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Post by dodger on Aug 29, 2013 5:40:45 GMT
Old news is only fit for wrappin' up fish 'n chips. Said in days when our take away food came wrapped up in old newspaper. Now our choice is just as likely to be a curry or a chinese. Besides after a century or so it was decided that the practice was unhygienic, printers ink being a well known carcinogenic. Another EU regulation to plague us? So yesterdays news. So yesterdays news is fit for nothing, not even food wrapping. Just re-pulping, the paper that is, the news also to some extent. So a commodity. Still it was instructive to read whilst eating , just making out through the grease and vinegar a cast iron , 18 carat promise from a politician that was cynically broken,a few months previous. A solemn pledge that country A had no warlike intent or territorial ambitions towards country B. Who at that very moment were seizing towns with names half remembered from school bible study. The local beauty queen who wanted to work with animals and spread a message of peace whilst banishing hunger in the world...later found to be pregnant....never reached the finals.
news analysis - turkey's stand against terrorism
WORKERS, DECEMBER 2003 ISSUE
In response to a call from trade unions, peace protests were held on 22 November in major Turkish cities including Istanbul, Ankara, Antalya and Batman. The protests expressed revulsion at the horrific suicide bombings in the Turkish capital Istanbul, four in one week, which tore through two synagogues, the British consulate and HSBC bank.
Protesters showed their deep anger at the terrorist outrages, which they saw as attacks on the whole Turkish people, and they again called for an end to Turkey's alliance with the US over the Iraq war. Strangely, the trade union protests were hardly mentioned at all in British and US press reports, which concentrated on the statements of political "leaders".
A chilling al-Qaeda statement exulted in the destruction and misery caused by the bombings, saying "the cars of death (are) reaping the souls of the allies of the tyrant of the era" and defined their suicide bombers as "people who love death". In fact, the cars of death killed and maimed ordinary workers going about their everyday lives in the Turkish capital. The desire to terrify and blast the Turkish people back into a repressive, medieval era is the mirror, not the opposite, of US attempts to dominate and subdue Iraq. As the protesters said, both are enemies of progress who need to learn that people are not easily cowed by bombings.
Blair and Bush
Also chilling was the press conference in London, where Blair stood beside Bush to hear him express the US's right to wage war anywhere it chooses, under the guise of "not flinching" in the face of terror: "We stand absolutely firm until this job is done - done in Iraq, done elsewhere in the world."
In Britain, Foreign Office minister Denis MacShane caused a furore when he called on British muslims to choose "the British way, based on political dialogue and non-violent protests" instead of the values of terrorism. Trevor Phillips, chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality, declared that the phrase "the British way" was offensive.
That depends on who defines it. Is it a government which decides to abandon British interests in subservience to the US, sending its troops to die in a "pre-emptive" war abroad in the teeth of massive opposition from its people and even before it had fixed the vote in parliament? A government which has made Britain a far more dangerous place to live? Or is it the many thousands of workers who marched in London to oppose Bush's visit, a cross section of society speaking with a united voice, disciplined and dignified?
The latter, just as in Turkey the peace protesters rejected terrorism in their own "Turkish way", on the streets of their cities.
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Post by dodger on Aug 29, 2013 6:10:37 GMT
free movement of labour - stealing Africa's health workers
WORKERS, JULY 2005 ISSUE
The British Medical Association and the Royal College of Nursing have confronted the G8 with a simple but profound demand. Never mind "pie-in-the-sky" debt cancellation — always supplanted by another "aid" package — nor fatuous claims to be making poverty history, the BMA and the RCN are calling for an end to the stealing the greatest wealth of any country or continent — its people.
The organisations have demanded an end to the importation of qualified nurses and doctors from the poorest countries in the world into the wealthiest and for Britain, the USA and others to establish training programmes at home to meet the needs of their own populace.
In the next 5 years, the USA intends to increase its number of doctors by 200,000 and its nursing workforce by 800,000 — most of these bought in at reduced rates from countries where HIV/AIDS, malnutrition and endemic diseases are legion. Denuding African countries of their precious health workers is tantamount to sentencing millions to death.
