Sign the petition: do not extradite Julian Assange

https://internal.diem25.org/petitions/1










On the day of the first extradition hearing in London's court, we are inviting you to join the public protest DiEM25 and Demokratie in Europa will be staging at one of Germany's most iconic monuments: the Brandenburger Gate.

On Thursday, May 2, 2019, we will demonstrate just a few meters away from the UK and US embassies - the two countries that hold the future of WikiLeaks founder and DiEM25 Advisory Panel member Julian Assange and freedom of press in their hands. Please tell everyone you know about the protest!

You see, Germany is not - and should not be - an innocent by-stander.

As we already know from Edward Snowden's relevations on NSA spying on Germany, the sovereignity of Germany - its journalists and the privacy of its citizens - is also under threat. The May 2 court hearing in London is more than just about Julian Assange. It's about our right to know. It's about you and me.

And while Chelsea Manning remains in prison, precisely because she rejected to testify against WikiLeaks, the protection of whistleblowers has never been more important - and urgent, all across Europe, including Germany. The stakes are global.

It's highly likely that the US is preparing to file more charges against Julian. The current indictment is but an attempt to criminalise long-established source protection practices and journalists working with whistleblowers aiming to disclose classified information for the public interest.

Scores of press freedom organisations, news outlets, United Nations representatives, politicians and public figures have denounced Julian's arrest and his possible extradition and have warned of its worrying implications.

Whatever the outcome of the court hearing, the very fact that Julian is being kept in solitary confinement at the "British Guantanamo" Belmarsh prison, is enough for us to gather at the Brandenburger Gate to protest against the inhuman conditions he is facing now and to loudly say Stop the extradition of Julian Assange!

Join us to lend our voice to Julian and to the journalists, whistleblowers and freedom of press activists areound the globe who's lives are at risk for defending our right to know. If you don't live near Berlin, spread the word and spread the petition against Julian's extradition.

The "We are all Julian Assange!" protest will begin at 12:00 with speeches by German theater director Angela Richter, Whistleblower Network chairmanAnnegret Falter, investigative journalist and author John Goetz, biologist and founder of EcoLeaks Esteban Servat, and myself. The speeches will be followed by a reading of a short exclusive statement by Edward Snowden brought by Angela Richter from Moscow to this special DiEM25-led public demonstration.

For Edward Snowden, our demonstration is not just about "a man who stands in jeopardy, but the future of the free press"

And last but not least, a DiEM25 and Demokratie in Europa message to all German voters: don't vote for any party at European Elections that is not ready to stand in the protection of whistleblowers, freedom of press, and, more specifically, to oppose Julian's extradition to the United States.





https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m5GaqdVtNag&feature=youtu.be


There is no future for Europe - no democracy - without the freedom of press.

Looking forward to seeing you at Brandenburger Gate (Pariser Platz) on May 2 at 12:00PM.

Here are some masks you can print for the protest: Mask-Germany, Mask-US, Mask-UK

We are all Julian Assange!

Srećko Horvat

Why Buttigieg Is DEAD Wrong About Bernie

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J1mBf1_2odo

Yanis Varoufakis on Julian Assange, Militarization, European Politics & Social Movements

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1d0tXtMIXk

On Belief and Otherness

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFtnPSd4rds

Lacan’s four discourses and the real

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHNH2lkrG5w

Richard Wolff On Gramsci And Hegemony ft. Richard Wolff

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jpn_WvkR-0E

Richard Wagner - "Tristan und Isolde", Prelude

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-qoaioG2UA

Warren Calls Out Joe Biden’s Corruption

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=reXYgFJb--4

Can Progressives Stop Biden, the Credit Card Candidate?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YoCREko9kRg

History Shows Joe Biden 3.0 Is a Bad Idea

William Rivers Pitt, 

Truthout

April 26, 2019

https://truthout.org/articles/history-shows-joe-biden-3-0-is-a-bad-idea/

So Joe’s in now, and really, thank God. The corporate neoliberal “center” is dreadfully under-represented in the current tiny field of potential Democratic nominees. In the event candidates Buttigieg, Harris, O’Rourke, Booker, Klobuchar, Moulton, Inslee, Hickenlooper and Gillibrand fail to successfully advocate for continuing 30 years of failed conservative “centrist” Democratic policies, former Senator and Vice President Joe Biden (D-Delaware) will be there to shoot the gap.

