Molly'sBlog

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Peaceful Demo. in Poland Against US Missile Base Ends In Police Brutality

On Saturday March 29th over 700 people attended a protest at noon in the city of Slupsk, Northern Poland, against the Polish government's plans to permit the construction of a US missile base, part of their notorious 'Star Wars' program. On Friday and Saturday solidarity vigils were held with Polish activists in Prague, Dublin, London, Hamburg, Berlin, Leipzig, Moscow, Washington and the U.S. spy base at Fylingdales in England.

The demonstration was organised by a wide range of Polish anarchist groups working together as the Polish Campaign Against Militarism. A variety of representatives from other political groups and anti-militarist campaigns attended the demonstration. The 'No Logo' guideline helped keep focus on participants opposition to the missile base and avoided a space which merely provided a marketing opportunity for political parties to promote themselves.

It was the first time a manifestation was held at the potential site for the U.S. government's missile defence program in Poland, where they intend to have 10 ground based interceptors costing billions of dollars. In return, the Polish government are requesting the U.S. help modernise the Polish army to the tune of $20 billion by 2015.

A recent poll conducted amongst residents of Slupsk city established that 60% of residents are against the proposed missile base and that 87% demand a referendum on the issue. The opposition level is similar throughout Poland. An agreement may be signed between both governments as early as June, construction would most likely occur from January 2009 and be completed by 2013.

Approximately 200 local residents listened and participated in a 'Hyde Park' public debate by the town hall while a 'No Missile Shield' newspaper was distributed outlining the arguments against the missile base and increased militarisation. The speakers included Australian Ciaron O'Reilly who has spent over 2 years in U.S., Australian and Irish jails fighting for peace and justice by nonviolently disabling military equipment. A large majority of locals who spoke from the platform and were in attendance were opposed to the missile shield.

The Food Not Bombs group kept participants strong and healthy with delicious vegetarian food.

Two excellent samba bands from Gdansk and Poznan and a street theatre group from Torun and Slupsk led the demonstrators through the streets after the public discussion has concluded. Placards had slogans including, 'We don't want to be a missile shield for the U.S.', 'No Shield, No War, We are for Peace', while participants chanted and danced around the city centre. It attracted a lot of attention and many local residents, both young and old, joined in.

At the end of the demonstration 100 people marched 4km from Slupsk to the ex-soviet military base next to the town of Redzikowo and likely site for U.S. weapons. Riot police blocked participants entrance and forced them from the area, which is currently a disused Polish military property undergoing.

The demonstration finished in Redzikowo town at 4.30pm where demonstrators had positive interactions with local residents, despite the bad weather. The reception we received bodes well for future co-operation. Appeals were made at a military barracks for Polish soldiers to stop fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq and to resist defending the violent interests of the rich and powerful arms companies and politicians against their peaceful fellow citizens.

Police repression and revenge against activists
At 6am, on Sunday morning after the demonstration, police violently broke their way into an apartment in Slupsk, arresting 23 anti-missile defence activists under the pretext that they were disturbing the 'night silence'. They used tear gas and batons, forcing their way into the apartment and beating the 18-25 year old peace activists staying there. One person had his arm broken.

By noon on Sunday, 30 protesters had gathered outside the police station where the anti-militarist activists were being detained. The police are accusing some of the arrested of unethical force against a police officer and disturbing the peace. It remains to be seen whether the injured activists will bring charges against the police officers for their brutal revenge on those opposed to the U.S. missile base. Those present at the apartment during the police assault have stated that the police version of events is not true.

At 8pm Sunday 13 remained in police custody. They are due to be released by 3pm tomorrow. activists are due to be released.

Funds to support the repressed activists and the Campaign Against Militarism would be gratefully appreciated. If you want to donate to support the efforts to stop the construction of the missile base in Poland you can do so by transferring your donation to this account:
Jakub Gawlikowski

(PL) 05 1140 2004 0000 3702 4238 2269

BRE Bank S.A. Retail Banking, al. Mickiewicza 10, 90-050 Łódź

BIC/SWIFT: BREXPLPWMUL

SORT CODE: 11402004
Very important:
Write "Against the Missile Shield" for general campaign support.
Write "For Repressed Activists" to support those currently arrested.
Videos of demonstration:

http://www.tarcza.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=123&Item...
Polish Campaign Against Militarism
English Contacts: 0048607340093or 0048662535719

This is another article with new information about arrested people. Laure's article has slightly different numbers of participants, but people always count differently. :-) Also here are links to videos:

Protest Against Proposed US Missile Base in Poland: Good public support, politicians and police against the people.

On Saturday, March 29, about 800-1000 people demonstrated against the installation of a US missile base in northern Poland. The base, which the governments of the US and Poland would like to build in Redzikowo, just outside of Slupsk near the Baltic Sea, would house elements of the American Missile Defense program, namely so-called interceptor missiles (which can also be used for offensive purposes. Despite the fact that 60% of local residents and over half of all Poles are strongly against the base, and only a small fraction of the rest support it, the government is intent to go ahead and build the base. A radar base is also to be built in the Czech Republic, again despite the opposition of most citizens.
The Demo
The demonstration started with a Hyde Park / open meeting in front of the town hall. A few hundred local residents came to hear the arguments against the missiles, to demonstrate and to speak out. Many people spoke only the meeting had to be cut slightly short due to an impending downpour of rain. The only person who spoke in favour of the base was a paid lobbyist, Andrzej Jodkowski who was hired by the American Missile Defense Advocacy Alliance to make pro-missile propaganda in Poland. He was loudly jeered by the crowd and some old ladies tried to beat him with sticks. People of all ages came out but it was quite noticeable from both this demonstration and a meeting the day before that survivors of WWII are especially angry about the base and concerned about militarism and a few elderly people in their 70s and 80s spoke out.

During the Hyde Park, free food was served by Food Not Bombs and some theatre was made by the Autonomist Collective and Anarchist Federation group from Torun.

A lively demo followed through the city. Slupsk is a city of under 100,000 people which very few activists and the only other such demonstration held there since the fall of communism was a May Day march organized by the Anarchist Federation in 2002. It was quite a sight for local people, many who watched or joined in. Two nice samba bands played, a car went with music, people chanted “No Missile Shield” and lots of other slogans that don’t rhyme in English translation.
At the Base
After the main demo ended, a group of a bit over 100 people broke off and marched to Redzikowo, the site of the future American base, a former Polish airforce base during the PRL times, currently disused but still guarded by the military. The police and military started to show their strength, sending out a military helicopter and lots of police vans. (Police had to be sent in from Gdansk for this action. Although Slupsk is home of a police academy and has an extremely large police presence, they were not available as many of them had been sent to Kosowo.)

A small action was made at the side entrance and some people removed the ridiculous barricade made there and went on the territory, at which time the police started to act. However nothing happened since the police claimed to demonstrators that there was “nothing there” and “no base there” and therefore could not give a legitimate reason to the anarchists why they were not allowed on that area. They threatened to arrest people for not following police orders but not for trespassing.

The demonstration moved to the main gate of the base where there was some symbolic attempt to jump the fence. Some local residents came out to talk despite the fact that the large police presence and the cops with dogs could look a little scary. Again local residents, despite the fact that many of them were relatives of former military, complained about the base to the protesters. Mr. Jodkowski the lobbyist, who followed us during the whole march, could only walk around sheepishly trying to give the demonstrators cookies.
Unpleasant Actions and Police Violence
The whole action went without incident, accept perhaps not including problems with vanguardist frauds from the Young Socialists who openly disregard requests not to come with self-advertising, party flags. (They are known throughout Poland as being sleazy party-sponsored parasites who fraudulently present themselves as organizers of other people’s demonstrations.) However as soon as people left Redzikowo and dispersed, the cops took the opportunity to vent their frustration on some scapegoats.

For whatever reason, a small group of people stayed in Redzikowo. Police used dogs against them and one woman was bitten. They started to give people bullshit fines. One guy was fined for having a black flag on his car. Later, one guy was arrested and fined for cursing. The fine was almost 300 dollars US, really an incredible exaggeration for something like that which in no way should be a punishable offense.

The real problem happened lately on, in the early hours of the morning just before 5 AM. There was a concert/ after party. A group of people were followed from the party by the police. They returned to one guy’s place, where a group of people were already sleeping. Shortly later the police raided and attacked them, including people who were sleeping. The pretext was “disturbing the peace” although clearly sleeping people were not disturbing the peace. People were gassed and beaten. 23 people were arrested. One guy had his arm badly hurt – in fact he was sure it was broken. (It turns out not to be broken but just badly hurt.) The police also thought his arm was broken and he was taken to the hospital. He escaped and called people to tell them what happened.

The police at first denied that anything happened or that anybody was arrested but later changed their story (more than once). Few people were left in town, but those who were went down to the police station to demand the release of the arrested. The police are claiming that this brutal attack has nothing to do with the demo but present the arrested as being drunk and disorderly. They are charged with typical bullshit charges of “not respecting the police” and two are being charged with “violating the untouchability of the police”, which is more or less assaulting an officer. This charge is used against demonstrators quite often, usually in situations where the police is beating somebody and they try to ward off blows or get the police off them.

As of the time of this report, all but two of the arrested have been released, 8 of them being charged with “not respecting the police”. (The two still in custody will probably have the more serious charges against them.) They are going to file a complaint against the police.

Anarchist Solidarity and Anarchist Black Cross will try to help them: for more information or to send a donation for legal help, contact anarchistsolidarity@yahoo.com.
The Struggle will Continue
The event was covered widely by local, national and some international press, although the American media refused to cover the event. Perhaps the action was not big and “spectacular” enough, but surely that’s not the only reason. No worry though; if they go ahead with the base, which looks to be a strong possibility, this will just be the beginning. The next demo will be much bigger and louder.

The demonstration was organized by the Campaign against Militarism (started by anarchists but open to others) together with big participation others like the Anarchist Federation, the Autonomous Collective, some local, non-affiliated activists, some members of Greenpeace and the Union of Syndicalists. Practically all of the anarchist and anti-authoritarian groups in Poland were in attendance as well as some anti-war activists and a small handful of leftists from different groups and parties. A good part of the crowd was also made up of Slupsk residents. Probably this was the largest and most successful action we have made in a couple of years and undoubtedly the most important action against this military base that has happened so far in Poland. Despite the fact that most people are against the base, few people publicly demonstrate their discontent. Unfortunately. The Campaign has decided to continue its work and, should the work on the base be started, to organize more radical protests and actions.

The campaign can be reached at campaignagainstmilitarism@gmail.com

The website for the action includes lots of info in English about the missile bases: www.m29.bzzz.net

Also see: www.tarcza.org.
There are many press reports in Polish as well as photo reports. Here are a few links to photo and video:
http://cia.bzzz.net/fotki_z_demonstracji_przeciw_tarczy

http://www.kfp.com.pl/index2.html?p=szukaj&klucz=antytarcza&zid=12069778... (Commercial photo agency shit)

http://wiadomosci.gazeta.pl/Wiadomosci/1,80708,5068992.html (Main newspaper in Poland, video from TV)

http://www.gp24.pl/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080331/MAGAZYN/393713386 (Voice of Pomerania, videos, article. First video (multimedia) has English with speaker from Catholic Worker. Second, talking head in Polish, third has part of march.)

Legal update: all are free

Legal update: all are free now.

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For revolutionary struggle, not activism
By Asher

“We need more people!” “If only there were more anarchists…”
These phrases and others like them are all too common amongst our anarchist communities across Aotearoa (and no doubt the rest of the world). But in themselves, they betray a fatal mistake in our goals, in how we see our role in moving towards a revolutionary situation.

An anarchist revolution will not come if we simply seek to convert more people to anarchism. Rather, more people adopting anarchist theory will be a by-product of successful anarchist organising and solidarity. There are a few issues we need to examine in order to best understand the role of anarchists in capitalist society.

Who will make a revolution?
An anarchist revolution cannot be made by a vanguard, by an elite group of activists, politicos or anarchists. A truly libertarian revolution, which all anarchists seek, can only be made by the great mass of the working class, in a broad sense of the term. This revolution will not magically appear the day we manage to get 51% of the population to call themselves anarchists, but rather by constantly seeking to expand upon the consciousness and militancy of the working class.

Genuine revolution will not be created by a specialist group of “professional revolutionaries”. While many anarchists have a sound critique of groups such as Greenpeace, SAFE or Amnesty International in that they posit themselves as the experts on activism, who the majority of people can pay to do political work, anarchists frequently fail to see that much of what they are doing is exactly the same, except they’re silly enough to do it for free! A large chunk of activism done by anarchists in Aotearoa in the last few years has been of this bent – we call the marches, we show up (perhaps with a few others, but rarely from outside of the wider activist circles), we hand out leaflets to bemused onlookers (who either ignore us or laugh at us, but certainly wouldn’t join in), then we go home. Ongoing organising be damned, we’re making a stand!

What are we doing?
Almost all anarchist activity in Aotearoa falls into two broad categories – activism (covering protests, single-issue groups etc) and propaganda (infoshops and publishing). It is activism that I will deal with here.

Activism deals primarily with issues far removed from the everyday lives of most people in Aotearoa – NZ troop involvement in overseas invasions, coal mines on the West Coast, a meeting of rich countries on the other side of the planet. In focusing on this type of issue, we ensure that we remain invisible to the vast majority of the working class, and out of touch with the very forces that can create the revolutionary situation we so desire.

In activism, we separate ourselves from the majority of the populace – protesting, marching, direct action etc are activities undertaken by “activists”, a specialist cadre of experts on social change.

Of course, there is no continuity in our activism, no real ongoing organising. Just jumping from protest to protest, deluding ourselves that we are having any effect whatsoever. Even our ongoing campaigns (for instance anti-war, or Save Happy Valley) are generally little more than semi-regular protests, with the odd press release in between. Almost nowhere is there any long term, strategic, grassroots organising taking place. Almost nowhere do we seem to acknowledge that things do take time to come to fruition. Instead, we bang our heads against a brick wall for a while, then move round the corner to the wall made of concrete, deceiving ourselves into thinking that we’re making progress.

Our activities are primarily oriented to other radicals, both in Aotearoa and overseas. We go to protests with each other, then head to a computer and post reports and photos on Indymedia, so our activist friends around the country can see what we did. If the demo was especially interesting, we might even all go together to a flat so we can see ourselves on the evening news! We are an insular collection of people, and even when we have the appearance of interacting with the public (for instance, on a march), we still ensure that we are separate from them, the “normals”. We don’t engage in conversation, just hand them a flier then move on, and after a while retreat back to the other radicals, safe behind a line of banners.
Against a subcultural orientation
The anarchist community in Aotearoa is thoroughly mired in subcultural politics. The punk and hippy subcultures between them supply the bulk of self-identified anarchists, with most of the remainder coming through the “alternative” liberal (ie – Green Party, fair trade, organics etc) community. That’s not to say that none of those people are working class, but rather that they are getting involved because of their subcultural identity.

There is a huge difference between a working class movement that is oriented to working class struggles and therefore attracts working class people, and a subcultural community that is oriented to specific subcultures and therefore attracts people from those subcultures. One of the above options could lead to a revolutionary situation. The other keeps us in our self-built ghetto.

For struggles of everyday life
If we are seeking to expand the consciousness and militancy of the working class, we need to stop focusing on battles which for most people appear to have little relevance, and are totally unwinnable for us few anarchists in Aotearoa anyway. We need to move away from the WTO and towards the workplace, away from the coal-mine and towards the community, away from the spectacular summit demo and towards the struggles of everyday life.

We need to stand in solidarity with workplace struggles that are taking place – standing on the picket lines and engaging with the workers taking part. We also need to be agitating with our workmates in our own work places. There are always grievances, it is our task to do all we can to promote collective action to fight for better wages and conditions, of course without any illusions that this will ever be enough in and of itself.

We need to be engaging with our own communities, whether they be geographical, ethnic or otherwise. In our geographical communities, we need to agitate with those around us and build a sense of purposeful connection now, so that when attacks come, we already have a base from which to struggle. When city councils attempt to impose extra charges (such as bin taxes or water metering), destroy community facilities such as libraries or swimming pools, or raise rents on council flats, we need to stand with our communities in opposition and fight.

This type of organising around the struggles of everyday life isn’t easy, it isn’t quick, and it isn’t sexy, but it is vital if we are to build a revolutionary movement against capital and state. The more we struggle, the more we build our bases in our workplaces and communities, the better chance we have of winning, and the broader and more interlinked our struggles will become.
For the broadening and intensification of struggle
“I am an anarchist not because I believe Anarchism is the final goal, but because I believe there is no such thing as a final goal. Freedom will lead us to continually wider and expanding understanding and to new social forms of life.”Rudolf Rocker, a German anarcho-syndicalist

It is the task of anarchists to always be broadening the terms of any given struggle, and to fight against its recuperation. In workplace struggles, we should be wary of union attempts to sell out workers. In community struggles, we should be wary of NGOs and community groups who may seek a swift resolution without the meeting of all demands.

We must always seek to bring to light the systemic roots of what we are fighting against, and to link our struggles with others happening within our communities and around the world.
We must also realise that the odds are stacked against us, and, for a long time, we will likely lose more than we win. This doesn’t mean that we should stop fighting, or retreat into our activist ghettos. For if we fight, we have a chance at creating a better society, but in giving up or retreating, we lose any chance we ever had.
Further Reading
The Myth Of Passivity by Toby Boraman

The Myth Of Passivity documents the class struggles against the neoliberal policies of the 1980’s, such as the Employment Contracts Act, “Ruthinasia”, and “Rogernomics”. It takes a critical look at the way major Unions opposed these policies as well as looking at resistance from groups such as Maori, the Unemployed and Anarchists.Available online at http://libcom.org/library/myth-passivity-class-struggles-neoliberalism-aotearoa-toby-boraman or order from http://katipo.net.nz/product_info.php/products_id/194
Beyond Resistance: A Revolutionary Manifesto by the Anarchist Federation (UK)

Beyond Resistance is the Anarchist Federation’s analysis of the capitalist world in crisis, suggestions about what the alternative anarchist communist society could be like, and evaluation of social and organisational forces which play a part in the revolutionary process.Available for order from http://katipo.net.nz/product_info.php/products_id/357
The Lessons Of The Bin Tax Struggle –

Interview with Dermot Sreenan, Workers Solidarity Movement The opening years of the century saw a mass community based struggle against the shifting of taxation further onto the working class in Dublin, Ireland. Thousands of households were paid up members of the campaign and tens of thousands refused to pay this new tax over a period of years despite prosecutions, media hysteria and the jailing of over 20 activists.Available online at http://libcom.org/library/the-lessons-of-the-bin-tax-struggle
Poll Tax Rebellion by Danny Burns

The gripping inside story of the biggest mass movement in British history, which at its peak involved over 17 million people. Using a combination of photos, text, and graphics, and drawing from the voices of activists and non-payers, it describes the everyday organization of local anti-poll tax groups and chronicles the demonstrations and riots leading up to the battle of Trafalgar. It shows how the courts were blocked, the bailiffs resisted, and the Poll Tax destroyed.Available for order from http://akpress.com/1996/items/polltaxrebellion and see a review at http://libcom.org/library/poll-tax-rebellion-danny-burns-reviewed-wildcat-uk-1993
Also see the history, library and organise sections at http://www.libcom.org

Quebec city: anti-militarist demonstration
About 300 anti-militarists took the streets Friday, March 28 in Quebec city. In a rare showing of unity, the main anti-capitalists groups of the city marched together, along with delegations from other cities, such as Montreal and Sherbrooke. The marchers commemorated the 90th anniversary of the riots against conscription and took the occasion to again express their opposition to the war in Afghanistan.

==> Our photo-report

Anti-militarist Quebec city
"Quebec city is not only a garrison town, it also has a proud anti-militarist past" said Mathieu, of the Northeastern Federation of Anarcho-Communists (NEFAC). It’s not on the agenda of the insipid 400th anniversary of the city, but 90 years ago, the city inhabitants rose against conscription. Five days of rioting occurred downtown, which ended in a bloodbath when the army opened fire on a crowd of civilians, leaving 4 dead and 35 injured. "It’s this popular history that we want to take out of oblivion" added the anarchist militant.

