Save Vestas

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(Thanks Harpymarx)

4th Anniversary of Jean Charles De Menezes Murder

Join us at Stockwell Tube tomorrow morning at 9:45am to mark the 4th ANNIVERSARY OF THE SHOOTING OF JEAN CHARLES DE MENEZES

AT 10AM THE FAMILY OF JEAN CHARLES WILL UNVEIL A BEAUTIFUL NEW MEMORIAL MOSAIC that it hopes can form a permanent memorial outside Stockwell Tube.

The family will be launching their petition entitled ‘Never Forget’ calling on the Mayor of London and Transport for London to allow the mosaic to remain outside Stockwell Tube.

The family needs your support to make this a reality by signing the petition.

Jean Charles de Menezes was shot dead on 22nd July 2005 at Stockwell tube station during a pre-planned police anti-terror operation. Four years on from his brutal killing no-one has been held accountable for his death.

The family will be unveiling a beautiful mosaic memorial of Jean Charles which they have helped make and have requested be allowed to remain as the permanent memorial to him outside Stockwell Station. The Mosaic would replace the current memorial which has been at Stockwell Tube for the last four years and has been carefully looked after by the family and supporters.

We hope you can join us for a short while tomorrow morning to commemorate Jean’s death and support the mosaic.

Mike
Jean Charles De Menezes Family Campaign

Vestas!!! Stand For Their Jobs & Earth

As many others are reporting the UK’s only wind turbine factory was going to close, yep that’s right even as NL release their Green strategy they were allowing the only place that makes wind turbines to be closed by profit before all else capitalists. So the workers on the Isle of Wight (really!) have done the right thing and occupied the factory!

Send messages of support to:Savevestas@googlemail.com

The Vestas Fighting Fund: Cheques Payable to ‘Ryde and East Wight Trades Union’

Send Cheques to:
22 Church Lane
Ryde
Isle of Wight
PO33 2NB

And via Harpymarx-

Martin Empson via Derek Wall:- Save Vestas – Defend Jobs, Save the Planet – Support the Occupation

Workers at the Vestas Wind Turbine factory on the Isle of Wight have JUST NOW occupied their factory. They are fighting for 600 jobs and the future of the planet. They need help now.

PLEASE TEXT AND CALL EVERYONE YOU KNOW.

There is a large picket of support starting outside the factory. This will be crucial in giving people confidence inside. We want hundreds of people by morning.
If you are not working, come now, by car, bus or train.
If you are on the South Coast and working, come for the night and go to work exhausted and proud.

If you can’t come, call up friends and offer to pay the fare or petrol money for someone else to come down. Or part of the fare.
Don’t just call the environmental and union activists you know. Call your friends and ask them who they know. Call your brother’s friends or your children’s friends. Text everyone. Get your friends calling and texting.

WE WANT HUNDREDS OF PEOPLE NOW.
SAVE THE JOBS – SAVE THE PLANET.

The workers want Gordon Brown to step in as if it was a troubled bank and save the jobs and keep making wind turbine blades. They gave the bankers trillions. They say they care about climate change. He has talked about creating 40,000 “Green Jobs”, the first step should be protecting these 600.

The workers will need solidarity – donations of money, food and other assistance. In the first instance please send messages of solidarity to savevestas@gmail.com

We will suggest other forms of solidarity soon. Do this now. Reach for your phone

Invaders, Colonists…Settlers

(IPS) – A little village nestled in a valley between several hills in the Bethlehem governorate is today fighting for survival. All around Wadi Fuqin village on the outskirts of Bethlehem in the southern West Bank is the expanding and illegal Israeli settlement Beitar Illit, home to 35,000 settlers. The settlement is situated on a hill overlooking the little Palestinian village of 2,500.

Next to the settlement several mushrooming settler outposts together with Beitar form a semi-circle around Wadi Fuqin, closing in on it. While settlement construction booms and the number of settlers in Beitar and its outposts continues to swell, Palestinians in Wadi Fuqin are forbidden by the Israeli authorities from building new homes, or enlarging current ones to accommodate new generations.

[More]

Bear in mind Bibi just basically told Obama to Fuck Off over stopping the illegal colonisation program. Did Obama then rethink US taxpayers money being given to Israel? No sign of such as yet. So US taxpayers continue to subsidise the invasion and apartheid.

KerChing!

Funny that, you conduct a war against another nation’s enemy and then you sign a ‘defense pact‘ with that nation, that ol timey imperialism that works so well-

(Reuters) – The United States and India said on Monday they had agreed on a defense pact that takes a major step toward allowing the sale of sophisticated U.S. arms to the South Asian nation as it modernizes its military.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, at the end of her first visit to India as Washington’s top diplomat, said Delhi had also approved two sites for U.S. companies to build nuclear power plants.

