The Community Avengers are a team of residents from Miami who are standing up in these trying times, calling out the criminal bankers, and inspiring action. They have been spotted tumbling out of a van at a recent Miami Dade County budget hearing, moving into the seething crowd and taking to task politicians with their lively chants and street theater. After mixing with all those malcontented with proposed cuts to the Miami Dade County budget, the Community Avengers did a double header and headed over to a health care town hall for a show down with the riled up right wing.

Just this week the Community Avengers joined forces with residents and pastors from Miami Gardens to fight back against banks bent on eviction rather than loan modification. Always on call to do battle with the villains of bad government and corporate greed, the Community Avengers rallied to support an ordinance that would sanction foreclosing banks.

Click here to read more about this action: http://tinyurl.com/Communityavengers

It is time for progressive people everywhere to learn a lesson from the Community Avengers. Let’s creatively mobilize and call out the culprits across the country. Where right wing pundits play on irrational fears, we will be there. Where greedy bankers rob our people, we will be there. Where government bows to a marginal and maniac minority, we will be there.

You too can be a Community Avenger!

• Joseph Phelan, Miami Workers Center

Mainly for Jay and Duncombe. I think at the core, one of the things he’s talking about, is if all that work getting Obama elected actually mattered…

Also where were the parliment guards when this went down? You shoot a laser beam at Congress and it’s Guantanamo time here in the good ol’ USA. Nice to know there’s still some Dukes of Hazard style parity in Russia.

via: Exiled Online

Last weekend (Nov. 7 actually–ed), a Russian anarchist revolutionary art group called War pulled a fast one on Prime Minister Putin. Or at least they thought they did. Russian revolutionaries sure do fall far from the tree these days.

On the night of November 7, a group of them set up a laser on top of a building across the river from the Russian White House — that’s the place where the prime minister carries out daily his business — and projected a 150-ft. wide toxic green skull and bones on its facade. But the protest didn’t end there. While a laser was sweeping across the building, a half-dozen people were scaling the building’s 20-ft. front gate. But they revolutionaries didn’t linger, staying on hostile territory long enough to pose for a few photos and a quick Rocky victory jog up the stairs. They were in and out so fast, the cops didn’t have enought time arrive at the scene. Take that Vladimir Vladimirovich! (More pictures below.)

The stunt was meant to commemorate the anniversary of the Russian Revolution, with the laser beam symbolically standing in for the revolutionary signal shot fired from the Aurora cruiser. My first thought was, “Cool!” But then I thought, “Whoa! Are Russian revolutionaries going candy raver?” I mean, this was one of those non-violent and non-confrontational attempts at political change through art. Laser art, probably to techno. It really put Russia’s rich history of revolutionary violence to shame.

This is an except from the end of the interview that I thought was relevant to the questions we’re asking in How to Win.

Gross: Do you think some of the tactics that you took on were in some part this youthful expression of anger, something that only a young person would do?

Ayers: Absolutely.

Gross: What fits into that category?

Ayers: Well I think that you’re caught up in a street demonstration and you are young and full of fire and you just spontaneously find yourself spilling onto the streets. Leaving the line of march. And deciding to throw a rock at the window of a military recruiter. That’s spontaneous opposition. It’s not well thought out, um, but it makes a certain amount of sense but it’s not part of a larger strategy that’s thought through.

Gross: Is there a level of doubt that you feel when you were young you didn’t allow yourself to entertain because you had to feel so committed to the cause and what your plan was that you couldn’t allow certain doubts to enter your mind?

Ayers: Yeah I think that I live with doubt today, every day, all the time. And it is different than being young and certain and jacking yourself up to do certain things. I argue to my students, I argue to young people all the time that you cannot live a political life – you can’t live a moral life – if you’re not willing top open your eyes and see the world more clearly. See some of the injustice that’s going on. Try to make yourself aware of what’s happening in the world.

And when you are aware, you have a responsibility to act.

And when you act, you have a responsibility to doubt.

And when you doubt, you can’t get paralyzed. You have to use that doubt to act again. And that then becomes the cycle. You open your eyes, you act, you doubt, you act, you doubt.

Without doubt you become dogmatic and shrill and stupid.

But without action, you become cynical and passive and a victim of history. And that should never happen.

P.S. If you haven’t seen the Academy Award nominated Weather Underground documentary, I highly recommend it. You can watch it in its entirety below:

In recent weeks, I’ve ended up more than once amid marketing executives discussing, with apparent seriousness, what the purveyors of ordinary products can learn from the campaign that sold America on Barack Obama. To which my response is, well, they can learn lots. As long as they, too, sell something that makes people cry when they see it giving an acceptance speech.

…

Hate to tell you, Mr. Marketer, but your yogurt isn’t going to turn those who eat it a few times a month into heroes. Because—duh!—yogurt, like virtually all other products, won’t generate intense identification and loyalty and participation among the citizenry. Those who pontificate on marketing matters already are prattling on about how Obama created a wiki campaign, in which thousands, if not millions, both influenced and sold the brand. But what’s left obscure is how impossible it is for almost anything else to generate such a response. And it overlooks how disciplined the Obama campaign was in driving its one-word message of “change” from the top down. The genius was not in the wiki. It was in launching a simple-themed campaign that participants flocked to.

