Nia Box
A soap box with a purpose

Its-not-a-sit-in,-Its-a-Live-in_-Take-Back-the-Land-Rochester[www.savevid.com]

Rochester Police arrest Emily Good in her Front Lawn For Filming Traffic Stop

In spite of the fact that Wikileaks is a legal entity, which has not been charged with a crime, a growing list of banks are refusing to process payments to the whistleblower website.

The New York Times ran a piece on the trend today, including this tidbit:

Still, there are troubling questions. The decisions to bar the organization came after its founder, Julian Assange, said that next year it will release data revealing corruption in the financial industry. In 2009, [Wikileaks founder and frontman] Mr. [Julian] Assange said that WikiLeaks had the hard drive of a Bank of America executive.

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Less than one month after releasing a small portion of the quarter of a million American diplomatic cables- all of them classified- Wikileaks frontman Julian Assange was arrested in London, England, on a Swedish warrant in an unrelated sex crimes investigation. After a week in custody, Assange was released on bail, but the fight for his freedom appears to have just begun, as several countries, most notably the United States, desperately scramble to identify a crime associated with the data drop for which he can be charged, held and reliably prosecuted.

While it is important not to minimize the importance of any sex crime, it certainly appears that Swedish officials went beyond their normal course of operations to capture Assange in England. While the mass media has made the link between the high profile data dumps and Assange’s arrest, the mainstream media, which are major corporations dependent upon other major corporations for income, cannot be depended upon to conduct our research, questioning, analysis and thinking for us.

While the US is never happy with the release of her secret documents, the hype around the diplomatic cables, which most pundits agree amount primarily to high level gossip, is being whipped up to divert attention away from the real reason Assange is being hunted like an international threat: Wikileaks is planning to release thousands of highly damaging internal documents from a “major” US based financial institution.

International pressure is being brought to bear against Assange not to stop the diplomatic version of celebrity news, but to protect the interests of major financial institutions and the government which bailed them out, but did not hold them accountable.

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I am not one who believes we should take political direction from comedians, however, this is a brilliant expose of the religious right and the hypocrisy inherent in a political movement dominating religion, in this case, conservatives dominating and expropriating Christianity. Go Steven Colbert.

TheRealNews.com, an independent media source, recently produced a piece examining the relationship between US social movements and their counterparts in Latin America, particularly Brazil.

The story examines two radical political actions in the US: the worker takeover of Republic Windows and Doors, based in Chicago, IL, and the Take Back the Land- Movement, with affiliated organizations throughout the US. The Real News looks at the actions and similar actions taken in South America, in Argentina and with the MST in Brazil, respectively.

Monica Adams of Take Back the Land- Madison represents the Take Back the Land- Movement and explains the connection between Take Back the Land and the MST, as well as brilliantly putting to rest the notion that making housing a human right somehow turns human beings into lazy bums.

Watch the video after the jump

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The Take Back the Land- Movement was recently featured on Pop and Politics, with Farai Chideya. Max Rameau discusses the foreclosure crisis and the fight to elevate housing to the level of a human right.

Gentrification is Dead: A Proposition

DOWNLOAD THE PDF PRINT VERSION.

I. Introduction

The modern era of gentrification, starting approximately in mid 2002 and ending abruptly towards the end of 2007, is possibly the most extreme- and brutal- since the term was coined in England in the late 1800s. In June 2005, The Economist magazine, widely regarded as the world’s most respected financial periodical, argued, with documentation, that never in history have home prices rose so high, for so long and across so many countries, bestowing upon the “housing boom” a more appropriate moniker: “the biggest bubble in history.” A significant and integral component of that bubble was speculative gentrification.

The social justice movement in the United States proved woefully ill prepared to counter what became a national crisis with devastating impacts on the local communities the movement serves. Consequently, many organizations and activists entered the gentrification game well in the fourth quarter, down by too many points to compel meaningful compromises from the forces of capital dictating and profiteering from gentrification.

Once the severity of the crisis was properly recognized, however, organizations eager to mute it’s effects, retooled and positioned themselves to fight gentrification. As a result, half way into 2008, countless social justice organizations focus at least a portion of their time, resources, campaigns and political outlook on the battle against gentrification, developing theories about how it works and how to combat it, including detailed and complex political objectives and campaigns.

At this juncture, however, for better or worse, the rapidly deteriorating economy, along with other factors, including the collective work of the social justice movement, have effectively ended gentrification as an economic cycle.

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Miami-Dade’s airwaves, op-ed pages and water cooler discussions are alive with vigorous condemnations of the gross public corruption and pilfering of funds earmarked for low-income housing. While such discussion is just and appropriate, particularly in the context of a devastating crisis of gentrification and low-income housing, not nearly enough time, energy and brain power is devoted to solving the housing crisis itself.

While shocking, immoral and criminal, the reality is that the impact of public corruption on the crisis pales in comparison to the impact of bad public policy on the crisis. If government officials stop stealing tomorrow, or, God forbid, they are actually charged with stealing, the crisis itself would continue, unabated, because there is neither the political will nor the plan to build enough low-income housing to meet the demand. Therefore, ending corruption is important, but insufficient, in addressing this crisis.

In October 2006, the Miami-Dade Department of Planning and Zoning updated its 25 year Comprehensive Development Master Plan (CDMP), outlining challenges, goals and objectives for several strategic ‘elements,’ including transportation, conservation, waste management and the like. On page one of the Housing Element of the CDMP, census and housing data is used to conclude the county “will require 294,200 new housing units” by 2025, of which “about 42 percent… will be needed by very low and low-income households.”

123,564.

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On June 22, 2006, the FBI arrested seven Black men, based in the Liberty City section of Miami, Florida, charging them with various counts of planning acts of violence. What distinguishes this case from the myriad of other Black men arrested in poor, oppressed communities is not that the men had no weapons to commit the acts of violence or even that they clearly lacked the capacity to advance the plot ascribed to them, but that in the arrests, the U.S. Government invoked the ‘t’ word- “terrorism.”

In this politically charged atmosphere, speaking “terrorism” is not unlike the charge of “communism” during the McCarthy era in that all logic, question of authority and presumption of innocence is diminished. The Liberty City 7 (LC7) are being rail-roaded by the government, with the gleeful support of the media and the deafening silence of the majority.

The reality is the LC7 were entrapped by more than one paid government informant and used by the Bush regime to divert attention from it’s own problems, while scoring political and public relations points. Most people have serious questions about the government charges, even if afraid to raise those questions publicly.

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