But no really the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan is all about Teh Democracy and Freedom™ and stuff.

Still Killing Mental Patients

Zephaniah Samuels:- Police presence on psychiatric wards is also touched on in this report. The shocking eye witness account of an elderly service users who watched while a squad of 12 heavily equipped police officers with riot armour, CS gas, Taser guns and an Alsatian attack dog went onto a hospital ward to remove just one young African man from a hospital is a practice that is largely unknown to those outside mental health services.

The final report by the now defunct Mental Health Act commission has revealed a catalogue of failings within the service, resulting in patient deaths which could have been prevented and an unecessary increase in the already high numbers of people from African Caribbean communities detained in psychiatric care.

And this is telling-

A section on ‘restraint and safety’ in this document notes that two patients suffocated after being restrained face down with excessive force, this report points out that this may have been avoided if staff ceased prone restraint earlier. Researchers also found some staff restrained patients without proper training.

Recommendations within the David ‘Rocky’ Bennett inquiry report, into the tragic death of an African Caribbean patient, who died after his was forcibly restrained by a team of up to five staff for almost half and hour while in a secure unit in a hospital in Norfolk, led to recommendations that no patient should be restrained in the prone position for longer than three minutes. A decade after Bennett’s death this new report confirms that the Government has neither established national mandatory training or endorsed a time limit on face down restraint recommended in the inquiry report.

Now that ain’t laziness or a mistake, that’s approval. Read more @ Black Mental Health, MHAC report is here pdf).

Brutal Karma

An American soldier captured by the Taliban, he apparently says in video released that US forces should leave Afghanistan, was he tortured in order to make him say that? (Or is he stating the truths he has learned?) America has zero moral authority over insisting the soldier be treated as to the Geneva conventions, his captors could torture him to death over a long period on video and would be doing no more than the US does to prisoners. The Taliban could score a propaganda victory, release him in good condition after having treating him well. But again, as the allied forces have decided propaganda is best served as terrorism- fight us and we will bomb your people and torture captives to death, can we expect the already brutal Taliban to act better than their opponents. No one should be tortured. But apparently even our media thinks it impolite to mention our countries use torture so they call it ‘abuse’.

I think the American empire is now at a stage where any president must have a war, just like kissing babies or having a Twitter account, their legitimacy must in part be earned by how much foreign blood they spill (at knock down rates), look at how entitled the political establishment is to the war drug, Dean is a medical doctor-

JUAN GONZALEZ: In terms of the—to get back again to other issues right now, I’d like to ask you about the continuation and expansion of the American war in Afghanistan. Do you have concerns about—that this is becoming really President Obama’s war—

HOWARD DEAN: It is.

JUAN GONZALEZ: —and the impact on our country in the future?

HOWARD DEAN: Look, again, you know—and I don’t have to say anything nice; I’m not in the administration. But I’m with Obama on his conduct of the war. I always said, when I was running against the Iraq war, that Afghanistan was different.

Let me tell you what the stakes are now. And what I find incredibly refreshing about this president is he uttered words that Lyndon Johnson never said, which is that we cannot win this war militarily. He knows that from the get-go. Here’s what’s at stake. It’s not just the Taliban. I think we could probably control the Taliban and the al-Qaeda in the Northwest territories by doing some of the things we’re already doing—drones and air power and so forth. Roughly 50 percent of the Afghan people are women. They will be condemned to conditions which are very much like slavery and serfdom in a twelfth century model of society where they have no rights whatsoever. So, I’m not saying we have to invade every country that doesn’t treat women as equal, but we’re there now. We have a responsibility. And if we leave, women will experience the most extraordinary depredations of any population on the face of the earth. I think we have some obligation to try and see if we can make this work, not just for America and our security interests, but for the sake of women in Afghanistan and all around the globe. Is this acceptable to treat women like this? I think not.

AMY GOODMAN: We just interviewed an Afghan parliamentarian, Dr. Wardak. She said the opposite. She said, yes, she agrees with you on the way women are treated, but that this is worsening the treatment, that the increased number of civilian deaths in Afghanistan, the huge number of troops that are coming in right now, are alienating the Afghan population.

Their own excuse refuted by the very people they claim to be helping, (you don’t think that’s a patronising talking point to cover yet another make work drive by the military-industrial-congressional thingy-majig do you?). Obama’s doing this differently?

