Global revolution is imminent.

[lupercal]

^ DYEW may I humbly suggest that you stick to the thread subject which as you may have noticed isn't me. And if you're trolling for custom again, sorry, I have higher standards, luv ya tho. Gotta run.

[DevilYouKnow]

@mtawfeeqCNN Mohammed Tawfeeq
#Iraqi authorities decided to impose a ban in all types of vehicles in Baghdad starts from 12 am local time and until further notice.

@mtawfeeqCNN Mohammed Tawfeeq
Some local #Iraqi TVs speared out false rumors against the government ahead of Friday demonstrations, #Iraqi government officials said.

@BigBearOP Observation Post
"@AlArabiya_Eng: #Maliki urges #Iraqi s not attend "Saddamist" demos, Iraqis plan 'day of rage' rallies on social media http://goo.gl/YAETb

@Nbazzaz n.b
#Maliki government announces that #feb25 is a 'working' day despite it being a weekend in #Iraq. Anyone who doesn't go will lose job.

@Nbazzaz n.b
Anxiety and Hope ahead of Iraq protests: "Now, we want to change things through our ideas." http://wapo.st/hm1Mnd #feb25 #iraq #maliki

Shakir Kattab, a parliamentarian, said he would be one of several lawmakers to join the demonstrations Friday. He said he is uneasy these days with his own political party, that of the Iraq's most prominent secular politician, Ayad Allawi, another Maliki rival who joined the governing coalition.

"I'll be very honest," Kattab said in an interview at his office. "Today, our people have discovered that the biggest enemy is the Iraqi politicians that have power and use that power to rob and steal."

[Pele'sDaughter]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20110224/wl_ ... hoethrower

– Thu Feb 24, 11:32 am ET

BAGHDAD (Reuters) -An Iraqi journalist who threw his shoes at former U.S. President George W. Bush was arrested by security forces in Baghdad Thursday for encouraging people to rally for better services.

A relative of Muntazer al-Zaidi said the reporter was detained in the northern Adhamiya district whilst voicing his support for a mass demonstration expected to be held Friday.

Iraqis have been protesting for weeks against shortages of food, power and jobs, and against corruption as anti-government demonstration sweep across the Arab world.

"Security forces in Adhamiya district arrested Muntazer Zaidi and his brother Durgam. We don't know where they took them," Hashim al-Iraqi, a relative of Zaidi, told Reuters.

A security source confirmed Zaidi had been detained for "inciting people" to take part in protests.

Little-known Shi'ite reporter Zaidi, said to have harbored anger against Bush for the thousands of Iraqis who died after the 2003 U.S.-led invasion, shot to fame in 2008 when he called Bush a "dog" in Arabic and threw his shoes at him during a news conference in Iraq.

Throwing shoes at someone is one of the worst insults in the Arab world.

[Jeff]

AJE now reporting Baghdad riot police have opened fire on demonstrators.

Silly people want their Green Zone back.

[Plutonia]

Hundreds protest demanding reforms in Mauritania
Sat Feb 26, 2011 8:26am GMT

By Laurent Prieur

NOUAKCHOTT (Reuters) - Hundreds of people took to the streets in Mauritania on Friday calling for better living conditions and more jobs in the vast, impoverished desert nation that straddles black and Arab Africa.

Such demonstrations are rare in the West African country and few expect to see protests on the scale of those that have rocked Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and to a lesser extent, neighbouring Algeria.

A handful in the crowd of 1,000-1,500 mostly young people who took part in the peaceful protest demanded the departure of President Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz, but they were in the minority and there was only a light security presence.

"The president has to respect his people. Aziz has always said he's the president of the poor; now the poor are in front of you asking for dialogue," said Mocktar Mohammed Mahmoud, a social worker who said he had got involved through Facebook.

"There is no party behind us, there is no particular tribe behind this. We are behind you in your war against terrorism but you've got to stand behind us in our war against hunger."

Abdel Aziz came to power first in a 2008 coup and then won an election in 2009, which has largely restored stability to the nation but failed to bridge the gap between the mostly rich Arab elite and the largely poorer African classes.