:facebrick:

“The third time’s lucky,” reads Alexander Hilsop’s 1862 compendium of Scottish proverbs. I guess we’re all going to find out how true that is over the course of the 79 weeks standing between this ragged little patch of time and the 2020 presidential election. Senator Biden’s first run at the brass ring began on June 9, 1987, and ended in searing disgrace only 106 days later after his campaign was subsumed by plagiarism accusations and his questionable relationship with the facts of his own life.

Biden ran for president for the second time 20 years later, after dancing right up to the edge of declaring his candidacy before stepping back in 1992 and again in 2004. Biden managed to stay in the 2008 race for 11 months while never polling above single digits, finally withdrawing after placing 5th in the Iowa caucus. He did get noticed, however, and ultimately accepted the number two slot on what became a victorious Obama/Biden ticket.

Biden kicked off his third presidential run on Thursday with an ominous and somewhat cumbersome 6:00 am tweet — “[E]verything that has made America — America — is at stake.” The announcement tweet failed to mention Biden’s plans to attend a big-dollar fundraiser hosted by David Cohen, chief lobbyist for Comcast, the most despised company in the country. This, morosely, is par for a very long course.

Though he labels himself a friend to working people, Biden has a record of harming workers that spans decades. “His energetic work on behalf of the credit card companies has earned him the affection of the banking industry,” wrote Sen. Elizabeth Warren in 2002, “and protected him from any well-funded challengers for his Senate seat.”

“State laws have made Delaware the domicile of choice for corporations, especially banks,” writes Andrew Cockburn for Harpers, “and it competes for business with more notorious entrepôts such as the Cayman Islands. Over half of all US public companies are legally headquartered there.” Joe Biden spent 36 years as a Delaware senator until Obama raised him up in 2008, and during that time he served his core constituency with vigor.

Biden voted in favor of one of the most ruthlessly anti-worker bills in modern legislative history, the 2005 Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act, depriving millions of the protections provided by Chapter 7 bankruptcy. For this, and for his pro-corporate labors stretching all the way back to 1978, he has earned the financial devotion of the too-big-to-fail club many times over.

Millennial voters are touted as the sleeping giant of the 2020 election: Turn them out in large numbers, goes the thinking, and you can practically start measuring the drapes in the Oval Office today. If this is true, and I believe it is, candidate Biden began his campaign behind an eight-ball roughly the size of, well, Delaware.

“Student debt broke $1.5 trillion in the first quarter of 2018 according to the Federal Reserve,” writes Mark Provost for Truthout. “Twenty percent of student borrowers default on their loan payments. Delaware’s own senator and former vice president of the United States, Joe Biden, is at the center of the decades-long campaign by lenders to eviscerate consumer debt protections.”

Biden became chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1987, at a time when Republicans were running actively racist campaigns under the gossamer veil of being “tough on crime.” Chairman Biden, who was about to spend 106 days failing to become president at the time, was not about to miss the boat. By 1994, he had become the Democratic championfor the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, a vicious piece of legislation which ushered in an age of mass incarceration that lawmakers today are still laboring to dismantle.

Biden’s problems on the matter of race go far beyond his full-throated support for the 1994 crime bill. “I do not buy the concept, popular in the ’60s, which said, ‘We have suppressed the Black man for 300 years and the white man is now far ahead in the race for everything our society offers,’” he said in 1975 regarding school desegregation. “‘In order to even the score, we must now give the Black man a head start, or even hold the white man back, to even the race.’ I don’t buy that.”

You can expect to see that quote at least once a day for as long as his campaign remains active. One can try to shrug off a 44-year-old quote as the words of a man whose opinions on race have “evolved” — he shared the ticket with Obama! — but his record on the issue is unavoidably long and bleak. “Joe Biden’s greatest strength is that he’s been in the mainstream of American politics for the last 50 years,” writes the NBC politics blog, The Fix. “And that’s his greatest weakness, too.”

In this, Biden mirrors the history of the party whose nomination he seeks, a party that was firmly on the wrong side of racial justice until the middle of the 1960s. “My state was a slave state,” he told Fox News in 2006. “My state is a border state. My state has the eighth-largest Black population in the country. My state is anything [but] a Northeast liberal state.” Later that same year, before a mostly Republican crowd in South Carolina, Biden jokedthat Delaware only stayed in the Union during the Civil War “because we couldn’t figure out how to get to the South.”

Joe Biden voted in favor of George W. Bush’s invasion and occupation of Iraq. I have spent the last 17 years of my life writing about that horrific war, and expect to still be writing about it right up until they wind me in my shroud. There is no lack of irony to be found in the fact that Biden ultimately decided not to run for president in 1992 because he voted against George H.W. Bush’s Gulf War resolution, believing that vote irretrievably damaged his chances for victory. Some 26 years later, his vote in favor of a different Iraq war will be around his neck like a blood-soaked millstone, and justly so.