Holbrooke faced very few tough questions–not even on drone strikes. Rep. Lynn Woolsey did press Holbrooke on the fact that 90 percent of the administration’s war supplemental goes towards military expenses, while the counterinsurgency strategy calls for a ratio of 80 percent political and 20 percent military.

Even by their own strategy they are not even trying, the smart change is merely to put an expert user of death squads in control

It turns out the commander of this international order of assassins has just been appointed by Defense Secretary Robert Gates to head of U.S. forces in Afghanistan. As part of the “fresh thinking” in the Obama administration, epitomized by the COIN crowd, Lt. Gen. Stanley McChrystal replaces Gen. David McKiernan. So who is McChrystal? A 2006 profile in Newsweek put it this way:

“JSOC is part of what Vice President Dick Cheney was referring to when he said America would have to ‘work the dark side’ after 9/11. To many critics, the veep’s remark back in 2001 fostered his rep as the Darth Vader of the war on terror and presaged bad things to come, like the interrogation abuses at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay. But America also has its share of Jedi Knights who are fighting in what Cheney calls ‘the shadows.’ And McChrystal, an affable but tough Army Ranger, and the Delta Force and other elite teams he commands are among them.”

The dark side includes McChrystal’s overseeing of Camp Nama, a detainee center outside of Baghdad (since renamed and relocated) notorious for its brutality. The very same administration that is up on its high horse about forbidding torture has just elevated one of the chief torturers to direct Obama’s war in Afghanistan. It is hardly inconceivable that what we saw at Camp Nama – beatings, degradation of prisoners, and outright, cold-blooded murder – is going to be replicated on a nationwide scale.
That’s what they call “fresh thinking” over at Obama’s Pentagon.

I’m always puzzled why relatively intelligent people think the military will establish human rights and gender equality, because like yeah they’ve been at the forefront of all human rights struggles and feminist revolutions haven’t they?

The scope of the problem was brought into acute focus for me during a visit to the West Los Angeles VA Healthcare Center, where I met with female veterans and their doctors. My jaw dropped when the doctors told me that 41% of female veterans seen at the clinic say they were victims of sexual assault while in the military, and 29% report being raped during their military service. They spoke of their continued terror, feelings of helplessness and the downward spirals many of their lives have since taken.

So the spending remains overwhelmingly military and the war run by a war criminal Cheney admired.

To actually help the people in Afghanistan-

Support RAWA (Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan)

• RAWA- How You Can Help
• RAWA News
• RAWA & Afghan’s Women’s Mission Online Credit Card Donation Form

Also see rethinkafghanistan.com

Chiquita & The Honduran Coup?

Nikolas Kozloff says-

When the Honduran military overthrew the democratically elected government of Manuel Zelaya two weeks ago there might have been a sigh of relief in the corporate board rooms of Chiquita banana. Earlier this year the Cincinnati-based fruit company joined Dole in criticizing the government in Tegucigalpa which had raised the minimum wage by 60%. Chiquita complained that the new regulations would cut into company profits, requiring the firm to spend more on costs than in Costa Rica: 20 cents more to produce a crate of pineapple and ten cents more to produce a crate of bananas to be exact. In all, Chiquita fretted that it would lose millions under Zelaya’s labor reforms since the company produced around 8 million crates of pineapple and 22 million crates of bananas per year.

When the minimum wage decree came down Chiquita sought help and appealed to the Honduran National Business Council, known by its Spanish acronym COHEP. Like Chiquita, COHEP was unhappy about Zelaya’s minimum wage measure. Amílcar Bulnes, the group’s president, argued that if the government went forward with the minimum wage increase employers would be forced to let workers go, thus increasing unemployment in the country. The most important business organization in Honduras, COHEP groups 60 trade associations and chambers of commerce representing every sector of the Honduran economy. According to its own Web site, COHEP is the political and technical arm of the Honduran private sector, supports trade agreements and provides “critical support for the democratic system.”

Hmmm… Chiquita

Restraint

Certainly The Guardian has shortcomings but it is only fair to give credit where credit is due. Allegra Stratton managed to interview James Purnell while he tried to sound deep, thoughtful, caring and ensure a continuing high profile career (d’you think he’s signed to Portillo’s agents?), without ever once breaking down and repeatedly punching him very hard in his lying smug face. So well done Allegra!

PS. Amount Purnell thinks people can live on while being harassed to find jobs that do not exist- £64.30 (over 25 mind, young un’s get by on 50 quid)

Amount he claimed in just one expenses receipt… for fridge magnets- £250, overall expenses claim average of £1,506 a month (in addition to Ministerial salary of £64,766, and as a Cabinet Minister with entitlements he did get £144,520).

