What would happen if an asteroid hit U.S. banks?

(Reuters) - Ever wondered what the U.S. economy might look like should there be another Lehman Brothers-style bank collapse? Well, it would not be pretty.

Unemployment could jump to 13 percent, recalling the breadlines of the 1930s. The Dow Jones industrials might plunge 50 percent to 5,668, a level last reached before the dot.com boom in the mid-1990s. At the depths of a brutal year-long recession, output might shrink at an 8 percent annualized rate, wiping out two whole years worth of growth.

Anyone lucky enough to have a job or cash left after the carnage could snap up a home at November 2000 prices.

This dire picture is what the Federal Reserve wants U.S. banks to imagine when they test their balance sheets for resiliency against a major economic shock.

So tough is the test that Karen Petrou, managing partner of Federal Financial Analytics, quipped: "The only adverse event the Fed left out is a direct asteroid strike on a major banking center."

It sounds shocking. But it's actually similar to the firestorm that swept through the United States after the shock bankruptcy of investment bank Lehman in September 2008, which ushered in the worst recession since the 1930s.

Next time around, however, damage could be even worse because the U.S. economy would enter in a weakened state. It is still healing from the last recession and a second blow could be crippling.

Few economists predict a U.S. recession, though uncertainty is rampant. A Reuters poll earlier this month put the risk at 25 percent, down from 30 percent the prior month, and recent U.S. economic data has improved.

The Fed last year began running banks through annual "stress tests" to measure how their balance sheets and capital buffers would cope with conditions in the consensus economic outlook, plus a major shock. On Tuesday it announced details of how it will conduct its round for 2012 release.

The latest stress test is tougher than the last -- little wonder, noted Nomorua Equity Research, given Europe sliding back into recession, China slowing, financial markets in turmoil over the euro-zone sovereign debt crisis and an uncertain U.S. fiscal picture.

But Richard Bove, a banking analyst at Rochdale Securities, says it is irresponsible to put 31 U.S. banks through a worst-case scenario. A stress test this tough risks forcing banks to prepare for the worst, possibly creating what regulators fear.

"They are going to dump loans, they are going to stop lending and they are going to put us into the recession that the government wants to know how they will function within.

"This is a really stupid stress test," Bove told Reuters Insider Television.insider.thomsonreuters.com/

Srinivas Thiruvadanthai, director of research at the Jerome Levy Forecasting Center, disagrees. He welcomed the Fed's move, saying it will hasten a shrinkage of bank balance sheets that is much needed to match a slower-growing economy.

NOT FORECASTS

The Fed stated in bold letters several times in its news release on Tuesday that the adverse conditions "are not forecasts but hypothetical scenarios."

But the deep recession the Fed conjures is based upon actual experience of severe recessions, such as 1973-75, 1981-82 and 2007-2009. In fact, the numbers closely mirror the scale of damage from the Lehman bankruptcy, layered upon a weaker baseline.

The Fed also notes risks from overseas.

"An outcome like the supervisory stress scenario, while unlikely, may prevail if the U.S. economy were to experience a recession while at the same time economic activity in other major economies were also to contract significantly," it said.

If the United States were to enter a deep recession in the fourth quarter of this year, the Fed's worst-case scenario envisages the euro zone hit hard, suffering almost two year's of contraction until mid-2013, while output shrinks by a more than 6 percent annualized rate at its depths.

(Additional reporting by Dave Clarke; Editing by Dan Grebler)

Pictures of the Week, November 18–25

From renewed riots in Egypt and Saif al-Islam Gaddafi’s capture to the pepper spray outrage at University of California-Davis and the Kabaddi World Cup, TIME’s photo department presents the best images of the week.

See last week’s Pictures of the Week.

Via: http://lightbox.time.com

#OccupyLA Refuses To Leave, Police Attempting To Evict Now

Yesterday we reported about the planned eviction of Occupy Los Angeles. Occupiers have refused to leave and the police are currently enclosing. Thousands have arrived to defend Solidarity Park, forming human chains. Watch it live:

Italy's shadow economy moves into political spotlight

(Reuters) - In the busy Naples square where she works, 18-year-old Arianna is a familiar sight as she darts back and forth from a cafe bearing trays with espresso and pastries.

With a bright blue apron, lip stud and cheerful smile, she is known to all except the Italian taxman -- for whom the Neapolitan waitress has never existed and probably never will.

