Beautiful Trouble
What might a 2017 general strike look like?
…g their jobs at 2:38pm , the point after which they would otherwise in effect be working for free. What we learn here: General strikes come in lots of flavors: they can start in one city or one sector and spread; they don’t have to start or end with labor unions; they can be largely symbolic or physically interrupt business as usual. Fundamentally, a general strike is about mass non-compliance. Even if we don’t have the conditions or capacity to…
Whose Tea Party?
Two Republican Congressmen, Dick Armey from Texas and Billy Tauzin of Louisiana, have come to Boston to promote their snake oil proposals for a flat tax and national sales tax, two initiatives that would dramatically shift the tax burden off the wealthy and onto low- and moderate-income working families. They’ve set up a classic photo opportunity by inviting national TV and print media to the Boston Harbor Tea Party Ship Museum, where they plan…
Society of the spectacle
…ch Situationist movement, described and decried. Marx famously argued that under capitalism, the commodity becomes “fetishized” and reduced to its exchange value. Debord applied Marx’s ideas to mass communication, showing how capitalism has penetrated not just what we produce and consume, but how we communicate. The spectacle — as manifested in mass entertainment, news, and advertising — alienates us from ourselves and our desires in order to fac…
Use the law, don’t be afraid of it
…almost always right for two reasons: 1) In the U.S. at least, the law does in fact protect freedom of speech to a very high degree (not always a good thing: corporate lobbying is also considered free speech), and 2) corporations don’t sue you because they know how it can blow back on them and they want to avoid having yet more egg on their big, blank, mechanical faces. In the Yes Men’s twelve years of activism, we’ve only been sued once. Corporat…
The Teddy Bear Catapult
…on movement. Thirty-four heads of state from across the Americas were gathering in Québec City to negotiate the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), a sweeping trade deal with deeply anti-democratic provisions. Protests had been called, tens of thousands were expected to fill the streets, and a giant fence defended by thousands of riot police was to be erected around the Old City to keep protesters far from the convention center. As the summit…
Billionaires for Bush
“Some people call you the elite,” George W. Bush joked to his wealthy funders, “I call you my base.” Whether candidate Bush meant it as a joke or not, the Billionaires for Bush (B4B) campaign used humor, street theater and creative media actions to show the country how true the quip was. Working to expose how the Republican Party serves the interests of the super-rich, the Billionaires also addressed the broader issues of economic inequality and…
Cacerolazo
As the clock struck 8 pm on a Montréal spring night in May 2012, a sound rose like crickets at dusk: a metallic tapping in the distance that multiplied and spread until a cacophony of clanging pots and pans filled the air. All over the city, tens of thousands of people took to the streets that night, and for many nights to follow, armed with kitchenware. It was the largest pot-banging protest — cacerolazo in Spanish, les casseroles in French — t…
Bread and Puppet Theater
…nifesto: “ART IS FOOD. You can’t EAT it BUT it FEEDS you.” Their name refers to the practice of giving out free bread after each of their performances. Although their early work focused on issues specific to New York, their huge puppets on stilts were a fixture of anti-Vietnam War and other major protests. In 1970, Bread and Puppet left New York for Vermont, where they set up first at Goddard College and later on farmland in Glover. It was there…
Pimp My… Carroça!
…word for carriage — that is, a wheeled vehicle for conveying people, often drawn by horses, and designed for comfort and elegance. Curiously, in Brazil this word also refers to the ramshackle carts that some human beings are compelled to use. These are the collectors of recyclable materials, or just “collectors” — the thousands of informal workers that scavenge, carry, and sell reusable supplies to local junk shops or recycling co-ops. Wherever…
Operation SalAMI
…member countries of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development and the International Chamber of Commerce. The name SalAMI includes this agreement’s French acronym AMI (or “friend”) preceded by “Sal,” meaning bad or dirty. In May 1998 SalAMI surrounded and delayed the Conférence de Montréal on Globalized Economies. The ensuing global mobilizations actually led to the shelving of the agreement. Since then, Operation SalAMI has colla…
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