Censored 2012 Read Online Free PDF Page A

regarding the preparation for marshal law and military control in the US. Tim Reid and Michael Evans document the worldwide deep penetration of empire forces deployed in seventy-five countries. Tina Mather, Kimberly Daniels, and Shannon Pence disclose the systemic waste of food by corporate capitalism. Nick Fielding, Ian Cobain, Darlene Storm, and Stephen Webster warn of the immediate penetration of empire enforcers into cyberspace for propaganda control. Regionally, we are reminded of the ongoing apocalypse in central Africa by Keith Harmon Snow, while E. Eduardo Castillo and Martha Mendoza address the massive US involvement in Mexico’s war on drugs.
    The overall environmental disasters of empire expansion featured in
Censored 2012
are seemingly beyond comprehension, ranging from new diseases to massive life-threatening pollution of the oceans, air, and earth. We, in our bodies, are all Fukushima, Gulf oil, plastics, andelectromagnetic waves. No one is safe, including the children of our children. Without immediate mass interventions, humankind is in danger of permanent extinction.
    Also documented in
Censored 2012
are the very human efforts around the world to counter the empire of destruction. There are movements to ban plastic bags, protect the environment, develop local banks, and establish community-based budgeting, as well as many other efforts to protect the commons and encourage collaborations. The democracy movements of young people in the Middle East, Greece, and Spain are inspiring other attempts to counter the empire of destruction. These social movements in resistance to power, crossing ideological lines, are a manifestation of grassroots radical democracy. They are community-based reality checks by human beings sharing inequality in the face of overwhelming power.
    During the movement’s May 15, 2011, protests in Madrid, Spain, Project Censored affiliate professor Concha Mateo wrote from the M15 camp in the Puerta del Sol (“Gate of the Sun”), just before it was taken down on June 12:
    [A]fter five hours debate, the Assembly of Sol decided on the continuity of “acampadasol” as it is known in the web.… One more step forward.… The local assemblies are working. The 15M goes on.
    The energy will never disappear—it only gets transformed.
    We are moving out of Puerta del Sol. We will leave the
Puerta
but will take the
Sol
with us. The 15M goes on.
    One sign over the wall says: The sun can rise up whatever night.
    The night: democratic deficits, collective efforts required to rescue banks but no collective profit, economic austerity measures imposed by the government dictated by financial capitalism, 4 million unemployed [in Spain], corrupt politicians.… We are not anti-system, the system is anti-us. 1
    While we can be encouraged by the emerging awareness of the need for democratic challenges to empire, we cannot ignore the extreme danger of total economic collapse, chaos, and environmentaldestruction that potentially undermines human rights and civil societies everywhere. This empire of destruction seems to many to be unstoppable. Over a million civilians have died in Iraq since the US invasion. US-NATO wars continue in Afghanistan, Libya, and Pakistan, with alarming daily civilian death rates. Over three billion people live on less than two dollars a day. Human misery expands inside the empire of destruction, while the transnational corporate class—less than 1 percent of the world’s population—relishes in wealth, opulence, and greed protected by both private and public military forces and cooperative governments doing the bidding of empire.
    But, we can draw strength through mutual recognition of our resistance movements. Iara Lee’s new film,
Cultures of Resistance
, is a heartwarming look at the daily efforts of people worldwide to protect humanness in the face of fascism and repression, and is symbolically representative of the efforts that need to be manifested in real life, around the