And then there is the matter of Anita Hill, which rolls many of the most pressing issues of the day — women’s rights, the patriarchy, racism, the conservative balance of the Supreme Court, collusion with a Republican Party that thinks “bipartisanship” is hilarious — into a very hard ball.

“Joe Biden was the ringleader of the hostile and sexist hearing that put Anita Hill, not Clarence Thomas, on trial,” writes Shaunna Thomas, co-founder and executive director of the women’s group, UltraViolet. “In doing so, Biden caused tremendous harm to all survivors, he set back the movement, and he helped put Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court. This is not a subject he can sweep under the rug. This is not something he can just get out of the way before announcing his candidacy. This is not something one line in a speech or interview will fix.”

Prior to announcing his candidacy, Biden expressed regret for his treatment of Anita Hill, going so far as to say “I’m sorry” on the Today show in September 2018, which speaks volumes about how long he has been contemplating this campaign (Hill was not present in the studio to hear the apology). On the day he announced this third run, CNBC reported that Biden had spoken to Hill personally. “They had a private discussion,” said a campaign spokesperson, “where he shared with her directly his regret for what she endured and his admiration for everything she has done to change the culture around sexual harassment in this country.”

According to The New York Times, however, Hill was having none of it. “Ms. Hill, in an interview Wednesday, said she left the conversation feeling deeply unsatisfied and declined to characterize his words to her as an apology,” reported the Times. “She said she is not convinced that Mr. Biden truly accepts the harm he caused her and other women who suffered sexual harassment and gender violence.”

“I cannot be satisfied by simply saying I’m sorry for what happened to you,” Hill is quoted as saying. “I will be satisfied when I know there is real change and real accountability and real purpose. The focus on apology, to me, is one thing. But he needs to give an apology to the other women and to the American public because we know now how deeply disappointed Americans around the country were about what they saw. And not just women. There are women and men now who have just really lost confidence in our government to respond to the problem of gender violence.”

Joe Biden’s first three public endorsements — from conservative Democratic Senators Chris Coons (Delaware), Bob Casey (Pennsylvania) and Doug Jones (Alabama) — tell you all you need to know about who is rooting for his candidacy. A significant number of the policies he has devoted his life to are simply terrible. He’s a bannerman for a failed Democratic Party experiment, and the only people who don’t seem capable of perceiving that failure are the “centrist” Democrats cheering him on.

Biden is planning to run on the same “But I can win!” platform that worked out so poorly in the last election. The politics blog Crystal Ball labels him as potentially “The Most Experienced New President Ever,” which was also what some people were saying about Hillary Clinton in 2016. Even in the short time between now and then, a great many Democratic voters have demonstrably left him behind.

Three decades of watching conservative Democrats assist Republicans as they drove the country to the right is enough already. Alexander Hilsop’s proverb, I strongly suspect, is dead wrong on this one. Joe Biden is leading in the polls at the moment, but if he’s still in the race after Super Tuesday, I will be stunned. At least he’ll know how to find the exit. He’s done it before.

The Time of the Era and the Time of an Analysis

 27 April, 2019

Jorge Assef

http://www.thelacanianreviews.com/

In the course of his Brazilian seminars published under the title of “The Erotics of Time”, Jacques-Alain Miller, referring to La Rochefoucauld’s saying about the impossibility of looking death in the face, states: We could say there is a Horror Temporis[1].

After the decline of the Name of the Father, and confronted with the empire of the capitalist discourse and the consequent rise of object a to the social zenith, we can see how our era lives in the frenzy of making the most of its time. The push to jouissance, along with the imperative that “time is money” so don’t waste it, have shaped the hyper-modern version of the contemporary “Horror Temporis”: This is the horror at wasting time which translates into an ongoing status of subjective urgency.

The other side of these phenomena is that those who do not know how to catch this train remain on the fringes, in some sort of suspension of time, or delayed condition of apathy or uncertainty. How does this phenomenon appear in the clinic today?

One typical form has to do with being in a hurry: patients ask about the length of the treatment in their first interview, say that they don’t have time to come often, get upset if there are delays in the waiting room, etc. Another form is a kind of lethargy manifested in the doubt that some patients express about coming every week, using as justification the argument that there is nothing so important going on in their lives, they would not know what to talk about, for instance.

