System
A Nice Little Memento
Police-paid spy Rob Gilchrist says a senior officer shook his hand and gave him a “nice little memento” as thanks for his 10 years of undercover work. Mr Gilchrist said the officer visited him on Thursday night, five days after his role infiltrating activist organisations was publicly exposed. “It was a very gracious thanks,” Mr Gilchrist told the Weekend Herald. “He appreciated the work I’d done over the last 10 years [and] understood how difficult it might have been.”
System
Intellectuals Are The Shoeshine Boys Of The Ruling Elite
Georges Prevelakis is a Greek-born professor of Geopolitics at the Sorbonne University in Paris, the starting point for the infamous Paris riots of 1968. Speaking from Athens, he described the present situation: “There is still a little trouble, it is not as intense as last weekend; it is sporadic; there are demonstrations but from young kids, from schools rather than universities. We have just got confirmation that the killing of Alexandros was an accident – he was killed by a ricochet bullet as opposed to a direct shot so that may be a factor.”
System
System
A Farewell Kiss, You Dog
The Times and its ilk have a hard time dealing with activist journalists. Josh Wolf, the young blogger who broke the U.S. record for being jailed for his journalistic efforts (over 200 days in the federal slammer for refusing to identify participants in a San Francisco anarchist march that was attacked by the police), was treated in the corporate press as just another drug-addled adolescent. Like al-Zaidi, Brad Will, the Indymedia photojournalist cut down by Mexican cops during the Oaxaca urban rebellion in 2006, was tarred as “unprofessional”, a radical activist masquerading as a reporter. As an older activist reporter covering social turmoil in Mexico, I am regularly questioned by the representatives of the corporate press for my “lack of objectivity.” The “objectivity” so championed by j-school journalists is a weapon of class war that ascribes equal weight to the wronged and the wrongers alike. Held sacrosanct by “professional” journalists who are more attentive to their own career tracks than to the righteous indignation of the victims of Bush’s war on the peoples of the earth, this vaunted “objectivity” neutralizes injustice and negates responsibilities. ~ Que Huevos!: Where’s al-Zaidi’s Pulitzer?, John Ross, Counterpunch, December 24, 2008
System
Suffer The Children
We all have one thing in common. We are 15 years old in a society that you have made for us yet without us. You never asked us, nor did you ever listen. You choke us with the ideals of wealth, of the corporations, economic growth and power.
… The ideals of the broken window displays; of luxury cars, expensive clothes, jewelry watches. You flood us with rotten entertainment, food and culture saturated in convenience and stupidity and you condemn us for the broken windows of multinational chain stores who rob every one of us.
We are accused of destruction and arson. Yes, we set fire to all that which burns up our lives, so we can endure the tons of chemical tear gas thrown upon us by the police and the army. Because we don’t have any other weapons. Only our hands, tangerines, plastic water bottles and stones, the odd Molotov cocktail, but we must resist each one of us, however we can, in the face of the military machine of repression and armed murderers.
They shoot and kill us.
And when we protest,
They curse us.
They beat mercilessly.
Cripple us.
They handcuff us.
They choke us with tear gas
They condemn us…
We are on the streets and we are calling for our lives.
I see 6 ‘System’ references. How many drugs. Come on. Fess man, FESS.