HAS THE ARAB SPRING BLOSSOMED?

CAIRO.

This from The Anarchist International:

          We have all observed the emergence in Tunisia of a vast energy that spread to Egypt. In Tunisia as well as Egypt, unstable dictators were unseated. We distrust the people who helped push for these limited goals. Specific people and organizations (such as the April 6 Movement) persistently agitated and organized to implement technocratic capitalism in Tunisia and Egypt. In Tunisia, elections have been held and a new prime minister elected. Now that Tunisia has a reliable capitalist democracy, the actors that exacerbated the insurrection have mysteriously vanished. There is still rebellion and the population knows how to utilize the tools of the democracy-bringers, but the absence of these actors is very clear. In Egypt we see a similar pattern catalyzed by these same actors, fighting for technocratic capitalism.

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DEMOCRACY VIA THE ARMY? I DON'T THINK SO!!

       At the time of the "Arab Spring" in Egypt I wrote up a little post stating that if the Egyptian peole are relying on the army to deliver democracy, they will be sorely disappointed. Think of the authoritarian regime with all its cronies discussing the control of the country with all those high ranking officers, they would be discussing crackdowns and surveillance, and imprisonment of the opposition. Then suddenly when the people rise up, the top ranking military are there defending democracy, it doesn't happen. They are all buddies in the same gang. The army by its structure is an authoritarian machine, democarcy is an anathema to its top brass, they live by power and authority.

To prove a point, this from Labour Start.

        Kamal Abbas, a leading figure in the fight to create independent democratic trade unions in Egypt, has been sentenced to six months in prison for the "crime" of insulting a Mubarak-era hack at an International Labor Organization conference. Abbas is used to such treatment at the hands of the Mubarak regime, which jailed him and tried to crush the Center for Trade Union and Worker Services (CTUWS) which he headed. But the Mubarak era is supposed to be behind us. After all, we are now one year into the Arab Spring.
       The world's trade unions are calling for a massive online mobilization to demand that the charges be dropped.

Please take a moment to click here and then spread the word.

Thank you!

Eric Lee

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STATE REPRESSION.

          Not all Arab Springs lead to sunshine, while the media mainly focuses on Egypt, we should not forget that all across the Arab world there has been people rising up against authority and in most cases this is being met with brutal repression. Messages of solidarity can let those being violently intimidated know that we in other countries are aware of their struggles and will raise our vioces in their support. They are not alone, an injury to one is an injury to all.

  

From LabourStart.

Last spring, while Tunisians and Egyptians celebrated the fall of authoritarian regimes, the people of Bahrain also staged a series of peaceful protests.

They were met by fierce repression. Leaders of the teachers' union were arrested and sentenced to long jail terms.

This weekend, their appeal comes before the courts. The Education International, representing some thirty million unionized teachers around the world, has called for a major online campaign to press the Bahraini government to drop the charges.

You can learn more and send off your message here.
Thanks very much - and please spread the word.

Eric Lee

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FORM A UNION, GET THE SACK???

        Corporate fascism is rampant across the world at the moment, it sees the "crisis" as a wonderful opportunity to slash at the rights and conditions of its work force. Getting people to believe that there is a "crisis" allows them to spout that they must take drastic action. Of course that drastic action is to increase profit margins at the expense of the wages and conditions of those who produce those profits. The parasites want more, and the state is right behind them ready to back them up with legislation.

       This is an appeal from IUF International Union of Food, Agriculture, Restaurant, Catering, Tobacco, and Allied Workers.

         Sheraton's parent Starwood Group, owner of the Four Points, W, aloft, Luxury Collection, Le Méridien, element and Westin brands, has long set the benchmark for global hotel chain profitability, regularly delivering 16% and higher returns to investors. While investors rake in the money and Algeria's elite do their deals at the 5-star Sheraton Club des Pins in the capital Algiers, workers seeking to form a union at the hotel/resort have been dismissed by the hundreds for attempting to form a union in accordance with the law.

Algerian hotel workers have yet to see an 'Arab spring' - you can support their struggle. Click here to send a message to the local and regional corporate management, telling them to respect fundamental human and trade union rights and reinstate immediately and unconditionally all employees dismissed for exercising their rights and supporting a union!