Paid 100 euros a week in cash, the high school dropout is one of hundreds of thousands toiling away in a parallel Italian economy where cash is king, contracts or receipts do not exist and the taxman is cut out of the equation altogether.

"Here in Naples, you've got to accept what you get," she said, recalling her start as an irregular worker in a bag factory where she was paid just 50 euros a week.

"They know you're young and need work, so they offer to pay you off the books without any benefits. I'm used to it by now. I don't really hope to ever get a job with a contract."

With Italy fighting to emerge from a debt crisis that could sink the euro zone, Prime Minister Mario Monti is taking aim at these practices in the hope of netting at least part of the 120 billion euros in unpaid taxes of which it deprives the state each year.

The new premier has already promised the state will closely monitor wealth accumulated by Italians to crack down on fraud and lower the limit of payments that can be made in cash.

History, however, is not on Monti's side. Successive governments in Italy have promised, tried and ultimately failed to cripple a flourishing grey economy in a country where dodging the system is often considered a necessity or even an art.

Former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi once famously even encouraged workers laid off from carmaker Fiat (FIA.MI) to seek a job off the books.

Over the past decade, the underground economy has shown signs of shrinking but still accounts for 16.3 percent to 17.5 percent of the overall economy, statistics office Istat says. Other estimates put it as high as 22 percent, second only to debt-choked Greece in the euro zone.

Nowhere is it more on display than in southern cities like Naples, where underground activity of one form or another is so pervasive that a U.S. diplomat in a cable published by WikiLeaks last year wrote of a "culture of illegality" across the Italian south.

Factories in and around Naples churn out fake Fendi and Gucci bags. Traditional coffee bars and restaurants often pay staff in cash, while illegal immigrants hawk cheap scarves and trinkets along a busy road dotted with glitzy stores.

Further down the coast from Naples, poor African migrants pick tomatoes in fields for as little as a few euros a day.

MAKES SENSE FOR ALL

For many in Naples, working in "black" is a way of life.

Sitting outside a cafe along one of the city's many narrow streets, 32-year-old Ivan, who like others interviewed for this article asked that his family name not be used, recounts how his entire 11-year career as a plumber has been off the books. Officially, he's unemployed.

Doing it that way was a no-brainer: getting a work licence, giving up nearly half his take in taxes and keeping up with the mass of paperwork and bureaucracy required to stay legal would leave him with virtually nothing, he says.

The way he sees it, everyone involved wins.

"It makes sense for both me and the client," he said.

"The client saves money because you don't have to add taxes, and I save money too obviously."

Working informally, he pockets about 2,000 euros a month. His wife, a domestic helper, also works unofficially, earning 400 euros a month when she isn't busy taking care of their four- and six-year old children.

Sitting across from him at the cafe, his friend Marco flashes a conspiratorial smile when asked which side of the law he falls on.

He did want to be on the right side, he says with a sigh, but realised the economics were against him.

After a series of a low-paid part-time contracts as a gym instructor failed to translate into a steady job, Marco decided it made more sense to work off the books at different gyms when needed, rather than being tied to a contract and schedule.

"Frankly, it's the only choice I have," he said. "They won't give me a full-time job and it doesn't make sense to work part-time for 450 euros a month."

Paid in cash by his clients, he says he now takes home 1,400 euros a month -- a good sum for a few hours' work a day. He can even afford to stay in bed till noon, he said with a laugh.

"Look around you -- pretty much everyone here is working in black in one way or the other," he said, pointing to a stream of people sauntering along the street packed with stores and cafes.

CULTURE OF LEGALITY

A few blocks away in a sumptuous office decked with flags and portraits near Naples' famed opera house, Prefect Andrea De Martino settles into a couch and appears defiant when asked if there is any hope of winning the battle against the likes of Marco or Ivan.

"The culture of illegality can be and is being transformed into a culture of legality," said De Martino, a government-appointed law and order official.

He proffered statistics that he said showed the state was winning the fight -- a recent survey showed 90 percent of companies suspended for hiring workers unofficially have since resumed business fully in compliance with rules.

He dismissed the suggestion that the shadow economy is pervasive, saying an inspection this year of over 6,000 companies in the Campania state that includes Naples showed only about 8 percent of workers were working "in black".

In a drearier office building overlooking a slum, a police official on the frontlines of the battle is less enthusiastic.

About 20 to 25 out of every 100 companies his men inspect end up facing penalties for violating laws on informal workers, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to speak to the media.

