[-empyre-] from 5th Avenue New York City

[Ana Valdés]

Dear Renate and Tim, it's very moving hear your comments from the belly of the beast, US, the worlds biggest superpower but also a nation in disray, being at the same time the police of the world and having so much unfairness in its own backyard.
On Monday we in Uruguay are going to receive six prisoners from Guantanamo, they have been jailed without trial or accusation for 12 years. Yesterday I presented my book about my years in jail and my many years in exile. Many of my old jail comrades were there it was forty two years ago but it felt as today. In my book I wrote about my many trips to Palestine and Damascus, Jerusalem, Jenin, Gaza, Hebron, Baghdad.
I wrote as well how appalled I was when I realised in Palestine that jail was now almost a common ground for so many people. Jail and police violence and the militarisation of the world, the birth of so many mercenary armies as Blackwaters and others I met in Baghdad. The most private armies recruited their soldiers among poor Latinoamericans, Peruvians, Bolivians and people from Salvador.
Violence is now a big industry and Blackwater and Haliburton and so many others are profiting of it.
Ana

Skickat från min iPhone

> 5 dec 2014 kl. 22:59 skrev Renate Ferro <renateferro at gmail.com>:
> 
> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> It is raining here in New York City.  Tim Murray and I just joined
> hundreds of protestors who marched down 5th Avenue, one of the most
> tourist, commodified streets in the world.  Past the Rockefeller
> Center Christmas tree decorated in lights galore hundreds of tourists
> stood in line to watch on one side the lit tree and the other side a
> light/video show on the facade of Saks Fifth Avenue.  Loud speakers
> filled the block and adjacent streets with holiday music.  Disrupting
> that scene hundreds of what I noted as young activists marched
> directly down the side walks of this holiday scene shouting "Hands Up,
> Don't Shoot,"  "I can't breathe," and other chants to stop shoppers in
> their tracks.  Shoppers had two choices:  to clear out of the way for
> protestors or to join.
> 
> Right now in Macy's protestors move into the inside of the shopping
> season, lay down and conduct a "die in."
> 
> I find it stunning (has to be another word) that reflects the
> confusion of the  junta-postion between a commodity driven season and
> a politically driven movement that collides head to head.  How crazy
> is it that just moments before when I opened my email via the smart
> phone I was using to video the moment, the White House sent out this
> message:
> 
> "We've been watching the economy steadily improve for years, but today
> there's new reason to really zoom in on that progress. Consider this:
> Last month, American businesses created 314,000 jobs, extending the
> longest streak of job growth on record. That's 10.9 million jobs added
> over the last 57 straight months.
> Let's put that in perspective: With 2.6 million jobs created in the
> first 11 months of the year, we've already added more jobs in 2014
> than in any entire year since the late 1990s.
> It's been a long road to recovery since the Great Recession. And while
> there's more work to do, America is outpacing much of the world in
> putting people back to work.
> Take a look at how far our economy has come since President Obama took
> office -- then share the facts with everyone who needs to know:"
> 
> HELLO?  What about the thousands of young and dis-engranchised who for
> the past three nights around the US  have been shouting out to be
> heard about the injustices that have manifested themselves over the
> past several weeks.
> 
> World-wide ordinary people from Hong Kong to Mexico to the US are
> shouting out as well about other injustices.  Can we take a moment to
> reflect on how these movements may be organically generating?  How
> does social media, list serves, networked media enable movements such
> as these? What else may be inspiring these gestures of resistance.  I
> am looking forward to speaking to all of you now but for now I have to
> run.
> 
> Renate Ferro (and Tim Murray from NYC)
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