Ron Oswald
General Secretary, IUF

International Union of Food, Agricultural, Hotel, Restaurant, Catering, Tobacco and Allied Workers' Associations (IUF)

8, rampe du Pont-Rouge
1213 Petit Lancy, Switzerland
Tel: +41 22 793 22 33
Fax: +41 22 793 22 38
website: www.iuf.org

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COULD THIS BE THE START OF SOMETING BIG??

        

         Occupy LA begins this Saturday Oct 1st! We are Occupying LA in solidarity with Occupy Wall St. (A Peaceful Occupation)

Starting at 10:00am in Pershing Square, marching to City Hall Map Join Us - Bring a sleeping bag, food, supplies, friends!

         The Middle East protests are applauded by the West, protests have been spreading across Europe and now we have them in New York and Los Angelos, could this be the start of something big? I can't wait to hear the Western media ring out the praises of all those brave people facing the wrath of the state machinery. I don't expect anybody to be shot in the West, just pepper sprayed, roughed-up, beaten and arrested, perhaps a few tasered. However, the West is not totally innocent in the field of bring troops on to the streets to handle unrest, Liverpool and Glasgow can testify to that.

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WHAT IS NATO DOING IN LYBIA?

       As the Western take over of Lybia continues with more than 6,000 NATO attacks on Tripoli so far, and the Western imperialists keep mouthing noises about doing it to protect civilians, we have to ask questions. Why not Syria, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia etc. where civilians are being killed on a daily basis? Why did the West support this particular uprising? The information coming out of Libya doesn't show them as a democratic group. There are reports of them moving into towns and villages and  "cleansing" them of "black" Libyans. These are Libyans who found themselves there because of Libya's previous connection with the slave trade. There have also been reports of looting as they enter towns and villages. Hardly the actions of a movement driven by the desire for true democracy.

The following extract is taken from The Commune and the full article can be read HERE.

       Joe Thorne looks at the evidence, and draws some conclusions.

Libyan Proverb "The calamity of a people is beneficial to others"

             The NATO powers are not intervening in Syria or Bahrain, where pro-democracy movements are also subject to brutal suppression. They did not intervene in Gaza during Cast Lead, or in Tamil Eelam during the offensive which wiped out thousands of Tamils. While millions of dollars are spent on cruise missiles and aerial bombing, UNICEF, the same powers in their guise as protectors of children, say they are worried that because of insufficient resources to deal with famine “65,000 children in Kenya alone are at acute risk of dying.” Indeed, “Britain trained and equipped some of the Libyan special forces who inflicted such horrors on cities like Misrata. Western states continue to train Saudi forces, and this may well have much the same effect.”

We don’t need to labour the point: the NATO powers are not ‘humanitarians’, their motives are not ‘humanitarian’, and what they do has nothing to do with the defence of human life. Could it be the case that their malign motives are a given, but the objective outcome of their policy may nonetheless be welcome? It was not the case in Kosovo or Iraq. The point of reminding ourselves of NATO’s hypocrisy is not just that they are hypocrites: it is to understand how the specific, very much non-humanitarian, objectives of the NATO powers will play out in their actual policy in the coming weeks, months, and years.

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SYRIA - TAKING SIDES vs IMPERIALIST INTERVENTION.

         An extract from an interesting article from The International Centre, it is well worth reading the whole article as it does throw some light on the very complex situation in the Middle East and the even more complex and seemingly contradictory attitude of the West.

         U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates’ declared on March 25, 2011 – that there are 3 repressive regimes in the Middle East that must be condemned – Syria, Libya and Iran. Why is the U.S. targeting these particular countries? The progressive political movement must avoid being just an echo and a justification of Pentagon war policy, especially whenever any developing country is in the cross hairs of a U.S. attack.

        Consider: isn't Israel a criminally repressive regime against the Palestinian population? Aren't Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, United Arab Emirates, Morocco, Jordan, Yemen, Bahrain, Qatar, Oman, Pakistan, Iraq, Afghanistan repressive regimes, military dictatorships and/or corrupt monarchies? All of these brutally repressive regimes have killed of thousands of their own population and could not survive one day with out decades of U.S. military, economic, diplomatic and political support. Is the U.S., with the largest prison population in the world and more weapons than the rest of the world put together, a repressive regime? It is the source of repression, destabilization, dictatorships and wars.