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Post by dodger on Aug 29, 2013 6:18:22 GMT
news analysis - RIP: the Free Trade Area of the Americas
WORKERS, FEB 2005 ISSUE
In December 2004, the Presidents of Venezuela and Cuba announced the death of the Free Trade Area of the Americas - FTAA or ALCA in Spanish. The US proposed the idea nearly five years ago as a crude copy of the European Union model. The plan was to expand NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Area, combining Canada, the US and Mexico with every country (except one) in the Americas including the Caribbean, North, Central and South America.
There would be a single currency, the US dollar, and the economies of all American countries (except one) would be annexed to adopt free market economics, cuts in public expenditure, deregulation and privatisation, and to become fodder for US capitalism. This was to be the mechanism to ensure the survival of US capitalism. The US economy would flourish with access to the new markets, a huge pool of cheap labour and plenty of new opportunities for US companies to exploit the "liberalisation" of these additional economies.
Conferences of all American countries (except one) were held to thrash out details and whip any reluctant nations into line. The one country excluded decided to campaign against the FTAA, not on the grounds that it wanted to be part of it. Cuba said it would damage workers throughout the Americas and enlarge the US empire. Cuba argued for referendums -not annexation.
The dream crumbles
The US dream quickly began to crumble. The new government of Venezuela broke ranks and said it wanted no part of the FTAA. This action was followed by the new governments in Brazil and then Argentina, whose previous government had collapsed trying to service debts of $100 billion. The new government refused to accept IMF conditions for debt repayment and began to turn its economy around. In January 2005, Argentine President Kirchner told its creditors they could have 25% of the debts repaid but that was it, they were getting no more.
The new governments in Panama and Uruguay are making similar noises and other new governments in Costa Rica and Bolivia are rejecting neo-liberal economic policies. The Caribbean countries of CARICOM are demonstrating their independence. The South American common market MERCOSUR has called for regional unity in the face of US pressure for the FTAA. These countries have responded by creating the South American Community of Nations to defend continental sovereignty.
The final nail in the FTAA coffin has been the joint Venezuelan-Cuban declaration to promote the "Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas". The declaration is based on eliminating import tariffs and tax free profits on mutual investments. Cuba will guarantee $27 per barrel for Venezuelan oil, 2,000 scholarships in Cuba for young Venezuelans, transfer of Venezuelan technology to the Cuban oil sector and promotion of joint ventures. Known in Spanish as ALBA, this concept is seen as the antithesis of the FTAA (ALCA) being based on cooperation and solidarity, not the neo-liberalism of the FTAA.
At a time when the Ukraine is being served up on a plate for future annexation into the European equivalent of the FTAA, the EU, concepts of sovereignty, solidarity, mutual cooperation, defiance of the IMF and opposition to free market policies are in the ascendancy in the other hemisphere.
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Post by dodger on Aug 29, 2013 6:50:18 GMT
Army - Court martial tragedy
WORKERS, MAY 2006 ISSUE
A court martial panel has sentenced Flight Lieutenant Malcolm Kendall-Smith to eight months in jail for refusing to serve in Iraq. The panel said that Kendall-Smith could not "pick and choose" which orders he obeyed.
But international law rejects the "Nuremberg defence" in which the defendant claims they were only obeying orders. Nuremberg Principle IV states, "The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him."
That is, members of the armed forces are obliged to "pick and choose", to obey lawful orders and to disobey illegal ones.
Was the order to serve in Iraq legal? The UN Charter permits the use of force against a sovereign state only in self-defence against an actual, armed attack. As UN Secretary General Kofi Annan said of the war on 16 September 2004, "I have indicated it is not in conformity with the UN Charter, from our point of view and from the Charter point of view it was illegal."
Since the war on Iraq was illegal, the consequent occupation is illegal. As the Attorney-General wrote in his Confidential Note to Blair of 26 March 2003, "It must be borne in mind that the lawfulness of any occupation after the conflict has ended is still governed by the legal basis for the use of force." There was no legal basis for the attack, so the occupation has no "lawfulness". Contrary to government claims, Security Council Resolution 1483 of 22 May 2003 has not legitimised the invasion or the occupation: it merely called on the occupying powers to conduct the occupation in accordance with international law.