Resistance to war
Today, Canada is still involved in an imperialist war. It is remarkable that, despite a propaganda campaign by the military, the popular opposition to the war remains, poll after poll. Unfortunately, this opposition to the war has found little space to express itself. "Many people in Quebec city are opposed to the use of their taxes in this war, Let's stop it!" Said Antoine, of Gauche socialiste. "They make war in our name, without asking us our opinion. The opposition to the war must be able to express itself, which is why we participated in the demonstration Friday "
Gathering in Saint-Roch
The event began at 5PM with a rally in Saint-Roch, in front of the Gabrielle-Roy Library. After a few speeches and slogans, the anti-militarists took the streets to go to the district of Saint-Sauveur, at the corner of Saint-Vallier and St. Joseph, where there’s a memorial to the dead of 1918. The march ended at the Parc Durocher and was followed by an anti-militarist conference organized by Alternatives at the AgitéE.

The organizers
The demonstration was an initiative of the Northeastern Federation of Anarcho-Communists (NEFAC). It was organized jointly by the Collectif anarchiste La Nuit, the Collectif Piranhas and Gauche socialiste. The following groups formally endorsed it and mobilized: Québec Solidaire Capitale-Nationale, Regroupement autonome des jeunes, PCR-Québec, Personne n’est illégal-Montréal, Bloquez l’empire-Montréal, l’Association des Étudiantes et des Étudiants en Histoire, Convergence l’Autre 400e and PCQ-Québec. This large anti-capitalist diversity probably make this event one of the largest open mobilisation of the political far-left in the city since the Summit of the Americas.

Here we are again with Molly's irregular feature, 'The Best of the Blogs', where she goes down the blogs on her links section, choosing those that have particularly interesting recent content. Today we do the letter combination "an".

A. Over at the Anarchia blog Asher muses on the existential condition of loneliness in 'On Being Alone'.

B. The Anarchist Philosophy Blog is more didactic, and the author explores his thoughts as to what anarchism is and isn't in his 'Anarchism Essay'. Special emphasis on the fact that the philosophy is not merely "negative"

C. The Anglican Resistance blog is closing down. The author, an Anglican priest, will be moving most of his efforts to his parish blog, the Blog of the Good Shepherd. He also recommends a couple of other blogs where his work occasionally appears, The Episcopal Cafe and The Covenant Journal.

D. Meanwhile out on the west coast the Anarcho-Cyclist has some interesting material on the "local foods movement". Check out his 'Radical Gardening and Local Food Production' and 'Saltspring Seeds 'Zero Mile Diet' Seed Kit'.

Apparent progess in first months of new tribunal has to do with which claims were processed, not now.

A HARPERINDEX.CA UPDATE OTTAWA,

March 28, 2008:

This week the Globe and Mail reported that the Harper Conservative government has settled a remarkable 50 land claims, apparently validating its stated plan to speed up land claims resolution.

HarperIndex.ca corresponded by email with the native affairs analyst (who has requested anonymity), that it contacted last June (see below), about the government's claim it would speed up land claims. When asked how this week's news contrasted with his opinion last June, that the new process would result in little meaninful progress on land claims settlements, the analyst replied:

"The key sentence in the story: 'You want to do the low-hanging fruit first, that's for sure,' he [Prentice] said. 'I certainly gave no instruction that way, but it wouldn't surprise me.'
This approach has certain validity, but not without serious problems: 1) those who have been waiting for years and years had to wait still longer while the bureaucrats spent their time on the 'low-hanging fruit'; 2) the biggest reason while the fruit was 'low-hanging' was because the amounts were small, meaning the aggregate value of waiting claims was not reduced; 3) 50 claims out of 800 or so is still just 6% of the waiting claims and while the low-hanging fruit was being harvested, more than 60 new claims were filed.

It's sort of like being in the hospital and not being treated because the doctors are busy working on 'low-hanging fruit', and as a result, these patients' care being cheaper, saving on costs.
Key question to ask: total value of claims settled."

Here is the original article:
OTTAWA, June 13, 2007 — Yesterday, Stephen Harper announced a process, he says, will speed up Aboriginal land claims in order to clear up the 800-claim backlog and relieve native tensions. The changes give Harper a good-news story but, experts say, they will do little to achieve the stated goals.

A law professor, expert in native law issues, asks why Harper, not native affairs minister Jim Prentice, made the announcement, "given he's stayed far away from Aboriginal issues in the past." Bradford Morse of Ottawa University says Harper moved quickly because, "This government is looking to have positive things to announce, and this is a sector where it has been vulnerable." Like the Chinese head tax issue, which Harper took over from heritage minister Bev Oda, yesterday's announcement has important political audiences, such as voters Harper hopes will see him as a moderate. He is also reaching out to the transportation industry, which feels threatened by the possibility of summer blockades. Government-invited industry representatives attended the Parliament Hill announcement.

A veteran native affairs analyst (who asked not to be identified for fear of repercussions from the government as a source of contract work) says many aspects of the announcement create problems and raise suspicions. For one thing, although the tribunal will be "independent", the government alone will pick the judges. Harper and cabinet "still have a unilateral approach to things."

The analyst points out that the tribunal, with just six judges, will be unable to deal rapidly with the backlog. "They're expected to deal with a backlog of 800 claims; you figure it out."
"The real problem," says the analyst, "is what has to happen before it gets to the tribunal," which is only going to be set up to deal with cases where negotiations have, in the government's view, failed. "As long as the government can say "let's continue to negotiate," cases will not be heard. You don't get a free ticket to the tribunal just because you have a claim," said the source.
Furthermore, the number of cases that can be dealt with is limited by the annual budget of $250 million. This includes the costs of the process, which could bring the actual claim fund down to $200 million yearly. "The commission will be set up so it can only have before it [that amount] worth of claims. You're really creating another block to the tribunal, in that it can only consider at one point in time on its docket $200 million worth of claims. If today they settle two $50 million claims and one $100 million claim, then only three more claims can come across in the following year," — with 800 waiting.

The source questioned, as well, the notion that the Assembly of First Nations (AFN) would actually draft the bill with the government, saying this work is always done by legal experts and that citizens are never involved in the drafting of legislation. The source says "It's about 99 percent certain Cabinet has already set out drafting instructions," and in any case, "legislation is not necessary to accomplish what the government set out to do today." The promised bill is more for political purposes and reasons of delay, according to the analyst.

Why, then, did the AFN's Phil Fontaine offer such strong support to the move after making dire warnings of native impatience a few weeks ago? "It could be lack of analysis," says the source. "It could be he will feel differently about it the day after tomorrow, or in September." It could also be that Fontaine is being squeezed by the government. "They're not giving him money; he's a nobody to them. In the standing committee [on native affairs] today, all but one of the Conservative members left the hearing when he spoke. All the opposition members stayed. It's the way this government has treated him."

If land claims are sped up, it would appear to indicate a break with the positions of Harper's longtime mentor Tom Flanagan, a University of Calgary professor who has written in opposition to, and been used as an expert witness against, land claims.

Harper Index (HarperIndex.ca) is a project of the Golden Lake Institute and the online publication StraightGoods.ca

Warning the World that Zapatismo Is in Danger

The Zapatistas have flashed a red alert to Mexico and the world. The problem is not just the growing military aggression, but rather that important sectors of Mexican society are ignoring the danger. Mexico will not be the only loser if Zapatismo is destroyed. Latin America and all of humanity will lose as well.

Jorge Alonso
Signs that the Mexican government is gearing up for war have led the Zapatistas to launch a red alert to the world. Increased activity is reported in the 56 permanent military bases in Chiapas, which are receiving modern weaponry, equipment and special forces. Activity by right wing paramilitary groups operating in Chiapas is also on the rise. Those aligned with the PRI, the army and state officials from the Agrarian Reform Office have mounted a series of attacks recently on Zapatista villages on lands liberated during the 1994 uprising. The attacks are of such intensity that the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) recently postponed its ambitious plans for participation in the Other Campaign.

Several years ago, after the government reneged on the San Andrés Accords, which among other things had recognized the indigenous peoples’ right to large areas of land that had been taken and collectivized by the Zapatistas, the Zapatistas devised a peaceful de facto solution: they simply exercised their right to the land in question by creating autonomous municipalities. The government’s violent response through paramilitary activity against many Zapatista towns, particularly since last September, has been documented and made public, but the Zapatistas’ call for support has largely been met with disinterested silence, especially in Mexico, where the Zapatistas refused to back Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD) presidential candidate López Obrador against Calderón of the National Action Party (PAN).

The PAN federal government, the PRD state government in Chiapas and local Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and PRD municipal governments and political bosses are calculating that the time is ripe for smashing the Zapatistas. The key is in wresting away the lands on which their Caracoles and autonomous municipalities have been built. Plans sponsored by international institutions, in which the US government’s hand is hard to hide, are designed to dislodge Zapatista communities by turning resources over to transnationals in the guise of defending the environment.

The Zapatistas reiterated the alert in December 2007 at an international colloquium organized by the University of the Earth, the EZLN and the magazine Contrahistorias to discuss the planet’s future and the situation of what are becoming known as the anti-system movements. The event was held at the university itself, which could not be a more symbolic locale. This non-formal learning center for indigenous communities fully living their autonomy receives nothing from the Mexican government; it even produces its own energy and controls its own water supply. Students from the communities gain hands-on experience cultivating organic products and there are also electricity, blacksmithing, mechanics and handcrafts workshops. They decide what they want to learn and how long they can stay.
Among the numerous speakers at the colloquium, the

EZLN’s Subcomandante Marcos made a seven-part presentation on behalf of the Zapatistas, the final one of which was titled “The Calendar and Geography of War.” He began by referring to capitalism’s warlike nature, its use of war as a profit-making venture. But rather than spend time on that point, he recommended The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, a recent book by journalist and “other world” activist Naomi Klein, who also spoke at the colloquium.

He then warned that the Zapatista communities were being attacked to a degree that had not occurred for some time, adding that this is the first time the aggressions are openly coming from a “supposedly” leftist government—a dig at the PRD government in the state of Chiapas. In fact, newspapers reported that same day that Chiapas’ Governor Juan Sabines had just appointed Constantino Kanter, the representative of Chiapas’ big farmers and an ally of López Obrador, a post in his government. Marcos noted that this would give Kanter the opportunity to provide even more resources to paramilitary groups, offering as evidence for such collusion Sabines’ accusation that the Zapatistas had caused López Obrador’s electoral loss and that his “institutional Left” party would never forgive them. He charged Kanter with having coined the phrase, “In Chiapas a chicken’s worth more than an Indian.”

Marcos listed many incidents squelched or ignored by the media that had occurred in his last trip to Vicam, Sonora, for the gathering of Indian Peoples of America. He acknowledged that the EZLN was itself an army, albeit a very different one, but said that the Zapatistas were continuing their peaceful Other Campaign while preparing to resist the army, police and/or paramilitaries. He also announced that this was the last time, at least for a good while, that he would be appearing at colloquiums, round tables, conferences, interviews and other activities of this sort. He added that this was hardly the first time the government had determined to wipe out the Zapatistas, but was, worryingly, the first time the national and international social response was insignificant and in some cases non-existent. Marcos concluded by warning that the stench of fear and war could be smelled in the Zapatista lands.

In the nineties, any danger to the Zapatistas triggered huge civil society demonstrations, which in Mexico City always included a sizable PRD contingent. Today, however, the prevailing feeling in that party is one of revenge because the Zapatistas didn’t line up behind López Obrador.

Blaming them for the PRD’s electoral defeat is way off base, however, because it ignores the fraud employed by the winning National Action Party (PAN) with help from the powers behind the throne: Mexico’s big money and influential media. Even if the Zapatistas hadn’t chosen to boycott the elections and criticize López Amador as just another cog in the system, it would not have altered such immense fraud. At the end of 2007, a prestigious polling firm found that if the presidential elections had been held at that moment, 69% of the population would have viewed them as either not very clean, not clean at all or frankly fraudulent.

Andrés Aubry: Zapatista Doctorate At the colloquium, Andrés Aubry was named Primus doctor liberationis conatus causa, which freely translated could be interpreted as a doctorate for his commitment to the effort and substance of liberation. This new doctorate was outlined in a paper signed by the EZLN’s Indigenous Revolutionary Clandestine Committee and by indigenous authorities of the Oventic Caracol and autonomous municipalities.

Historians Jerome Baschet and Jorge Santiago, both of whom spoke at the colloquium, briefly summarized Aubry’s life, above all in Chiapas. He had come to Mexico after the massive uprisings of May 1968 and following an anthropologists’ meeting in Barbados that had condemned missionary ethnocentrism, come out in favor of indigenous liberation, and argued for a liberationist anthropology. Aubry, who had an authentic spirit of liberation and was committed to the people, became a respectful apprentice in their struggles and wisdom. He accompanied the Zapatistas deeply and fraternally and because of that loyalty could look beyond appearances and live the secret of never being disillusioned. In September 2007, at the age of 80, he planned to drive to the meeting of indigenous peoples in Vicam. His doctor gave him permission to make the long trip, but he died in a highway traffic accident on his return to San Cristóbal de las Casas, just days before his planned journey.

The EZLN’s Comandante David, his voice breaking at one moment, declared that Aubry had been a constant, untiring friend and comrade. The Zapatistas would always remember him and his wife, who died some years earlier, with respect, honor and admiration. Diverse Zapatista groups, speaking in their native Totzil, Tzeltal, Chol, Tojolobal and Zoque tongues, explained that they had awarded this original doctoral honor to Aubry because he had genuinely accepted the lessons of the struggles and wisdom of the different peoples and cultures of Chiapas, Mexico and the world. He had learned from them, conceiving intellectual effort not as a privilege, a form of personal self-affirmation or a source of power over others, but as a collective experience that is necessary to resist, to nourish the good life and to change the world.

A time of tough questions and weak answers An ongoing seminar in the University of the Earth bears the name of social scientist Immanuel Wallerstein, a theoretician of the “Another world is possible” school, who also delivered the colloquium’s opening speech—mainly an overview of today’s anti-system strategies. He argued that before the 1968 world movement such strategies had centered on taking state power to transform the world, while today alliances are being sought among anti-system movements, in the style of the Zapatistas’ “Other Campaign.” He urged that the World Social Forum be kept alive as the only multi-varied international response to capital’s global power.

Contrahistorias director Carlos Aguirre Rojas lauded the Zapatista movement as one of the most advanced anti-system movements in the world, adding that these leftist movements no longer lean toward a central actor and do not have hierarchical structures. Rather, they are creating organizations from the ground up, generating a greatly varied resistance to capitalism.
Both during the sessions and in the corridors the discussion was lively among presenters and the many and varied groups of concerned young people from all over the world. There was general agreement that the existing frameworks don’t adequately explain what’s happening in the world or how to halt it. There was also basic agreement on the need to break with Euro-centric and metropolitan visions and to learn from the anti-capitalist movements, and most of the speakers acknowledged different aspects of the Zapatistas’ experiments with alternative political structures and social relations as inspiring and thought-provoking. Nonetheless, the prevailing atmosphere among these movements is still one of searching how to create an inclusive “other possible world” that is forged from below, and this search for new, useful theories and concepts for transforming from the grass roots was also a constant in the presentations, with questions generally in greater supply than answers. In other words, everyone agreed that something is dreadfully wrong with today’s world and shared a broad brushstroke vision of what a better world should look like, but ideas on how to get from here to there seldom exceeded principles of behavior, although several speakers are working with young anti-system movements of a whole new kind. Conspicuously absent, however, were any viable economic alternatives that reach beyond isolated pockets of resistance.

We can’t let ourselves be immobilized by perplexity .Although he couldn’t attend, one can intuit from his latest writings what Portuguese researcher Boaventura de Sousa Santos would have said from his South perspective. Like the other presenters, he sees neoliberalism as the most anti-social form of capitalist globalization, and has denounced the exclusion, oppression and destruction of the means of subsistence and sustainability of huge populations in the world. In this sense he has also criticized the conversion of Chinese communism into an extremely savage form of capitalism that he calls market Stalinism. But he is optimistic because the new information and communication technologies have enabled these situations to spark resistance actions that have led to the creation of alliances and struggles through local and global ties in distant parts of the planet. As a result, an alternative globalization is being built from the ground up.

Boaventura argues that understanding these new movements requires a new social theory and new analytic concepts because the Western modernity paradigm sheds little light on today’s world. He holds that we are witnessing the final crisis of the hegemony of that paradigm, and that in this era of transition tough questions and weak answers are inevitable. The questions are probing the future of the possibilities before us, each with its own roots and underpinnings, while the inevitably weak answers cannot assuage the perplexity generated by this uncharted territory and the frustration of wanting to change what is so seriously wrong without any models or precedents for how to do so.

He warns against pretending that this discrepancy between the force of the questions and the weakness of the answers is absurd or can somehow be eliminated. Instead we must recognize it as a symptom of the underlying complexity, of a new open field of contradictions in which the different possibilities compete, but in which there is also room for innovation. We must accept the invitation to mobilize, assume the risk of testing out new answers rather than allowing ourselves to be immobilized by the perplexity.

In this setting, practice resorts to a kind of theoretical bricolage according to the needs of the moment. Radical democracy is conceived as the transformation of unequal power relations into relations of shared authority in all fields of social life,a struggle for equality and recognition of difference that privileges rebellion over conformity, and an effort to stop activists turning into functionaries. Rather than an obstacle to unity, diversity becomes a condition for it, although fragmentation and atomization are the hidden face of diversity and multiplicity. Theoretical disputes must take place in a context of concrete collective actions, because resistance doesn’t occur in the abstract. Transformative collective actions begin in response to conflicts established by the oppressors, and their success depends on their ability to change the terrain and the terms of the conflict in the course of the struggle.

A new post-capitalist utopia

The Belgian priest François Houtart, founder and member of the World Social Forum’s international council and distinguished representative of the “other world” movement, presented his vision of 21st-century socialism, at the same time acknowledging that discussing socialism at all is controversial. Most of those who have been defined as “anti-system” believe the idea of both capitalism and socialism must be abandoned because they are two sides of the same coin. Others repudiate the term socialism because of its baggage—Stalinism, for example.
Houtart argued that actions without prior reflection lead to revolts with no future and that social processes are not decreed, but result from concrete actors. He said that capitalism’s destructive approach to nature and human labor has never been as intense or rapid as in the neoliberal period. The experience of social movements and convergences are delineating the focal points of a post-capitalism or new socialism. These include sustainable natural resource use, privileging use value over exchange value and establishing a representative and participatory democracy generalized in all social and economic relations rather than just political ones. This involves another philosophy of power and the construction of true multiculturality.

Hope is the conviction that struggling makes sense .Gustavo Esteva, a promoter of Iván Illich’s work and an activist and ideologue of grassroots movements such as that of the Oaxacan peoples, posited that the era of the world capitalist economy is over and US imperialism is reaching its end, given that, while it can still capture hearts and minds, it no longer has cultural hegemony. With neoliberalism now an empty shell, its end is generating chaos and producing new reactionary waves and religious fundamentalisms. He explained that some want to return to the now impossible welfare state modalities while others want to bring back socialism, which is equally non-viable because of the economistic perspective of both its philosophy and practice. Noting that the new social movements are having difficulties becoming anti-systemic because they were born in the old era, he exhorted his listeners to renounce socialism.

Esteva analyzed the Grassroots Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca and Zapatismo as a source of inspiration for such anti-system movements. He proposed channeling the general discontent from this perspective, transforming protests and denunciations into viable initiatives, and resistance into liberation by linking up pockets of resistance, building autonomous ways of organizing social life beyond the logic of capital. While it seems impossible to propose the convergence of all organizations attempting to situate themselves on the left, he counseled against accepting division and turning friends into the main enemy. Quoting British writer John Berger, he said that naming the intolerable in an increasingly desperate world is in itself hope, which he defined as the conviction that struggling makes sense, no matter what happens, rather than that things will happen as one thinks they will .

Redefining the concept of powerFor my part, I analyzed the social movements that are constructing a profound critique of neoliberalism and capitalism, and posited that there is a diversity of powers, the best known being that which is used by groups or individuals to get others to do what they want. This type of power can be backed by force or by subtle forms of acceptance based on the asymmetric construction of consensus, but it is always oppressive, a zero-sum game in which what is gained by one is lost by the others.

Another kind of power is one that does not hoard but shares, multiplies. An example of this is the power of common decision-making. The Zapatistas’ “lead by obeying” concept is a very different kind of power from that to which capitalism is accustomed.

A basic rule that has come out of the study of social movements is the need to learn from what people do. We mustn’t fall into a Manichean way of thinking, because the dominant ideology can easily be interjected and assumed in our social expressions given that we have all lived and absorbed capitalist alienation, but we do need to distinguish the remnants of oppressive power in incipient forms of alternative power.