Cracking down is not always easy either -- in tomato fields in the south, for example, migrant workers scatter and melt into the countryside at the sight of police, he said. Their employers can only be booked if an undocumented worker is detained and their personal information recorded, he said.

He said he did believe the rampant illegality could be overcome, but that would involve a cultural change first.

"You have to take out this mentality of illegality if there is to be real change," he said.

"You can't militarize a nation by putting a policeman at every corner to make checks."

THE RICHER SECTION

Workers like Ivan, Marco and Arianna fall under the "poor" section of the shadow economy, says Giuseppe Roma, director of the Censis foundation, who has written a book on the subject.

"This is mainly a sustenance-driven economy, one that is part of the shadow economy because it is not competitive," he said. "It's a very primitive form of an economy."

This poorer section -- which includes workers paid off the books in the agriculture sector and Italians illegally letting out rooms to tourists -- accounts for about 5 percent of the economy and is often seen in the underdeveloped south, he said.

A much bigger chunk of the shadow economy is the "richer" part seen in the country's north -- one of professionals like dentists and doctors who evade tax, and companies that violate rules by paying overtime off the books or failing to issues receipts for some transactions.

The level of illegality also varies sharply by sector, with rates of up to 50 percent in hotels and personal services or as low as 5 percent in the energy sector dominated by large companies, says Enrico Giovannini, president of Istat.

Giovannini says simple measures like lowering the limit for cash transactions from 2,500 euros at present to as low as 300 euros -- among moves Italian media say Monti is considering -- or making certain types of spending tax deductible at the source can be effective in the fight against evasion.

Whether the money recuperated from cracking down on evasion is used to simply reduce the deficit or whether it can be used to lessen the tax burden to reward businesses operating legally is another issue to be considered, he said.

None of this however impresses Neapolitans like Arianna, for whom the battle is entirely theoretical, fought far from the narrow alleys she hurries through each day with a tray in one hand.

"I've always worked in black, I don't think there's any hope of getting a regular job on the books," she said, before rushing back to her employer.

"If I wanted a job contract I would have to leave Naples."

SILENZIO

Editorial: We Are Free People

FOR SOME STRANGE REASON: No matter how many people get arrested, fear is not on the agenda. PHOTO: Adrian Kinloch

Democracy is not simply speaking truth to power, to ask, politely or not, for reforms great and small. Sometimes you have to do it yourself.

The 1% is just beginning to understand that the reason Occupy Wall Street makes no demands is because we aren’t talking to them. The 99% are speaking and listening to each other. 4,167 people have been arrested since the occupations began; millions more are reimagining the world we want to live in.

Police forces have been deployed by Republican and Democratic politicians alike to break a movement that was first ignored and then mocked in what passes for the news. It’s not just America. This is a living democratic movement that is global in scale and growing in real time. That this beautiful thing is met with state violence says everything we need to know about the perpetrators. It also means we’re on to something. Their attacks are based on an understanding of power that’s dying, if not already dead.

Mubarak is Berlusconi is Bloomberg is Quan is Walker is pepper spray is broken politics bound to the past and we make no demands of them because free people constitute governments, not the other way around.

We don’t know how this is going to end, but the beginning is near.

Incinta, riceve calci e spray al peperoncino dai poliziotti. Perde il bambino (video)

Urla dal dolore e dalla disperazione. Jennifer Fox ha perso il bimbo che portava in grembo dopo aver ricevuto da un poliziotto un colpo allo stomaco e varie spruzzate di spray urticante.

Diciannove anni, la ragazza si trovava nel bel mezzo delle proteste di Seattle quando ha subito la carica degli agenti. “Urlavo: Sono incinta. Lasciatemi passare. Sto cercando di uscire”. Spiegazioni non convincenti, visto che nel caos un ufficiale di polizia l’ha colpita allo stomaco e un altro poliziotto ha lanciato la sua bicicletta in mezzo ai manifestanti, colpendola nuovamente all’addome.

Poi lo spray al peperoncino: “Prima ancora che potessi girarmi, entrambi poliziotti hanno puntato lo spray al peperoncino verso di me e hanno spruzzato”.

Tanto stress e poi la triste notizia ricevuta dal medico: il cuore del suo bambino aveva smesso di pulsare. “Mi hanno detto che è stato provocato dal calcio e lo spray urticante è arrivato fino al bambino”. I quotidiani locali attendono i referti medici che confermino la triste diagnosi. Intanto un ufficiale della polizia di Seattle ha detto all’Huffington Post che è stata aperta un’inchiesta interna.