Ian Tomlinson Family Campaign

Via Harpymarx. Ian Tonlinson’s family have established a website iantomlinsonfamilycampaign.org.uk

This website and the Ian Tomlinson Family Campaign has been set up by Ian’s family. We are grateful for the huge amount of public support received since Ian’s tragic death on April 1st 2009 at the G20 protests in London. It has been very hard for our family particularly following the release of images of the police assault on Ian emerged. Ian is deeply missed by us and we simply want justice for him.

We may have a long and difficult journey ahead to achieve justice and we will rely on your continued support.

Our family has set up this campaign for the following reasons:

• To demand a full investigation into Ian’s death that scrutinises the individual conduct and operational command tactics of police officers present at the G20 protest and those in command of them when Ian was assaulted and died

• To call for full criminal charges to be brought against any officer whose actions or failure of duty resulted in Ian’s death

• To campaign for change to any police policies, tactics or frequent abuses of power which may effectively endanger people’s lives rather than protect them, so that future deaths and injuries to the public can be prevented

• To raise awareness of any issues we may experience as a family seeking justice through statutory and judicial systems that are a cause for public concern

These are some things you may wish to do for now to support our campaign:

• Keep updated by checking this official family website for press releases, news articles and updates

• Join the official campaign mailing list by e-mail at iantomlinsonfamilycampaign@gmail.com and send any messages of support or ideas to this address.

• Stay in contact – send us updates of any events you have organised including pictures, letters received back, press articles etc.

• Write to your MP

• Direct any witness information to our lawyers so it may be used in evidence

With thanks,

Family of Ian Tomlinson

Tales of Piracy

Husband and wife Adam Shapiro & Huwaida Arraf write about the Israeli piracy the led to them being assaulted, kidnapped and held in jail, the total lack of support from their own government and ponder how different Iran is treated. The first is Arraf in The Nation, and Shapiro gets to publish on the Huffington Post, (maybe beginning to realise it can no longer censor the truth about the apartheid in Israel), excerpts-

Huwaida Arraf:- We were boarded by force. Before we were separated, I saw Navy forces grabbing my husband, Adam, a filmmaker who has made documentaries from Palestine to Darfur, about the neck. Later, I learned that outside of my view, these government-sanctioned pirates pummeled Adam in order to wrest his videocamera from his grasp. Though I know it could not have been easy for him, Adam did not fight back. He was a multi-sport athlete in high school, threw out Manny Ramirez stealing second and is one of those rare individuals who bring a football player’s intensity to peace work. But like the rest of us, Adam insists on using nonviolent means to resist Israel’s military occupation. And though in his widely hailed Cairo speech President Obama made an implicit call for nonviolence as the means to challenge the Israeli occupation, the Obama administration made no public statement on our behalf — nor did it do so three months ago, when my dear friend Bassem Abu Rahme was killed while nonviolently protesting Israeli expansionism in the West Bank that threatens to destroy his village of Bil’in.

Perhaps we were politically inept. Had we sailed toward Iran to offer assistance to civilian protesters there, we would have been a cause celebre if the Iranian government had arrested us. Iran, however, for all its troubles, is not now under foreign occupation as Palestine is. Yet as I watched the demonstrations in Iran, I could not miss the similarities to Palestine’s nonviolent resistance to Israeli occupation. I cannot count the times I have marched peacefully, waving a flag and demanding freedom for my people — with only my voice and my presence as my weapons. And sadly, the number of friends I have lost — killed by Israeli forces as, like Neda Agha-Soltan in Iran, they nonviolently demonstrated for freedom — is becoming too great a pain in my heart.

Adam Shapiro:- In a flurry of activity, we were boarded. Those of us with video cameras bore the brunt of the over-zealous navy forces. We were beaten to break our grasp on the video cameras. I have documented events from Afghanistan to Darfur to various locations around the Middle East, but until then I had never been physically attacked on account of my work. Israel’s military censor continues to hold the evidence and I expect never to retrieve it. With the evidence gone, much of the media have treated the event as though it never occurred. Instead of sailing into Gaza’s bombed and broken port, we were kidnapped at gunpoint, taken to a foreign country, and imprisoned. Instead of delivering toys to children in Azbet Abed Rabbo, where in February I met families living in tents (again) because their homes were left in rubble by Israel’s December-January invasion, we stood at attention for a prison guard to check our cell.