I looked at how the movements are demonstrating that one important instrument against concentrated and ubiquitous powers of domination is the convergences among the emerging movements. I wasn’t talking about convergences between movements and parties, both because the political class has fallen into an irreversible deterioration and because the party form corresponds to now outmoded structures of the industrial model. It is thus imperative to seek new ways to engage in politics, as the Zapatistas are doing. Convergences are part of a process in which it is no longer possible to postulate a privileged actor of change; it now has to be a kaleidoscopic panoply of agents, in our case a pluralist set of subjects that are working toward identifying, proposing and finding agreement on a common goal of transformation.This essentially new mass is surmounting dispersion, fragmentation and merely spontaneous expressions by experimenting with new and innovative organic forms, thus forging a diverse and pluralistic conglomerate. Many social movements have been demonstrating how such convergences are needed to access other possible worlds in which justice, freedom, equality and respect for life reign.

The Landless Movementand the Peasant Way Brazilian lawyer Ricardo Gebrim, a member of that country’s Landless Movement (MST), described a grassroots consultation process in Brazil similar to the Other Campaign promoted by the Zapatistas, stressing that Zapatismo has been a pedagogical example for many movements. He explained that many processes, such as the one in Bolivia, are not so much electoral events as insurrectional acts resulting from resistance struggles of many years. He explained that, while the MST had supported Lula, it was now building alternatives of broad-based unity and emerging strategic thinking, given that the current democracy is still nothing other than a set of mechanisms of capitalist domination.
Food expert Peter Rosset, a member of the world organization Vía Campesina, stressed that capital’s re-territorializing processes are in effect a genocidal war against indigenous peoples, peasants and fishing people. He described the destructuring and privatizing of the countryside and its control by transnational corporations that espouse a false environmentalism to justify dispossessing indigenous peoples of their lands, water and other resources. He reported on the alliances being built among traditional peasant movements and the newer anti-system ones and said that sharing experiences and debates has the potential of turning pro-system movements into anti-system ones. He also reported how the Zapatista example had spread to faraway lands, with Zapatista-style Caracoles being created in Thailand, for example.

Subversive wordsand eyes that speakArchitect and energy specialist Jean Robert spoke on anti-systemic action in times of crisis, like the one affecting the capitalist system right now, but added his voice to those who do not believe it is on its last legs. It is surviving through inertia and as it becomes illegitimate is basing its power on violence. He then posed a fundamental question: how can we prevent the system’s feedback mechanisms from devouring the pockets of resistance? He challenged the audience to examine whether the system of domination doesn’t learn from resistance movements and whether this learning doesn’t actually reinforce it.

Another aspect he dealt with was language. Western languages, he explained, make us speak of “capitalism” in a way that makes it seem like the only possibility. Daily language feeds a vision and a way of thinking that reinforces the system, while those who do not speak Western languages can have subversive words. He urged us to “de-capitalize” our minds.

John Berger himself counseled looking beyond words altogether, since what we perceive is more important than the name we give it. He related his visit to the Oventic Government Junta and listed four things that caught his attention: 1) they have an authority stripped of authoritarian features; 2) rather than making them less human, the balaclavas the Zapatistas wear actually make them more visible, since the expression revealed in the eyes is hardest to control, and in those eyes he saw sincerity; 3) resistance can produce fatigue and that fatigue needs to be consoled; and 4) by telling their local history and their place in the world, the Zapatistas represent the antithesis of all politicians of both Right and Left, and that opposition is in their bodies, minds and souls.

Systematic lies and blinding fearsPablo González Casanova confessed that something happens to him with the Zapatistas that never happened to him in the world’s great universities: he worries about whether or not it’ll pass the test. He spoke about coherent, scientific lies—such as those used and justified by the World Bank under the principle of authority—which he wasn’t sure whether to call deceit or self-deceit. He called salaries a systematic lie, as paying for “free” labor, paying what that merchandise is worth in the free market, hides the exploitation. He valued “prohibited” knowledge, much of which is very important if those from below are to advance, explaining that prohibitions exist precisely to stop people thinking differently.

González Casanova also referred to psychological violence and violence by intimidation, which lead to ambiguities, and explained how fear is an epistemological problem because it stops people from gaining knowledge. He alluded to the differences between what people say and what they do, such as self-proclaimed socialists who support neoliberal policies. He also provided current data to prove that those proclaiming imperialism’s death have gotten way ahead of themselves; the only thing that has died is socialism, asphyxiated by the bureaucrats.

Disaster capitalismJournalist Naomi Klein, whose book on the current rise of what she calls “disaster capitalism” was lauded by Subcomandante Marcos, repaid the compliment by recognizing that the world anti-system movement had been born in Chiapas. She also spoke of the movements in the North that oppose the dominion of the huge corporations, but acknowledged that after September 11 some resistance movements in the North had been weakened and even splintered. In that regard, she explained that the mechanism of disaster capitalism is to use the state of shock or exception to impose its neoliberal measures. With public policies abandoned, disasters are exploited to privatize, weakening the state and strengthening the corporations.

Shock resistance is a powerful force that is confronting this, with some peoples using their historical memory to resist. What happened in Argentina in 2001 and in Madrid in 2004 were examples of resistance to shock. Because today life itself is under threat, she made a call to combat the capitalist narratives with anti-capitalist ones.

Women’s equality as partof the Zapatistas’ definitionFeminist Sylvia Marcos called for an assessment of women’s contributions to the anti-system movements by their refusal to subordinate themselves to the kind of subjugation women suffer under capitalism and by generating new conceptions and new practices. She critiqued patriarchal contradictions, such as thinking that anything relating to women has only to do with them and not with everyone. After defending the need for alliances with other movements and for embracing other problems as part of a viable common agenda, she expressed appreciation that a guerrilla movement such as the Zapatista one had taken on women’s equality as part of its own definition.

In fact, on January 1, 2008, the 14th anniversary of its uprising, the EZLN took pride in the fact that the celebrations took place under the sign of transforming the role of women in the communities in struggle. urthermore, the Third Gathering of Zapatista Peoples with the Peoples of the World, held in the Caracol La Garrucha in late December 2007, wasan international meeting exclusively for women. Over 2,000 people from 30 countries participated in the three-day event. Women delegates from Vía Campesina in Asia, Europe and the Americas joined others from Brazil’s Landless Movement and from many other collectives around the world. Comandante Dalia, who spoke for the Zapatistas, said that women will never forgive what capitalism has done to them and affirmed that the Zapatistas were organized to defend their lands.

Zapatista Women led workshops on the history of their movement, women’s role in the rebellion and the future of women’s participation, while men were assigned housekeeping tasks. The Revolutionary Women’s Law, promulgated in Zapatista communities in 1992, underpinned the gathering, which celebrated women’s rapidly changing roles in Zapatista communities.
By the evening of January 31, the official 14th anniversary celebration of the Zapatista uprising, more than 5,000 people crowded La Garrucha, enjoying speeches, songs and dancing. The meeting ended with the warning that Zapatismo is being attacked in a hidden war with paramilitary forces made up of peasants co-opted and trained by the federal army who are trying to dispossess the Caracoles and autonomous municipalities of their land base. In fact there were precarious security conditions in Zapatista communities, especially in the North and Selva regions, at the time of the international gathering.

Neither Center Nor PeripherySubcomandante Marcos’ seven talks under the general title of “Neither Center Nor Periphery,” offered a sharp and lucid counterpoint to the other presentations.

“Geography and the Calendar of Theory.”

In this first topic, Marcos announced that he was presenting the basis of a theory so different that it is actually practice. He went on to explain that when the conceptual stone touches the surface of theory, it produces a series of concentric waves that affect different scientific and technical activities. This continues until a new conceptual stone drops and a new series of waves changes theoretical production again. The density of the theoretical production determines whether these ripples reach the shore of reality.

He criticized the aseptic zeal imposed on the social sciences, which leads to the idea that if reality doesn’t conform to the theory, tough for reality. Such theory is used to hide reality and ensure impunity. He said that Calderón, the man who currently passes himself off as President in Mexico thanks to an electoral fraud, hid his responsibility and that of those who preceded him for the catastrophes that battered Tabasco and Chiapas in late 2007 by blaming them on the moon. He also bitingly criticized supposedly progressive intellectuals who argue that social relations can be transformed without struggle and without touching the privileges enjoyed by the powerful.

Marcos then presented seven theses on the anti-system struggle. First: the capitalist system cannot be understood and explained without the concept of war. Second: the forms capitalists use to increase their earnings are to increase productivity, produce new merchandise and open new markets. Third: they achieve the latter by conquering or re-conquering territories and social spaces in which they previously had no interest, such as ancestral knowledge and natural resources. Fourth: he refuted the thesis that capitalism will collapse by itself. Fifth: he defended the idea that the capitalist system will only be destroyed if one or many movements confront and defeat capital’s central nucleus: private ownership of the means of production. Sixth: a society’s real transformations are those directed against the system as a whole. And seventh: the great transformationsdo not start at the top but with small movements and with the organized consciousness of groups and collectives that mutually know and recognize each other below and on the left and construct another kind of politics.

“The Calendar and Geography of Difference.”

In his second intervention, Marcos described how theories that emerge in the metropolis are exported to the periphery, where they suffer the blockages of those geographies. Hecited the example of trying to impose a metropolitan feminism on the communities without consulting them or understanding what’s already being done. He contrasted this with what women from the Zapatista movement and The Other Campaign are doing in one of the weightiest, most complex and ongoing anti-system struggles for equality and difference. These struggles would rock not only the whole patriarchal system, but also those who are barely beginning to grasp the strength and power of that difference.

“The Calendar and Geography of Destruction.” Here Marcos criticized people who suggest we stop worrying about those who exploit, dispossess, repress and deprecate in order to debate and agree on what comes after this nightmare. He said that arrogance is usually a bad counselor on practical and theoretical issues, and spoke of the destruction of nature—deforestation, contamination, ecological imbalance—and the misnamed “natural” catastrophes, which hide the bloody hand of capital accompanying these adversities.He analyzed the catastrophe in Tabasco and Chiapas that affected a million people, recalling that the “self-declared” President Calderón had painted a picture of a nearly divine tragedy that had nothing to do with the development model that led to the closing off of old water routes. The inundations were a crime given the opening of the Peñitas dam, monopolized by individual interests for electricity production. In contrast with the politicians’ actions, Marcos highlighted the population’s solidarity, above all by the poor for the poor. On this point he told how the Zapatistas got help to stranded communities, which of course was not reported in the major media.

He also talked about Cuba and its history, which is one long braid of pain and dignity, and about the extraordinary challenge of building its own destiny as a nation, its own socialism. He stressed that its rebellion had come at the cost of an economic blockade and a massive demonizing campaign by the United States.

“The calendar and geography of the land.” Marcos described the uses and abuses by the big farmers in Chiapas before the Zapatista uprising. He recalled that in 1994 the Zapatistas fought against the federal army and central government of the time, which included various figures who now back López Obrador. The Zapatistas will keep talking about their persecutors, executioners and killers, adding that if they had supported the PRD’s supposed alternative to the Right, it would have been a betrayal of those who had died.

He referred to the revolutionary women’s law and the revolutionary agrarian law. Because of the latter, ranchers had been expelled from their huge holdings, which were then divvied up among the indigenous. The passing of the land into the hands of the Zapatistas was accompanied by processes that can now be seen in their territories: advances in government, health, education, housing, food, trade, culture, communication, women’s participation, etc. The Zapatistas have recovered the capacity to decide their own destiny, which among other things implies the right to make their own mistakes.

“The calendar and geography of fear.” In this segment, Marcos said that freedom must be built collectively, and not on the fear of others who, although different, are our equals. A movement’s ethics are more important than the number of people it has, its media impact, the forcefulness of its actions or the clarity and radicalness of its program. He pointed to the lack of ethics at the top, which is the ethics of fear. The capitalist system can be defined as the empire of fear. There are many fears: fear of gender, which not only implies women’s fear of men and vice versa, but women’s fear of women and men’s fear of men. There’s also fear of different generations, fear of others, fear of race…

He stated that the Zapatistas have no hierarchy of spheres and don’t claim that the struggle for the land has priority over the gender struggle, or that the latter is more important than recognizing and respecting differences. The Zapatistas want a broad movement with clear objectives: a radical transformation that involves the destruction of the capitalist system. They ask that their rights be recognized, to be allowed to be what they are and how they are. They aren’t interested in positions or posts or awards or honors. They simply want to be able to get up each morning without fear of being on the day’s agenda: fear of being indigenous, a woman, a worker, homosexual, young, old, a child… and that’s not possible in the capitalist system.
“The calendar and geography of memory.” In this intervention, Marcos underscored that the Zapatista uprising had been against being ignored and forgotten. He distinguished the way Zapatistas look from the way they are looked at, detailing the respectful look that anthropologist Andrés Aubry always had for them. He warned that those who look at them are incapable of taking in all that the Zapatista movement has been, is, means and represents. The way they are seen by social scientists, analysts and artists is a window through which others look at them. We need to be aware that this window only shows a small part of the Zapatistas’ great house, leaving aspects such as the communities’ heroic daily resistance unseen.

Cuba: A revolution that knows how to dance

Another position shared by the immense majority, Zapatistas at the head, was recognition of Cuba’s heroic role in the liberating process.
Cuban speaker Gilberto Valdés, who collaborates with Havana’s Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Center, talked about his country’s culture of resistance, which has forged a very participatory people. He analyzed the current debate on the island, in which the people are seeking solutions to problems of all shapes and sizes. At the end of 2007, over two million specific proposals for responding to the daily problems and bureaucratization had been gathered. He proudly claimed that the Cuban revolution has continued to exist because it “ knows how to dance and sing,” referring to an anecdote by Marcos of a young woman who had told him she didn’t want to be invited to his revolution if it didn’t know how to dance. Valdés noted that one huge challenge in the new Latin American panorama, with its anti-imperialist, emancipationist and libertarian logic and its search for a response to the perverse mercantilist logic, is to figure out a model of alternative well-being.

Awareness of dangerAt one point, a presenter respectfully inquired why a hard-line, sell-out and illegitimate rightist presidency such as Calderón’s hadn’t been prevented from taking office, referring to the Zapatistas’ decision not to back the PRD candidate. It was explained that former PRI members who were the Zapatistas’ main persecutors and the instigators and organizers of paramilitary groups in Chiapas were now with the PRD in Chiapas’ state government, where they were continuing to attack the Zapatista peoples. This was presented as proof of Marcos’ argument that the Zapatistas cannot make alliances with their executioners.
The participants were deeply disturbed when they realized the grave danger

the Zapatista communities are facing today. Colloquium organizers and participants signed a declaration stressing that the Zapatistas had honored their word to put aside their weapons despite the formation of paramilitary groups, the massacre in Acteal and all the other terrible things the army had done in Chiapas. They had created the Caracoles and their peaceful activity was exemplary, yet in recent months paramilitary groups had been harassing them to get them off the land. The declaration demanded that the state and federal governments cease the aggression, since peoples should not be forced into using violence to defend against the violence they are suffering.

The Acteal massacre is a symbolThe gathering culminated on the tenth anniversary of the Acteal massacre, when the government and its intellectuals attempted to twist history to elude what had happened: a state crime. Jesuit Ricardo Robles wrote at the time: “Although governments, and behind them the de facto powers, are attempting to cover their crimes with silence, obscurity and oblivion, the dead continue their work; they care for their struggles so they don’t die with them. And their protests, proposals, utopias and slogans remain alive in truth. However much they are denied, the flames of Acteal remain alive. Acteal’s horror goes beyond today’s dirty war; it has become a symbol of all the horrors.”

Zapatismo is the whole world’s patrimonyAfter the colloquium, several participants used different media to call on people to mobilize to defend Zapatismo. Wallerstein stressed that the Zapatistas had set up de facto autonomous indigenous municipalities that are functioning well despite being under siege and constantly threatened by the Mexican army. He admitted that world support for the Zapatistas is suffering from some degree of fatigue and that the colloquium sought to resuscitate alliances.

Naomi Klein also echoed the Zapatistas’ red alert, given the evident signs of war on the horizon. She warned the world and Mexico in particular that new massacres such as the one in Acteal must be avoided. John Berger also demanded immediate support for the Zapatistas from Mexican civil society, arguing that everyone will suffer the consequences if this threatened project disappears.

There’s still time to stop the aggressionThe political parties, now hugely discredited for having acted against people’s needs, have lost the support of a large proportion of the population. The Zapatistas are legitimately seeking other paths and other ways of engaging in politics and that search has to be defended. Leaving the Zapatistas to their fate would be enormously shortsighted and an act of terrible complicity. There’s still time to raise voices from the media that claim to be democratic to halt a massacre of the Zapatista option.

If the political polarization in Mexico is tolerating this crime, there is still the international option. It is urgent that individuals and groups around the world be made aware of what is happening and act in time to halt the aggression against the Zapatistas. Zapatismo is the patrimony of those at the bottom everywhere in the world. It belongs to us all.

Jorge Alonso is a researcher for CIESAS West and envío correspondent in Mexico.

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Jailed Iranian trade unionist requires urgent medical treatment

Mahmoud Salehi has long suffered persecution by the Iranian authorities, spending several periods in prison because of their legitimate and peaceful activities as trade union activists and human rights defenders. He began his sentence on 9 April 2007. Amnesty International considers him a prisoner of conscience and is concerned for his health.

Mahmoud Salehi, who has serious long term medical concerns, is now on a total hunger strike and there are serious fears for his safety. He went on hunger strike after he was summoned to appear for questioning by Branch 4 of the Sanandaj Courts on 17 March 2008 when, after a prolonged wait, new charges were issued against him.

He has reportedly been accused of ‘communicating with those outside prison for the purposes of issuing messages of solidarity’ for other individual prisoners on hunger strike and students facing arrest. The new charges appear intended to justify Mahmoud Salehi’s continued detention beyond his scheduled 23 March 2008 release date, when he will have completed a one year prison sentence.

Health fears Mahmoud Salehi, former leader of the Bakers’ Union in Saqez, has long-term medical concerns. He was reportedly transferred briefly to hospital, unconscious, on 11 December, after repeatedly collapsing in prison between 4-10 December. During an earlier hospitalisation, on or around 4 December, the authorities placed restraints on his bed. He may not be receiving adequate medical care.

A May 2007 request by his doctor that he be accorded specialist treatment outside the prison has been ignored. He suffers from chronic kidney disease, as a result of which he requires dialysis. He is also said to suffer from a heart disorder and has been returned to prison where he remains.

In December 2007 it was reported that Salehi has grave intestinal edema or swelling that may be connected with his renal disease. His wife, Najibeh Salehzadeh is reported to have said on 18 December that:
“…the physical health of my partner is extremely severe. One of his kidneys has stopped working and because of being deprived of proper medical treatment the other kidney is losing its functions. His blood pressure fluctuates and his blood sugar is surging. He falls unconscious about twice daily. The lack of treatment of his kidney has affected his heart as well. His feet and legs are swollen and the excessive injections of tranquilizers have seriously endangered his well-being….”

Mahmoud Salehi has been denied visits from his lawyer and family. His family, who live 400km from Sanandaj, have been able to contact him by telephone. He was arrested after a peaceful demonstration to celebrate May Day 2004. In November 2005 he was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment and three years' internal exile in the city of Ghorveh, Kordestan. At his trial, the prosecutor reportedly cited his trade union activities as evidence against him, and referred to a meeting he had held with officials from the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU) - now reconstituted as the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) - in April 2004, shortly before the May Day demonstrations.

His conviction was overturned on appeal, but after a retrial he was sentenced on 11 November 2006 to four years’ imprisonment for "conspiring to commit crimes against national security". He was free until the appeal hearing on 11 March, when his sentence was reduced to a three-year suspended prison sentence and one year’s imprisonment, which commenced with his imprisonment on 9 April 2007.

Mahmoud Salehi has long suffered persecution by the Iranian authorities, spending several periods in prison because of their legitimate and peaceful activities as trade union activists and human rights defenders. He began his sentence on 9 April 2007. Amnesty International considers him a prisoner of conscience and is concerned for his health.

Mahmoud Salehi, who has serious long term medical concerns, is now on a total hunger strike and there are serious fears for his safety. He went on hunger strike after he was summoned to appear for questioning by Branch 4 of the Sanandaj Courts on 17 March 2008 when, after a prolonged wait, new charges were issued against him.

He has reportedly been accused of ‘communicating with those outside prison for the purposes of issuing messages of solidarity’ for other individual prisoners on hunger strike and students facing arrest. The new charges appear intended to justify Mahmoud Salehi’s continued detention beyond his scheduled 23 March 2008 release date, when he will have completed a one year prison sentence.