What both these forms express is an avoidance of what Lacan situated as the logical time between the instant of seeing and the moment for concluding. Lacan calls this blank space, where there are no certainties (whether good or bad), no conclusions and no answers, the time for understanding. It has to do with a necessary lapse, a lapse where something can come into being, something can be loosened, something can be built, can ripen, break away or crop up.

For this “Time for Understanding” to acquire its power, we need to safeguard it against the oppression of apathy as dead-time and from the acceleration of hyper-activity; which is something that in itself goes against the grain of our era and its imperatives. It installs the analytical experience as an unprecedented pause in the generalized velocity of our way of life.

There is an often repeated remark from Lacan’s interview on Belgian radio published as a text called “Radiophony” where, referring to Socrates, he states: “He knew like us that a being needs time to come to be” [2]. Lacan says that this time, which is a logical time, needs to be respected and supported not only by the patient but also by the analyst. That is why he then adds: “This ‘it takes time’ (faut du temps), he — i.e. the analyst — supports it long enough for that which comes to be said not to fail…[3]”

And precisely, when Lacan gives his interview for the Italian magazine Panorama he states: “My books are called incomprehensible. But for whom? I did not write them for everyone, thinking that just anyone could understand them. (…). For me, it is enough to have an audience who reads my work. If they do not understand, well, let’s be patient. (…) I am also convinced that within ten years at the utmost, people reading my work will find it entirely transparent (…).’ [4].”

He does not say that his work will become transparent, as if he were a man ahead of his time; he says that those who read it will, within ten years at the utmost, find it transparent, meaning that he also includes time in the act of reading. The formation of the psychoanalyst thus also requires time for understanding.

In fact, when an analyst acquires the skill of managing time in the direction of the treatment (which includes supporting the time needed “to come to be”) it is an effect of their formation, and formation is also a matter of time.

We thus see that supporting time, a time that has no forced limits, no deadlines, no certainties, the time of the “Time for Understanding”, is part of the materiality of the analytical session. That is why Lacan says: “(…) except that discourse is not simply (…) something which leads somewhere, has a fabric, a texture, and not only does it take time, not only does it have a dimension in time, a certain density which means that we cannot in any way be satisfied with the instantaneous present (…)[5]

Therefore, it is thanks to this “Time for Understanding” that the “Instants of Seeing” can irrupt, like the spring of the lion that Freud talks about, as well as the “Moments for Concluding” as precipitations that often take the subject by surprise.

The analytical experience ranges between these two zones[6]:

The series, frequency, continuity and regularity: so that those events in life that left a mark on the subject (and which fixed a certain regime of jouissance) are displayed. Then the effects of truth can be gathered[7] and organized as knowledge.

The cut, spring, surprise, the act, the irruption.

It is between these two registers of time that one makes room for something to happen that will lead to the end of the analysis.

In the meantime, our practice does not detain itself in setting deadlines, or goals according to a time schedule, a chronological period or fixed hours. It is not a question of how long an analysis takes or how long a session lasts, but about the effects that are produced there.

It is said that once a journalist asked Jackson Pollock how he knew when one of his drip paintings was finished. His answer was: “And how do you know when you are finished making love?”

The time of the analytic act is a time that breaks all clocks, because it operates at the level of the subjective experience of time. This is why Miller claims: (…) In precise terms, I consider Lacanian sessions as a time frame with a supplement of the infinite (…) Otherwise the problem of the duration of sessions would become insolvable. They will always be too short or too long (…) It is not that we give short sessions, but that we give sessions that are infinite[8].

---

[1] Miller, J-A (2002). “La erótica del tiempo”. P. 19. Buenos Aires: Tres Haches.

[2] Lacan, J. (2012) “Radiofonía” in Otros Escritos. P. 449. Buenos Aires: Paidós.

[3] Lacan, J. (2012) “Radiofonía” in Otros Escritos. P. 451. Buenos Aires: Paidós.

[4] Lacan, J. (1974 [2015]) “Jacques Lacan Freud for Ever” an interview with Panorama. Published in Hurly-Burly. The International Lacanian Journal of Psychoanalysis. Issue 12. P. 16. Published for the Freudian Field by the New Lacanian School.

[5] Lacan, J. (1957-1958 [2017]). “Formation of the Unconscious. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan | Book V”. USA: Polity Press.

[6] Brousse, M-H. (2019) Available at: https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=299986064184879/

[7] Córdoba, C. (2019). Available at: https://www.facebook.com/CIECSeminarioInternacional/photos/a.790997284294532/2145609028833344/

[8] Miller, J-A. (2002). “La erótica del tiempo”. P. 19. Buenos Aires: Tres Haches.