Al Jazeera reports French resistance hero and Holocaust survivor Stephane Hessel, whose 2010 manifesto "Time for Outrage" sold millions of copies and inspired protest movements worldwide, has died at the age of 95.

"Time for Outrage!" argued that the French needed to become as outraged now as his fellow fighters had been during the war. He was highly critical of France's treatment of illegal immigrants, and Israel's treatment of Palestinians, and passionate about the environment, a free press and France's welfare system. His call was for peaceful, non-violent insurrection.

Hessel joined Charles de Gaulle in exile during World War II, was waterboarded by the Nazis, escaped hanging in concentration camps and took part in drafting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948.

The career diplomat was already celebrated as one of the last living heroes of the 20th century when, as a nonagenarian, he became the unlikely godfather of youth protest movements such as "Occupy " and Spain's "Indignados."

More on Stephane Hessel here.

TTS-FULL-ENG by OXYGENPROD

TTS-FULL-ENG by OXYGENPROD

Tahir Square, Puerta del Sol, Syntagma Square, Wall Street…Cairo, Madrid, Athens, New York…as many cities, as many places where different nations started camping to take the streets over, take public spaces back, take democracy back. This documentary tells the story of a movement that first took place on the banks of the Nile to spread across the world and try to change democratic interactions.

The movie Take the Square was shot in 2011, covering the various social movements (Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, Indignados…) which unsettled the planet. Watch the trailer here.

Click here to donate. The money won’t be debited unless the goal (6000 €) is reached by March 2013. In case of failure, your money will be given back to you.

Beyond the financial aspect, you can help in many ways:

– Share the info in your networks (social, emails) – Translation (English, Spanish, Egyptian arabic) and retranscriptions – Also looking for people who can help with releasing the film in different theaters

Thank you for sharing the information among your contacts and, for those who can financially help, see you on touscoprod.com. You can use this tutorial.

For more information, you can email us here: takethesquarethemovie@gmail.com. Follow our updates on our blog or on the project’s Facebook page.

Trailer for your Spanish-speaking friends.

[Via OccupyWallSt.org]

Via Occupy Wall Street, Real Democracy Now! Paris:

To the financial institutions of the world, we have only one thing to say: we owe you NOTHING!

To our friends, families, our communities, to humanity and to the natural world that makes our lives possible, we owe you everything.

To the people of the world, we say: join the resistance, you have nothing to lose but your debts.

On O13, in the larger context of the worlwide "globalnoise" mobilisation, and within the Global Week of Action against Debt, we will mobilise against debt in several cities of the world: Barcelona, Madrid, Mexico, Paris, New York, Rome…

The governments' response to the financial and economic crisis is the same everywhere: cuts in expenditure and austerity measures under the pretext of reducing deficits and the repayment of a public debt which is the direct outcome of decades of neoliberal policies. The same neoliberal policies that have plundered economic and natural resources and exploited human lifes in Latin America, Asia and Africa for decades, are now also being imposed on the people of Europe and North America.

Governments in the service of finance are using this pretext to further reduce social spending, lower wages and pensions, privatize public utility and goods, dismantle social benefits and deregulate labour laws, and increase taxes on the majority, while social and tax giveaways are generalized for the big companies and the highest income households, the rich, the 1%.

Continue reading »

This amazing video touches on most all of the ills of the world: pollution, abuse of the environment, nuclear energy, fracking, water pollution, poverty, starvation, hunger, income disparity, politics, lack of healthcare, indifference and war. Combined with the moving music, it's possibly the most moving video you'll see at just over 3 minutes in length. Buenísimo!

Though under house arrest and about to be extradited to Sweden, Julian Assange is still producing his show for RT, "The World Tomorrow," the most recent episode of which he dedicated to the Occupy Movement. Shot in the old Deutsche Bank building in London, which is controlled by friends of Occupy, Julian enlists guests Marisa Holmes, Alexa O'Brien and David Graeber from Occupy Wall Street, and Aaron Peters and Naomi Colvin from Occupy London, to parse the future of Occupy.