Read the joint Amnesty-Global Unions' statement on Mahmoud Salehi's continued detention here
More about Iranian trade union rights
Send an appeal to the Iranian authorities to release Mahmoud Salehi or to ensure he urgently receives appropriate medical treatment

Molly

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What Does "Free Tibet" Mean for You?

by Laure Akai

Friday, Mar 28 2008, 12:45pm

The struggle to be free is one that is commendable and deserves our sympathy. At this time when the state is committing brutal violence against a people, solidarity and action is needed and in fact, around the world well-wishers have expressed their outrage at the situation in Tibet. Protest movements have been calling for "an end to cultural imperalism", "freedom", even for "crushing the oppressor" and are united in such slogans and demands. Yet what if Tibet were to gain independence from China?

The question of national liberation is a complicated one. Discrimination, destruction of culture and community are forms of repression which are often seen in the contest of nation against nation instead of in the context of the ruling classes against the subjugated. Thus national liberation movements of all kinds tend to create the illusion of a mass common interest against an oppressor which is always external. "Self-determination" is too often a slogan which really means establishing the right of the elites of a given nation to exert power and influence, both economic and political, over those who would be subjects of a new nation state.

The struggle to be free is one that is commendable and deserves our sympathy. At this time when the state is committing brutal violence against a people, solidarity and action is needed and in fact, around the world well-wishers have expressed their outrage at the situation in Tibet. Protest movements have been calling for "an end to cultural imperialism", "freedom", even for "crushing the oppressor" and are united in such slogans and demands. Yet what if Tibet were to gain independence from China?

*****
The question of national liberation is a complicated one. Discrimination, destruction of culture and community are forms of repression which are often seen in the contest of nation against nation instead of in the context of the ruling classes against the subjugated. Thus national liberation movements of all kinds tend to create the illusion of a mass common interest against an oppressor which is always external. "Self-determination" is too often a slogan which really means establishing the right of the elites of a given nation to exert power and influence, both economic and political, over those who would be subjects of a new nation state.

*****
It is no coincidence that the "struggle to be free" is supported selectively. Individuals or larger groups of society may give precedence to one struggle over another for various reasons and in Europe and North America one can observe the existence of "causes célèbres" which are given both support by famous and powerful persons and disproportionate media attention (when compared to other analogous struggles). Causes célèbres are able to attract and mobilize people, gather ardent supporters for the cause. But not all social struggles or even human tragedy can qualify as a cause célèbre.

Causes célèbres are easily mobilized around those national liberation movements which are also (not coincidentally) related to establishing independence from the superstates created by so-called "communist nations". The brutal totalitarian nature of such states are joyously exposed with indignation by countries many of which even have equal atrocities on their account. Members of the American political establishment are quick to condemn human rights conditions in China and some even call for a boycott of the Olympics similar to that held in 1980, while Americans continue to kill civilians in wars for oil, support right-wing murderous paramilitaries, execute prisoners and financially support slave-like working conditions in factories around the world producing goods for American consumers. Few "concerned citizens of the world" were whipped into such a frenzy to demand a boycott of the Olympic Games in the US.

This is not to say that a reaction to the situation in Tibet is undue. Quite the contrary. However, I would like to pose a few questions for consideration.

The Tibetan situation is treated by many with, quite justifiably, a sense of urgency. In my city, at least three pickets have been held in the past week with large crowds in attendance and throughout the country, people mobilized instantly. We are being passionately implored to boycott the firm that is producing Olympic uniforms, to go to the Chinese embassy, to boycott Chinese goods and anybody who has been less than enthusiastic about this may be told they are supporting genocide. By comparison, many recent events have gone largely ignored in these parts, for example recent Turkish military actions against Kurds or, even more tragically, the ongoing and outrageous situation in Congo. How is it that over 5 million people have been killed in Congo over the last ten years and the great local activist masses have stayed passive, if not totally ignorant of the situation?

The answer is complex, and, unfortunately not very convenient. Tibetans can be easily portrayed as the ultimate victims. As some internet commenter argued, Tibetans are more deserving of our support (than Kurds) because they haven't been violent. I was asked "how many people have they killed" (in comparison to Kurds).

I don't think any historians are in a position to give an answer to this question. During the CIA-sponsored Tibetan resistance, surely tens of thousands of Chinese were killed, but supporters of the Tibet cause would argue that this was merely self-defense. Currently, some Tibetans have also taken part in random ethnic violence (in fact pogroms) which also tends to be justified by supporters of the cause as an appropriate reaction to Chinese settlement in Tibet. These types of episodes, if known at all, are easily juxtaposed by the dominant images of Buddhist monks, led by the Dalai Lama, as men of peace, a noble opposition to the violent and barbaric Chinese.

The creation of such images of peaceful, happy Tibetans is probably the result of a long-term PR campaign boosted by naive believers and well-wishers as well as government-sponsored propaganda. Few people care to know about the realities of the feudal system which existed in Tibet up until the second half of the twentieth century, nor do they wish to view "his holiness" the Dalai Lama as a human deity who lived in a huge palace, up kept and served by serf labour, a person whose prime interest was to maintain social servility and Tibetan elites. The social composition of Tibetan society played no role when the CIA supported the Tibetan resistance; its support was absent when it needed China as an ally and came when its political priority became "fighting the spread of communism".

The campaign to free Tibet which sprung up in the 1980s was largely kick started through help from the CIA and the National Endowment for Democracy. With such backing it had a good start to build grassroots movements and student groups which would later give it complete activist legitimacy. The Tibetans were a perfect subject that could be presented as the ideal victims: peace-loving, religious, wise, living in Shangri-La and viciously oppressed by the world's worst human rights abusers. Celebrity Buddhists and New-Agers helped segue this issue into the mainstream. Thus gaining its legitimacy through the mainstream media and having become a cause célèbre, thousands of people interested in peace and social justice around the world have taken up the cause. Some may envision the development of some sort of bourgeois civil society after Tibetan is free, while others maintain some idolized vision of spiritual Tibet and appear at pickets donning orange robes and carrying portraits of the Dalai Lama. And while this cause is picked up by the thousands, hundreds of equally urgent struggles remain unknown or are dismissed as the actors in these struggles fail to present themselves as the perfect victims. They may have been defined and portrayed to the world through the lens of the capitalist-dominated press or otherwise did not inspire enough empathy to mobilize support.

*****
The struggle for a "Free Tibet" may begin with a struggle against the Chinese police state - but it certainly does not end there. Self-determination is usually a code word for national determination, but real self-determination begins with self-management.

Can the movement in Tibet be transformed from a national liberation struggle into a social revolution? We have no evidence of such revolutionary tendencies although the information we receive tends to be filtered through the ideological lens of the liberal establishment. Recent experience has tended to show that people can throw off the yoke of a totalitarian communist state but, without experience in grassroots self-organization, and operating largely in a vacuum, such countries can develop into more-or-less democratic market economies run by economic elites, or they can develop into autocracies or rather undemocratic regimes such as one finds in parts of Central Asia.

The struggle for freedom in Tibet is thus not just a struggle against the Chinese state, but also a struggle against all the powers which would enslave the average Tibetan upon gaining nominal independence. The feudal order represented by the monks, the Dalai Lama and the children of the merchant class in exile cannot be allowed to take root again in that country.

One may be quick to point out that feudalism is not likely to be restored in Tibet but this does not mean that similar conditions cannot arise under different socio-economic regimes. Many workers find themselves in indentured servitude even in Western Europe, the US or the Gulf States where such an economic system does not technically exist. In factories throughout Asia, workers are treated as chattels, although their countries have achieved national independence. The chains of one ruling class were simply exchanged for those of another, the form of slavery merely modified.

"Free Tibet" cannot be reduced to religious freedom, freedom to associate in non-threatening civic organizations or other freedoms which are normally the rewards of democratic independence movements. Of course one cannot justify repression of such freedoms; even a critic of clericalism can condemn repression on the grounds of religious conviction and understand the impulse to fight against this. Yet all of these freedoms do not amount to a society where there is true popular control, where workers and communities cooperate to create social equity and where the financial and political elites are divested of their power, their means of exploiting and controlling people. This vision of "Free Tibet" is inspiring but, unfortunately one that is still lacking in the popular imagination.
Laure Akai
Article written for Anarkismo.net

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A full four months after the IUF-affiliated Nestlé Perm Workers Union first demanded a substantial wage increase for the almost 1000 workers at the Kitkat candy and confectionary plant, Nestlé Russia still denies bona fide wage bargaining. The union is now calling for international protest action in order to highlight the right to wage negotiations as a basic workers right.

At a protest rally in Perm on March 22, workers declared their support for the union's demand of a 21,5% wage increase from Jan. 1. Workers are not prepared to accept the wage increase decreed unilaterally by management nor to be a party to the bad faith negotiations forced upon them by Nestle Perm management.

As reported earlier (> Nestlé Russia tells workers "We don't negotiate wages"), Nestle had denied wage negotiations for several months, contending that wages were not subject to collective bargaining at all. After a collective labour dispute was declared, and an OECD complaint was filed against Nestlé for violation of basic workers rights, the company changed its strategy from one of refusing to one of constantly delaying negotiations. Up to now, no concrete new proposal for a wage increase has been received from management.

At the protest rally held in the centre of the city of Perm on Saturday, March 22, more than 200 participants demonstrated their refusal to put up with Nestlé’s postponement game any longer. It became abundantly clear that the company’s hope of placating the workers by handing them a 15% wage increase had not been realised. No wonder – this does not even cover the official inflation rate of over 16% in the region in 2007. “We need a real wage increase now” speakers declared at the meeting “Many of us donate blood regularly, as we can’t make ends meet with the salaries we get”.

The protest rally in the centre of Perm attracted more than 200 participants. As management has declared on several occasions that final decisions are taken not in Perm, but in Moscow or even at Nestlé headquarters in Switzerland, the union will take the protest beyond Perm. On Tuesday, March 25, a demonstration will be held in front of Nestlé Russia headquarters in central Moscow with the support of the Agricultural Workers Union of Russia and the Federation of Independent Trade Unions of Russia (FNPR).

IUF General Secretary Ron Oswald commented – “Nestlé is responsible for ensuring that trade union rights, including the right to bona fide wage negotiations, are respected in every single factory and worksite. A global corporation may not shirk such obligations by attempting to dictate terms and conditions unilaterally. The right to wage negotiations is a fundamental workers right – everywhere!”

Support Nestle Perm workers in their struggle for the right to wage negotiations!

Click here to send a protest message to Nestlé corporate management now!

Copies will be automatically sent to the IUF secretariat.

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Chile Part 5 - More Failures of Neoliberalism
I have already touched on the problem of rapid economic growth coupled with price inflation and wage stagnation. (With the exception of the 1998 Asian Tigers Crisis, GDP growth has averaged between 5 and 10% annually. (1) ) I also referred to the grotesque level of inequality, one of the worst in the world (2), and the refusal of the government to create proper social welfare and education systems in an attempt to rectify this. But there are more problems than these facing Chile.

An export-dependent economy. What happens when the global economy goes into the toilet? What will happen to Chile in the coming years when the rising oil prices make it uneconomic to export fruit?

The central part of the country where most of the population lives and most of the fruit growing occurs is drying up and may well become desert in the coming decade. Due to global warming, the Andes get less snow, lowering the water table and river flow. Furthermore, clear-cutting and poor water usage are contributing factors, Chileans have told me.(Yet, you read not a word about global warming in the Chilean press.)

Chile has almost no oil and natural gas. This at a time when prices for these resources are sky-rocketing. Power brown-outs are blamed upon Argentina's refusal to renew its natural gas export contract, as it seems that country needs its gas for its own use. And since there is less water, hydro projects don't seem to be the answer. The electricity problem is a fine example of the failure of neo-liberalism. Central and North Chile get sun 365 days a year. The coastline gets wind off the Pacific. You would think solar and wind power would have been introduced. But no, Chile is 30 years behind other countries in this technology. Utilities were corporatized under Pinocho and thus cannot see any further than this years profit margins.

Meanwhile, the authorities have applied the US model of suburban sprawl and vast shopping malls everywhere. (It was never so evident as this trip, and the disease was only beginning in 1996.) At a time of water and power shortages and rising oil prices, the most energy-inefficient way of living in the world is being actively promoted.

Agribusiness is driving campesinos off the land. They crowd into the cities and exacerbate the problems there. The remaining campesinos are being forced into mono-crop sub-contracting for the corporations. This further undermines campesino life and threatens the farmer's markets, the one source of cheaper food for the populace.

The inability of the Peruvian state to deal with its economic problems is forcing many Peruvians to immigrate (legally and illegally) into Chile, a country that is wealthy by comparison with theirs. The Peruvians add to the number of poor in the cities and due to racism are blamed for "stealing jobs." and a rising crime rate.

I am left with the feeling that these problems will tear the country apart in the coming years.

One final point that I didn't know where to fit in. Chile used to be one of the most socially progressive countries in Latin America. Thanks to the Pinochet dictatorship, this is no longer the case. It was a deliberate policy of the dictatorship to stamp out socially progressive ideas and it shows. Chile is in many ways like stepping back 40 years. "White" Chileans will cheerfully tell you that People of Color are inferior and that Indians are stupid, the sort of talk that went out of style among middle class Canadians a good while ago. Even though blonds only make up maybe 15% of the population, most women in advertisements are rubias. There are no women bus, taxi or truck drivers and no women tradespeople or construction workers. Only 30% of Chilean women are engaged in wage work, the lowest in Latin America and the same as Canada in 1960. This dependence upon one income is a contributing aspect of the poverty in the country and is a direct and long-term expression of the social reaction of the Pinochet regime.

NOTES:
1.) Average GDP growth between 1990 and 2001 was 4.7% Average growth, 2002-2007 was 4.71% (2007 at 5.2%) Sources, CIA Fact Book
2.) The GINI Index. Zero would equal absolute equality and 100 absolute inequality. Chile stands at 58.3, Costa Rica 48.9, Brazil, 56.7, and by way of comparison, Canada at 33.1, France at 32.3 and Norway at 25.7. Sources CIA Fact Book

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National Petition to End Sweatshops & Slavery in the Fields

The Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) has launched a national petition drive to demand that Burger King and other food industry leaders work with the CIW to improve the wages and working conditions of the workers who pick their tomatoes and join with the CIW in an industry-wide effort to eliminate human rights abuses from Florida’s fields.

Please take a moment to sign the petition, which will serve as notice that those who sign are "prepared to stop patronizing Burger King now, and other food industry leaders in the future, should they fail to do so."
Tell me more

Full Petition Text:
WHEREAS, there is an ongoing human rights crisis in Florida's fields, including: poverty wages, rooted in an antiquated piece-rate pay system that hasn't changed significantly in nearly 30 years;

long hours without overtime pay when work is available, unemployment and transience when it is not;

physical abuse and wage fraud by crew leaders, supervisors, and growers;

damage to body and soul from back-breaking labor, with no employment benefits such as sick days, paid leave, health insurance, or pensions;

retaliation against workers who protest or organize to alleviate these inhuman conditions;

and, most shamefully, modern-day slavery, with six successful federal prosecutions of farm labor operations for servitude in Florida over the past decade, and a seventh just initiated, involving well over 1,000 workers and more than a dozen farm employers; WHEREAS, by leveraging their high-volume purchasing power to extract the lowest prices possible, Burger King and other food industry leaders profit from and play an active role in creating the miserable conditions in Florida's fields;

WHEREAS,

Burger King and other food industry leaders have not only refused to join Yum! Brands and McDonald's in working with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) to improve farm labor conditions, but have actually sought to reverse gains made by workers in agreements with those corporations;

WHEREAS,

private equity firms including Goldman Sachs, Texas Pacific Group, Bain Capital and others, which are principal shareholders in Burger King and other food industry leaders, have made significant investments in the restaurant industry over the past decade, and have ignored calls by farmworkers and consumers for farm labor reform, while continuing to draw billions of dollars in private profits from their investments;

THEREFORE,

I add my name and voice to those of countless consumers calling upon Burger King and other food industry leaders to immediately join with the CIW in efforts to end exploitation in the fields and modern-day slavery in the 21st century. I am also prepared to stop patronizing Burger King now, and other food industry leaders in the future, should they fail to do so.

Specifically, I call on Burger King and other food industry leaders to:

Pay a penny more per pound for tomatoes and ensure that the increase is passed on to tomato pickers in the form of increased wages;

and Work with the CIW to establish and enforce a human rights-based code of conduct, including zero tolerance for forced labor, to ensure fair and safe working conditions.

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Media Release: Disability Rights Activists Picket Discriminatory Queen St Restaurant‏

Media Release

- For Immediate Publication -

Disability Rights Activists Picket Discriminatory Queen St Restaurant

Friday, March 28, 2008

Aaron Shelbourne is a disability rights activist and a member of the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP). He has Cerebral Palsy and uses Alternative Augmentative Communication (AAC), which involves using his eyes to communicate and the facilitation of an assistant.

Mr. Shelbourne went to Everest Restaurant on Queen St today to demand an apology from management that has told him they don't serve customers in wheelchairs, and asked him never to come back. Mr. Shelbourne was joined by 20 supporters today. Mr. Shelbourne entered Everest asking to speak with restaurant manager Karma Sanchok who had previously told him they don't serve people in wheelchairs. Mr. Shelbourne sought a public apology from Ms.Sanchok and the restaurant, and a promise that this kind of blatant discrimination would not continue. Ms. Sanchok refused to speak or engage with Aaron in any way, speaking only to his non-wheelchair-bound supporters and quickly retreating behind the counter refusing to apologize or speak directly to Mr. Shelbourne as a fellow human being. Ms. Sanchok proceeded to call the police to forcibly remove Mr. Shelbourne and his supporters from the restaurant.

Mr. Shelbourne's simple, just request for an apology was rudely ignored.This is unacceptable, and Mr. Shelbourne is not prepared to allow this kind of discrimination to continue unchallenged. He calls on supporters, allies and members of the public – especially those using wheelchairs – to go to Everest Restaurant and demand an explanation from the management!

Mr. Shelbourne and his supporters and allies will be back at Everest en masse in the near future, to pursue Mr. Shelbourne's just request for an apology and to ensure that this restaurant does not discriminate against people with disabilities with impunity.

Background

Last week, Mr. Shelbourne went to Everest Restaurant & Lounge with one of his assistants. They had a meal, and at one point he had to use the washroom. It was not accessible and he nicked the door with his wheelchair going in.

As Mr. Shelbourne and his communication assistant were leaving the restaurant, after paying for their meals, the restaurant manager pulled Mr.Shelbourne's assistant aside and informed her that they were not welcome back. She said that the restaurant was newly renovated and wheelchairs aren't welcome because they cause damage.

"I am a person," says Mr. Shelbourne. "The worker at the restaurant didn't even come to tell me all of this herself but went to my assistant instead.I was angry because I am a human being and I have rights."

This Friday March 28th, with the help of the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP) and DAMN2025, Mr. Shelbourne returned to Everest Restaurant to seek redress, to send a loud message to management, its customers and the public that people who use wheelchairs have rights and this type of treatment is discriminatory and unacceptable!

Says Mr. Shelbourne: "I am demanding a public apology from the management of the restaurant. I want them to acknowledge that I am a person and that because I use a wheelchair, that doesn't make me any less of a person. If they don't like scratches on their bathroom doors they should make the washroom accessible!"

I think that it is a safe prediction that the age of Leninist revolution is really and truly dead, never to rise again, and it is wonderful thing that it has died. Another left wing tactic- left wing social democracy- has a little more life in it, once more quite often by borrowing from libertarian ideas (usually quite unacknowledged), but outside of the South American continent this "way to socialism" generally has nothing of the vitality it had even 2 decades ago. There is also a leakage of people from both the Leninist parties and left social democracy towards libertarian socialism as people discover the source of the socialist ideas that are still attractive, no matter how much their leadership might want to keep them in ignorance. The leakage is more gradual from the social democratic camp because social democracy is nowhere near as flagrantly in contradiction with both anarchism and morality and reality as Leninism is. Social democrats generally don't suddenly convert ; they just get slowly more and more libertarian.

Anyways, the following article explains how such leakage is playing out today in a country that previously had little or no anarchist tradition. The following has been slightly edited for English grammar.

