This episode of It's the End of the World
As We Know it and I feel Fine
was made possible by contributions
from slaves like you.
Spank you very much!
This amateur footage
captured the violence of an attack
on two police officers on Wednesday.
After kicking in the police car's windows,
a protestor threw an explosive
into the vehicle...
setting it alight.
The attack occurred while a protest
was being held BY the police
not far away at Paris'
Place de la Republique.
This spring over 350 of them
have been injured by protestors
during the Up All Night movement
and anti-Labour Law rallies.
A few hundred people
defied a state order
and gathered at the same time
to march against police brutality,
chanting Everyone Hates the Police!
Goooooooooood morning slaves
and welcome to another sedition of
It's the End of the World as we Know it
and I Feel Fine...
the show where pigs
get reality checks cashed…
free of charge.
It really poses the question -
what do you want to do?
Do you want to take a chance
and risk getting KNOCKED OUT?
Oh my god!
Oh......wow!
What an idiot!
What a loser!
Good!
I am your host the Stimulator
and though you wouldn't know it from
watching the corporate fucking media...
The candidates took to Twitter!
My word!
Indeed there was a lot to discuss.
for months now, peeps in France
have been teaching the world
a valuable lesson on how to wage
a popular mothafuckin insurrection.
While a fair amount of attention
has been devoted to Nuit Debout
- the vibrant movement
of participatory democracy
whose participants continue to hold
nightly assemblies in cities
across the country,
outside of these occupations,
a broader decentralized movement
has been steadily expanding
in a nationwide showcase
of tactical innovation
and militant fucking resistance.
In just one example,
on mothafuckin May Day
militants in the northern city of Rennes
stormed and occupied La Maison du Peuple
- or House of the People - transforming it
into a public gathering space
and logistical hub complete with
its very own guerrilla radio station.
These badass squatters held down
the occupation for nearly two weeks,
before a heavily militarized
tactical squad managed to take back
the building on May 13th.
Buuuuuuuuut rather than accepting defeat,
peeps just said fuck it!
And went ahead and re-occupied
the building on May 27th,
forcing the cops to come back
and clear it out again two days later.
Yup… France has become
a veritable mosaic of revolt,
a tapestry of combative street demos,
occupations, direct actions,
and nationwide one-day general strikes.
The latest of these was on May 26th, when
over 150,000 people took to the streets
in cities across the country,
with riots and clashes with police
breaking out in Toulouse, Nantes,
Lyon, and Bordeaux.
In Paris over 20,000 peeps
took to the streets for a
particularly rowdy demo.
During the fracas
a 28 year old photographer, Romain D,
was critically injured
by a police flashbang grenade
and ended up spending
eight days in a coma.
On June 4th a large contingent of antifa
hit the streets of Paris
to commemorate the third anniversary
of the murder of 18 year old anti-fascist
Clément Méric,
who was killed by neo-nazi shitbuckets
back in 2013.
After a few luxury shops
and a real estate agency
were smashed the fuck up,
the march quickly descended into
a pitched street battle,
with the pigs attacking the demo
with tear gas, flashbang grenades
and rubber bullets
- and militants responding in turn, with
bottles, bricks and other projectiles
French workers have also thrown down
in a serious fucking way,
paralyzing the country with
a series of coordinated strikes
and blockades aimed at
forcing the government to back down
on its package of proposed labour reforms
- the so-called Loi de Travail.
Given French workers' proud history
of militant wildcat actions,
bossnappings
and industrial fucking sabotage,
the country's tepid union leadership
has been forced to go along
with these strikes,
in a desperate effort to maintain
their position as
the legitimate negotiating partners
of the French State.
This wave of labour unrest
has hit the energy and
transportation sectors particularly hard,
with workers blockading oil refineries
and fuel depots,
and shutting down nuclear power stations
causing long line-ups at gas stations
and forcing the government to dip into
its strategic fuel reserves.
These workers have been joined by
striking train operators,
dock workers, truck drivers,
air traffic controllers,
and thousands of striking students.
Pilots with the national airline,
Air France, have also joined the fray,
announcing plans for a three-day strike.
This ongoing unrest
comes at a particularly bad time for
France’s shit-sipping socialist president,
Francois Hollande.
