protest of a new piece of American legislation that seeks to limit online piracy. The legislation, of course, has global implications. Activist for online freedom, Rebecca MacKinnon, talks to Democracy Now! about the global struggle for Internet freedom. "If we want democracy to survive in the internet age, we really need to work to make sure that the internet evolves in a...

Google Is Done

Video Venture capitalist, Roger McNamee notices a precipitous decline in Google's search business as a result of the iPhone and other mobile devices, which use apps to access the internet instead of the world wide web. "Because search is falling, I believe that we're being liberated," says McNamee. McNamee believe that Google is strategically in a very difficult situation. They have been too successful and the result of their success has been a pollution of their product. Over the...