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An overview of anarchism in Jordan today.*..theory and activities
Finally after more than 50 years of communist activism in Jordan the anarchists started to gather…Most Jordanian anarchists are artists who work in music, film making, and graphic design. One of our comrades is finishing his master in gender studies…Some comrades are Jordanian and others are Palestinian refugees living in Jordan… ---- Most of us come from a Marxist background so theory has great importance for us…Two comrades finally found an Arabic book that talks about anarchism…Actually we found three more books but with different Arabic words for “anarchism” ---- 1- Fawdawiya which literally means kenotic ---- 2- La soltawiya which literally means anti-authoritarianism ---- 3- Taharoriya which literally means libertarianism ---- 4- Anarkeya which literally means anarchism

We also found Egyptian and Lebanese anarchist websites which were extremely helpful. Until now we are about 20 comrades …I believe that there are more anarchists in the country, but it is hard to find them! Lately, we became part of a bigger movement called the social left which consists of Marxists feminists and others…Despite the fact that the movement has more than a 1000 members, we –anarchists- have ,relatively, very strong influence and effect in/on the group… we meet in Anti-globalization office in Jordan

When we started reading we looked for any form of anarchy in our own history and local culture…After reading a book called “Sufi tropics” written by an Iraqi writer(Hadi al Alawi).. we found that Sufism is ALL ABOUT anarchism…Actually we found a website on the internet that talks abut Sufi-anarchism…Now most of us label themselves as Sufi anarchists…We even found Sufi anarchist movements and groups from the 8-16 century… So after reading what we were able to find from Bakunin’s Proudhon’s Kropotkin’s books…and after studying the history of anarchy in Spain Ukraine Paris Mexico…and after studying Sufism, we started to have our own understanding of anarchism…

Another real messed up comrade of ours even worked on his own understanding of Sufi-anarchism in a way compatible with his own understanding of post modernism and the fall of ideology or what he called nihilist Sufi anarchism(plz don’t ask me to explain!!!)

We heard about other groups in Egypt, Morocco, Lebanon and Palestine but never met any of them…Last week, a very important columnist wrote about us –anarchists- in the most popular newspaper in the country…after he saw our flag for the first time in a protest…

All political movements and parties in Jordan have a problem with numbers,…recruiting more people can be very difficult because most people are too afraid to participate…In Jordan we still suffer from expulsion from universities because of any political activities. Laws that are extremely hard to understand and interpret which are used against political activists like: disturbing civil harmony! bashing higher status! long tongue!!! (I wonder what that is-Molly )copying without permission! Unauthorized gatherings!

Human Rights Watch talks about torture, kidnappings…There is also 3 years in prison because of founding unauthorized groups..So, anarchism in Jordan still has a long way to go but it is expected to grow in the upcoming years…

From your brothers/sisters …

Anarchists of Jordan

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* by H - jordanian anarchist

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The first act of Saskatchewan’s brand new government was to introduce two union-busting pieces of legislation. The Essential Services Act (Bill 5) will take away the right to strike of almost every public sector worker, and even allows the government, at their own whim, to deem private sector workers as essential. Bill 6, amendments to the Trade Union Act, will allow employers to use threats and intimidation to communicate their opinions about unionizing and the business of the union. It will also move organizing from automatic certification to secret ballot votes, which is far less democratic and will result in a halt to union organizing in Saskatchewan. The Saskatchewan Federation of Labour and its affiliates have launched a public relations and mobilization campaign to have Bills 5 and 6 withdrawn. We are also challenging the legislation in court, arguing that they violate the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the Human Rights code, and international law, including the International Bill of Human Rights and several UN and ILO Conventions

The Harper Index is sort of an online "Harper Watch", devoted to keeping a close eye on all things connected with the federal Conservatives and especially what they would like to remain hidden. There's a great recent article there on what a majority Conservative government would likely be like. Sort of a "disaster planning" exercise I guess. The consensus was that Harper would throw his present restraint and caution to the winds if the tooth fairy left him what he wants. There are some people who should never be trusted with sharp instruments. Anyways, the article....

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Majority government would move faster and farther
Social conservatives could call shots if Conservatives faced fewer constraints, predict most surveyed.

Ottawa, March 26, 2008: In federal by-elections March 17, the Harper Conservatives showed surprising strength. They nearly won in Liberal bastion Vancouver Quadra and won by a landslide in the formerly Liberal Saskatchewan riding of Desnethé Missinippi Churchill River.

Despite serious controversies (Mulroney- Schreiber, AECL, Afghanistan, Cadman), Stephen Harper's and his party's polling numbers have held firm over the winter. The Conservatives are polling consistently in the low-to-high thirties, with high ratings for Stephen Harper's leadership. Although many Canadians appear to adamantly oppose Harper, there is a real prospect the next election, if it is fought on Harper's terms and turf, could result in a majority Conservative government.

What would a majority Stephen Harper Conservative government look like and do? How would it differ from the current minority government, which Harper has tried to position as moderate?

To get a sense of the answers, HarperIndex.ca conducted a small, informal survey of ten reporters and political observers. All responded to an email asking them to "type a number from 1 to 10 after each item on this list to show the priority you think it would get from a Harper majority government," and to offer other comments. Of the ten who responded, two simply offered comments, one by phone.

Would Harper bring back capital punishment? Some thought it was a top priority, some the opposite. Opinion was more consistent on other issues.

Most felt that an anti-union labour law would be a fairly high priority.

So would privatizing the CBC, which no one rated lower than 6. Other privatization projects - like Canada Post, the ports and social insurance - were consistently rated between 4 and 9 in priority.

A Harper majority would "lay-off or reduce civil service by 60,000 positions," forecast pollster Marc Zwelling, who added that "Harper would push more deregulation in the interest of 'competitiveness' (and corporate tax reductions), and de-emphasize climate change and the environment."

Privatization of health care, most panelists felt, would be a high priority. Three gave it number-1 ratings.

All ten panelists saw the introduction of a flat tax as likely, with two number-1 ratings, and none lower than 5.

A 'three strikes' law was also seen as a high priority by many, with one number-1 rating, and none lower than 6.

Several of the commentators warned that a Harper majority government would pander to the religious Right. At least two thought an attempt to rescind same-sex marriage laws would be likely.

Toronto Star columnist Antonia Zerbisias expects a Conservative majority would "start chipping away at women's reproductive rights" with measures like recognizing the fetus as a person. "Judging from the emails I get, I think that the woman-should-be-barefoot-and-pregnant misogynists would be difficult to control," she writes.

University of Toronto political scientist Nelson Wiseman isn't so sure. "While [Harper] is socially conservative, that isn't his priority. He's more interested in economic issues, so I don't think he could touch abortion, and I'm not sure how far he could actually go on same-sex marriage. I think he would move on the gun registry and have that totally dismantled, although he's done that (already) by not enforcing" it. He also expects there would be quick action on "so-called democratic reform," such as an elected senate.

Wiseman says Harper "would try to ensure the feds can't enter into areas of provincial jurisdiction. He would continue to have an emphasis on defense and the military, and would probably have a less sympathetic approach to Aboriginal interests..."

York University political scientist and author James Laxer thinks a Harper majority government would be more extreme than does Wiseman. The government, Laxer says, would "throw red meat to the Conservative backbenchers, who have suffered from the gags tied on them by the PMO during the minority." How? By having parliamentary committees study capital punishment, by banning late term abortions, by placing restrictions on immigration, through support for faith-based initiatives, by cuts to federal support for the arts and for research, and through the private marketing of wheat and the termination of the Wheat Board.

"Unlike social democrats when they take office (as they have in four Canadian provinces over the decades), a Harper majority government would not hesitate to implement the full Right-wing agenda for which the Conservative Party of Canada was created," Laxer writes. "The Harperites will not compromise on anything. They will put through their program, always with an eye to making it irreversible by any future government - just as Brian Mulroney did with free trade."

Harper, Laxer says, "would act quickly to set up a sweeping study (perhaps Royal Commission) on the prospects for a much closer North American Union" and tighter economic military integration with the US.

Dalhousie University journalism professor Stephen Kimber expects the Harper Conservatives would "dismantle the CRTC, reduce what restrictions remain on foreign ownership, more closely ally our military with US forces, look for ways to undermine gay marriage and a woman's right to choose, and offer more corporate tax cuts."

None of those surveyed expected a Stephen Harper majority government would move with the caution of the current minority.
Posted: March 26, 2008
Harper Index (HarperIndex.ca) is a project of the Golden Lake Institute and the online publication StraightGoods.ca

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Canada, Quebec: Resistance to war, past and present
All the relevant information on the March 28th anti-militarist demonstration, including about the buses leaving from Montreal and Sherbrooke.

--Anti-militarist demonstration in Quebec City Friday, March 28th

Rally at 5PM In front of the Gabrielle-Roy Library

<==>

To get a place on the bus leaving Montreal at noon, write to mtl@nefac.net

<==>

To get a place on the bus leaving Sherbrooke at 1:30 PM, write to aecs@cooptel.qc.ca

or call 819-346-1874

---- Call for an anti-militarist demonstration Resistance to war, past and present ----

90 years ago, Canada was engaged in an imperialist war in Europe. With the flow of volunteers drying up, authorities turned to conscription to continue to provide their share of cannon fodder. It was January 1, 1918. Opposition to conscription was virulent in Quebec and the army was reduced to chasing draft-dodgers in the cities, resulting in numerous incidents.

Quebec city was at the time witnessing a genuine popular revolt against conscription. From 28 March to1 April 1918, crowds of several thousand people confronted the military, bare-handed, in the streets of the city core. Five days of riots ensued, during which a police station was put under siege, militarist newspapers were attacked, and an army office burned down. Five days that ended in a bloodbath in the working class neighborhood of Saint-Sauveur when the army charged the crowd, causing 35 injuries and 4deaths.

Today, 90 years later, Canada is once again at war.The reasons are no different, it is once again an imperialist war waged in the name of democracy and freedom. But, then as now, people are not fooled. There may be no conscription but it is in our name,and with our money, that Canada is at war. Despite the incessant propaganda, a majority of Quebec's population opposes the war.This popular opposition needs to have a voice! That is why we will march on March 28th, to commemorate the 90th anniversary of the riots against conscription and to express our opposition to the war in Afghanistan

.=x=x=x=x=x=x=x=x=x=x=x=x=x=x=x=x=x=x=

An initiative of NEFAC* (http://www.nefac.net)

This call is supported by:

Collectif Piranhas (piranha@resist.ca)

Gauche socialiste (http://www.lagauche.com)

Quebec Solidaire Taschereau riding association(http://www.quebecsolidaire.net)

Regroupement autonome des jeunes (RAJ)PCR Quebec-city branch (http://www.pcr-rcp.ca)

No one is illegal-Montreal(http://nooneisillegal-montreal.blogspot.com)

Block the Empire-Montreal(http://bloquezlempire.resist.ca)

Association des Étudiantes et des Étudiants enHistoire (http://aeeh.asso.ulaval.ca)

Convergence l'Autre 400ePCQ-Québec (http://www.pcq.qc.ca)

PI-Québec

To endorse this call and participate in the mobilization, send an email to nefacquebec@yahoo.ca Nouveau: Le blogue de La NUIT

http://voixdefaits.blogspot.com--

Collectif anarchiste La Nuit (NEFAC-Québec)

a/s Groupe Émile-HenryC.P. 55051, 138 St-Vallier Ouest

Québec (Qc), G1K 1J0

--nefacquebec@yahoo.cahttp://www.nefac.net

As Molly has mentioned previously at this blog the Ontario based Common Cause organization has brought out issue # 3 of their publication Linchpin. Here's one of the articles in that paper, a book review of Martha Acklesberg's book 'Free Women of Spain', about the Spanish anarchist organization Mujeras Libres. Gives the flavour of what Linchpin contains....

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Free Women of Spain
The Free women of Spain strikes its readers into thinking about equality, empowerment community and revolution, Karine from the Hamilton local delves in further to what sounds like a brilliant book.

Martha Acklesberg, in Free Women of Spain, reviews the history of the struggle for women's emancipation in Spain, before and during the Spanish Revolution (1936-1939), focusing on the major anarchist women's organization, the Mujeres Libres (Free Women) a group of libertarian women in many parts of Spain.

She introduces us to their struggle by interviewing some of the women of Mujeres Libres who explain their role and contribution during the revolution, but also the difficulties they encountered within the male-dominated organization, (such as CNT, FIJL and many others) of getting their voices heard. Nevertheless, they always believed in the importance of working together within these organizations while having their own organization in order to develop their sense of self and the skills they would need to believe in their own capacities.

This book is about empowerment, equality and the need to build community organizations. Mujeres Libres was a group that was able to reach up to 20,000 women, by, but not only, distributing their newspapers and offering courses and programs for women's interests. Many of us can learn a lot from their experience by reading this book because it reminds us to have to fight inequality, not only outside in the society, but also within our own organizations. It is book that I, myself, felt very empowered by and I hope it can reach you in the same way.

BUY IT>> AK Press carry this book at their site http://www.akpress.org/

READ ON>> There's an archive of a talk based on the book given to the Irish Workers' Solidarity Movement at http://www.wsm.ie/story/3131

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27/03/2008 IBM GLOBAL DEMONSTRATION
AGAINST GLOBAL JOBS OUTSOURCING
Global decisions from companies need Global action and response from employees. We saw that with the virtual strike and now we can do it with a virtual demonstration. The national unions, works councils and IWIS (IBM Workers International Solidarity) global network are organizing a global virtual demonstration against the outsourcing contract.

IBM is misusing outsourcing contracts to reduce the workforce in a cheap way. In this kind of contract, IBM is selling not only services and machines but also people. We can see that recently in the IBM NSD to AT&T contract and Printing Systems/ PSD maintenance to RICOH as well as other outsourcing deals.

IBM employees from Network Service Delivery are against forced outsourcing to AT&T and request negotiations right now!

AT&T market-share and competition in the European market and the past experience with this Telco provider leads to the conclusion that there is a high risk of job loss for the IBM jobs that will be transferred.

Therefore we, the International Unions at IBM, ask with 'One Global Voice' for IBM management to open negotiations immediately in countries and offer employees 'in scope' other options: voluntary-based transfers, guarantee of employment in the new company with a return ticket to IBM in case of failure within contract duration (5 years). Other options could be envisioned.

Different actions have taken place in different countries, demonstration, strikes, petitions online (535+ signatures collected), etc… over the past months. All of them are showing the large concern of the employees and their frustration and anger.

All unions clearly request IBM management to review this decision and to adjust it, taking into account respect for the employees as a person and recognize the need for job security on.
We are against forced jobs outsourcing to AT&T, RICOH, and future ones, and officially request win-win negotiations about job transfer terms and conditions, in the different countries, urgently!
On March 26, 2008 - IWIS (IBM Workers International Solidarity)

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Tell Seneca College President Rick Miner to take responsibility for violence at Markham Campus!

On Monday March 10th Aramark food service and cleaning workers went on strike at Seneca College's Markham campus. Since then the level of violence against striking workers has been escalating steadily. College President Rick Miner needs to take control of a situation that could see someone seriously injured. Already there have been half a dozen incidents of cars striking picketing workers causing injury. Seneca College does not seem to be communicating the situation to the College community and students and faculty appear to be unaware that there is a lawful picket and that they need to be patient and respectful.

Tell President Miner to ensure the safety of workers at his college by: * Communicating that there is a strike and a strike protocol to students and staff and demand that it be respected * Telling Aramark to stop hurting Seneca's reputation and treat workers fairly Students across North America are learning about the safety issues at the Markham campus. The College's leadership needs to take action to protect the College's reputation.

The Aramark workers at Seneca's Markham campus organized last year and have been fighting for wage and benefit improvements and to address abusive behaviour by Aramark management. The workers make less than $10/hour, while their counterparts at other Seneca locations make at least $13/hour. Aramark, on the other hand, had sales of $12.4 billion last year.
Send a letter to the following decision maker(s): College President Rick Miner Director of Human Resources Phil Wong
Below is the sample letter:
Subject: President Miner ensure the safety of your workers!

I was astonished to learn of the current situation involving striking Aramark workers at the Seneca College's Markham campus. The level of violence on the picket line is completely unacceptable- how far does this situation have to go before you act?

Tuesday, Mar 25 2008,

link to pdf
Common Cause is an Ontario anarchist organization that wants to see anarchists active in every town, neighborhood and workplace across Ontario. We have just published the third issue of our paper, Linchpin, online at http://linchpin.ca/node/722. You can download and distribute the PDF version from http://linchpin.ca/files/linchpin3_1.pdf or read the articles online below

Free Robert Lovelace!

Robert Lovelace, former chief of the Ardoch Lake Algonquin First Nation, has begun a six month jail sentence for his role in peacefully resisting uranium exploration near Sharbot Lake this passed fall.

A full time job should keep you OUT of poverty, not IN it! Is that not the cure prescribed by politicians and much of the public for poverty: to merely have people who are homeless and on assistance get a job? Meg R. looks at the issue of a living wage.

The Free women of Spain strikes its readers into thinking about equality, empowerment community and revolution, Karine from the Hamilton local delves in further to what sounds like a brilliant book.

In the wake of racist remarks made by Toronto city councillor Rob Ford, where he essentializes Asians and rhetorically suggests a 'take over' by Asians, it is imperative that we look at the history of discrimination and racism directed towards the Chinese, perpetrated by governments and business interests, here in Canada. Edward W glances back...

Anarchistblackcat.org is a moderated discussion board, set up by platformist anarchists. It was set up for a number of different reasons, here one of the moderators gives us her take on why the site was set up and what role it can play in our movement.

At the Common Cause founding conference in September, 2007 we decided to put in place a dues structure. This means that as members of Common Cause we agree to, as our constitution puts it “pay 1% to 3% ”of income according to the number of people financially dependent on the member concerned. , explains Alex D

Racism is not just an individual problem of attitude toward a particular group: it is also systemic and structural, inherent in institutions such as the education, health, and justice systems. The Colour of Poverty Campaign raises awareness of these inequalities and suggests ways to work toward equality and inclusion in Ontario, explains Kathryn Hunt

After its recent very special edition on the tar sands, Greg McDougal picks up a copy of the Dominion and looks at its radical media making.

Please download the PDF of the paper ( at http://linchpin.ca/files/linchpin3_1.pdf) and print out and distribute copies of it. If you let us know how many you have done and where you are via the contact form at http://linchpin.ca/contact you'll make us very happy!
http://www.linchpin.ca

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Giant and Safeway Workers Deserve a Fair Contract
UFCW Local 400 and 27 members work in Safeway and Giant (Ahold) grocery stores across Baltimore and Washington, D.C. They are are essential to their companies’ success. Grocery workers are there every day in the stores--slicing meat for sandwiches, preparing fresh arrangements of flowers, stocking shelves, ringing up purchases. They always have a friendly smile and a cheerful greeting that keeps customers loyal to their stores.

But Giant parent company Ahold and Safeway, who are in negotiations with these grocery workers, refuse to recognize the value of their employees. Even though they extended a fair contract to other grocery workers in the last year, they won't do the same for their Baltimore/D.C. workers. All those employees want is quality, affordable health care and wages that pay the bills. But Safeway and Ahold don't seem to care.

Please let Ahold and Safeway know that you believe their workers deserve a fair contract, with wages that keep up with the rising cost of living. Send a letter to Ahold/Giant and Safeway CEOs and key decision makers, and tell them you support Baltimore/D.C. grocery workers.
And make a phone call today to tell these companies that their Baltimore/D.C. workers deserve a fair contract. You can call any of these numbers:

Safeway - 1-877-723-3929
Stop & Shop - 1-800-767-7772
Giant Food Landover - 1-888-4-MY GIANT

Be aware that Safeway and Ahold may not want to hear what you have to say. They may block your email, causing it to be sent back to you. Don't worry if that happens--a copy of your email still exists, and we'll let grocery workers know that you support them. Instead, pick up the phone and call Ahold and Safeway, and tell them that they need to listen to their customers AND their workers. And tell them workers deserve a fair contract.
Thank you for your support!
Tell me more
Talking Points
*Local 27 and Local 400 members work hard to make Safeway and Ahold/Giant successful.

*These workers deserve a share of that success. They shouldn't have to choose between paying the electric bill, taking a sick child to the doctor, and putting food on the table for their family.
*A fair contract for Baltimore/D.C. members would include affordable, quality health care, a secure retirement, and wages that pay the bills.

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Upcoming Kanadian Anarchist Bookfairs: Calgary (April), Montreal (May), Victoria (September), Edmonton (October)‏
From:
Jaggi Singh

[Basic info below about some upcoming anarchist bookfairs to take place inthe Canadian state in 2008: Calgary, Montreal, Victoria and Edmonton.]

*--> CALGARY (April 25-27, 2008)*

On April 25, 26 and 27, Calgary will be hosting its fifth annual Anarchist Bookfair, bringing vendors from across Western Canada and beyond. This year's event promises to be this city's biggest and best bookfair yet and will feature dozens of vendors, three days of workshops, free food, a keynote speaker (TBA), the ever-popular "People's Prom" and a mini "filmfest".---- What: Anarchist Bookfair

---- When: Friday April 25, Saturday April 26 and Sunday April 27

---- Where: Calgary Old "Y" Centre

---- How much: All events and food are free

INFO: http://bookfair.anarchistservices.ca - anarchistbookfair@linuxmail.org

*--> MONTREAL (May 17, 2008)*

Saturday, MAY 17, 10am to 6pm

CEDA, 2515 rue Delisle(near the Lionel-Groulx metro)

--> Part of the month-long Festival of Anarchy (May 2008).