He has been at the forefront of the region's fight against local al Qaeda factions but some of his rivals accuse him of using the Islamist threat to weaken his opponents while those around him have been accused of corrution.

"We don't want soldiers in power ... So many graduates are jobless. It's enough," said student Hanena Hohamed.

A number of protestors said they had heard about the march through Facebook and other social networking sites which have been key in the organisation of popular anti-government movements across the Arab world and North Africa.

Last month a Mauritanian man set himself on fire in front of the presidential palace in an echo of the suicide last December that triggered the popular revolt in Tunisia, followed by Egypt, both resulting in the ousting of authoritarian leaders.

Ahead of Friday's planned demonstration, Prime Minister Moulaye Ould Mohamed Laghdaf said that the government would soon create 17,000 jobs, develop new infrastructure projects and boost local food production capacity to tackle spikes in prices.

[seemslikeadream]

Ireland's new government on a collision course with EU
Ireland's new government is headed for confrontation with Brussels after the country's ruling party was wiped out on Saturday by voters in a huge popular backlash against a European-IMF austerity programme.

[wintler2]

Behind the Arab Revolt is a Word We Dare Not Speak

By John Pilger

February 25, 2011 "Information Clearing House" --

Shortly after the invasion of Iraq in 2003, I interviewed Ray McGovern, one of an elite group of CIA officers who prepared the President’s daily intelligence brief. McGovern was at the apex of the "national security" monolith that is American power and had retired with presidential plaudits. On the eve of the invasion, he and 45 other senior officers of the CIA and other intelligence agencies wrote to President George W. Bush that the "drumbeat for war" was based not on intelligence, but lies.

"It was 95 per cent charade," McGovern told me.

"How did they get away with it?"

"The press allowed the crazies to get away with it."

"Who are the crazies?"

"The people running the [Bush] administration have a set of beliefs a lot like those expressed in Mein Kampf … these are the same people who were referred to in the circles in which I moved, at the top, as ‘the crazies.’"

I said, "Norman Mailer has written that that he believes America has entered a pre-fascist state. What’s your view of that?"

"Well … I hope he’s right, because there are others saying we are already in a fascist mode."

On 22 January, Ray McGovern emailed me to express his disgust at the Obama administration’s barbaric treatment of the alleged whistleblower Bradley Manning and its pursuit of WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange. "Way back when George and Tony decided it might be fun to attack Iraq," he wrote, "I said something to the effect that fascism had already begun here. I have to admit I did not think it would get this bad this quickly."

On 16 February, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gave a speech at George Washington University in which she condemned governments that arrested protestors and crushed free expression. She lauded the liberating power of the internet while failing to mention that her government was planning to close down those parts of the internet that encouraged dissent and truth-telling. It was a speech of spectacular hypocrisy, and Ray McGovern was in the audience. Outraged, he rose from his chair and silently turned his back on Clinton. He was immediately seized by police and a security goon and beaten to the floor, dragged out and thrown into jail, bleeding. He has sent me photographs of his injuries. He is 71. During the assault, which was clearly visible to Clinton, she did not pause in her remarks.

Fascism is a difficult word, because it comes with an iconography that touches the Nazi nerve and is abused as propaganda against America’s official enemies and to promote the West’s foreign adventures with a moral vocabulary written in the struggle against Hitler. And yet fascism and imperialism are twins. In the aftermath of World War Two, those in the imperial states who had made respectable the racial and cultural superiority of "Western civilisation," found that Hitler and fascism had claimed the same, employing strikingly similar methods. Thereafter, the very notion of American imperialism was swept from the textbooks and popular culture of an imperial nation forged on the genocidal conquest of its native people. And a war on social justice and democracy became "US foreign policy."