In other words, the Blair government's invasion and occupation of Iraq are illegal, so orders to serve in Iraq are illegal. This case is not over yet, not by a long way.
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Post by dodger on Aug 29, 2013 7:07:26 GMT
 ID Cards - Fingerprinting children
WORKERS, DEC 2007 ISSUE
Fingerprint
All children aged 6 years and upwards are to be fingerprinted for EU passports and nationally issued ID cards. Hidden away in European Commission and European Parliament resolutions and regulations [Article 62(2)(a) of the Treaty establishing the European Community; Regulation of the European Parliament and Council amending Council Regulation (EC no. 2252/2004!], the decision to press ahead has been given the green light. Serious consideration as to the fingerprinting of children aged younger than 6 years has been undertaken but shelved after "technical considerations".
In another decision, all passengers travelling in and out of the EU are to be recorded – to be called passenger name records (PNR). These will be profiled and stored for 13 years. The European Parliament has been consulted but as with national parliaments not given a voice. The EU's own Data Protection Agency is opposing both these measures – not being convinced of the necessity. The decision of the EU to spy on all who enter Euroland mirrors the secret decision they arrived at with the US government to provide personal details on all travellers to the USA via the EU. |
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Post by dodger on Sept 28, 2013 19:06:42 GMT
"Join the Army See the world, meet interesting people and
.........................kill them ..."
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Post by dodger on Sept 29, 2013 18:07:15 GMT
Sorry for the inconvenience...... Residents wading through flooded streets months after the supposed completion of a flood control project. (Photo by Jocel de Guzman/bulatlat.com) -
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Post by dodger on Sept 30, 2013 14:16:36 GMT
Great Irish Famine aid (1847) Choctaw Stickball Player,
Painted by George Catlin, 1834Midway through the Great Irish Famine (1845–1849), a group of Choctaws collected $710 (although many articles say the original amount was $170 after a misprint in Angie Debo's The Rise and Fall of the Choctaw Republic) and sent it to help starving Irish men, women and children. "It had been just 16 years since the Choctaw people had experienced the Trail of Tears, and they had faced starvation… It was an amazing gesture. By today's standards, it might be a million dollars," according to Judy Allen, editor of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma's newspaper, Bishinik. The paper is based at the Oklahoma Choctaw tribal headquarters in Durant, Okla. To mark the 150th anniversary, eight Irish people retraced the Trail of Tears.
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Post by dodger on Oct 10, 2013 17:22:58 GMT
Cross-border anti-EU talks
WORKERS, FEB 2006 ISSUE French leaders of the successful anti-EU Constitution campaign in France met recently with the leadership of Trade Unionists Against the European Constitution (TUAEUC) and the Campaign Against Euro Federalism and Centre for a Social Europe in January in order to increase cross-border cooperation in the anti-EU struggle.
The participants combined a philosophical exchange of views with practical strategies. It was generally recognised that the EU's attack had intensified and in a vain attempt to bolster the ailing euro, the EU Commission was progressing with directives aimed at privatising as many public services as possible. Bob Crow of RMT particularly highlighted the implications of the current plans to privatise railways throughout the continent by 2010.
French and British anti-EU Constitution campaigners meet to plan struggle.
Photo: Workers
The meeting did not shy away from the question of mass migration either, and the close links between the freedom of movement of capital and the migration of peoples throughout the EU. This issue will be considered by the pan-European forum of anti-EU groups, TEAM, at its meeting in April.
TUAEUC Secretary Doug Nicholls described the EU as a dying beast lashing out in weakness. It represents failed national capitalisms, which huddle together for warmth, but in reality are on a life support machine. He likened the real motor behind the EU, the "Round Table" of industrialists, to pirates robbing the people ever more greedily, but as their treasure chests rise so their ships begin to sink.
Speaking powerfully of the importance of public services County Councillor Marie Claire Culie described also how the May 29th Committees which energised and organised the No Vote on the Constitution were still in existence and were now taking on the many-pronged attacks on workers. French Communist Party MP Daniel Paul gave examples of how various EU plans had been defeated in well coordinated industrial and political campaigns.