--> Followed by a full day of Anarchist Presentations and Workshops (May 18,2008).

The Montreal Anarchist Bookfair (May 17, 2008) brings together anarchist ideas and practice, through words, images, music, and day-to-day struggles for justice, dignity and collective liberation. The Bookfair is as much for people who don't necessarily consider themselves anarchists, but are curious about anarchism, as it is a space for anarchists to meet, network and share.All are welcome.

The Bookfair is organized in a spirit of openness towards the different traditions, visions, and practices of anarchism. Together we share a commitment to promoting anarchism through the values of mutual aid,grassroots democracy, direct action, autonomy and solidarity, while opposing oppression in all its forms.

*"What happens at the Montreal Anarchist Bookfair?!"*

The Bookfair takes place at the CEDA, an adult education and community center in southwest Montreal, a short 2-minute walk from the Lionel-Groulx metro station. In the main Bookfair auditorium, between 10am to 6pm, there are over 75 booksellers, distributors and groups from all over Montreal, Quebec, North Amerika and beyond, sharing their publications and materials, most of which is hard or impossible to find at mainstream book stores. Many materials are available for free, and much is published specifically to be available at the Bookfair. During the Bookfair day, there is a film room upstairs screening alternative films and documentaries, while the walls of the Bookfair venue are covered with the works of anti-authoritarian artists. There is a room dedicated to local zine distributors, another that focuses on solidarity struggles, as well as skill-sharing opportunities.

In past years there has been an autonomous media room, as well as a live radio broadcast from the Bookfair site. Free childcare is available at the Bookfair, as well as a kids program organized by the Montreal Childcare Collective. In previous years, therehave also been discussions on radical parenting. Kids and parents are welcome and encouraged to attend! There are also workshops throughout the day, in English and French, intended as introductions to anarchism for those who are new to anarchy. This year's introductory workshops include:

"Demanding the Impossible: Sharing Visionsof Anarchism" and

"An Introduction to Anarchism and its Aspirations".

In general, during the Bookfair, don't hesitate to ask folks who are tabling or presenting any question or inquiry you have about the ideas and practice of anarchism.

If you're interested, come back on May 18, 2008, for a Day of Anarchist Workshops, Presentations and Discussions, which explore anarchist-related topics in more depth. A list of workshops from previous years is linkedhere: http://www.anarchistbookfair.ca/en/node/18

The Bookfair site is adjacent to a large park and sports field, and when the weather is nice (May in Montreal is usually quite beautiful), a large part of the Bookfair can be about kicking around a soccer ball or hanging out with friends, and soon-to-be friends.

The entire Bookfair is free, and open to all; however, your donations are encouraged, as each year, after meeting our expenses, the Bookfair aims to support local and international anarchist (or anarchist-supported) projects with a financial donation. Groups that have been supported in the past by the Bookfair include the DIRA Anarchist Library (Montreal), the Biblioteca Social Reconstruir (Mexico City), Books to Prisoners-Montreal, the Six Nations Land Reclamation, and more.

Photos from the 2006 Bookfair, which give you an idea of the atmosphere ofduring the Bookfair Weekend, are linked here:http://photos.cmaq.net/v/7thbookfair

INFO:

www.anarchistbookfair.ca

- info@anarchistbookfair.ca

*--> VICTORIA (September 13-14, 2008)*

Saturday and Sunday, September 13th (11am-7pm) & 14th (11am-5pm)

At the Downtown Community Activity Centre of the Victoria Cool Aid Society

755 Pandora St., Victoria, BC

We are glad to announce the third year of the only Anarchist Bookfair on the

Canadian west coast. The Bookfair is for anarchists and non-anarchists, with

participants from all over North America and beyond. We seek to introduce

anarchism to the public, to further elaborate upon current and historical

anarchist ideals and to foster dialogue between various anarchist tendencies. Participants from different anarchist traditions, visions, and practices are welcome.

The events include book and information tables,workshops, readings, films, presentations, and much more.

A Festival ofAnarchy will take place during the week before the Bookfair, including a DIY Fair on September 12th, 2008.

Proposal callouts for workshops, presentations, street art exhibits, films,Festival of Anarchy events and tables are on our website. We look forward to your suggestions and contributions! INFO:

www.victoriaanarchistbookfair.ca

- info@victoriaanarchistbookfair.ca

*--> EDMONTON (October 4-5, 2008)*

Western Canada's Largest Anarchist Bookfair!

Looks like the 2008 fair will be the first weekend of October, at the Alberta Ave Community Center (same place as last year). We will update our website as we know more details.

Where:

Alberta Avenue Hall, 9210 - 118 Ave., Edmonton

When:

Oct 4th and 5th, 2008

INFO: http://edmontonanarchistbookfair.blogspot.com/

Over at his Porkupine Blog Larry Gambone is continuing his series about the situation of Chile today. Here is part four of his impressions during his latest visit to that country.

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Chile Today - Part 4 The Failure of Neo-liberalism
Seventeen years is a long enough time for an experiment in economic development. South Korea moved from Third World misery to developed status in hardly more than that. How has Chile fared in the 17 years since my first visit? When I returned in 1996 it seemed the place was hopping, lots of new houses – small houses for normal people, not MacMansions – were built by the thousands, unemployment dropping and the squatter colonies were going to be a thing of the past. Of course masses of unemployed and underemployed were still selling pens on the street and long hours, low wages was still the lot of 90% of the employed, but it was supposed to improve.

The optimism of '96 had dissipated somewhat in 1998 due to the collapse of the Asian Tigers the year before. This should have been a wake up cry to the fact that the neo-liberal "export-based" model makes a country highly vulnerable, but I saw nothing about this in the press. Back again in 2001, and the economic motor seemed chugging along again, but still the problems of underemployment and low wages persisted. Added to these problems was the fact that almost no social services existed. No welfare, no health care system, a pension tied to a fluctuating stock market, privatized education and therefore the burden of school fees and university tuition.

What do I find in 2008? Low wages, long hours, poor or non-existent social services, guys selling pens in the streets and tin shack colonies. Middle class people tell me, as they did in 1991, '96, '98 and 2001, that they really wonder how they survive given the low incomes and high cost of everything. Three quarters of Chileans earn less than $440 CDN a month. Yet the prices on most items are about as high as in Canada. In Canada during the early 1960's when most Canadians earned less than $440 a month, prices were in accordance with income – a quart of milk was 20 cents, a kilo of bread 40 cents, a bus ticket 20 cents and so on. Chileans in 2008 pay $1.40 for a litre of milk, $2.30 for a kilo of bread and $1.10 for a bus ticket, and earn 1962-level wages! Professionals and skilled workers make from one quarter to one fifth what their Canadian counterparts make. I should also mention, that the hours are longer and the benefits are also far less, so it is even worse that the wage figures would indicate.

The claim is made that Chile is too poor to afford social services or a more egalitarian wage structure. According to the CIA Source Book Chile's 2007 per capita GDP was $14,400. Adjusted for inflation, Canada's per capital GDP was about the same in the early 1950's. But by then we had a whole raft of social welfare measures and social reforms such as welfare, unemployment insurance, hospital insurance, the eight hour day, two weeks vacation, minimum wage legislation etc. We had a system of public education and wages were rising and would continue to do so until the mid-1970's. Unionized industrial workers were now seen as "middle class" and lived accordingly. All on a per capita GDP of $14,400 which the Chilean rulers find too feeble.

But Chile does have a lot of newly minted multi-millionaires and billionaires...
To be continued

In the early Church the practice in the East was to celebrate Easter on the 14th Nissan(the fourteenth day of the Moon), while the practice in the western Church was to celebrate it on the following Sunday. Those who held to the traditional date of Easter were called "Quartodecimans". This may seem something of a silly controversy today, but Molly hastes to remind her readers that this was one of many controversies whereby the early Christians slaughtered each other to numbers that exceed the persecution of the Roman state byat least a factor of ten. As the Church became increasingly anti-Semitic in te early years of the Common Era the practice of celebrating Easter on the 14th of Nissan fell into increasing disfavour.

The next phase of the controversy over the date of Easter arose with the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE. The emperor Constantine (of matricidal and Christian fame). The Christians of Syria and Mesopotamia still held to the 14th of Nissan as the date of Easter. The Council of Nicaea attempted to fix the date of Easter with our present tradition. The actual power to determine the date of Easter was referred, not to the Papacy at Rome, but rather to the Bishop of Alexandria. At this time methods of calculation called Computus were adopted. These paid tribute to a pre-Marxist scholastic tradition whereby the reality of astronomical events was ignored in favour of deriving dates from texts. In further years the date of Easter was often ascertained by political compromises between Rome and Alexandria.

The final phase of the 'Easter Date Controversy' arose during the struggle of the Papacy to place the Irish Church under their authority. The Irish monks had re-Christianized England and also Scotland. Their missionaries had spread well afield into Germany and Denmark. The Irish monastic tradition represented a serious threat to the diocesan imperial method way of organizing the Church as per the Papacy. In the end the Irish bowed down on this and other matters. The way that the Irish determined the date of Easter is still obscure. It may have been from following a different calender system than the Julian. It may have been from following the practice of the early Church in the east.

Presently "Pascha" is an important feast of the Orthodox and eastern Catholic Churches. It is actually the most important feast in their calender, having precedence over Christmas. These celebrations are, of course, held according to the Julian calender rather than our common calender.

But anyhow, it is Easter, and you must hear the horrifying tale of the 'EASTER EGG MASSACRE' .

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EASTER EGG MASSACRE
Every year, reports flood in to scary squirrel world describing thieving skwerls ruining Easter parties around the nation. Take this classic example: at least 10 chitterdemons attacked a children's party in Rochester, New York, making off with plastic eggs filled with candy in full view of frightened onlookers.

The arboreal terrors were driven off, but party host, Ann Wiater observed, "It was such chaos... who wants to eat candy from an egg that's got teeth marks all over it?"

Isolated incidents? Coincidence? Simple opportunism? One might think so. In fact, scary squirrel world once viewed these annual attacks as routine skwerlien harassment. After all, any event or holiday involving outdoor activity invites chitterbox aggression. But why so many attacks on Easter?

Our extensive research found the answer in a centuries old Teutonic practice:
Squirrels are also part of the Easter rites in the Harz mountains of Germany: the people of Braunrode go into the nearest woodland to hunt squirrels "by throwing stones and cudgels, till at last the animals drop exhausted into their hands, dead or alive" (Grimm, Teutonic Mythology, II, p. 616).

There you have it, Patriots. Proof positive that the drooling nutkins are spreading Easter mayhem in retribution for the noble efforts of brave German villagers, fellow Patriots, who dared to resist the chitterbox plan for squirrel world domination...

So, what can be done to prevent these horrendous attacks? Studies show that the traditional methods are ineffective or illegal in these modern times. In fact, many municipalities, where most Easter egg hunts occur, have laws against chucking cudgels (aka whacking stick) and/or shooting at skwerls within city limits .

Additionally, some of today's children are appalled and even traumatized by efforts to keep the bushytail horde in check. However, there are ways to prevent the slavering skwerlballs from making off with Easter eggs. For example, do not hide the eggs until a few minutes before the hunt begins. Even the most well organized skwerlien cadre will have trouble mustering its forces on such short notice and the egg hunt should proceed unmolested by nutzy saboteurs.

Unfortunately, many events can't accommodate the strategy described above. In that case we recommend using the Egg Head Skwerl Trap and/or hiring an Attack Clown to counter skwerlien aggression.

Now, we know what some of you are thinking. You're guessing that there's no such thing as the Egg Head Skwerl Trap (but that doesn't mean there shouldn't be), and you figure the Attack Clown in the video moves to slow to catch a cold let alone a slavering chitterbox. Well, you may be right, but that's not important... What is important is that we find a way to save our Easter egg hunts from the savage onslaught of the bushytail horde. If our ideas seem impractical or outlandish, perhaps you have a better ones.

See Scary Squirrel World for the complete videos associated with this article.

A. Over at the Acts of Hope blog there's an article titled 'The New Media Monopoly', a review of a book by the same name by Ben Baydikion.

B. There's an interesting article on 'Voting' at the Against the State blog.

C. Alas a Blog has an article 'Is There Something to Celebrate' about International Women's Day and how much further we still have to go.

D. And then at the All Spin Zone there's an award winning item, 'What Do Nataline Sarkisyar and Brittany Spears Have In Common', all about the difference that the rich and the poor receive when they enter the medical system.

The following report is taken from the platformist Linchpin/Common Cause site. Seems there is to be a rally this upcoming Tuesday protesting the actions of the University Administration over the events of March 20 (see earlier her on Molly's Blog).

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Tuesday March 25, 4:10 PM

Simcoe Hall (27 King's College Circle)University of Toronto

Map: http://tinyurl.com/2oatgu

ACTION ITEM: Statements of solidarity and support; endorse and organize a contingent for the rally.
Join us in a peaceful demonstration outside the University of Toronto's administration building to protest police aggression against students and rising fees: Tuesday March 25, 4:10 PM, outside Simcoe Hall (27 King's College Circle).

Over the course of this year and in past years, the overwhelming majority of students have repeatedly demonstrated their opposition to increasing fees.In 2005, 98% of students at UofT voted against fee increases. Thousands of students rallied on February 7, 2007 against fee increases. Students' unions across Canada have advocated against fee increases. Despite all of this, and the efforts of student representatives at UofT, the administration continues with fee increases, making education inaccessible.

On Thursday March 20, 2008, over forty students staged a sit-in at Simcoe Hall, which houses the offices of the President and Provost. The students' main demand was to speak with President David Naylor in person or by telephone. Students also requested that proposed fee increases be removed from the March 25 University Affairs Board meeting and to be given 15 minutes at the meeting for a presentation and discussion on broader issues of access to education.

The peaceful sit-in of the students was met by physical aggression by campus police on the orders of senior administrators. Students were not allowed to demonstrate their dissent, and were not to be heard at all. Administrators left before the end of their workday, escorted out of the building, literally walking on top of students begging to be heard. This was captured on video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ketNtnZQIwQ

The next step is to mobilize outside the University Affairs Board (Simcoe Hall) meeting on March 25 at 4:10 pm, in hopes of meeting these demands:

1. That the motion to increase students' fees be stricken from the agenda.

2. That representatives from Always Question be allotted 15 minutes to speak at the UAB meeting.

3. That representatives from Always Question, UTSU and ASSU have a meeting with President David Naylor to discuss students' rights and the role of police on campus.

At the rally we will bring attention to the fact that students can no longer advocate for accessible education without facing aggression from police, and most importantly, the administration.

Please attend to make the University of Toronto a safe space for student dissent.We are asking for statements of support and solidarity to be sent to alwaysquestion.info@gmail.com, and that you contact President David Naylor(president@utoronto.ca) to condemn rising student fees and the heavy-handed actions of the police against students.

For further information:

Farshad Azadian, student member and organizer with Always Question: (416) 569-7471;

Ryan Hayes, President of Arts and Science Students Union: (416) 421-0879;

Michal Hay, Vice President University Affairs,University of Toronto Students' Union: (647) 802-4131

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PF08 Launches "Catch the Flame" to Pressure IOC to Take Action‏
From:
Clean Clothes Campaign ( info@cleanclothes.org )

Olympics: Play Fair 2008 Launches Alternative Olympic Flame

Brussels, 20 March 2008: With the start of the official Olympic Torch Relay for the Beijing Olympics only a few days away, Play Fair 2008< www.playfair2008.org > , an international campaign seeking respect for workers’ rights in the production of Olympics-licensed products, today launched “Catch the Flame” < www.catchtheflame.org >, an electronic relay race to bring public attention to the need for the Olympics movement to stamp out abuses of labour standards in workplaces making Olympics goods.

“By joining this alternative torch relay, people around the world can send a clear message that for the Olympics to really be fair, working conditions for those who produce Olympic goods have to be fair as well,”said Esther de Haan, coordinator of the Clean Clothes Campaign, one of the organizations coordinating the Play Fair campaign.

Play Fair 2008 has been in contact with the International Olympic Committee (IOC) on several occasions since 2003, most recently since Play Fair investigators uncovered a series of gross violations of workers’ rights in four Chinese factories making products under license to the Beijing Olympics in 2008. (Read or download the report at www.playfair2008.org )

“While discussions with the IOC in December were constructive and we remain hopeful that the world’s peak sporting body is prepared to take concrete action to put an end to maltreatment of workers who make the products which bring important revenue to the Olympics, there has been little if any actual progress, and this new initiative gives people the chance to join in the call for action,” said International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) General Secretary Guy Ryder.

With a wave of Bluetooth, sms and e-mail messages, “Catch the Flame”forwards Play Fair’s version of the Olympic flame to Beijing. The “Catch the Flame” relay starts in the Netherlands, where the flame for the modern Olympic Games was first lit in 1928.

Visitors to the “Catch the Flame” website are able to show their support for the Play Fair campaign’s objectives for fair labour standards in Olympics production. With the 2008 Olympics being held in China, international attention has focused on a range of human rights issues in China and related concerns such as press freedom. While Play Fair’s work has documented serious violations in Olympics production inside China, the problem is not limited to China, and previous Play Fair studies have documented workers’ rights violations in sports merchandise production in a range of other countries.

“It is now time for the IOC to recognise that as the owner of a global brand, it has a duty to ensure that a uniform and robust approach is taken by host cities to ensure that those goods that they procure bearing the Olympics logo have been made in workplaces that meet the highest employment standards,” said International Textile, Leather and Garment Workers’ Federation (ITGLWF) General Secretary Neil Kearney.

Contacts for Play Fair 2008 coordinating organisations: ·

ITUC

Mathieu Debroux, Press Officer Tel. +32 2 224 02 04 or +32 476 62 10 18 ·

Doug Miller, Mulitnationals Department Tel : 0044 191 273 22 44 (office) or 077 88 41 32 26 (mobile) ·

Esther de Haan, Coordinator Global Campaigns Tel. +31 20 412 27 85 (office) or +31 642 24 31 53 (mobile)

Play Fair 2008 is an international campaign taking place in the lead up to the 2008 Olympic Games to push for respect for workers’ rights in the production of Olympics-related merchandise and the global sporting goods industry. To learn more about PF08 visit our website: http:// www.playfair2008.org .

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Billionaires and the Rest of Us

Consider: "There were 469 US billionaires, worth a combined $1.6 trillion, while the 656 billionaires who live outside the United States are worth $2.8trillion." That is the upshot of the latest Forbes billionaire list. Leave aside the thought that US troops probably kill more Iraqis every week than are on that list. I just wondered if it was possible to calculate how many man hours of labour produced the $4.4 trillion of wealth that is enjoyed by this very small number of individuals. Obviously, we could pretend that the canniness of these investors was itself the key magical ingredient that produced all this wealth, and then the problem would no longer exist. That claim has the grave disadvantage of being insusceptible to proof or disproof,of course, like most forms of magical thinking. On the other hand, if the value embodied in that wealth was principally produced by labour, then surely it would be possible to produce aggregate figures for all the man hours of labour that went into producing it.

Let's say, hypothetically, the average value produced by a single man hour of labour across the globe was $40. That would be 11 billion man hours of labour.I have no idea what the actual figure, supposing it was obtainable, might be,but I'm just trying to get a sense of scale here. For this 1,125 people to live in the manner to which they are accustomed, it really must take billions of man hours. Well, obviously they didn't do all that work between themselves. Let's put it another way. Warren Buffet increased his wealth by $10bn last year. That would be 250 million man hours right there. And say the average worker does 2,500 hours of work a year (that would be a 48 hour week every week), this would mean that Buffet's increase in income over twelve months was supplied by100,000 people all working long hours without holidays - workers in Fruit of the Loom, Dairy Queen, Ginsu and other firms owned or co-owned by Buffet.

Bill Gates got a $2bn increase over last year. At fifty million man hours of labour,that would be 20,000 workers going flat out to produce just his 2007 bonus.Again, these figures are entirely speculative, for the purposes of constructing some scalar conception of this wealth in relation to the work that made it. A grand don't come for free. $4.4 trillion took a mammoth exertion across many sectors of the international labour force to produce. In practically every newspaper and television report, the tone of the response to this annual Oscars ceremony for the uber-rich is laudatory, of course, and viewers are encouraged to admire the go-getters and dynamic wealth-creators who have locked up so much of the booty. Where, the commentariat gushes, did all this wealth come from? It's amazing. It's the touch of Midas. It's the Sage of Omaha. It must be magic. These men rule because of their godly prowess among mortals. It is the only explanation.