As the Washington historian William Blum has documented, since 1945, the US has destroyed or subverted more than 50 governments, many of them democracies, and used mass murderers like Suharto, Mobutu, and Pinochet to dominate by proxy. In the Middle East, every dictatorship and pseudo-monarchy has been sustained by America. In "Operation Cyclone," the CIA and MI6 secretly fostered and bank-rolled Islamic extremism. The object was to smash or deter nationalism and democracy. The victims of this Western state terrorism have been mostly Muslims. The courageous people gunned down last week in Bahrain and Libya, the latter a "priority UK market," according to Britain’s official arms "procurers," join those children blown to bits in Gaza by the latest American F-16 aircraft.

The revolt in the Arab world is not merely against a resident dictator but a worldwide economic tyranny designed by the US Treasury and imposed by the US Agency for International Development, the IMF and World Bank, which have ensured that rich countries like Egypt are reduced to vast sweatshops, with half the population earning less than $2 a day. The people’s triumph in Cairo was the first blow against what Benito Mussolini called corporatism, a word that appears in his definition of fascism.

How did such extremism take hold in the liberal West? "It is necessary to destroy hope, idealism, solidarity, and concern for the poor and oppressed," observed Noam Chomsky a generation ago, "[and] to replace these dangerous feelings with self-centred egoism, a pervasive cynicism that holds that [an order of] inequities and oppression is the best that can be achieved. In fact, a great international propaganda campaign is under way to convince people – particularly young people – that this not only is what they should feel but that it’s what they do feel."

Like the European revolutions of 1848 and the uprising against Stalinism in 1989, the Arab revolt has rejected fear. An insurrection of suppressed ideas, hope and solidarity has begun. In the United States, where 45 per cent of young African-Americans have no jobs and the top hedge fund managers are paid, on average, a billion dollars a year, mass protests against cuts in services and jobs have spread to heartland states like Wisconsin. In Britain, the fastest-growing modern protest movement, UK Uncut, is about to take direct action against tax avoiders and rapacious banks. Something has changed that cannot be unchanged. The enemy has a name now.

[Plutonia]

RashaYassin
by Sandmonkey
3o2bal our PM!! RT @shadyshedo: Tunisia's prime minister announces his resignation on state TV. #tunisia #Egypt #jan25
33 minutes ago Favorite Retweet Reply

[Plutonia]

It's everywhere!

Thousands join anti-government protests in Croatia

Feb 26, 2011, 18:11 GMT

Zagreb - Thousands of dissatisfied Croats took to the streets of the capital Zagreb on Saturday to demonstrate against the government.

The core of the protesters was made up of veterans from the 1991- 95 civil war, who were trying to draw attention to the social problems they face.

New war-crime proceedings that are expected to be launched by the courts were also criticized by speakers at the event.

Police used tear gas and batons when one group of demonstrators streamed toward a government building.

Prime Minister Jadranka Kosor had this week criticized similar prior demonstrations, saying that they threaten the conclusion of European Union accession negotiations in the summer.

Protesters on Saturday once again shouted anti-EU slogans.

Anons collecting opCroatia data here: http://piratenpad.de/opcroatia

[Jeff]

Meanwhile, in Britain:

The coalition has sneaked a coup on a sleeping public
Its project to drastically remodel British society is speeding ahead without any regard for what it told voters last year

John Harris
guardian.co.uk, Sunday 27 February 2011 19.00


As people elsewhere are killed for their belief in democracy and the rule of law, the supposed controversies of British politics inevitably rather fade. By comparison, we live in an Eden of stability, and argue over mere increments: to be getting in a lather about Cameron and Clegg can easily feel not just indulgent, but indecent.

Still, in the broadest terms, there is a tale to be told that includes Westminster as well as Tripoli and Cairo, and underlines what watershed times these are. Much of the world's current tumult is traceable to the long and tangled fall-out from the crash of 2008 (note the role of rising food prices in Middle Eastern unrest). And though most commentators seem either too polite or deluded to recognise it, the British side of this story is rapidly being revealed: not just cuts, but the most far-reaching attempt to remodel British society in 60 years, undertaken at speed, and with a breathtaking disregard for what was offered to the country only months ago. Last week, Labour MP John McDonnell wrote to the Guardian arguing that the increasing gap between claims of fiscal necessity and a transparently ideological project merited another election. It won't happen, but he has a point.