United States of Occupation

Liberty Square is where it all began. But far from Wall Street, in parks and plazas and public spaces across the nation, people outraged at financial crimes and political skulduggery have slept and eaten and talked and cared for one another — a new American civic space has been created. Marching with signs, shouting with strength, demonstrating with peace: in every corner of the country, the occupation has arrived.

Camping out with strangers is never easy, even under the best conditions. So the Idahoans who’ve joined Occupy Boise have developed an outlet: a grievance booth, designed to collect evidence for the injustices stated in the Declaration of the Occupation. There, people are able to articulate their reasons for joining the movement, vent their frustrations and tell personal stories.

While Occupy Wall Street sits in the belly of the financial beast, Occupy Detroit symbolizes the devastation wrought by those financial and corporate elites: “Wall Street is the source of the problem,” occupiers there say, “and Detroit is the result.” Since the occupation of Grand Circus Park began on October 14, the camp has risen to the challenge of building a political movement in a city blighted by vacant homes, buildings, lots and schools by deploying its resources to provide for homeless Detroiters.

Occupy Los Angeles set up tents on the steps of City Hall, where their proximity to Skid Row has been both a blessing and a curse. Within days, Skid Row residents started showing up for food and water. Thefts and violence soon followed. But since working with local advocacy groups like LA-CAN (Los Angeles Community Action Network), starting an Occupy the Hoodaffinity group and instituting a policy of inclusive self-policing, security has improved. Many at the camp take pride in this accomplishment.

Occupy Tucson began their encampment on October 15 at Armory Park, just two blocks from the city’s financial district. Each night thereafter, police entered the park at the 10:30 p.m. curfew with a pad of citations; though each carried more than $1,000 in fines, determined Tusconans continued to hold the park. On the evening of November 3, Tuscon police rousted the encampment. Everyone was forced to pack up and leave. They walked a few blocks up South Stone Ave. and reoccupied at Veinte De Agosto Park.

Police trashed Occupy Boston’s encampment on October 11, but the protesters returned and several hundred people are now sleeping in Dewey Square. With a unanimous mandate from their general assembly, the legal working group is preparing a preemptive lawsuit which would ask for injunction relief against any future attempt to evict the occupiers from Dewey Square.

In Albany, Governor Andrew Cuomo asked Mayor Jerry Jennings to clear the encampment near the State Capitol, but Jennings and the city police department refused. Tennesseeans scored a victory when a U.S. district judge issued a temporary restraining order against a curfew the police were trying to enforce on the Occupy Nashville encampment at Legislative Plaza.

In the middle of the night on October 25, some 500 riot police surrounded Occupy Oakland’s Oscar Grant Park, tore down the encampment and arrested at least 105 people. That afternoon, more than a thousand people marched back to the camp and though the police once more met them with force—tear gas, rubber bullets and flash grenades—the occupiers took back the park and immediately called for a city-wide general strike. On the same night, across the bay in San Francisco, police backed down on their threat to evict the occupation.

Around the world people poured into the streets in solidarity with Occupy Oakland. One week later on November 2, instructors held teach-ins, dozens of businesses closed voluntarily and demonstrators took to the streets of Oakland for the general strike, periodically clashing with police and eventually shutting down the Port of Oakland. In Los Angeles, New York, Denver and dozens of other cities across the country, people marched to show their support for the strike.

Occupy DC is keeping the heat on at Capitol Hill, with arrests recorded at a super-committee hearing, an occupation of General Atomics (a defense contractor that specializes in drone aircraft) and the periodic shut-down of the Chamber of Commerce. “Thus far the police have been a model that Oakland and New York and other police could learn from,” said occupier David Swanson. “I’ve watched a police officer refuse the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s request to arrest us as we blocked the Chamber’s doors.”

On November 6, thousands from university, non-profit and community groups nationwide joined Occupy DC to protest the Keystone XL pipeline project. Forming an unbroken chain around the White House, demonstrators called on President Obama to reject Transcanada’s plan to send polluting tar sand crude from Alberta to the Gulf of Mexico.

On November 3, Occupy Wall Street convened a People’s Trial of Goldman Sachs, with Chris Hedges and Cornel West presiding and victims of foreclosures and public lay-offs speaking as witnesses. After finding Goldman Sachs culpable for “fraudulent manipulation of financial markets,” hundreds marched to its headquarters, where the NYPD arrested 16 people.