All hail.
http://leninology.blogspot.com/2008/03/grand-dont-come-for-free.html

A man was blissfully driving along the highway, when he saw the Easter Bunny hopping across the middle of the road. He swerved to avoid hitting the Bunny, but unfortunately the rabbit jumped in front of his car and was hit. The basket of eggs went flying all over the place.

The driver, being a sensitive man as well as an animal lover, pulled over to the side of the road, and got out to see what had become of the Bunny carrying the basket. Much to his dismay, the colorful Bunny was dead. The driver felt guilty and began to cry.

A woman driving down the same highway saw the man crying on the side of the road and pulled over. She stepped out of her car and asked the man what was wrong. "I feel terrible," he explained, "I accidentally hit the Easter Bunny and killed it. There may not be an Easter because of me. What should I do?"

The woman told the man not to worry. She knew exactly what to do. She went to her car trunk, and pulled out a spray can. She walked over to the limp, dead Bunny, and sprayed the entire contents of the can onto the little furry animal. Miraculously the Easter Bunny came to back life, jumped up, picked up the spilled eggs and candy, waved its paw at the two humans and hopped on down the road.

50 yards away the Easter Bunny stopped, turned around, waved and hopped on down the road another 50 yards, turned, waved, hopped another 50 yards and waved again! The man was astonished.He said to the woman, "What in heaven's name is in your spray can? What was it that you sprayed on the Easter Bunny?"

The woman turned the can around so that the man could read the label. It said: "Hair spray. Restores life to dead hair. Adds permanent wave."

The Paschal full moon has a few other names, derived from native American traditions. These include the 'Full Worm Moon', the 'Full Crow Moon', the 'Full Crust Moon' and the 'Full Sap Moon '. See 'The Moons of 2008' earlier on this blog for the names of the full moons of this year. You can also find the exact time of any full moon by consulting the tables on the Time and Date website.

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Immigrant NY Foodstuffs Workers Organize Industry-Wide IWW Campaign

From the Anarcho Syndicalist Review:
Although the Industrial Workers of the World pioneered industrial unionism 100 years ago, it hasn’t seen a significant organizing drive in the United States for decades—until a recent drive among short-haul truckers on the West Coast and an ongoing campaign by the IWW Food and Allied Workers Union, New York Local I.U. 460/640, to organize food industry workers (the vast majority of them undocumented immigrants) in New York City.

The two-year-old organizing drive has reached about 500 workers in dozens of food industry companies and has significantly improved, directly and indirectly, wages and working conditions across the industry in the New York City area.

Proving wrong those who claim that you can’t build a union with undocumented workers, the IWW has succeeded where traditional unions failed, becoming the only union in the country with 90% undocumented members (more than 70 have joined Local I.U. 460/640).

Although there were serious setbacks and the challenges continue, the following shops were successfully organized in Brooklyn and Queens: HandyFat Trading Corp., Sunrise Plus Corp. (formerly EZ-Supply Co.), Top City Produce, Bread and Company, Amersino, HWH/Dragonland Trading, Wild Edibles, and Giant Big Apple.

The campaign began in August 2005, when IWW New York Local I.U. 460/640 began to organize HandyFat Trading Corp., a 14-worker shop (5 drivers, 9 warehouse workers) in Brooklyn after two undocumented Mexican employees asked for outside help. HandyFat was paying its workers $280 per week for 60-65 hours a week, with no overtime and no benefits of any kind.

What IWW organizers found at HandyFat and the other shops was extensive and longstanding abuse of undocumented workers, primarily from Mexico, who had no recourse due to their legal status and inability to speak English. All of the companies had sweatshop conditions: workers were paid sub-minimum wages with no overtime, no medical insurance or sick days, no safety measures, no vacation time, and verbal abuse from the owners that included constant shouting and racial slurs towards Mexican workers. Top City Produce paid no overtime and sub-minimum wages for 72-hour weeks. But perhaps the worst offender was restaurant supplier HWH/Dragonland Trading, which forced its workers to put in 80-115 hours a week for $4.95/hour, with no overtime pay.

The success of this campaign was based on its tactics and strategies. In addition to traditional IWW organizing techniques, direct actions, and rank-and-file principles, supply-line organizing proved effective, as did a variety of legal tactics.

Supply-line organizing proved successful at a number of shops during the campaign. At the same time the union was organizing a targeted shop, as in the case of HandyFat, it began to gather information on the company’s suppliers and customers with the end of organizing the workers there as well. Then those workers could unite with union workers at the original shop to force their employers to pay legal wages and generally improve their working conditions.

One success that was highly visible in the New York press was the case of Wild Edibles, a high-end retail and wholesale seafood supplier. The IWW organized the workers of one of Wild Edibles’ customers, the upscale restaurant Pastis. As a result, Pastis (which had fired four IWW workers when they filed a lawsuit for back wages) and three other trendy Manhattan restaurants with the same owner stopped using Wild Edibles as their seafood supplier until the conflict with the union was resolved.

Taking legal action was another successful strategy used during the campaign. The use of the legal system in the form of NLRB elections, lawsuits for back wages and the reinstatement of workers fired for organizing, and written agreements was a hotly debated topic within the union. In the past, the IWW had used legal recourse only when it would have an immediate effect, for example, to help workers who had been beaten up by bosses or the police or to spring workers from jail for actions they had taken a part in. But, until this campaign, the union had never before used the legal system as a strategy and tactic.

One of the concerns was that using the legal system could focus the campaign on winning shop elections and relying on government agencies like the NLRB and the courts instead of building shops and training workers for self-management. Another criticism was that filing lawsuits was a waste of time and energy because they often take years to reach a resolution and decisions cannot be relied on. As one member of the campaign, Jim Crutchfield, said, “The state and the law have never been friends of the workers.”

In the end, it was decided that legal tactics could work in the union’s favor if they were never relied upon as a principal organizing tool. For example, winning a shop election and filing a wage and hour lawsuit could serve to intimidate bosses into meeting their workers’ demands for improved conditions on the job.

This proved to be the case in several shops, including HandyFat, which provides a good illustration of how Local Local I.U. 460/640 successfully used the legal system against several of the shops in the campaign.

By September 2005, all nine of HandyFat’s warehouse workers had joined the IWW, making it the first Asian shop ever organized. That November, the HandyFat workers voted to be recognized by the owners and to seek a bargaining agreement. In preparation, I.U. 460/640 organized a solidarity dinner in honor of the workers to request solidarity and support. It was attended by other workers’ organizations and the press.

On the morning of December 5, 2005, the HandyFat workers and their supporters locked arms and marched on the shop to demand minimum wage, time-and a half overtime pay, and the cessation of verbal abuse on the job, as well as National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) elections. A petition for elections was made to the NLRB by the union that same day, following the wishes of the rank and file.

Recovering from their initial disbelief, the HandyFat bosses went into action. They knew that 9 of its 14 workers had already joined the union and would easily win the NLRB election, so they hired a lawyer who initiated an anti-union campaign, telling the workers that if they joined they would have to pay dues, strikes would cost them money, and joining a union would make their lives harder overall.

But the underhanded tactics did not stop there. HandyFat management also bribed three of the nine union members with free trips to Mexico in exchange for dropping out of the union and voting against it, successfully tipping the balance in favor of the company by decimating the number of unionized workers from nine to six. (Similar illegal tactics were used by the bosses at Amersino, who in March and April 2007 created a ficticious “night shift” of workers to vote against the union during an NLRB-supervised election there.)

In response, the union used a favorite tactic of shop owners against HandyFat: challenging the results of an election by alleging that certain votes were not valid in order to delay the final results with the objective of wearing down the workers and gaining enough time to fire union workers at will for bogus reasons.

By challenging the votes of the three workers who had accepted the trips to Mexico and left the union on the basis that they accepted a bribe, the union forced the election into a hearing with the NLRB. The NLRB decision stated that, although there was bribery involved, those 3 workers’ votes were valid. Nevertheless, the tactic was successful: the delays had cost HandyFat enough money and aggravation to make it willing to negotiate a non-recognition agreement with the union even though it officially lost the election because of the NLRB decision on the challenged votes. (Billy Randel, one of the IWW organizers, pointed out that, although written agreements were executed with some of the shops during the campaign, the union always retained the power to carry out direct actions against the employer.)

The non-recognition minority contract that was reached by the end of 2005 with HandyFat included the following terms:
*Wages increased to $7.50 (above minimum wage), then to $8
*A two-step grievance procedure that required resolution of issues directly between workers and bosses—no arbitration. If no resolution could be found, the union reserved the right to use economic force (slowdowns, strikes, other forms of direct action) against the owners.
*May Day and 5 other paid holidays
*Paid vacation days and a number of sick days
*Production bonuses for workers when unloading certain types of products (for example, loads that weighed more than 100 lbs.)
*Respectful treatment of workers

During 2006, four more warehouses were organized in Queens and Brooklyn, and collective bargaining agreements similar to HandyFat’s were reached at Sunrise Plus/E-Z Supply, Big Apple, and Top City Produce. At Sunrise Plus/EZ-Supply, workers won an NLRB-supervised election in February 2006, and in November worked out a tentative contract that provided two weeks of paid vacation, paid breaks, sick days and 60-cent raises every six months.

Things were going well at HandyFat, too, with bosses honoring the agreement with their workers. Then, in early January 2006, what’s come to be known in IWW circles as “The Massacre” happened. In what is believed to be a concerted move to break the union, HandyFat and Sunrise Plus/E-Z Supply fired all of its union workers. Most of those workers had been employed at their companies for years. Twenty-one IWW members lost their jobs.

The bosses’ purported reason to get rid of “troublemaker” workers was to demand legal working papers even though the law states that they must request that documentation within 72 hours of employment. In a clear attempt to break the union, when the workers could not produce the work permits, they were fired.

“The employers thought it was going to kill the union, but putting 21 workers out of work didn’t stop us,” said Stephanie Basile, one of the IWW members involved in the campaign, adding that Local I.U. 460/640 was financially able to help the workers survive during that period. “We got a lot of support from other IWW locals, benefit shows, and individuals” who helped raise funds to pay for the workers’ food, rent, etc. In total, the IWW spent more than $20,000 to keep the workers afloat while they awaited decisions on wrongful dismissal suits they filed with the New York State Attorney General’s Office and the Department of Labor.

HandyFat workers had also sought back wages through the legal system, as did IWW workers in a number of other shops. Class-action lawsuits were filed by IWW workers under the Fair Labor Standards Act and New York state labor law against the following companies:
*Bread & Co. – a settlement of $7,000-$10,000 was reached
*Sunrise Plus/E-Z Supply – a settlement of $25-$35,000 was reached through the Department of Labor, and a $1.2 million suit is ongoing for the rest of the back wages that are owed to the workers
*Giant Big Apple – a $2.2 million suit was filed on behalf of about 20 workers
*HandyFat – a $600,000 suit was filed on behalf of 6 fired workers
*Amersino – an $810,000 suit was filed on behalf of 5 fired workers
Almost all of the fired workers have found new jobs as they await decisions on reinstatement, and the NLRB and the U.S. Department of Justice are investigating the companies’ illegal requests for working papers and subsequent firings.

In September 2007, a New York NLRB judge ruled for reinstatement of the six fired HandyFat workers, but the Washington, D.C. branch of the NLRB appealed its own ruling and the workers were not reinstated, proving that legal tactics cannot be relied upon in any significant way.

The NLRB trial for the Sunrise Plus/EZ-Supply firings took place in the summer and fall of 2007. A decision is expected in spring 2008.

Workers at other shops, including Amersino, Wild Edibles, and Flaum Appetizing, are continuing to organize, and five new shops were organized during a summer 2007 drive.

Overall, the results of this ongoing campaign have been impressive. After 10 strikes, dozens of pickets and demonstrations, and a number of marches, all of the targeted shops are compliant with the minimum wage law ($7.15/hr. as of January 2007), pay time-and-a-half for overtime, and have agreed to vacation and sick days. Several even pay higher rates than the minimum wage.

One of the IWW workers fired from Amersino, Eliezer Maca, says losing his job has been worth it. “Some workers are afraid of losing their jobs if they organize, but we have to do it. We have achieved major changes in many companies and have helped many workers and their families.”
http://www.wobblycity.org/current/news_letter.cgi

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Let's Stop US Missile Defence in Europe
As the Polish Campaign Against Militarism enters it's final preparations for next week's demonstration against the proposed US missile base near Slupsk, Northern Poland, we once again appeal to all anti-militarist campaigns and colleagues worldwide to stand with us on March 28th and 29th as we stage the first demonstration against the latest US military expansion.

Solidarity vigils have so far been confirmed at Polish embassies and consulates in Prague, Washington, Moscow, London, Berlin and Hamburg. A demonstration will also occur at Fylingdales (spy base) in England.
Recent developments
During Polish Prime Minister Tusk's recent visit to Washington to meet Mr. Bush, leading US peace groups and academics submitted a letter of protest rejecting the aggressive nature of current US foreign policy and the proposed missile defence elements for Europe.

We are working hard here to counter recent efforts by the US based Missile Defence Advocacy Alliance (MDAA) to fool Polish people into thinking that more missiles are beneficial for their country's security and their own personal welfare.

The president of the Slupsk region would do well to learn from the brave example of Czech mayors, including Mr. Jan Neoral, the Mayor of Trokavec where the radar is expected to be built, who have respected the wishes of their fellow citizens by rejecting US military expansionist plans.
The myth of Iraq war profits
Pro-US missile base politicians claim US analysts believe the construction of the ' missile shield' interceptors will mean investment to the value of $2 billion over the next 10 years in the region of Slupsk. Similar claims of enormous profitability were made prior to Poland's participation in the Iraq war. However, this turned out to be a myth.

Leading Polish daily newspaper Rzeczpospolita reported on March 20th 2008 that of the $2.2 billion Polish firms believed they would gain from their government's support of the US/UK led disaster, in fact they only filled their pockets with $410 million in war time contracts.

The cost of the Iraq war to the Polish taxpayers, on the other hand, has to date been around $800 million. And yet Polish nurses, doctors, teachers and miners amongst others continue to have to march on the streets of Poland demanding their government give them a decent wage.
Get Up, Stand Up - Don't Give Up the Fight
We appeal to international activists to register their protests against increased militarisation attempts at their local Polish consulate or embassy on March 28th and 29th or any other relevant site.
Related Link: linkhttp://www.m29.bzzz.net
Polish Campaign Against Militarism

Polish Media Contacts: 0509058651 / 0887524465 / 0662535719

International Media Contact: 0048 607340093email: campaignagainstmilitarism@gmail.com or tarcza@bzzz.net

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Press Release
University of Toronto Students Occupy President's Office

Police violence used to force students out
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
March 21, 2008 – Toronto
March 20, 2008 thirty-five University of Toronto students occupied Simcoe Hall, the home of the President's Office, to protest a 20% fee increase. The nonviolent sit-in was accompanied with a peaceful rally outside the building—until the police began brutalizing those inside. This was captured by multiple video cameras.

The students had three simple demands.
1) To be granted a meeting with President David Naylor;

2) To have the proposed fee increase removed from the University Affairs Board meeting, scheduled to take place on March 25; and

3) To be given 15 minutes at the University Affairs Board meeting for a presentation and discussion on broader issues of access to education and the impacts of high tuition upon students, families and communities.

Students attempted to deliver their letter to the University of Toronto President, David Naylor, and to speak to other members of the administration in Simcoe Hall about the rising costs of education in Ontario. The administration refused to meet with the students. The response of the University of Toronto was to violently remove students from their peaceful sit-in. Police aggressively grabbed students and dragged them away from the entrance of the office. The students feared for their safety and after four hours in the building, the police violence forced the students to leave.

Video of these events has been posted on YouTube and it can be viewed here:
Images can be viewed here:

http://www.edwardfwong.com/uoftact/10.jpg
Students are continuing to demand a meeting with President Naylor, and the right to accessible and affordable education.

For more information contact:Farshad Azadian, student member and organizer with AlwaysQuestion: 416-569-7471

Ryan Hayes, President of Arts and Science Students Union: 416-421-0879

Michal Hay, Vice-President University Affairs, University of Toronto Students' Union: 647-802-4131

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IRAQ: Five Years, And Counting

Analysis by Dahr Jamail

WASHINGTON, Mar 18 (IPS)

Devastation on the ground and largely held Iraqi opinion contradicts claims by U.S. officials that the situation in Iraq has improved towards the fifth anniversary of the invasion Mar. 20.

U.S. Vice-President Dick Cheney, during a surprise visit to Iraq on Monday declared the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq a "successful endeavour".

According to the group Just Foreign Policy, more than a million Iraqis have died as a result of the invasion and occupation, now entering its sixth year. A survey by British polling agency ORB estimates the number of dead at more than 1.2 million.

Nobel laureate and former chief World Bank economist Joseph Stiglitz recently published a book with co-author Linda Bilmes of Harvard University titled 'The Three Trillion Dollar War', a figure it considers a "conservative estimate" of the long-range price tag of the invasion and occupation of Iraq. The authors say the Bush administration has repeatedly "low-balled" the cost of the war, and has kept a set of records hidden from the U.S. public.

According to the U.S. Department of Defence, close to 4,000 U.S. soldiers have been killed. The number of British casualties is 175. "The war in Iraq has been one of the most disastrous wars ever fought by Britain," journalist Patrick Cockburn of London's Independent Newspaper wrote Mar. 17. "It will stand with Crimea and the Boer War as conflicts which could have been avoided, and were demonstrations of incompetence from start to finish."

According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, more than four million Iraqis are displaced from their homes, with roughly half of them outside of the country. The Iraqi Red Crescent estimates that one in every four residents of Baghdad, a city of six million, is displaced from home. The International Committee of the Red Cross said in a report Mar. 17 that millions are still deprived of clean water and medical care. Iraq's infrastructure is worse on every measurable level compared to Iraq under the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein, and including 12 years of the harshest economic sanctions in history.

During those sanctions more than a million Iraqis died from malnutrition, disease and lack of medical care. The international aid group Oxfam International released a report last July that found that four million Iraqis were in need of emergency assistance. It found a 9 percent increase in childhood malnutrition, and that 70 percent of Iraqis lacked access to safe drinking water. The average home in Iraq, even in Kurdish controlled northern Iraq that has been held up by the Bush administration as an example of success, has on average less than five hours of electricity a day. Oil exports, from which Iraq has obtained over 80 percent of its income, have not for a single day of the occupation matched pre-war levels. Unemployment, already 32 percent before the invasion, has vacillated during the occupation between 40-70 percent, according to the Iraqi government.

With more than a million dead, more than four million displaced, and another four million in need of emergency aid, a third of Iraqis are displaced, in need of emergency aid -- or dead.

All this Cheney calls a "successful endeavour".

Soon after he said that, a suicide bomber killed at least 32 and wounded 51 near a mosque in the holy Shia city Kerbala, south of Baghdad. Bombings in Baghdad near the Green Zone just after Cheney arrived killed another four, and wounded 13. Baghdad has become the most dangerous city in the world, largely as a result of a U.S. policy of pitting various Iraqi ethnic and sectarian groups against one another.

Today Baghdad is a city of walled-off Sunni and Shia ghettoes, divided by concrete walls erected by the U.S. military. These areas even fly their own flags; Sunni areas fly the old Iraqi flag, Shias use the new version, and the Kurds have their own flag.

Ethnic and sectarian cleansing strategies, backed by occupation forces, have virtually eliminated all mixed areas of Baghdad. Republican Party presidential candidate John McCain, also in Iraq, met with Iraqi leaders as part of a Senate Armed Services Committee fact-finding mission. He, like Cheney, said he would support the Iraqi government and maintain a long-term military commitment in Iraq. "The surge is working," McCain told reporters, referring to the troop build-up in Baghdad.

With "enduring" U.S. military bases established in Iraq, and an embassy in Baghdad the size of the Vatican City, there appears to be no end in sight for the U.S. occupation of Iraq.

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Declaration of St. Petersburg Anti-Fascist Resistance Group

Declaration of St. Petersburg Anti-Fascist Resistance Group on attack on participants of a picket against Kosovo recognition

March, 7 at 16:00 several ultra right groups held a picket in St.Petersburg against Kosovo independence near the US consulate.

