Johann Joseph Most (5 February 1846 in Augsburg – 17 March 1906 in Cincinnati) was a German-American anarchist and orator. He is best known for accepting the strategy of "propaganda of the deed," which promoted direct action against a single person or institution (including the use of violence) to force revolutionary change and inspire further action by others. He travelled in Europe, and he lived in countries such as France and United Kingdom. In 1906, in Ohio, he fell sick because of a chronic case of erysipelas, a bacterial skin infection, in an era without any antibiotic treatments. Most died in a few days.
Francesco Saverio Merlino
Francesco Saverio Merlino (born 9 September 1856 in Naples; died 30 June 1930 in Rome) was an Italian lawyer, anarchist activist and theorist of libertarian socialism.
Merlino started to participate in the anarchist movement in Italy during his university studies.
In 1884 he went into exile in England and also travelled to the USA. After he returned to Italy in 1894, he was arrested and had to spend two years in prison.
In the following years, he developed his theory of libertarian socialism in arguments with his friend Errico Malatesta.
Murray Rothbard
Murray Newton Rothbard (March 2, 1926 – January 7, 1995) was an American economist and writer. He helped make the Austrian School of economics popular in the United States.
Rothbard helped to create modern libertarianism, a political belief in less government and more personal freedom. He founded a form of free-market anarchism which he called "anarcho-capitalism". Rothbard believed society should organise itself, and he didn't like central planning.
Rothbard wrote over twenty books and was an important central figure in the American libertarian movement.
Rothbard advocated the abolition of government control of society and the economy. He considered the monopoly force of government the greatest danger to liberty and the long-term well-being of the people. He called the state a "gang of thieves writ large — the most immoral, grasping and unscrupulous individuals in any society".
Rothbard thought that all services provided by monopoly governments could be provided more efficiently by the private sector. According to him, many regulations and laws passed "for the public interest" were self-interested power grabs by scheming government bureaucrats to make themselves look important. These schemes were not subject to market disciplines.
Government services were not efficient, and would get eliminated, if the services could be provided by competition in the private sector.
Rothbard was equally condemning of big business working with government. Business elites, he thought, used government's monopoly power so as to influence laws and regulatory policy to help themselves at the expense of their competitive rivals.
He argued that taxation was theft on a grand scale, backed by law. It was "a compulsory monopoly of force" which prevented the more efficient voluntary procurement of defense and judicial services from competing suppliers. He also argued against central banking and fractional reserve banking. A monopoly system where the government decides how much money to print is, to him, a form of state-sponsored, legalized financial fraud. It is against libertarian principles and ethics. Rothbard opposed military, political, and economic interferences in the affairs of other nations.
Carlo Tresca
Carlo Tresca (1879 - January 11, 1943 New York City) was an Italian-born American anarchist, newspaper editor, and labor agitator. Tresca was famous for the fight and the opposition to the fascism, stalinism, and the mafia. Tresca was part of the defense committee for accused murderers Sacco and Vanzetti, and frequently spoke in their defense at rallies and in articles. During the 1930s, Tresca became an outspoken opponent of Soviet Communists and Stalinism, particularly after the Soviet Union had engineered the destruction of the anarchist movement in Catalonia and Aragon during the Spanish Revolution. Before this, Tresca had supported the Bolsheviks, with the excuse of that a Communist state was preferable to a capitalist state. In early 1938 Tresca publicly accused the Soviets of kidnapping Juliet Poyntz to prevent her defection from the Communist Party USA. Tresca said that, before she had disappeared, Poyntz had talked to him about her disgust over Joseph Stalin's Great Terror. In 1941 Tresca, in a revealing moment, admitted to Max Eastman that Nicola Sacco was guilty of the crime with which he was charged, though Vanzetti was innocent. In New York, Tresca also began a public campaign of criticism of the Mafia in his weekly newspaper, "Il Martello". Tresca was killed probably by the mafia, with a gun shot. Others have thought that Tresca was eliminated by the NKVD because of the criticism of the Stalin regime of the Soviet Union.
Benjamin Tucker
Benjamin Ricketson Tucker (April 17, 1854 – June 22, 1939) was a leading proponent of American individualist anarchism in the 19th century, and editor and publisher of the individualist anarchist periodical "Liberty". In 1906, he opened Tucker's Unique Book Shop in New York City. In 1908 the books were destroyed by a fire. Tucker closed the shop. Tucker died in Monaco in 1939
John Zerzan
John Zerzan (born in 1943) is an American anarchist and primitivist philosopher and author. His works speaks about agricultural civilization. Some of his criticism has extended as far as challenging domestication, language, symbolic thought (such as mathematics and art) and the concept of time. His five major books are "Elements of Refusal" (1988), "Future Primitive and Other Essays" (1994), "Running on Emptiness" (2002), "" (2005) and "Twilight of the Machines" (2008). Zerzan is currently one of the editors of "Green Anarchy", a journal of anarcho-primitivist and insurrectionary anarchist thought.
2014 FIFA World Cup
The 2014 FIFA World Cup was the 20th FIFA World Cup being held in Brazil. It was the second time that Brazil hosted the World Cup and the fourth time that a South American country hosted the FIFA tournament. Germany won the tournament after defeating Argentina 1–0. The defending champions, Spain, were eliminated from the World Cup after losing to the Netherlands and Chile in the group stage and the host country, Brazil, were eliminated after a record-breaking 1–7 loss to Germany.
Before the tournament began, all teams received US$1.5 million for preparation costs. The teams that were eliminated from the Group Stage got US$8 million, from the Round of 16 got US$9 million, and from the Quarter-Finals got US$14 million. The fourth place team got US$20 million, the third place team got US$22 million, the second place team got US$25 million and the champions got US$35 million.
A total of Seventeen cities showed interest in being chosen as World Cup host cities: São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Belo Horizonte, Porto Alegre, Brasília, Belém, Campo Grande, Cuiabá, Curitiba, Florianópolis, Fortaleza, Goiânia, Manaus, Natal, Recife (a stadium would be shared by both cities), Rio Branco and Salvador. Maceió withdrew in January 2009.
According to current FIFA practice, no more than one city may use two stadiums, and the number of host cities is limited between eight and ten. The Brazilian Football Confederation (CBF) requested permission to assign 12 cities hosting World Cup Finals. On 26 December 2008, FIFA gave the green light to the 12-city plan.