At Occupy Austin, as elsewhere across the country, protesters have relocated private funds through bank actions. The occupation’s Bank Action Committee has overseen transfers from Bank of America, Wells Fargo and Chase to local credit unions. Texan credit unions reported 47,000 people had joined and $326 million was moved in October — four times the usual growth rate. Nationwide, the Credit Union National Association reports 650,000 people have joined credit unions and have added $4.5 billion in new savings accounts in the past month.

As of this writing, there have been demonstrations in nearly 1,000 cities worldwide. From Anchorage to Orlando, encampments are being created by people who likely never imagined they would sleep in a park in winter. Even Antarctica has been “occupied,” thanks to researchers at McMurdo Station who braved the cold to show solidarity with the movement. And though police continue to arrest occupiers across the nation, they are quickly learning that while you can arrest bodies, you can’t arrest an idea.

Thank you to the following contributors: Jon Chisum, John Dennehy, Brad Edmondson, Ruth Fowler, Charlie Lockwood, Joanie Masters, Keesha Renna,

Kevin Schiesser, Jenna Spitz, David Swanson, JoAnn Wypijewski

Via :http://occupiedwallstjournal.com

POLIZZIOTTO E MATTARELLO UNIVERSALE

Police pepper spraying and arresting students at UC Davis

Tactical Response to Police Brutality: Wear White Overalls....

White Overalls, Italy, of the Autonomia movement (see the inner tubes...?)

Topic Response: #OCCUPYWALLSTREET

I think we should form our own riot control squads. The police have become the main purveyor of violence at all protests and we need a democratic use of violence to reassert our right to exist as a movement. Protestors should dress up in homemade riot suits and march around other protestors in mimicry of the police. Never should they charge or start a confrontation. But always shall they guard against protestors being beaten like this, at the Berkeley campus last week.

Read below to clarify.

Violence is always the first subject of discussion when any real attempt at change is fomented. Every movement takes a stance on it. Occupy Wall Street has taken a clear stance in favor of non-violence while the philosophical groundings remain varied within the group. This essay is not advocacy for violence. It is a reinvestigation into how it functions at the level of a police confrontation.

In full disclosure I think it is ignorant and privileged to condemn violence as a political tool in all instances; we have no moral right to condemn the overthrow of the Czar in the winter of 1914 or the black rebellions in our own country. Angela Davis puts it best,

“I mean, that’s why when someone asks me about violence, I just — I just find it incredible, because what it means is that the person who’s asking that question has absolutely no idea what black people have gone through, what black people have experienced in this country…” (continued...)

However, I agree with protestors at Occupy Wall Street, there is nothing to be gained by violence in their movement; it would be amoral in the sense that it is unnecessary, not to mention aa poor strategic move, potentially alienating to the American people.

Having said that, we are getting the shit beat out of us. Our encampments are being trampled and our projects actively being destroyed. We have few legitimate weapons today, any attempt at deterring or responding to police violence would be decried as illegitimate. We are facing the state monopoly on violence.

Antonio Negri and Micahel Hardt put forth a very simple defense of violence in their book Multitude:

“The disobedience to authority and even the use of violence against tyranny is in this sense a kind of resistance, or defensive use of violence.”

Violence has the dual nature of destruction and protection but violence never creates anything. When out goal is to create a better society, we shouldn’t use violence. However, when we have actively built a community where homeless people are being fed and daily experiments in communal living are undertaken, a defense is needed. Even Gandhi said,

“I do believe that, where there is only a choice between cowardice and violence, I would advise violence…”

A notion of defensive violence coincides with a broader understanding of violence, put forward by Slavoj Zizek in his bookLiving in the End Times:

“In order to grasp this parallax nature of violence, one should focus on the short-circuits between…power and social violence: an economic crisis which causes devastation is experienced as uncontrollable quasi-natural power, but it should be experienced as violence. The same goes for authority: the elementary form of the critique of ideology is precisely to unmask authority as violence…”

When we come to understand the crashing economy and system of inequality as a violence equal if not greater than the police repression we face, our move to defend whatever positive creation, like the community at Zuccati park, increasingly appears moral to us.