 

         It is within this context that progressives must view the demonstrations that have been taking place for two months against the Bashir Assad government in Syria. The regime has both acknowledged that reforms are essential and responded with force. The actual character and the social forces involved in these demonstrations remains unclear, as does the political direction of the Syrian opposition.

          The events in Syria are connected to the social explosion shaking the Arab world. Washington and all the old regimes tied to it in the region are trying desperately to manage and contain this still unfolding mass upheaval into channels that do not threaten their domination of the region.

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       BLAIR MOUNTAIN, WEST VIRGINIA.

        There isn't a country in the world that does not have people protesting against what this corporate fascist system is doing to our lives and the planet, which is the future lives of our kids and grandkids. From the "Arab Spring" to the Pan-European protests agains the plunder of our public assets, from groups objecting to the rape of the planet to the cruelty to animals and all this vandalism is done in the name of profit for the rich, parasitical corporate shareholders. It is time that we all joined hands and made it one massive movement against the system that breeds poverty for the many and the eventual demise of the planet.

A REPORT FROM, MARMET, West Virginia—

      On Monday morning, hundreds of people began a weeklong, 50-mile trek to protest mountaintop removal mining and defend labor rights. Nearly 250 marchers and supporters of the Appalachia Rising March on Blair Mountain gathered at the Marmet Baseball Field for a rally on Monday morning. An hour later, shortly after 10 a.m., they headed toward Blair, a town near the Boone-Logan county border, where their march will end on Friday.

SOLIDARITY.

     As the marchers began, several people driving through Marmet honked their horns in support of the marchers. Two small groups of counter-demonstrators held up signs including “Friends of Coal” and “I Love Coal.”

      The marchers plan to walk the same route more than 10,000 coal miners took between Aug. 24 and Sept. 4, 1921, marching to Logan County to organize non-union miners.

 

        The 1921 March on Blair Mountain was the biggest armed conflict in American labor history. After several days of battles, federal troops arrived and ended the conflict.

Read the rest of the story and see video from the Charleston Gazette here

Find out how to join the march here

http://earthfirstnews.wordpress.com/

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THE SCOTS WHO FOUGHT IN SPAIN.

    

       Another wee bit of Scots history that is well worth remembering, though today don't expect the fascists to come marching down the street with jackboots. This time they have arrived in suits in offices of the corporate world where they dictate their policies to their subservient front line troops, the parliamentary party political system. It was Mussolini who said that it should not be called Fascism but Corporatism, as it is the coming together of the corporate world and the state. I'm sure if he were around now, he would be delighted to see its progress. It has arrived and it is world wide. Our only hope is more of the "Arab Spring" across the globe. More than ever solidarity is not to do with your work-place and community, it is to do with our class across the globe. Corporatism is world wide, our resistance has to be the same.

Photo by Capa.

More of this series  HERE.        

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A SOLD REVOLUTION???

        As Cameron's battle for Libya thunders on we have to admit that it bears no resemblance to the original idea of an “Arab Spring” What was originally floated as a wee umbrella to help the pro-democracy uprising in Libya get on with the their revolution, has now changed into a NATO attack on the government of a North African country. In the regime change being sought in Libya, we have to ask the question, “who is doing the changing” and why? The Libyan people would do well to remember that there is no such think in politics as a free lunch, and also, that NATO and the Europeans are not spending a projected £1 billion in a six month military expenditure out of benevolence towards a North African pro-democracy movement. The European track record in that part of the world does not read of benevolence and democracy.

         The best that the Libyans can expect out of this is a partitioned country, or a civil war. In either case the infrastructure of their country will be in tatters, they will be dependent on the West for loans in an attempt to reconstruct the country. The West will have it troops in, just to keep the peace, of course, and it will also have control of the oil. The Libyans meanwhile can get on as best they can with their civil war or partitioned country.

      Is there anybody out there that believes that the Libyan people will come out of this the victors? When the "rebels"called in a foreign imperialist military power, they sold their revolution. They may get rid of Gaddafi, but their new masters, the West backed up by NATO will prove to be just as ruthless and perhaps even more so. When it comes to oil and profit, people come away down the scale.

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