Some of the picket participants were attacked by antifascists after the picket. This fairly ordinary event led to a lot of public attention.Nationalists calling themselves patriots and Russian Orthodox believers started another hysteria in the media. In this connection we would like to make the following declaration to express our attitude to the event:

1.When the ultra-right Orthodox clericals come out into the streets (there were activists of RONS, RID, DPNI, Black Hundred and other on 7 March) and raised their flags they should remember that the time has passed when they could freely gather in the city. It is becoming dangerous to call for hatred and dominance of some groups of people over others. It is well known that the groups present at the picket support violence against their political opponents and those whom they consider their enemies. An attack on them can be regarded as self-defense of the most conscientious citizens of St.Petersburg.
2.It is irrelevant at what sort of events Nazi appear – legal or illegal, big scale or local - they spread the ideas of hatred, ethnic confrontation and xenophobia. It is not important whether they are silent on this particular day or they shout their slogans. If nationalists are in the streets we must fight back by any possible ways.
3.We believe that any idea can exist even an absurd one (as in case with ultra-right Orthodox). But it is one thing when people with such ideas gather in their headquarters and church parishes and it is a different thing when they come out into the streets and offend the people with their slogans, flags, handouts and ideas. Such gatherings are a dangerous hotbed of hatred and provoke hate related crime which is often committed by very young people manipulated by party activists who only make propaganda.
4.Ultra-right criticism of the existing Russian police regime seems illogical as at the same time they cooperate with it. In fact they constantly ask their enemies (or friends?) such as the police and the procurator office to defend them. But in fact this is not surprising – the police, the church and nationalists make up one block and are a tool which the regimes in all countries have always been using. The so called patriots use every possibility to present themselves as victims, to demonstrate how they are beaten and torched for just making a political presentation. But where does all this opposition spirit go when they cooperate with the investigation? Such people can only be scorned and despised.
5.We agree with the declaration on Kosovo which the Serbian anarcho-syndicalists made (http://www.ainfos.ca/ainfos07935.html).
6.Neo-Nazis shall have no place in our streets. We remember. We fight.
Anti-fascist Resistance of St. Petersburg

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by Zabalaza Anarchist Communist Front

zacf@zabalaza.net address: Postnet Suite 47, Private Bag X1, Fordsburg, South Africa

South Africa is said to have one of the most progressive constitutions in the world. It enshrines the rights of every person, of every background, from workers and immigrants to women and homosexuals. As such you would think that, especially for people from oppressed groups, South Africa would be a safe haven.

But if you look a bit closer you will surely see that, despite all the rights we hold on paper, people living in South Africa are far from guaranteed a safe and enjoyable existence. Our so-called human rights, as enshrined by the constitution and gloated over by politicians, are violated on a daily basis.

Workers have the right to strike, but only if they first warn their bosses of their intentions and after they have exhausted all other avenues for addressing their concerns. Workers who decide to strike without first giving their boss a chance to hire scab labour, and even when they do - as we have recently witnessed with the excessive use of force by the SAPS on striking Samwu workers in the Nelson Mandela Bay Metropole (137 of whom were arrested and held over night after being shot at without warning) - are likely to be arrested, fired or violently attacked.

Workers do not have the right to decide what they produce and how they distribute it, and in what quantities, because everything that a worker produces belongs to his or her boss - the owners of the factories and machines, those to whom the workers sell their labour for a wage in order to survive. In the constitution workers do not have the right to take over the factories and occupy the land, in order to produce the goods they need to survive, because that would be violating another sacred right, the property rights of the bosses and land-owners.

Under capitalism, the economic system of the world, people are allowed by law to own, buy and sell private property. Those who can afford to buy property, be it a piece of farm land or a factory and its machines, very often use this property to enrich themselves from the labour of those who have no property, and thus have no choice but to work for a wage under the direction of those who have property. In this way the group of people who own private property - and it is a relatively small group - exploit the labour of those who do not own private property - a much larger group. They get rich through the labour of the poor, simply for having already been rich enough to buy property in the first place; and their right to exploit the workers and poor is protected by the same constitution which protects the rights of the workers not be be exploited! Ironic, isn't it?

Similarly, the equal rights of women with men are written into the constitution and upheld by law, but, as recent events - such as that at Noord street - have once again shown, so too are these rights violated on a daily basis. Women in South Africa are not treated as the equals of men, they are harassed, abused, raped and degraded by virtue of the fact that they were born women. It matters very little to a woman who is beaten by her husband, or raped by a taxi driver, whether or not this is allowed under the constitution. What she cares about is not being raped, not being beaten. This is a security that cannot be guaranteed to her under the present capitalist system, because the same system that defends the rights of the bosses to exploit the workers, also relies on the patriarchal oppression of women by men, in order to keep the poor and working class divided from itself, thus unable to find the strength to challenge the system which protects the rights of the propertied classes at the expense of the workers, poor and oppressed minorities.

We anarchist communists believe that constitutional human rights mean next to nothing as long as we are living in a world which thrives on the violent exploitation of the masses by a ruling minority, a system in which the majority of the population - the workers and poor - are divided from each other by means of sexism, racism, nationalism and religion. We believe that, as long as we live under the threat of starvation and imprisonment, oppression and exploitation, our human rights will never be safe. It is impossible for the workers and poor, for women and oppressed minorities to live in dignity under capitalism. As long as there is a price on our labour, as long as we are under threat of attack because of our identifies, and as long as we live under threat of unemployment, hunger and disease, our rights to live with dignity and free from violence will never be realised.

Under such circumstances, in which we find ourselves today - as many of us did under Apartheid - the only way to live with dignity is to take up the fight against the system of capitalism, the system which defends the profits and property of the rich and powerful at the expense of the human rights of the exploited and oppressed. The only way to live with dignity is for us to live and struggle for a new system; a new world in which we are no longer divided, where there is no private property, and where we are all workers and in which we all have control over what we produce and how it is distributed, according to the principle "from each according to ability, to each according to need". A world in which, because we are all workers, and we all work for the benefit of our fellow human beings, we treat each other with the respect that each one of us deserves.

Capitalism cannot guarantee human rights for all, only real human freedom can guarantee and protect our rights, rights which are safeguarded by our belonging to an international community of free workers, not by writing them onto paper. If we had real freedom, there would be no need for the phony rights of the bourgeois constitutions of South Africa and other so-called democracies.

We are supposed to have the freedom of choice, but the only choice we have under capitalism is either to be exploited and oppressed, or to organise and resist. Anarchist communists have chosen to organise and resist, to fight for a better future, and in so doing to live and die with dignity. Join us.
http://www.zabalaza.net

The folowing is Part 3 of Larry Gambone's report on the present political situation in the country of Chile. See The Porkupine Blog for previous installments and for still more in the next few days.

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Chile Today Part 3 - The Radical Left
I have already written about the Chilean anarchist movement and will say no more about it here, other than to say it is an important part of the opposition to neoliberalism and the corporate state.

The Communist Party. Like other Communist Parties I have observed, the Chilean party seems to have benefitted in the long run, ideologically and in practice, from the collapse of the USSR. Freed from having to give support to the policies of an ever-more conservative Soviet bureaucracy, these parties now adapt to their own national situations. (It must be remembered that during the Unidad Popular days, the CP was a conservative force in that alliance.) These reformed CP's now attempt to become a voice for the trade unions and social movements and do not seem to engage in the sectarian practices of yore. They are now willing to unite with other forces more radical than themselves. Their actual politics are left-social democratic, making them far more radical than the contemporary socialist and social democratic parties, which, as we have seen, have been corrupted by neoliberalism. However, while more militant than before, the CP is still on the "moderate" wing of the radical left.

While visiting Chile the only large circulation newspaper I could find that was worth reading was El Siglo, the CP weekly. There may have been other socialist weeklies but I never found any, and El Siglo was sold at most kiosks.

The party plays a major role in the CUT, the main trade union federation. (There is much criticism of the CUT by anarchists and other radicals. For an example of a more militant labour federation see CGT Mosicam.) Graffitti evidence of the Young Communists abounds. The CP gets about 5% of the vote and due to the restrictive nature of the voting system has no seats in either the Senate or Chamber of Deputies. They do have a fairly large number of municipal councellors, however.

The MIR. During the UP years the MIR was the most promising revolutionary force. It had thousands of members and was involved in land and factory occupations as well as the occasional armed action. For this it won the implacable hatred of the Pinochetistas and many members were tortured and murdered. The party broke apart in the 1980's and more or less dissolved by 1989. It reformed in 1990 and gave up armed struggle in 1997. Its original policies were supposedly Castroist, however, from what I read now the group seems to have adopted a Bolivarian approach. (See below.) I think the group is rather small and only saw one MIR graffitti. MIR has united with a host of other parties and groups in a broad anti-neo-liberal front called Junto PODEMOS Mas .

Junto PODEMOS Mas unites most of the non-anarchist left – including the Communist Party. Its policies are Bolivarian or left-wing populist i.e., broadly anti-neoliberal, favoring direct democracy, return of national resources, social reforms, trade union rights, Latin American unity, and opposition to racism and sexism. (I should add that I find this desire for unity a very positive direction.) PODEMOS got about 7% in the election to the Chamber of Deputies, but as in the case of the CP did not get any seats. The following groups belong to this front:
Partido Humanista
Partido Comunista de Chile
Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria (MIR)
Movimiento Patriótico Manuel Rodríguez
Izquierda Socialista
Movimiento Por el Socialismo
Identidad Rodriguista
Movimiento Fuerza Ciudadana
Partido Comunista Chileno Acción Proletaria
Izquierda Cristiana
Partido Alternativa Socialista
Cambio Democrático
Comité de Defensa y Recuperación del Cobre
Frente Amplio de Profesionales de Izquierda
Asambleas Populares
Comité de Defensa de Derechos Humanos y Sindicales
Coordinadora Metropolitana de Usuarios de la Salud Publica
Corporación Urracas de Emaus, and 36 other social, trade union and environmental groups.

Partido Ecologista. In the early 1980's there was a reasonably strong Green tendency in Chile. I don't know what happened to it, but there are a number of ecological groups. And judging by the millions of plastic bags polluting the countryside, the air pollution and the clear cuts, they cannot be all that effective. Just recently, Chilean Greens came together to form the Partido Ecologista and will be running in the up-coming election.

Trotskyists. I saw no overt evidence of Trotskyism in Chile. I know that a Trotskyist party, the PRT does belong to PODEMOS. But it is not one of the major groupings of the tendency, and is a split-off from the horrible Healyite WRP! Indeed, there does not seem to be any Mandelist, ISO or IMT organizations in Chile. Of course, compared with Argentina, Peru or Bolivia, Trotskyism has been weak here. I think it might be due to the fact that strong movements to the left of the Communist Party have always existed in Chile and people who would otherwise become Trotskyists join these organizations instead.

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Western Canada's Largest Anarchist Bookfair!

Looks like the 2008 fair will be the first weekend of October, at the Alberta Ave Community Center (same place as last year). We will update this page: http://edmontonanarchistbookfair.blogspot.com/ as we know more details.

Where: Alberta Avenue Hall 9210 - 118 Ave., Edmonton

When: Oct 4th and 5th, 2008

Stay informed Subscribe: edmontonanarchistbookfair-subscribe@yahoogroups.ca

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Commemorating Aleksey Krylov in Moscow

Date Thu, 20 Mar 2008 22:01:58 +0200
19th of March,

3 days after the murder of Aleksey Krylov on his way to a concert of Petrozhavodsk oi!-band Nichego Horoshego, anti-fascists of Moscow gathered to commemorate him. ---- Around 6 PM people began to gather at the murder place, Maroseyka street 4. They lit candles and laid fl lowers. Someone made graffiti "We will remember Kryl forever! Murdered by Nazis 16th of March 2008!". People had banner "Fascism won't trespass". All together there were some 50 people,and they gathered for half an hour but the police did not show up to disperse the illegal gathering. ---- As the original gathering place of Pushkinskaya square was leaked to the open internet 7 vans of police and small groups of Nazis were spotted there. It was decided that the action should be moved to another spot.

Marchers gathered in the Kropotkinskaya(Yes, there is a Metro Station in Moscow named after Kropotkin-Molly) Metro station, where the march started moving clockwise to the Gogol Boulevard. It was obvious that this was the biggest ever reaction against a concrete case of fascist violence in Moscow - more than 250 demonstrators joined, in a spectacular unity -there were punks, lgbt(?-Molly),anarchists, hardcore kids, skinheads and just anti-fascists. Maybe this does not seem a lot in a city of 10 million, but it hard to organise in a conspiratorial manner in the condition of a total ban of such demonstrations - it would have been impossible even to legalize a picket or a candlelight vigil in such a short timescale .

The marchers carried banners "Fascism is murdering, authorities are covering!" and "Your ignorance is our death!". A number of sea torches were lit. People scanned("screamed" I guess-Molly) "Get to the streets - reclaim the city!","Fascism won't trespass!", "We do not care about color of skin - we refuse fascism!", "Antifa!", "Alerta, alerta, antifascista!", "Our fatherland is all humanity!", "As long as we are united, we will never be divided!" and other slogans.

The march turned to the old Arbat, and finished at Smolenskaya Metro station.The police failed to make any arrests.

Video:

(http://www.avtonom.org/index.php?nid=1660)

"Winnipeg is not for sale"

A group of citizens operating under the banner "Winnipeg is not for sale" has come together to oppose the City's long-term plan to sell off, contract out and privatize our public facilities and programs. In order to demonstrate our opposition to Katz's privatization agenda we've organized a protest at City Hall on Wednesday March 26th at 8:30am -- the day that City Council will approve the 2008 Operating Budget. A poster for the event is attached. More information about the trend towards the privatization of City services is provided below.

To contact Winnipeg is Not for Sale, phone 947-9334, or email antiprizatizewinnipeg@gmail.com

Please forward this email far and wide, and come out on March 26th to send the message that "Winnipeg is not for sale"!

Background:

One of the clearest indications of the shift towards privatization at City Hall is the final report of the Economic Opportunity Commission(EOC). Last year Katz struck a committee tasked with finding ways to replace the revenue lost by the proposed elimination of the Municipal Business Tax. The Economic Opportunity Commission (EOC) was comprised mainly of representatives of business and the manufacturing sector and did not include any public input. In June of last year the EOC released its final report entitled "Improving Our City's Competitiveness". Among the many recommendations in the report are suggestions to replace community club and library staff with volunteers, sell public swimming pools and rec centres, increase the use of Public-Private Partnerships (P3s) for capital projects, contract out unionized City jobs and attract corporate sponsorship for public facilities.

The EOC report expects that these recommendations will be implemented over the course of the next 6 years. While the 2008 Operating Budget does not propose to cut the business tax as expected, it does make significant cuts to public sector City jobs, cuts funding to the arts by more than half, and it continues the use of Public-Private Partnerships (P3s) to finance capital projects. As the publicly stated intent to cut the business tax, Katz's "open for business" rhetoric, and the EOC report all demonstrate, this budget can be seen as the continuation of a process of public disinvestment that began when Katz was first elected in '04, and may very well continue for the remainder of his term (if it is left unchallenged).

To view the complete EOC report, visit: http://www.winnipeg.ca/interhom/eoc/eocFinalReport.pdf

For a critical guide to the EOC report from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, visit: http://www.policyalternatives.ca/documents/Manitoba_Pubs/2008/2Visions_2Cities.pdf (especially Part 4) and http://www.policyalternatives.ca/documents/Manitoba_Pubs/2008/2Visions_2Cities_Public_Services_For_Public_Good.pdf

An interesting fact is that our "seasons" are not of equal length. It is 94 days from the June solstice to the September equinox, but only 89 days from the December solstice to the March equinox. That makes summer 5 days longer than winter. Now aren't you grateful ? The difference is because of the variable speed of the Earth during its revolution about the Sun. During the winter months it is closer to the Sun, and therefore moves faster. There are also small perturbations in the times due to the influence of the Moon and the other planets.

It is a "hothouse" that brings together social scientists, filmmakers, computer scientists, activists and artists. The Citizen Lab sponsors projects that explore the cutting-edge of hypermedia technologies and grassroots social movements, civic activism and democratic change within an emerging planetary polity.

The centre and its website is an invaluable resource for those who are concerned about and wish to make a "run-around" internet censorship. The following news item about one of their recent products- Psiphon- and the award it has won is just one of the exciting things to be found at the Citizen Lab....

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Canadian software tool blows away Net censorship, wins global award
Posted Feb 25, 2008 in MediaCoverage by sarahb
Canadian software designed to evade government censorship of the Internet is the first recipient of a new award for digital pioneers chosen by an international group of specialists and awarded in Paris in mid-February.

From ITBusiness.ca

Canadian software tool blows away Net censorship, wins global award

Psiphon - designed by the University of Toronto's Citizen Lab - is the first recipient of a new award for digital pioneers chosen by an international group of specialists and awarded in Paris this month.

2/25/2008 5:00:00 AM

by Grant Buckler

Canadian software designed to evade government censorship of the Internet is the first recipient of a new award for digital pioneers chosen by an international group of specialists and awarded in Paris in mid-February.

The University of Toronto's Citizen Lab designed Psiphon for citizens of countries that block access to many Web sites.

Psiphon evades such censorship through an encrypted connection between the user's computer (in the country with Internet censorship) and another piece of software – essentially a Web proxy – on a volunteer's computer in a country where Internet access is not controlled.

Psiphon was chosen from about 100 technology projects from around the world that were nominated for the Netxplorateur of the Year Grand Prix award.

Former French Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin presented the award to Ronald Deibert, a University of Toronto professor and director of the Citizen Lab, and Michael Hull, head of spinoff company Psiphon Inc., at a Paris ceremony in mid-February.

An international network of specialists chose the initial list of 100 projects considered to be “concrete and innovative at the same time, but also loaded with meaning,” according to Ingrid Brégeon-Fall, a spokeswoman for the awards.

This was narrowed to a short list of 10 Netxplorateurs of the Year, from which the Citizen Lab was chosen the Grand Prix winner.

This is the first year the prize has been given, Brégeon-Fall says. There is no cash award associated with the prize.

The Citizen Lab has been researching Internet censorship for several years, Deibert says.

It has seen a gradual growth in the number of countries practicing it, from only two or three in 2002 to 26 countries where there was some evidence of sites being blocked in 2006.

The six countries that censor Internet access the most are China, Myanmar (Burma), Vietnam, Tunisia, Iran and Uzbekistan, Diebert says.

Danny O'Brien, international outreach co-ordinator at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a non-profit group concerned with Internet freedom, describes net censorship as “a growing problem.”

That's due partly to the advance of filtering technologies, he says. “More and more countries are finding ways to do fine-grained censorship of the Internet.”

O'Brien says that is fueling a technology arms race between censors and groups like the Citizen Lab.

Citizen Lab senior researchers came up with the concept of Psiphon in 2004, Diebert says.

According to the Citizen Lab, Psiphon's design makes it virtually impossible to detect and block.

A computer user with unrestricted Internet access can download and install a small Psiphon application from the Web site at the Psiphon Web site.

They then give the unique connection information for this node to a friend or relative in a country with restricted access.

This connection information is the computer's Internet Protocol (IP) address with an extension chosen by the user.

Only people who know the address of a Psiphon node can use the software to evade Internet censorship.

The Citizen Lab and Psiphon Inc. are now working on a plan to host Psiphon nodes themselves on behalf of trusted individuals in censored countries, Diebert says.

Those people would be able to control the nodes and give out access information to people they trust.

A government that monitored Internet use and became suspicious of repeated connections to an IP address in a distant country could detect that someone was using Psiphon, and could block access to the specific node, says Deibert, but that would not affect the many other nodes.

Being detected could be dangerous for citizens in some countries, he adds.

So a person who is being watched would probably not be safe using it, but for ordinary citizens, detection is unlikely.

Psiphon is free, open source software and has been available from the Citizen Lab since 2006.

As of last week, Diebert says, 145,000 copies had been downloaded. He adds that the Citizen Lab has had no reports of any of those nodes being detected and blocked.

Recently, the Citizen Lab launched a startup company called Psiphon Inc. which will provide professional services for media outlets and other organizations that want to use the software for unrestricted Internet access.

Reporters covering the Olympic Games in Beijing this summer will need a way of gaining unrestricted access to the Web while working in China.

Psiphon Inc. is working with several media companies – which it can't name because of possible repercussions from the Chinese government – to provide open communications from Beijing, says Hull.

Psiphon is also working with non-governmental organizations such as Witness.org, which operates a Web site documenting human rights violations.

Witness.org wants to ensure access both so that people in countries with censored Internet access can both view the site and send information to it, Hull says.

Psiphon has previously been recognized by Esquire magazine, which named it one of Six Ideas to Change the World in December 2007, and by Fast Company magazine, which listed Psiphon Inc. as one of 50 companies to watch for in 2007.

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