Our synthesis is made clearer by Hardt and Negri when they describe the task of the left today as “the search for and experimentation with new weapons”. They again do us the favor of offering their experience with Italian activist in the 90’s, the last time there was an active movement against the status quo. They analyze a group who called themselves The White Overalls:

“The White Overalls movement first appeared in Rome in the mid-1990s when the traditional parties and organizations of the Italian left were becoming increasingly marginalized. The White Overalls, from the beginning, claimed no political affiliation with any other political groups or parties. They claimed they were the "invisible" workers, since they had no fixed contracts, no security, no basis for identification. The whiteness of their overalls was meant to represent this invisibility. And this invisibility that characterized their work would also prove to be the strength of their movement.”

There a clear parallels (especially for the oppression we students are familiar with, as chronically underemployed and excluded from the social space) such as an institutional anemia that left the people of Italy without a voice. It is clear that the White Overalls were responding to a similar situation. This is why an investigation into their tactics is useful to us. Particularly this part:

“That is when the serious conflicts with the police began, and the White Overalls came up with another stroke of genius of symbolism. They began to mimic the police spectacles of repression: when the police put on their riot gear to look like Robocops behind their Plexiglas shields and armored vehicles, the White Overalls too dressed up in white knee pads and football helmets and transformed their dance trucks into monstrous mock battle vehicles…”

Here, we find an example of tactical innovation, something that is desperately needed. The protestors have been kicked out of Zuccatti and Oakland Mayor Quan has revealed that many city leaders have collaborated on methods of dispersing these communities, saying they no longer belong to the people who started them and have been hijacked by violent anarchists. Ouropponent is innovating and we need to be doing so as well. Our opponent prefers to take pages from the books of police states, but we can in contrast learn from other activists. That is what Occupy Wall Street has accomplished, creating a global community of resistance, as Angela Davis put in her article this week about her visit to Occupy Philly:

“At the site, I reflected aloud - with the assistance of the human microphone - on the differences between the social movements with which we have become familiar over the last decades and this newly-grown community of resistance… The Occupy activists and their supporters have brought us together as the 99%. They call upon the majority to stand up against the minority. The old minorities, in effect, are the new majority. There are major responsibilities attached to this decision to forge such an expansive community of resistance.”

Perhaps what will guarantee our survival as a movement is that we will be different than the past. But only because we do better, and learn faster. Not because we try the same things over and over.

Who will watch the watchmen? We should take it upon ourselves to create a REAL POLICE FORCE, one that checks the main purveyor of violence at these protests, and that is the police themselves. This is the ironic power of the White Overalls that Hardt and Negri outline: the media refers to the protests as violence, while pepper spray and batons are called public service. In a reversal, we mimic police to protect the public from violence, to stop conflict, revealing the inherently militarized nature of the police.

It will take courage. This is in a way more difficult than simply getting beaten and dragged away. This is why it hasn’t been done. But the police are trying their own tactics, are growing and changing to defeat the developing community of resistance. This week on Democracy Now! Amy Goodman interviewed Steven Graham about his new book called Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism, which is about the police and their increasing investment in new markets of surveillance and “non-lethal weaponry” and their collaboration with the FBI, CIA (recently to evict occupiers...), and even military counter-insurgency experts as they develop new tactics and strategies for containing and defeating political unrest.

In his book American Counter-Insurgency, in Chapter 2, Roberto Gonzalez shows how the academic research by military think-tanks concerning counter-insurgency for suppressing political resistance in occupied countries like Iraq works on a two way street. Methods of control used by the military were first theoretically tested by retired US Army Lieutenant Colonel Ralph Peters on a hypothetical resurgence of the Black Panthers in domestic urban centers in an article called ‘The human terrain of urban operations’ (2000). In turn, today, police innovate through collaborating with studies done in countries the US now occupies. (find article here)

All this to show is that in the face of ever improving police and control apparatus, it seems naïve and ignorant, if not outright stupid not to experiment with as many new methods of resistance in turn, especially when we consider the asymmetry of this struggle. With a closing quote from Hardt and Negri,

“To these three principles any democratic use of violence must also add a critique of arms, that is, a reflection on what weapons today are effective and appropriate. All the old weapons and methods are still around, from passive resistance to sabotage, and they can still in certain contexts be effective, but they are not at all sufficient. Leon Trotsky learned his lesson in the Russian Revolution of 1917-" A revolution ," he says, "teaches you the value of a rifle" but a rifle does not have the same value today as it did in 1917… We need to invent new weapons for democracy today.”