At the time of writing, the country
is bracing itself to play host
to Euro 2016
- a month-long football extravaganza
that will inundate the country
with tourists,
and put it firmly under
the international spotlight.
With the ruling Parti Socialiste
stubbornly refusing to back down,
the national trade unions calling for
another general strike on June 14th,
and intransigent French youth
giving no sign that they're gonna stop
lobbing rocks and bottles at pigs,
and setting shit on fire anytime soon,
the coming days and weeks should make
for quite the fucking show.
In my last sedition,
me and my subMedia slaves
took a fond look back at
the mothafuckin Oaxaca Commune,
an epic six-month long uprising
that turns ten years old on June 14th.
In my report, I pointed out that
the teachers of Section 22
of the Coordinadora Nacional
de Trabajadores de la Educación,
or CNTE,
who kicked things off back in '06,
are still holding shit down to this day.
For three years now,
they've spearheaded resistance to
neoliberal education reforms that
Mexico's taco-smuggling president,
Enrique Peña Nieto, has been trying to
impose on the whole fucking country.
Well... this work paid off.
And on May 15th - or Mexico’s
national day of the teacher,
members of the CNTE launched
an indefinite mothafuckin strike,
and peeps around the country took part
in a day of action that saw marches,
rallies and plaza occupations,
or plantóns,
break out in 23 of Mexico’s 31 states.
Since then, this strike has
totally fucking paralyzed Mexico's
education system,
with thousands of schools shut down
in the southern states of Oaxaca,
Chiapas, Guerrero, Veracruz and Michoacan
and support going strong in Mexico's
Federal District - where one in five
Mexicans live.
In Chiapas on May 27th,
thousands of teachers temporarily
took over a number of private radio
and television stations
to call bullshit on the corporate media’s
framing of the strike,
and to get their own message out.
That same day, teachers in Oaxaca,
in a truly impressive tactical manuever,
managed to surround a contingent
of hundreds of federal police,
forcing the pigs into
the awkward situation of having to
negotiate their own withdrawal.
In the areas most heavily impacted
by the strikes,
the teachers enjoy widespread
public support.
Not only are they demanding that
the government scrap their proposed
education reforms, but they're
also calling for increased funding
for education more generally,
freedom for all political prisoners
and prisoners of conscience,
and justice for the 43 missing
Normalista students from Ayotzinapa.
And that's why we're marching together...
for our teachers... for our children...
and for the generations still to come.
And a bit further south,
Colombia has also been
brought to a standstill,
in this case by a Paro Nacional,
or national strike,
initiated on May 30th by a broad-based
coalition of Indigenous groups,
Afro-Colombians, farmers, truck drivers,
teachers, students and precarious workers.
As part of the Paro,
an estimated 100,000 people
have taken part
in over 100 blockades, occupations
and so-called points of concentration
across the country.
This is the third Paro this year,
and each time they've gotten
more fucking intense.
A defining tactical feature
of these strikes has been
the coordination of mass highway blockades
by rural peasants, aimed at paralyzing
the national transportation networks
in order to force government concessions.
During the current Paro, participants
have raised a number of demands,
many of which focus on the ongoing
privatization of state assets
and national resources,
the failure of Colombia’s
lizard-faced fuck of a president,
Juan Manuel Santos,
to live up to previous agreements
with social movements,
and the horrific fucking state
of human rights in the country
– where disappearances and assassinations
of organizers and land defenders
are still common practice.
So.... to learn more about just
what the fuck's going down in Colombia,
I recently caught up with Marcela
of las Organizaciones Sociales de Arauca
- or the Social Organizations of Arauca.
Hey Marcela... how the fuck are you?
There is a lot of violence
against the people.
So, we are not doing well.
On May 30th, peeps in Colombia
staged a Paro National,
or a nationwide blockage,
somewhat akin to a general strike.
What led people to take this action?
Well, principally it's the economic model.
The people are tired of the same
economic policies that the government
has been implementing for decades.
These are the same policies that generated
the armed conflict in the country,
but they have also has generated
social issues that the people can
no longer continue to tolerate.
So this is what has provoked this
national agrarian, peasant, ethnic
and popular strike.