Several delegates highlighted how the EU was a political project aimed at the break up of nation states and therefore democracy. Any belief that the EU can be reformed must be set in that context. Doug Nicholls explained that the EU is doing what it was set up to do. It is time to re-assert the workers' vision of independent nations peacefully co-operating. Perhaps it is also time to reread Lenin on the fallacy of the United States of Europe and James Connolly's essay, What is a Free Nation?.
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Post by dodger on Oct 13, 2013 12:38:18 GMT
second thoughts - government extends illegal occupation
WORKERS, JULY 2004 ISSUE
The illegal 37-year US occupation of Diego Garcia and related islands by the US military has now been extended by the British government. The forcible deportation of the islanders in 1967, to create a vast US military base threatening the Middle East and Indian Ocean, was authorised by the British government, which leased the islands to the US. After 30 years of legal challenge, the High Courts ruled in 2000 that the islands should be returned to the indigenous people.
Now, using feudal legislation dating back nearly 800 years, the Labour government has bypassed Parliament, set aside the High Court ruling and arbitrarily extended the US occupation. The arrogance of the British government clinging to territories seized by imperialist aggression is only matched by the warmongering ambitions of US imperial might.
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Post by dodger on Oct 13, 2013 12:44:37 GMT
second opinion - london tube
WORKERS, SEPT 2004 ISSUE
Whingeing like a market stall holder who has to pay his Saturday labour too much, Mayor Livingstone decided to blast the RMT and cross its picket lines if the gutter press needed him to. It would have been a classic photo opportunity.
Scared that the union's tough stance for a reduced working week for working in his dangerous tunnels will break the cosy "progressive coalition" of highly paid, self seeking individuals he has cultivated around himself for decades, the London mayor joined the long list of Labour politicians who condemn the workers when the chips are down — that is down in their opinion.
Organised workers, not "progressive coalitions", make history. We would all benefit from the job-creating proposals that the RMT offers in all humility.
Those Londoners hurrying to work their 70-hour weeks on the tube should reflect on how tube workers are trying to regain control of their working and waking lives — and start to do likewise.
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Post by dodger on Oct 13, 2013 12:46:03 GMT
back to front - a very brussels coup
WORKERS, NOV 2004 ISSUE
It's been described as the biggest slow motion coup d'etat in history. The drive towards one legal and political entity under one constitution, known as the European Union, has reached a crossroads. The multinationals and bankers want ultimate power over a superstate in which nations cease to exist.
Any talk of welcoming this as a progressive counterweight to the evil empire of the United States is no more than support for the growing economic and ultimately militaristic conflict between the great blocs around the dollar, the deutschmark and the yen. The difference between a US President and an EU President could be, as their tensions continue, no more than between Pepsi and Coke.
And what would be the consequences of an EU Foreign Minister getting in the way of the US on any issue of substance ? One thing's for sure under the Constitution, our citizens could be called up to fight for the EU and not their own country.
A war between the EU and US is ever more likely and necessary in the eyes of some corporations, which is one reason why the EU desperately wants its centrally controlled foreign policy and armed services. Whatever the complexion of the US and EU, as competing blocs they are on a collision course.
Strangely enough we are in the middle with a Foreign Office currently split over the Atlantic and Channel and never looking at its own people.
If you are between a rock and a hard place, you must choose a different way - an independent socialist Britain. The struggle for revolutionary change in Britain has reached a new critical phase and the national question is the primary one to which all others are subsidiary.
This is the case, for all workers throughout the continent and workers in the US have an opportunity to reclaim their nation from the gangsters and foreign powers, particularly the Saudis who own so much of their economy.
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Post by dodger on Oct 21, 2013 14:43:23 GMT
back to front: who needs sovereignty?
WORKERS, FEBRUARY 2003 ISSUE
THE NEWS that France and Germany are to celebrate 40 years of the European Union with a joint session of their parliaments is more than a symbolic act. They know that nothing untoward could happen at a joint meeting, if only because their parliaments seem to have abandoned not just the idea that they might be central to their nations’ sovereignty, but also the idea that sovereignty might be a good thing.
It is more than this, of course. It is a reminder to Blair that whatever pose he likes to strike in Britain, no one is taking too much notice of him. Here is a man with the feeble ambition of being at the centre of Europe…perhaps he could make a stab at being in the centre of Britain, instead of either trying to hand us over to Brussels, or, on other days, provide cannon fodder for the US’s imperial ambitions.
