{"id":3293,"date":"2011-06-17T13:21:57","date_gmt":"2011-06-17T21:21:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.richgibson.com\/blog\/?p=3293"},"modified":"2011-06-20T11:57:31","modified_gmt":"2011-06-20T19:57:31","slug":"rouge-forum-dispatch-disrupting-the-universe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.richgibson.com\/blog\/rouge-forum-dispatch-disrupting-the-universe\/","title":{"rendered":"Rouge Forum Dispatch: Disrupting the Universe"},"content":{"rendered":"

We Say Fightback!<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

A. Roy on India, the Green Hunt, and Revolution (video embedded too) : <\/strong><\/p>\n

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That the war that is being waged is not a new war. But if we win, it will be a new victory. And we can win, because I don\u2019t think there\u2019s an example of any country anywhere in the history of this kind of fighting where the poorest people in the world \u2013 the poorest, most malnutritioned people in the world \u2013 are waging a resistance against the richest corporations in the world, supported by the security forces, by the corporate media, by the judiciary of the biggest democracy \u2013 or, so called democracy \u2013 in the world. Okay.
\nAnd they\u2019re winning. They have stopped these corporations in their tracks, so far. And if we join them, we can make it stop. I really believe that we can make history. If we want to. It can happen. Because there is a depth of understanding; there\u2019s a depth of understanding.
\nYou see, this insurrection that is going on, it\u2019s asking some very, very serious questions. Not just about, you know, justice and so on. It\u2019s asking you \u2013 it\u2019s questioning the meaning of democracy. And it\u2019s questioning the meaning of civilization itself. What does that mean? Being civilized. What does civilization mean?
\nAnd it\u2019s not, it\u2019s not that these questions have not been asked before. Of course they have been. You know, they have been. But they\u2019ve been asked in universities. They\u2019ve been asked in seminars. They\u2019ve been asked in art galleries.
\nBut here you have a situation where hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of people, are putting their bodies on the line to ask this question. And it\u2019s a very, very profound question. And it\u2019s a question that ho- the answer to that question is the key to what is going to become \u2013 not of the Congress government, not of the BJP, not of the Maoists; I really don\u2019t care \u2013 of this planet, of this civilization, of the human race. coto2.wordpress.com\/2010\/06\/06\/arundhati-roy-resists-operation-green-hunt-transcript-and-video\/<\/a><\/p>\n

Michelle Alexander on the Bogus Drug War, Mass Incarceration, the Problems of Affirmative Action and the Resistance of the Dispossessed: <\/strong>The audience has heard the facts: Our prison population quintupled in a few short decades for reasons that have stunningly little to do with crime or crime rates. Incarceration rates\u2014especially black incarceration rates\u2014have soared regardless of whether crime was going up or down in any given community or the nation as a whole. Mass incarceration has been driven primarily by politics\u2014racial politics\u2014not crime. As part of a backlash against the Civil Rights Movement, our nation declared a \u201cWar on Drugs\u201d that has turned back the clock on racial progress in the United States. Although people of color are no more likely to use or sell illegal drugs than whites, African Americans have been targeted at grossly disproportionate rates. When the War on Drugs escalated in the mid-1980s, prison admissions for African Americans skyrocketed, nearly quadrupling in three years, then increasing steadily to a level in 2000 more than 26 times the level in 1983. In some states, 80 to 90 percent of all drug offenders sent to prison have been African American. www.yesmagazine.org\/issues\/beyond-prisons\/think-outside-the-bars?b_start:int=1&-C=<\/a><\/p>\n