The other day, I picked up a copy of Naomi Klein's underrated book The Shock Doctrine, and was reminded of a celebrated quotation from Milton Friedman: "Only a crisis – actual or perceived – produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable."

...

What are we faced with? A polite kind of coup, in the service of an all-encompassing project that Klein and her followers surely recognise, and of which Friedman would be proud. The Labour party seems punch-drunk, and racked with confusion about how much the coalition has taken from peak-period Blairism (a simple solution: disown those aspects of your disgraced past, and start truly opposing). Every lurch to the free-market right shreds the idea that the Lib Dems are there to pull the Tories back to the centre. With Lib Dem backbench MPs and such grandees as Shirley Williams, I keep having the same conversation. They say they oppose some policies, but are heartened by others, and all is just about OK. In response, the old hippie phrase comes to mind: you are either on the bus, or off the bus.

It speeds on, anyway. And it really is the most amazing thing: not just that this most illegitimate of revolutions is happening, and fast, but that we are sleepwalking into it.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree ... CMP=twt_gu

[eyeno]

devilyouknow wrote:
What's Alex Jones' take on the protests in Wisconsin? False left-right Hegelian dialectics or distraction from the master plan of the globalists? I can't tell from perusing his site,

I just went by and had a look. He thinks the whole thing is pre-packaged con job by western backed NGOs. "It is a high-tech, high-speed invasion and subjugation, a corruption of the sovereign state similar to what Tacitus described in Roman conquered Britannia."

on edit: post misread. I thought devilyouknow was referring to the Arab situation and I got this in the wrong thread. The above was a mistake.
-------------------------------------

brekin wrote:
I don't have anything specific. Not knowing Arabic I think most of us are totally dependent on Western sources for coverage of the revolt.
It just seems an across the board shake up of the region has to benefit someone who can benefit. I guess the real test will be if we see Haliburton and friends in these countries in the coming months.

Yep. And whether this is a pre-canned con job or not it will be very tough to keep these forces out of the mix.

[Nordic]

[DevilYouKnow]

devilyouknow wrote:
What's Alex Jones' take on the protests in Wisconsin? False left-right Hegelian dialectics or distraction from the master plan of the globalists? I can't tell from perusing his site,

I just went by and had a look. He thinks the whole thing is pre-packaged con job by western backed NGOs. "It is a high-tech, high-speed invasion and subjugation, a corruption of the sovereign state similar to what Tacitus described in Roman conquered Britannia."

Oh Christ.

Wait, you're talking about the Arab revolutions not Wisconsin, right?

[eyeno]

devilyouknow wrote:
What's Alex Jones' take on the protests in Wisconsin? False left-right Hegelian dialectics or distraction from the master plan of the globalists? I can't tell from perusing his site,

I just went by and had a look. He thinks the whole thing is pre-packaged con job by western backed NGOs. "It is a high-tech, high-speed invasion and subjugation, a corruption of the sovereign state similar to what Tacitus described in Roman conquered Britannia."

Oh Christ.

Wait, you're talking about the Arab revolutions not Wisconsin, right?

Yes. I misread your post. I thought you mean the Arab situation. I need to go back and clean up that post.

[anothershamus]

An excerpt from Kunstler's Blog post today, he is a doomer but he has a point.

full post here: http://kunstler.com/blog/2011/02/wake-me-shake-me.html

Something that smells an awful lot like World War Three is shaping up around the Mediterranean and spilling over toward the Indian Ocean. German cruisers are already out there plying the seas off North Africa while the ghost of Erwin Rommel scratches his head on the gritty shores of Tobruk.
Nobody knows how anybody is going to pay for World War Three, but perhaps it is in the nature of an historic crack-up blow-off that the accumulated treasure of generations just gets vacuumed out of every vault and hidey-hole to keep the pyre burning - fire being nature's preferred dry-cleaning agent. The fate of a few quadrillion credit default swaps contracts may end up as tomorrow's Flying Dutchman, a haunting enigma plying the vapors of eternity, sure to frighten juveniles of the marmoset-like humanoid creatures who succeed us up the evolutionary ladder.