How was this Paro organized?
And what has the state's response been?
Well, the social movements are
connected to a platform called
the Agrarian Summit,
which includes participation from
peasant, indigenous and afro-descendent
organizations.
And there has also been dialogue with
other members of social sectors,
such as the truck drivers,
transporters, labor unions,
and other trade unions.
The people have been protesting for
a few years now and the government has
made promises that it has not fulfilled.
This new strike is demanding
the fulfilment of these prior agreements.
And the response from the government is
on one hand, to try and draw out
this dialogue, prolong these negotiations,
and on the other to repress.
To repress the people who are
mobilizing on the highways
and in the lands of Colombia.
One of the issues that organizers
of the Paro Nacional have raised
is the National Development Plan
being proposed by Colombia's president
Juan Manuel Santos.
What does this plan entail?
And why are people so opposed to it?
The National Development Plan is
a deepening of the economic policies
of the government.
Among other things, it allows
the land to be concentrated,
more than it already is,
into the property of businessmen,
cattle breeders,
and owners of agro-business.
It privileges mining, mineral extraction
and hydro-carbon extraction
above protecting the environment...
above maintaining
environmental equilibrium.
So basically it prioritizes extraction
at the cost of the resources and wealth
that the Colombian people produce,
and which exist in Colombian territory.
And this obviously negatively affects
the quality of life of the population.
So this is why the people are against
the National Development Plan.
Back in 1998, Billy Clint launched
Plan Colombia -a bilateral agreement
framed as an effort to help Colombia
fight a so-called War on Drugs.
This arrangement has continued under
both the Bush and Obama administrations
and has since served as a model
for the current war on drugs in Mexico.
What material effects has Plan Colombia
had on social movements in your country?
The consequences have been more poverty
and more militarization.
Really, drugs were just an excuse,
because here the drug problem
has not been resolved.
What was gained through Plan Colombia
was a massive increase to the budget
and resources required to finance the war,
to finance the state security forces,
to militarize the territories, the cities,
the countryside...
and so a consequence is that today
peoples lives are more heavily controlled.
Now the private sphere
has been militarized,
the schools have been militarized,
civil life in general
has been militarized.
That is the consequence of Plan Colombia.
And the phenomenon of narco trafficking
and the production of crops
with illegal uses,
continues basically the same.
How have the recent peace negotiations
between the government
and guerrilla groups like the FARC
and ELN affected the overall
political atmosphere in Colombia?
Well, the impact has been pretty negative
because on one hand,
the talks are not focused on resolving
the grave social issues that exist
here in Colombia.
What it has generated, on the other hand,
is polarization between
different sectors of the right-wing.
The neoliberal right-wing
of the industrial bourgeoisie, which is
connected to transnational corporations
has been supporting the peace process,
because it's a convenient solution
for them to pacify the territories,
in order to guarantee
the extraction of natural resources.
And the ultra right-wing, that is
closer to the cattle-breeding sector,
the oligarchy that is more closely aligned
with the land and landowners...
has not supported this process,
because they still believe that the state
has the military and economic capacity
to terminate and eliminate the guerrillas.
So this has been a small difference
in terms of the specific methods that
the right-wing and the oligarchy advocate
for ending the country's insurgency.
And so what the peace talks have done
is to polarize public opinion
between the two right-wing positions.
And as for the position of resolving,
in a structural way,
the problems facing the people
living in bad conditions...
this position is isolated,
neutralized and invisibilized.
As a precursor to
the current peace process,
in 2003 the government of Álvaro Uribe
began negotiations aimed at
demobilizing right-wing paramilitary
death squads, such as
the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia,
or AUC.
This process was supposed to have
finished in 2006.
Did these groups actually demobilize?
And what happened to
the members of these groups?
Well, really it is not them...
paramilitarism is not a group of people.
Paramilitarism is a strategy,
or mechanism of extrajudicial violence.
Of dirty war.
Paramilitarism was implemented
by the Colombian government,
by private armed groups,
but also by members of
the state security forces - the police,
army, security organisms, DAS -
to be able to carry out
undercover operations.
