Agora99.eu. Blockupy Frankfurt is a glimmer of hope in times of austerity | John Holloway. Now, more than ever, the world looks two ways at once. Which way it turns will depend significantly on the protests announced for the days that come: Blockupy Frankfurt on 16 to 19 May, and all the explosions of creative anger that will follow. One face looks towards a dark, depressing world. A world of closing doors. A closing of lives, of possibilities, of hopes. These are times of austerity. You must learn to live with reality. You must obey if you want to survive, give up your dreams. This lesson of despair was learned by Dimitris Christoulas, who shot himself in Syntagma Square in the centre of Athens on 4 April.
This is the meaning of austerity. That is the direction the world is heading in, but is that all there is? The basis of that hope is a simple no: no, we will not accept your austerity. That is our hope: we are the only possible future. But our refusal means little unless it is supported by an alternative creation. Goldman Sachs, enquête sur une société secrète. M le magazine du Monde | • Mis à jour le | Par Marc Roche CONTENT DE LUI, de son sort, de son employeur, Yoël Zaoui affirmait sans broncher que tout allait bien dans le meilleur des mondes. C'était en octobre 2008, la clameur de la crise financière semblait bien éloignée de la salle de réunion glacée de Goldman Sachs International à Londres où le Français, à l'époque codirecteur de la banque d'investissement en Europe, nous avait longuement reçu dans le cadre d'une enquête du Monde sur la banque la plus puissante de la planète.
Trois ans et demi plus tard, le petit prince de cette finance impitoyable est tombé de son piédestal. Après vingt-quatre ans de bons et loyaux services à Goldman Sachs, celui qui avait obtenu le statut d'associé en 1998 avant d'être désigné au saint des saints de la banque d'affaires - le management committee (comité de gestion) – a démissionné début avril, à 51 ans. L'histoire – et celle des entreprises n'y échappe pas – a souvent de mordantes ironies. Occupy and Failure. What a long chain of failures Occupy has been over the past seven months. Think about it: It didn’t shut down Wall Street on September 17th; it couldn’t set up camp in its first-choice location, Chase Manhattan Plaza; it barely marched a third of the way across the Brooklyn Bridge roadway before getting kettled; the Oakland General Strike did not exactly generalize; and occupations have been driven from plazas, squares, vacant buildings, and sidewalks across America.
Again and again, plans of action have not materialized as projected. You might expect me to counter this list of defeats with a list of successes— perhaps the many homes saved from foreclosure, or the shift in national debate to address inequality, or the money moved out of Bank of America. (If you were expecting such a list, you were wrong—but in an article about derailed expectations, that seems only appropriate.) The media narrative ahead of May Day is already settled on a fulcrum of success or failure.
Massive May Day Turnout Highlights Media's Disconnect From Reality. Share In my recap of the May Day event in New York City yesterday, I briefly summarized the inaccurate crowd estimations published by major publications like Reuters and the New York Daily News. Reuters declared the protest was a “dud,” though eventually walked back that diagnosis to make the exact opposite claim that the resurgence was “far from being a dud,” and the Daily News absurdly claimed that mere “hundreds of activists across the U.S.” participated in the marches even though in New York City alone, tens of thousands of people took to the streets. But that was only skimming the surface of bad establishment media coverage. CNN published a screed from Amitai Etzioni, a professor at George Washington University, titled “Why Occupy May Day fizzled,” that appears to make the argument that Occupy failed because capitalism still exists.
However, keeping the “general strike” theme also gave lazy journalists an easy out to dismiss the entire protest as a failure.