Protests EVERYWHERE

[Cain]

Looks like Turkey isn't the only place where people are pissed off and have had enough:

Protests against bus and underground fare rises in the Brazilian city of Sao Paulo have turned violent. Police fired rubber-coated bullets and tear gas, and detained more than 200 people. Police say they seized petrol bombs, knives and drugs. Violence has also been reported at protests in Rio de Janeiro. An estimated 5,000 protesters converged on the streets of Sao Paulo's central area on Thursday – the fourth day of the protests.

As many as 200,000 people have marched through the streets of Brazil's biggest cities, as protests over rising public transport costs and the expense of staging the 2014 World Cup have spread.

The biggest demonstrations were in Rio de Janeiro, where 100,000 people joined a mainly peaceful march.

In the capital, Brasilia, people breached security at the National Congress building and scaled its roof.

The protests are the largest seen in Brazil for more than 20 years.

Sao Paulo is, of course, infamous for its wealth disparities:



And the rest of Brazil is not much better, thanks to an ingrained culture of political corruption.

Greece, again:

Greece was back in protest mode after Antonis Samaras, the centre-right prime minister, broke ranks with his coalition partners and high-handedly closed the state broadcaster on June 11th without first securing their agreement. As sacked employees of ERT (Hellenic Radio and Television) continued to occupy the Greek state broadcaster's headquarters, streaming live coverage of their plight over the internet, scores of former colleagues peacefully set up camp in a park outside the ERT building in Agia Paraskevi, a suburb of Athens.

Paramilitary police officers have shut down and seized control of the ERT headquarters, and the intent is to dissolve the agency entirely. 

Naturally, this has nothing to do with saving money and everything to do with shutting down political criticism of the ruling coalition:

Giannis Stournaras, the unelected Greek finance minister whose ministry overtook control of ERT to oversee its dissolution, sent a written warning to radio and television stations, informing them that they would face consequences if they rebroadcast ERT's protest broadcast.  Sto Kokkino 105.5 FM, a radio station in Athens owned by the left-wing Syriza political party, was threatened with closure after it rebroadcast portions of ERT's broadcast.  More egregiously, 902 TV, a television station owned by the Communist Party of Greece (KKE) had its signal repeatedly taken off the air by DIGEA, a private company which operates the network of digital over-the-air transmitters used by Greece's national private television networks.

Malaysia:

Tens of thousands of people held a rally near Malaysia's capital against alleged electoral fraud, further raising the political temperature after divisive recent polls. The latest in a series of protest rallies over the May 5 elections – which the opposition says were won fraudulently by the 56-year-old ruling coalition – saw a large crowd gather in an open field outside Kuala Lumpur Saturday night.

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Southeast_Asia/SEA-01-290513.html

The UMNO-dominated ruling coalition, which has held power consecutively since 1955, had not lost the popular vote since 1969. That result was followed by race riots between ethnic Chinese and Malays, paving the way for two years of emergency rule and an intra-party coup which installed Najib's father, Abdul Razak Hussein, as the country's second prime minister since independence from colonial rule.

Najib faces a different type of crisis as allegations of fraud and irregularities in campaigning, polling and vote counting have raised widespread questions about the legitimacy of the May 5 polls. Led by former deputy prime minister and finance minister Anwar Ibrahim, the opposition Pakatan Rakyat (PR) coalition has rejected outright the election result and organized massive rallies with protestors clad in black to mourn the "death of democracy".

So far, 10 rallies have been held across various states, attracting crowds ranging from 20,000 to 120,000. Black T-shirts emblazoned with "505" (the date of the polls) and "blackout", a reference to the mysterious power outages that occurred in the vote-tallying centers of a number of constituencies, have featured prominently at the multi-ethnic rallies.

Instead of permanently occupying strategic sites, protestors have returned home after the rallies. Nonetheless, the spreading protests are taking the initial shape of a so-called "color revolution", similar to the ones seen in places like Georgia, Kyrgyzstan and Ukraine. Images of mass protests also hark to the early phases of the Arab Spring demonstrations that overthrew authoritarian regimes in the Middle East and North Africa.

Opposition and civil society leaders have so far denied any intention of overthrowing Najib's government in a similar type of "Malaysian Spring." But some analysts believe UMNO's own anxieties about the protests may eventually turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy, particularly if current levels of repression are intensified.

Bulgaria:

Police said on Sunday that about 15,000 people took part in a rally outside the government building in the capital Sofia to demand a new election. Protesters also gathered outside parliament and in other Bulgarian cities. Prime Minister Plamen Oresharski's decision to appoint 32-year-old media mogul Delyan Peevski as chief of the powerful national security agency DANS and parliament's rapidity in rubber stamping the nomination angered many people.

I believe our very own Dalek has given us a good amount of background information on the political situation in Bulgaria.