That is what paramilitarism is...
it's a mechanism that claims to be
a third actor, external to the government,
that carries out grave crimes
such as tortures,
disappearances, massacres etc.
It is logical that if there are
private individuals who participated
in these structures, they could have
been demobilized in a dialogue
with President Uribe.
Some of these people were.
But others continue carrying out this role
- so knowing that, what had to be
eliminated was not
the individuals involved, but precisely
the mechanism of illegal violence
that has been implemented by
the Colombian state since the 70s,
when paramilitarism began.
And this has not been resolved.
Paramilitarism continues to exist
and those in power continue to use it.
There is the clear case of the
disappearances of activists demanding
Land Restitution for displaced people.
Despite the fact that
these paramilitary groups no longer
officially exist, these people
continue to be assassinated.
And they continue to be assassinated
for the same reasons.
For decades Colombia has been known
as one of the most dangerous countries
in the world for trade unionists.
What is the current situation
facing workers in Colombia?
The situation is grave.
You no longer hear statistics
of hundreds of dead labour unionists...
because they have already been killed.
So... with this violent aggression
against the labour union sector,
the unions have become divided
and the people have been dissuaded
from joining these labour unions.
And the few that still exist
are always threatened.
They live controlled by the state,
and repressed by their bosses
- like the cases of Coca Cola, Nestle,
and Drummond - where it was proved
that these companies used
paramilitarism to control and eliminate
labour leaders.
The result is that we don't even have
10% of the unionized workers
that we had 20 years ago.
Anything else you wanna add?
Well, what the peasants are demanding
- the peasants, indigenous people,
afro-descendant people, and the other
sectors that have joined this strike -
is the minimum that any inhabitant
of this country could demand...
to live in dignified conditions.
They are not asking for the government
to fulfil the impossible.
But the economic sectors that obviously
hold the political power in Colombia
do not want to cede absolutely anything.
They want to continue accumulating all of
the wealth that the country produces.
The wealth of the natural resources,
but also the wealth that is produced
by the workers.
And because of this, they won't even
allow for a decrease in the price of fuel,
or a lowering in the price of
agricultural supplies.
They won't even invest
a couple million pesos to fix the roads,
the ones used by the peasants to bring
their products to the principle cities.
They won't do it and we don't know
how long the people will have to protest
to force the government
to come to the table.
Thanks Marcela.
And that about does it for this sedition
of it’s the end of the world
as we know it and I feel fine.
We’d like to give a huge mothafuckin
welcome to the newest member of
the subMedia.tv family.
Weighing a whooping 10 pounds,
the person known as Agent Charlie
will be producing a mustard-like
substance, and keep us awake at night
for the next few months.
To the elites of the world,
we’d like to say - watch the fuck out!
Because Agent Charlie is already training
to be a lean mean fascist-killing machine.
Bienvenido al mundo mi hijo!
Don’t forget that if you would like
to know the names of the songs we played,
the samples we used,
to subscribe to our podcast,
sign up to our email list
or to send me diaper changing techniques
just visit my fuckin website:
that said, this recital of
reactionary rethoric is made possible
because slaves like you kick down
a few bucks to help us keep the lights on.
So many muthafuckin thanks to Mathew,
Jennifer, Banjamin, John, Francois,
Dylan, Kyle, Steven, Jonathan, Shannon,
Margaret, Derrick, Marten, Meghsha, Max,
Gregory, Breton, David, Maciej, Ricky,
Andrew, Alexanda, Roma, Sebastian, Yifan,
Mason, Christopher, Reto, Jeremy, Gavin,
Willie, Justyna, Kirk, Michael , Marisol,
Joseph, Sawyer, Raul, Sky, Andrew, Lauren,
Sebastien, Coby, Juliano, Stephen, Bruno,
Gabriel and William.
Tortas!
I also would like to welcome
the newest members of the taconspiracy:
Raul, Sawyer, Marten and Crystel.
Janitzio!
Finally I’d like to send a shout out
to Blandine and Milene for facilitating
our coverage in Mexico and Colombia,
and to our incredible translation team
for taking the time to interpret the word
fuck in many muthafuckin languages.
Domo Arigato!
Stay tuned next time for more news
from the global muthafuckin resistance.
Hasta la pasta compañeros!