Marketing Lessons from Obama’s Campaign – BusinessWeek

The Democrats were able to snatch the mantle of newness from the neo-cons by running a candidate that the Republicans simply couldn’t. Nothing could be more unique, more new, and therefore more suited to the End of History word view than a black man with a very global-sounding name.

You can get this as a life size cardboard cutout

Thanks to You Tube and hip celebrity initiative, Obama was not just a presidential candidate, we was part of Will.i.am’s posse, he was sang about by hot chicks on the internet, and we was the subject of a super cool/patriotic (but not the old fuddy duddy patriotic, the new fashionable patriotic) Shepard Fairey poster. Obey. Vote Obama. Never before has a politician’s mug been emblazoned on more baby tees, baby bibs, and urban-chic stickers. You could be radical, fight the system, and be part of the greatest wave of youthful idealism to break on the shores of the US since the hippies. Without having to really do that much. Ah, and this is the challenge for people who want change beyond just a new member of the two-party establishment every 8 years.

He's even on skateboards

Real change requires people to alter how they live, not just what buttons they wear, and what levers they pull twice a decade. How to make people swoon over local produce, bike to work, and become tax resistors is an entirely more difficult proposition. But one that’s infinitely more important than which candidate to Obey Giant.

The Brand Called Obama

Life in the Post Political Age

Moving to the Center of Elite Consensus

Obey Giant Vote for Change (embeddable videos of celebrity endorsements)

Tri-Valley CAREs (Communities Against a Radioactive Environment) out of Livermore, New College in San Francisco and two allied groups filed the bid for the Livermore contract on Oct. 27. At the time, they acknowledged they had little chance of winning it, but said they hoped the bid would encourage public support for phasing out the lab’s nuclear weapons work and diverting its thousands of scientists into research on global warming, alternative energy sources and other peaceful enterprises.

On Friday, Tri-Valley officials said the National Nuclear Security Administration, which oversees the nation’s nuclear weapons complex for the U.S. Energy Department, had rejected the bid. Officials said the call for phasing out nuclear weapons work was “inconsistent” with Energy Department and Nuclear Security Administration strategic planning. read more – LIVERMORE / Anti-nuke activists lose out on bid to run weapons lab

Funny, engaged in pop culture, arguably hard-hitting message… this is good.

So to you Larry Flint, I say, “Thank you.” Thank you for being a cantankerous, lecherous, old perv who is not afraid (even after being shot!) to assert your Constitutional rights. I find the vast majority of your beliefs offensive, disgusting, immoral, and representative of the worst scum in the human soul, but I respect your tenacity in asserting those views in the face of vast opposition. We should all be so bold.

via: The Raw Story

Publisher Larry Flynt has announced that Hustler is releasing a porn film featuring a Sarah Palin lookalike and a tank full of stranded Russian soldiers.

Fox’s Megyn Kelly was immediately sure that “your average American — it’s offensive, it’s disgusting it’s dirty — they wouldn’t want to see it.” But her real question was, “Is this whole thing actually legal?”

In a consideration of that question on Monday, Kelly turned first to defense attorney David Wohl, who suggested that, although Palin would be best advised to ignore the film, she might “seek a preliminary injunction at least preventing its release before the election.”

Wohl acknowledged that the 1988 case of Hustler v. Jerry Falwell had established that celebrities have no rights to sue when it comes to parody, but he asserted that if the film could be viewed as “a political hit piece,” Palin might have “a good cause for action.”

“Might there be some actual confusion to the non-educated mind out there?” asked Kelly — who is apparently well-familiar with the Fox audience — of legal analyst Mercedes Colwin.

“That’s certainly a tremendous stretch,” Colwin replied. “There’s absolutely no confusion here. It is definitely parody like David said. It is protected by First Amendment.”

“It even pokes fun at our network,” Colwin continued. “It’s called ‘Faux News.’ And actually Bill O’Reilly stars in it as well.”

Wohl, however, wasn’t completely convinced by the first amendment argument, saying that the Hustler case involved a fake ad which was clearly over-the-top parody, while “this is a movie.” He went on to suggest, perhaps unfortunately, that “there’s going to be an undercurrent suggesting somehow that this is the way Sarah Palin lives her life, that there’s some deep dark secret she has.”

A partial script of the movie which has appeared online makes it clear that the film definitely has elements of political parody. In the opening scene, the actress playing Palin flings herself on a tanning-bed repairman, pronouncing, “You’re in luck. I fully support off-shore and on-shore drilling. … God almighty! You are hung like a moose. Now I have to eat ya! … Pound me until my head is so empty that I can’t even remember the name of the one Supreme Court case I actually know!”

“Whatever you think of Larry Flynt, the man knows his First Amendment,” Kelly concluded.

This video is from Fox America’s Newsroom, broadcast October 13, 2008.

YouTube – Pol-d