And there are protests going on in Peru (over privatization of education), Yemen (over security force brutality), Thailand (counter-protestors against Thaskin's Red Shirt movement), Japan (nuclear power), Indonesia (fuel price rises), China (in favour of Edward Snowden and Xuchang county protests over coal mining), Canada (employment insurance) and Egypt (everything).

[Junkenstein]

Holy shit. Glad I've got nothing planned today, the world's getting fun again.

That picture, Wow. How can it not fuck with you a lot when you're looking out onto a slum from your swimming pool balcony?

[Nephew Twiddleton]

Holy shit. Glad I've got nothing planned today, the world's getting fun again.

That picture, Wow. How can it not fuck with you a lot when you're looking out onto a slum from your swimming pool balcony?

I know, it totally ruins the view.

[Nephew Twiddleton]

Note, I'm not trying to make a one liner there, just show that it's probably not a concern for them. Will also see if I can read this a bit after the boss man goes home. (I'm leaving for work shortly).

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Shit's going down, change is afoot

but I have a feeling it's going to get a lot worse (in the States, at least) before it gets better.

[Faust]

WOOO, I'm going to be In Kuala Lumpur on Saturday. I have nothing but the best timing.

[Left]

Holy shit. Glad I've got nothing planned today, the world's getting fun again.

That picture, Wow. How can it not fuck with you a lot when you're looking out onto a slum from your swimming pool balcony?

I know, it totally ruins the view.

But I do agree with the original sentiment-that photo's stunning.

Damn, I miss a good protest, stomping around in righteous indignation with a large number of other righteously indignant people is outrageously fun.
Not sure it actually works to get anything done in this country.

(suddenly distracted by an ambitious little spider that seems to be intent on building a web in front of my computer monitor....oooh...)

[Left]

Shit's going down, change is afoot

but I have a feeling it's going to get a lot worse (in the States, at least) before it gets better.

That's my take, also.
...Why do you think that is?

[Doktor Howl]

Shit's going down, change is afoot

but I have a feeling it's going to get a lot worse (in the States, at least) before it gets better.

You might be surprised.  Industry is beginning to return to the USA, because that's where the fuel is, right now (shale), and if the American public starts looking at reasonably secure employment, they will put up with ANYTHING.

[Left]

Shit's going down, change is afoot

but I have a feeling it's going to get a lot worse (in the States, at least) before it gets better.

You might be surprised.  Industry is beginning to return to the USA, because that's where the fuel is, right now (shale), and if the American public starts looking at reasonably secure employment, they will put up with ANYTHING.

I dunno, economically the 60's were one of our best decades.

[Cain]

The 60s were very different ideologically though, in that there was an articulated program for alternative means of governance and a method of action behind them ie; Communism, the New Left, New Agers etc.

Now there is, as we are so often reminded, no alternative.  And none is being articulated.  Therefore, discontent is articulated exists entirely within the malfunction of the current arrangement, and as soon as the primary reasons for that discontent are removed (the lack of jobs), then the status quo, in America at least, will be much more secure.

I mean, realistically, jobs aside, there is no difference in the economic conditions of today, five years ago, ten years ago or twenty years ago.  The discontent does not come from the operation of the system itself, but in how it affects one personally.

[Q. G. Pennyworth]

I spent a good chunk of Friday yelling at buildings. Not enough of us showed up. It's pretty fucking sad hearing passers-by excuse the government for shitting all over the bill of rights.

[Left]

I spent a good chunk of Friday yelling at buildings. Not enough of us showed up. It's pretty fucking sad hearing passers-by excuse the government for shitting all over the bill of rights.

So what else can we do?
...Other than getting everyone you know to file FOIA requests, and I doubt that will do anything serious...
It's merely the one shoe I can think of to throw in the works.
...So, seriously, I see the shit, but I don't know how to stop it.

[Q. G. Pennyworth]

I spent a good chunk of Friday yelling at buildings. Not enough of us showed up. It's pretty fucking sad hearing passers-by excuse the government for shitting all over the bill of rights.

So what else can we do?
...Other than getting everyone you know to file FOIA requests, and I doubt that will do anything serious...
It's merely the one shoe I can think of to throw in the works.
...So, seriously, I see the shit, but I don't know how to stop it.

Call representatives and senators now, and in two weeks, and two weeks after that, and a month after that. They have short attention spans.

There are a lot of July 4th protesty things planned around the country, I would recommend finding or starting one locally for your stomping pleasure. No guarantee it will change anything, but you can't bitch if you don't try, right?

[deadfong]

Note, I'm not trying to make a one liner there, just show that it's probably not a concern for them. Will also see if I can read this a bit after the boss man goes home. (I'm leaving for work shortly).

This.  I've seen similar views from up-scale housing colonies in India.  Worse, actually - Indian slums are fucking horrifying, and the horror is compounded by the fact that they are everywhere.  And yet, the middle and upper classes who live in those colonies can't, or won't, see it.  They actually get angry when foreigners come to India and talk about all the poverty.