Franco—German cooperation is not a concept with a long or distinguished pedigree. Before the European Union was set up, its most noticeable achievements were a failed iron and steel cartel (replicated, perhaps, in the EU’s iron and steel policy, which appears to be to have no iron or steel capacity), and Vichy France. The aim, as always, is to get more power for the owners of capital.
When the French and German parliaments do get together, it won’t be a question of not mentioning the war, more like don’t mention the economy. Germany, in particular, is mired deep in recession, with faltering growth at the start of the year followed by actual decline in the last three months of the year.
Meanwhile, Blair is reduced to sending his Europe minister, ex-journalist Denis Macshane, on a "charm offensive", an unlikely combination of concepts. Macshane, interviewed by the BBC in the middle of January, would have us believe: "What we have to avoid is making the question of the euro a political issue…At the end of the day it is a currency, a measure of value, that’s all."
So, the question of who controls your currency is not political? But then again, Labour, having given up political thought for itself, now insists the whole country does so as well.
And then in the middle of January, a German court decided that since we are all in the EU, German laws must apply throughout the EU. It issued an injunction banning the Mail on Sunday from talking about German chancellor Schröder’s sleaze. To its great credit, the Mail on Sunday defied this injunction, and published.
We shall have to wait and see what the courts say. In the meantime, we have all to consider ourselves as having been served notice: inside the European Union, the only laws that are going to count are ones that come from parliaments other than your own.
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Post by dodger on Oct 28, 2013 3:31:36 GMT
www.workers.org.uk/opinion/opinion_1102/dangerous.htmlback to front: living dangerously
WORKERS, NOVEMBER 2002 ISSUE MORE COMMUNISTS were killed in Indonesia in 1965 than anywhere else at any other time in history outside of the Soviet Union in World War Two. More than half-a-million men and women (plus uncounted children) were slaughtered by the friend of north American and British governments, General Suharto.
This was done supposedly to prevent the spread of terrorism, to end anarchy and to bring stability to the fifth most populous country in the world, which, in the 1960s, was showing dangerous signs of not any longer being the plaything of western capitalism – showing signs of being independent, in other words.
Now we’ve seen the greatest single slaughter anywhere in Indonesia proper (not East Timor, in other words) since Britain’s friend Suharto tortured and murdered those who would have led their country away from anarchy and onto the road of independence. In Kuta on 12 October a massacre of the young took away two hundred lives, some of those lives not yet started in earnest.
The relatives of the dead are entitled to ask, "What happened to the war on terror?" Six months after al-Qa’ida were "routed" from their "only safe haven" in Afghanistan they’ve allegedly popped up again thousands of miles away. Were all those thousands of Afghan deaths for nothing?
Or for that matter those thousands killed in New York, Washington and over the skies of Pennslyvania?
Those relatives might conclude that perhaps there hasn’t been a war on terror. That perhaps Bush and Blair don’t want to destroy terror. That really they want to destroy nation states which are likely to stray from the course laid down by the World Trade Organisation; nation states which want to be independent, in other words. That it is more concerned with Saddam than with Osama. That the first of these two Arabs wants his country to be independent of others, while the second wants others to be dependent upon him.
They might conclude that that, after all, is one possible definition of a terrorist: someone who wants others to be dependent on him. Someone who wants others to be spiritually dependent, economically dependent, militarily dependent. Because they know that a dependent person can be a frightened person; a dependent country can be frightened, terrorised.
They might then wonder who else in the world fits that description of a terrorist. They might also realise that in fact it was the direct forerunners of Bush and Blair who actually created Osama bin Laden to stamp out Soviet influence in Afghanistan.
Blair and Bush cry crocodile tears. The road to Kuta began around Jakarta in 1965 with the sound of machine guns mowing down lines of Communists with their hands tied behind their backs. It has reached paradise, Bali, with hundreds of youngsters on holiday from work being ripped apart.
Where will that road end? And where will it take us in the meantime?
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Post by StalinistSpeaker on Nov 18, 2013 11:09:53 GMT
 An old newspaper side from 1903 of proletären (the proletariat) swedish far left newspaper. |
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