Coverage of Blockupy Frankfurt

  • The Occupy garden before the Euro monument in Willy-Brandt Platz
  • Police unilaterally abandon all Blockupy personal exclusion orders
  • DIGITAL CAMERA
  • Administrative Court upholds Blockupy-ban
  • Boris Rhein, Hesse's Interior Minister, just stopped short of claiming Blockupy had a 45 minute strke capability.
  • Occupy Frankfurt
  • Europa-Kaputt
  • The Occupy Camp in Frankfurt, which authorities hope to clear out as part of their prevention of of Blockupy
  • Blockupy Frankfurt Banner

Elections in Greece and France

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1
11 May 2012
Let us forget everything they have taught us. Let us recommence from our dreams.

The Eight of May was the Fête de la Victoire in France. It was also the day of François Hollande’s first public appearance as president-elect. The right-wing Le Figaro featured photographs of ‘deux presidents sous l’Arc de Triomphe’, in which Sarkozy managed to look even more disgruntled than usual and Hollande looked as if he had just grasped a double-edge sword by the blade. The public holiday commemorates the surrender of Germany at the end of WWII and the defeat of fascism in most of the states of Europe – Spain and Portugal being the exceptions. It was an interesting day as left-wing newspapers like Libération, L’Humanité and Le Monde expressed concern about the rise of the neo-nazi Golden...
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Institutional Xenophobia against Immigrants in Spain

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0
8 May 2012
xenophobia by Steeve Dubois (remixed)

Faced with the difficulty of explaining how the image of immigrants has been constructed by the migratory policies in the majority of receiving countries (as certainly is the case in the USA and the EU), many of us have turned on more than one occasion to the metaphor borne of UIysses' strategy against Polifema in Song IX of the Odyssey: “My name is Nobody”. Indeed, in line with the purely instrumental view that is so characteristic of these migratory policies, immigrants (with a particular emphasis on illegal immigrants) are not simply forced to occupy the margins of society; instead their designated realm is a "non-space". This is the space reserved for "nobodies", since the gaze we cast (the gaze...
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Argentina’s Expropriation of Repsol’s YPF (A Reversal of Fortune): Understanding the Decolonial Turn in Latin America

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0
3 May 2012
Vultures

Far from being an implausible paradox, the difference between what is happening in Europe and in Latin America lies at the epicenter of a 500-year long farce: coloniality. In a monumental reversal of fortune, the peoples of Latin America are deconstructing coloniality from its core, while within Europe this seems to be the new tune of power. What is occurring in Europe—the “Troika” devouring Greece, turning its people into new colonial and oppressed political subjects, the new racism against Spanish and Portuguese laziness, the Irish meltdown as a sign of provincial recklessness and lack of discipline—has been pretty much the history of Latin America, that is, until now. Today (3 May 2012), the Argentine National Congress is due to...
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Delinking, Decoloniality & Dewesternization: Interview with Walter Mignolo (Part II)

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0
2 May 2012
Walter Mignolo

Christopher Mattison: To continue our earlier discussion about Bolivia in relation to “refunding” or “decolonizing”—you’ve stated on a number of occasions that capitalism or socialism, as they are currently constituted, are not the answers? One of the alternatives that you offer to this issue is “delinking.” Could you expand on what you mean by delinking in this particular instance and how it integrates into modes of dewesternization and the various layers of decolonization? ¶ Walter Mignolo: Let me first re-state that the world is currently moving towards both rewesternization and dewesternization. The political ambition of the US (announced by Hillary Clinton in Honolulu and followed up by President Obama) is to mold the Pacific into the American Century. This...
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Trouble in the Garden: Critical Legal Studies & the Crisis

By
10
30 April 2012
path3

By modest reckoning 2012 is the fourth year since the Great Recession began. Over the last four years the victories won by socialist and trade unionist movements over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (universal health care, access to education, pensions and more) have been under constant attack. All as part of a systematic attempt to open up new avenues of accumulation for global capital and to weaken the working class, particularly in the ‘West’. The Occupy Movement, the Indignants and others have mounted stirring, if sporadic, protests in opposition to this rising tide of barbarism, but as of yet the ‘Left’ has not mounted a serious counter offensive. In effect, we are in the midst of...
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Notes on the ‘Loss of Sovereignty’