The Occupy movement has united hundreds of thousands across the world in protest against economic and social injustice. In this episode, key Occupy activists talk global finance, politics, and direct action.

The roots of the movement lie in the growing outrage many felt in the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis. However, according to Alexa O'Brien from Occupy New York and US Day of Rage, they are also responding to a "Global Political Crisis, because our institutions no longer function." Aaron Peters from Occupy London agrees that political failure is a "global phenomenon", with power shifting to unaccountable non-democratic institutions. However, the last word goes to David Graeber from Occupy New York, who jokes "there's nothing that terrifies the American government so much as the threat of democracy breaking out in America."

The global Occupy movement is undergoing a period of sustained tactical innovation. In the U.S. occupiers are experimenting with new techniques of nonviolent protest inspired by the Black Bloc. In Quebec, we are testing whether a sustained student uprising against fee hikes can spark a broad base anti-capitalist insurrection. In Spain, the indignados are imagining new ways of holding people’s assemblies without permanent encampments in the squares. And perhaps the most important tactical breakthrough has come from Germany where last week 25,000 occupiers took the streets for Blockupy, three days of visceral protest against capitalism and the logic of austerity.

The beauty of Blockupy is that it combined three tactics into one powerful event in Frankfurt’s financial district: Occupy, Blockade, Demonstrate.

One organizer explained that the goal was to transcend a narrow critique of the financial industry by broadening the movement’s tactics: “our action will visualize the different aspects of the crisis of the system we are witnessing and experiencing – a crisis of representative democracy, the destruction of the planet and our life resources, a crisis of traditional gender relations, of war regimes and militarized border regimes, of cities and urban life.”

[Via]

One year after the Spanish M15 movement inspired the world with their peaceful city-square occupations, millions have flooded the Spanish streets again. Their message: we’re still there, and more powerful than ever.

The Occupiers at Adbusters said in a note to readers Wednesday that a global “laugh riot” could “break through the G8’s veneer of legitimacy and expose the Camp David Summit and our current capitalist model for the farce that it really is.”

Activists will be taking to the streets again next week, when the G8 Summit is in full swing in Chicago.

Via:

Hey all you believers in a new world out there,

May Day wasn’t so great was it… the numbers were low, the maxims weren’t sublime, the excitement didn’t catch on. May 12 was hefty in Europe, reigniting the snuffed Indignados, but the energy did not seem to flow over to here.

Now we’re looking at May 18 ~ 21 when protesters, possibly in Arab Spring numbers, swarm Chicago… Security experts say it will be a challenge the likes of which no American city has had to face – a leaderless, all-consuming non-violent swarm. If we can pull it off in the fierce tradition of Gandhi and MLK, the next few days could become the spark, the eruption, the new spiritual home of our Spring offensive.

On a softer, more aesthetic note, the likelihood of a global #LAUGHRIOT starting May 18 feels especially fresh and new … imagine … the globalization of laughter … millions of people around the world decide to take a few minutes off from their usual routines, get together with friends and pull off a global cascade of riotously laughing flash mobs, transforming the flow of power from the heads of the elite to the bellies of the people.

At a time when our human experiment is buckling under austerity, financial madness and eco-angst, there is something so ludicrous, bizarre, even insane about the eight most powerful people in the world trying to conduct the people’s business – to set things right – from behind closed doors and razor wire fences.

A global #LAUGHRIOT could break through the G8’s veneer of legitimacy and expose the Camp David Summit and our current capitalist model for the farce that it really is.

A global laugh-in could be the relief we’ve all been waiting for: the moment when — in a communal burst of laughter — we the people suddenly wake up to the fact that the only power our leaders have is the power we give them.

Here goes … let’s laugh like we’ve never laughed before.

Or, you could stay home and listen to John Boehner cry about the debt ceiling.