27 August 201217 December 2022 4WardEverUK

Five examples of civil disobedience to remember

by: Richard Seymour | Comment is free
published: 20 August 2012

When Spanish mayor Juan Manuel Sánchez Gordillo recently led farmers on a supermarket sweep, raiding the local shops for food as part of a campaign against austerity, his political immunity as an elected assembly member protected him from arrest.

He now asks other local mayors to ignore central government demands for budget cuts and refuse to implement evictions and lay-offs. In this era of austerity, such flagrant disrespect for the law ought to be encouraged. Sometimes, the greatest strength of popular movements is their capacity to disrupt. So here, for the benefit of imaginative indignados, are five examples of civil disobedience.

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19 June 201217 December 2022 4WardEverUK

Rodney King, key figure in L.A. riots, dead at 47

originally by: Detroit Free Press
published: 17 June 2012

Rodney King, the black motorist whose 1991 videotaped beating by Los Angeles police officers was the touchstone for one of the most destructive race riots in the nation’s history, has died, his publicist said today. King was 47. His death was confirmed to the Associated Press by Suzanne Wickham of Harper Collins, who published King’s 2012 book ‘The Riot Within .My Journey from Rebellion to Redemption.’

The 1992 riots, set off by the acquittals of the officers, lasted three days and left 55 people dead, more than 2,000 injured and swaths of Los Angeles on fire. At the height of the violence, King pleaded on television: “Can we all get along?”

29 May 201217 December 2022 4WardEverUK

Protesting police murder of Alan Blueford and war on Afrikans

originally by: San Francisco Bay View
published: 23 May 2012

On Tuesday, May 15, the bereaved family members of Alan Dwayne Blueford eloquently addressed those members of the Oakland City Council who were present, seeking justice in a case that is looking suspiciously like a criminal assassination of the 18-year-old student in his senior year at Skyline High School. He was due to graduate in June.

The video re-play of the Oakland City Council meeting for that evening shows members of the family, arm in arm, giving each other much needed support as they spoke before a standing-room-only public audience with hundreds more outside of the doors of the council chambers, addressing the issues of the cold blooded assassination of their child.