4.16.2018

Mission Accomplished, no. 3



Just before the latest round of US bombing in Syria, I found myself appalled at a sabre-rattling op-ed in the Washington Post bearing the bloodthirsty declaration "We Need To Go Big In Syria. North Korea Is Watching". Never mind that we're bombing Syria again despite no real evidence of chemical attacks, and before the OPCW inspectors could get in to investigate -- hell, evidence is for squares these days -- the US media have totally shifted from the issue of fabricated chemical attacks to this tinhorn in North Korea who we're supposed to be scared to death of despite not being able to get his missles to work and whose nuclear arsenal isn't even 1/10 the size of the US -- the only nation in history to have actually used nuclear weapons.

Yeah, let's make an example of this tinhorn in order to put the fear of god into this other tinhorn -- classic crass schoolyard bullying. What else could you expect from an old GW Bush flunkie?

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Blast From Yer Past: "A16"

Oh, that good old Spirit Of Seattle. Turtles’n'Teamsters everywhere.




The mood and solidarity between different parts of The Movement — folks like old-skool unionists and environmentalists discovering common goals and realizing they were fighting the same fight against the same enemy — were electric and invigorating in the months following Seattle, and none quite like the personal charge I got when, just a couple of weeks afterwards, I saw the action call posted in alt.activism for the April IMF/World Bank Mobilization in Washington, DC, for April 16, 2000 — the now-legendary “A16".


Blast From Yer Past: "A16" IMF/WorldBank Mobilization, 04.16.00 from Mike Flugennock on Vimeo.


At last, no more watching for little shreds of TV coverage, of scouring another city’s IMC postings — the revolution circus was coming to my town, and I was going to actually be in it, and photographing and taping it, and telling the story of that week for everybody else out there… and, the wheatpasting. Oh, yeah, the wheatpasting...