Even President Obama, who seemed so sincere in his Cairo speech, is imprisoned by the status quo of American-Israeli relations that bend American values and interest to the will of a state that is increasingly being labeled internationally with the brand of apartheid. One set of laws for Jews and one set of laws for Palestinians is unacceptable in the 21st century. Washington can only ignore the facts for so long when Israel’s housing minister states, “We can all be bleeding hearts, but I think it is unsuitable [for Jews and Palestinians] to live together [in Israel].”

Friday! Camille- Too Drunk To Fuck

A cover of the Dead Kennedys song by Camille. And remember alcohol abuse is very bad for you whereas fucking is a very healthy activity, so make your choices wisely!

Friday Prayers

A lot going on in Iran, couple of timelines Guardian, Tehran Bureau. Naj who hates Hashemi is impressed!

Construction Industry’s McCarthy Gets Off With Small Fine

Remember this- black lists of left wing activists are traded in order to victimise them- well…

Some of Britain’s leading construction firms subscribed to a secret blacklist of workers which prevented them from getting jobs, a court has heard. More than 40 firms used the database of 3,213 workers – which included details of trade union activity – to vet workers, Knutsford Crown Court heard. Ian Kerr, 66, of Avoncroft Road, Stoke Heath, Worcestershire, has been fined £5,000 for administering the list.

Keer has form as a latter day McCarthy-

Kerr has spent many years compiling databases on workers. He did not wish to comment on a report in the Guardian 15 years ago which said he had been working for the Economic League, a controversial vetting agency which accumulated files on thousands of people it considered subversive between 1919 and 1993.

I said at the time- Will the numerous companies listed… who used his expensive blacklist services be prosecuted?- I am trying to act surprised that not only have none of them have been prosecuted but the single man brought to trial gets a small fine.

Kerr ran the blacklist for up to 15 years. The court heard that accounts showed it was paid £478,000 between 2004 and March 2009.

Still investigations are ongoing, as they say (will the police be helping the ICO?)…

After the hearing, ICO investigator Dave Clancy said the inquiry would continue to see if the companies involved had broken the law. ”We are looking to see if the requirements of the Data Protection Act have been complied with. We will take action in due course,” said Mr Clancy.

George Guy, regional secretary for the construction workers’ union Ucatt, said he was disappointed by the result of the hearing. He said: “The people who provided this information and received it have got off scot free. Some of our members were out of work for years because of this list. They were forced to live in poverty, unable to provide for their families and they had no idea why. We will continue this fight until the companies involved are brought before the courts.”

(ht2 Jim Jay)

Rape Doctrine

Click image for more @HarpyMarx

One might reflect that the crisis of capitalism is allowing those who abhor the public good but worship private profit to reveal their true selves and agendas. Of course there is the gender bias too, so we now find Rape Crisis Centres are under threat not just in North Wales but nationwide. Who does this favour? Well, neoliberals and rapists. Who does this hurt? All who object to rape and those who have experienced it, you might think that would pretty well much cover everyone, but clearly there is a sizeable number of people  (rich and/or men mostly) who are not that concerned with the prevalence of rape in our society. Boris Johnson the Conservative Mayor (really well done there London) gets a quarter of a million pounds a year to write a rubbish weekly column, an amount he referred to as chicken feed. In a just society that money would be taken immediately from him and given to Rape Crisis much as the bonuses paid to financiers should be seized and used to support those made unemployed by City irresponsibility.

Update: This story Capital D mentions also points out the conservative attempts to normalise rape, the Telegraph took an academic paper work in progress titled “Promiscuous men more likely to rape” and totally misrepresented it capping it with the headline “Women who dress provocatively more likely to be raped, claim scientists”, more @Bad Science. Clearly this is no mere lazy journalism, there is an agenda at work here, a counter movement by misogynists and given the prevalence in society, statistically some rapists (and the British Psychological Society don’t exactly cover themselves in glory either, try and act surprised). The research by the Women’s Resource Centre is very disturbing-

Key findings from this research include:

• The combined annual income for Rape Crisis centres in 2006-07 was just over £3.5m. The government spent more than twice this amount on advertising and public relations each week in 2004-05.
• The average annual income for Rape Crisis centres was £81,598, only marginally more than the cost, to the state, of one rape.
• 69% of centres identified that they were unsustainable in the future.
• 79% of grants they received were for one year or less.
• Only 21% of services provided by Rape Crisis are fully funded.
• The total number of average days spent on waiting lists equals 1,929 days – or 5.3 years.
• Rape Crisis is a crucial support service for women with historic experiences of sexual violence (such as childhood sexual abuse), with over three-quarters of service users having experiences of sexual violence that occurred in the past.