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).