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1
20 April 2012
Keatingeconomicpressure

A standard justification for the cuts to public services, the policy of prioritising the repayment of private speculator debts over funding for hospitals and schools, the policy of converting private speculator debt into sovereign debt, is that ‘we’ have lost our sovereignty, or, in a more refined version, ‘we’ have lost our ‘economic sovereignty’, as though the sovereignty of a state also operated in ways independent of the economic sphere. Let me examine what this means in a little detail. I don’t plan to go into an abstract discussion of different conceptions of sovereignty here. Instead, I want to focus on the effects achieved by this claim, which is made repeatedly by politicians of the ruling parties and the...
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The New Irish Constitution

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2
19 April 2012
638px-Flag_President_of_Ireland

Following the Irish Government’s decision to modify the constitution of 1937 following a new constitutional convention, the Ice Moon Blog - which has contacts in the highest places  in the Irish State – has been able to obtain a secret government memo with a full mock-up of the new constitution to be amended after the Fiscal Compact Referendum. The following are the relevant new articles: Article 1 The Irish nation hereby abrogates its inalienable, indefeasible, and sovereign right to choose its own form of Government, to determine its relations with other nations, and to develop its life, political, economic and cultural, in accordance with its own genius and traditions and confers these rights on another crowd altogether. Article 5 Ireland is...
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Debt as a Mode of Governance

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1
16 April 2012
debt is each one of us

Capitalism has complete control over life: it has “biopolitical” control. In the primitive society, debt is charged through the primitive inscription, or coding, on the body. Blood-revenge and cruelty address a non-exchangist power. In the despotic society, all debts become infinite debts to the divine ruler. In capitalism, all debts finally break free from the sovereign and become infinite by conjoining flows. With capitalism, debt is continuous and without limit: student debt, credit card debt, mortgage debt, medical debt. Whereas in the primitive system debt is incurred through inscription and, in despotism, exercised by divine law, in capitalism “the market-eye keeps a watch over everything”. In other words, the market-eye becomes the new normal that constitutes the biopolitical control...
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When They Make a Battlefield of Her Choice: The Harassment of Women and the Right to Protest

By
9
13 April 2012
40 Days for Life Campaigners

When I first noticed their banner as I walked by Bedford Square, in London,  I didn’t think too much about it. It registered as a depressing example of the public expression of a position I had strong opposition to, not much more. It wasn’t until sometime later that I clocked the unusual location of the small public protest — a quiet spot with relatively little pedestrian or other traffic upon which to make an impact. I googled. It turns out that the ‘impact’ of the protest was directed toward the women who were seeking the services of the clinic across the road, the British Pregnancy Advisory Service. Although the large banner, small signs, a handful of the ‘faithful’ across...
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On Trayvon Martin and the Cost of Suspicion

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0
11 April 2012
Trayvon Martin

A few weeks ago, while walking to my car after teaching a class, I saw a white woman who was approaching me on the sidewalk clutch her purse on her hip, cross the street, and head past me continuing in the same direction.  Out of curiosity, I looked backwards, and I saw her cross back to my side of the street again after I had passed. A few days later, as I shopped for some incidentals at a local convenience store, I looked up and suddenly realized that the Asian store owner had “coincidentally” decided to start reshelving items on my isle, shifting to the next isle every few minutes to coincide with where I was, until I finally...
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Open Wounds in El Salvador: Action of the International Tribunal for the Application of Restorative Justice

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0
10 April 2012
Those killed in the massacre of 'El Chupadero'

The many experiences of transitional justice taking place in a number of countries today do not follow a predefined model. They are shaped by the variety of transitional processes which, in turn, vary according to the political and military repression through which each country lived. As a result, the process of justice can take on singular, and at times unprecedented characteristics. Currently, one of the most relevant of such cases can be seen in El Salvador and the International Tribunal for the Application of Restorative Justice, of which I am a member. The tribunal is an initiative that brings together organisations and human rights experts aware of the lack of responsiveness of a state confronted with extremely serious human rights...
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