The Brooklyn Paper
March 26, 2012
BY ELI ROSENBERG
Occupy Wall Street wants to occupy your wall space.
A collective of poster printers in Gowanus is attempting to help reignite the social movement’s flames for a May 1 “General Strike,” with a handful of new pin-ups it hopes will be as arresting as the image of a ballerina atop a bull that kicked off the whole protest in September.
With the aim to confuse and 'stir up the shit', Brainstone built and launched a website that looked like the beloved Tea Party had given up on its right-wing clowns and finally supported Obama.
The site drew lots of twitter, blogger. social media and news site reaction. Members of Brainstone were frequently requested to conduct interviews and spent tons of hours responding to emails.
On July 2nd, 2013, after attending the Gas Exporting Countries Forum (GECF) conference, Bolivian President Evo Morales departed Russia from Vnukovo Airport in Moscow aboard his presidential plane. However, a "leak" suggested that Edward Snowden was aboard, which led Spain, France, and Portugal to close their airspace to the aircraft, to then be grounded in Austria.
The mischievous posters began appearing all over London in the past two months.
On the side of an East London bus stop, one of them shows Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, emerging from a Tesla’s roof with his hand pointing upward in a straight-armed salute. “Goes from 0 to 1939 in 3 seconds,” the ad reads. “Tesla. The Swasticar.”
El Anatsui, a visionary originally from Ghana, blends discarded materials into breathtaking sculptures that, in themselves, advocate for change and prompt us to reimagine our relationship with the environment.
On January 21, 2014, McDonald’s asked its customers to tweet supportive messages to the Olympians who would compete in the Sochi Games, along with the hashtag #CheersToSochi. However, within a couple of days, LGBT activists essentially hijacked the hasthtag from McDonalds.
In Seoul, thousands of protestors who represent organized labor marched in Seoul on Saturday denouncing the governments attempt to force thousands of striking truckers back to work after they all walked out over a dispute in the price of freight.
A giant leak of more than 11.5 million financial and legal records exposes a system that enables crime, corruption and wrongdoing, hidden by secretive offshore companies.
The Islamic Republic has always frowned upon dance but recently even a simple choreographed or ‘synchronized movement’ – as the regime calls it – has become an act of protest.
By Will Potter
I tried to resist. I really did. But when I jokingly posted on the Green is the New Red Facebook page that I wanted to make a “Sh*t the FBI Says” video, ya’ll went nuts about the idea. Like the videos that started the trend, it’s pretty goofy. But sadly, it’s all based on statements the FBI has made in court, in the press, or to activists themselves (I’ve heard quite a few of these myself).
ICE [Immigration & Customs Enforecement] is now heavily recruiting, in part with offers of a $50,000 signing bonus. ICE has run roughshod over the Constitution, targeting people via racial profiling, failing to give people their constitutional rights of due process, and whisking them off to prisons abroad.
Women in China are covertly resisting government crackdowns on discussions over their Me Too movement with a clever workaround.
The phrase “rice bunny” (米兔), pronounced as “mi tu,” has popped up on social media networks after censors removed posts that mentioned sexual harassment or the hashtag #MeToo. While those phrases are heavily monitored, Rice Bunny isn’t.
It has been a tumultuous and anxious week for women in Turkey. When President Recep Tayyip Erdogan issued a decree at midnight last Friday, annulling Turkey's ratification of the Istanbul Convention on violence against women, women poured onto the streets of Turkish cities to protest. Further demonstrations are planned.
The Mueller Report, important as it is, has not been read by most Americans. While perhaps written in more accessible language than other federal reports, there have been efforts to bring it into other formats: audio books, performances, and The Mueller Report presented in graphic novel form by Barbara Slate.
Dogs featured in one ruse to ridicule the regime—pictures of dictator Than Shwe were hung around the necks of the stray dogs that roam the streets of Rangoon. The pictures, which rapidly found their way onto the Internet, are the work of an exiled Burmese satirist who goes by the name of Mr Creator. Downloaded copies of his pictures and cartoons are popular items among cyber dissidents.
Savages are an all-female post-punk band that attempt to motivate people to be informed and take part in politics. They "try to give people a platform to express their own ideas" as Fay Milton of the band explains.
The following is the manifesto Savages wrote for their 2016 album, Adore Life:
Reading the introduction to Animal Farm by Christopher Hitchens a few years ago, I was stunned to learn that George Orwell, then a struggling writer in London, worked by letter with a group of refugees to publish the novel in Ukrainian in the displaced persons camps of postwar Europe.
Zuoxiao Zuzhou is a Chinese singer whose accented, croaky voice is hardly ever in tune. But for his fans he's the voice of a generation — one of the very few voices who dare to speak out. After a collaboration, Cowboy Junkies member Michael Timmins called him "China's Leonard Cohen."
The Fourth of July is upon us, so it’s time once again to sing what is arguably our most baffling national ditty, “Yankee Doodle Dandy.” Maybe you’ve noticed: Some of the lyrics seem like the work of a prankster on acid. Who else could have conceived a vignette as bizarre as a man riding a pony into town, then sticking a feather in his cap that, for unknown reasons, he insists on calling “macaroni”?
Spanish citizens held the first hologram protest in history in order to protest without violating the new draconian guidelines of the National Security Act, the new amendments to the Penal Code and the Anti-terror law. Thousands of people marched past a Spanish parliament building in Madrid over the weekend weekend to protest the new law that they say endangers civil liberties. But none of them were actually there.
Gum Election
Gum Election is a guerilla art project which started in New York City in October 2008. It encouraged people to vote during the presidential election in 2008 and also not to spit out their chewing gum carelessly on New York Cities already dirty streets. Now the Gum Election is back and New Yorkers are voting again “who’s sucking the most”.
Decades of institutional corruption, elitist exploitation, and social abuses have been sewn into the political fabric of Iran’s dictatorial Islamic republic and have moulded Kermanshah-born fine art painter Nicky Nodoumi’s satirical motifs.