A call from Palestinians in Palestine to join the Global March to Jerusalem
29 January 2012 | Global March to Jerusalem
Join us as we intensify our struggle against forced exile and the system of Israeli apartheid on Land Day 2012. We Palestinians have been ethnically cleansed and uprooted from our lands starting in the 1948 Nakba (Catastrophe) which resulted in the creation of the millions of refugees who are now living in the Diaspora. Nineteen years later, in 1967, Israel illegally annexed East-Jerusalem and the West Bank in a move which marked the Naksa (Setback), and subjected the remaining Palestinians to a brutal military occupation.
We are now in 2012, and we are still living in exile or under the Israeli apartheid regime, the illegal construction of colonial settlements is confiscating the remaining parts of Palestine, the Separation Wall divides and separates villages and towns, and Palestinians in Jerusalem are threatened with being driven out of their homes and lands for the mere purpose of the Judaization of this sacred city.
But we will not leave. We will stand and be firm. We will not permit thousands of years of our attachment to our land and our Holy City to be broken. We therefore invite and call upon all persons of courage and good will around the world to stand up and walk, with your fellow human beings, regardless of religion, of political affiliation – to stand up as responsible human beings and walk peacefully towards Jerusalem on the 30th of March, 2012.
We therefore ask all our brothers and sisters throughout the world to join Palestinians on Land Day, 30 March, 2011, in challenging the barriers, borders and procedures that separate Palestinians from Jerusalem and from their homes and lands in all of historic Palestine.
Related articles
- World Civilian Coalition Gathers for Global March to Jerusalem (alethonews.wordpress.com)
- Communique No. 1 of “The Global March to Jerusalem” (alethonews.wordpress.com)
We Have Every Right to Be Furious About ACTA
By Maira Sutton and Parker Higgins | EFF | January 27, 2012
If there’s one thing that encapsulates what’s wrong with the way government functions today, ACTA is it. You wouldn’t know it from the name, but the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement is a plurilateral agreement designed to broaden and extend existing intellectual property (IP) enforcement laws to the Internet. While it was only negotiated between a few countries,1 it has global consequences. First because it will create new rules for the Internet, and second, because its standards will be applied to other countries through the U.S.’s annual Special 301 process. Negotiated in secret, ACTA bypassed checks and balances of existing international IP norm-setting bodies, without any meaningful input from national parliaments, policymakers, or their citizens. Worse still, the agreement creates a new global institution, an “ACTA Committee” to oversee its implementation and interpretation that will be made up of unelected members with no legal obligation to be transparent in their proceedings. Both in substance and in process, ACTA embodies an outdated top-down, arbitrary approach to government that is out of step with modern notions of participatory democracy.
The EU and 22 of its 27 member states signed ACTA yesterday in Tokyo. This news is neither momentous nor surprising. This is but the latest step in more than three years of non-transparent negotiations. In December, the Council of the European Union—one of the European Union’s two legislative bodies, composed of executives from the 27 EU member states—adopted ACTA during a completely unrelated meeting on agriculture and fisheries. Of course, this is not the end of the story in the EU. For ACTA to be adopted as EU law, the European Parliament has to vote on whether to accept or reject it.
In the U.S., there are growing concerns about the constitutionality of negotiating ACTA as a “sole executive agreement”. This is not just a semantic argument. If ACTA were categorized as a treaty, it would have to be ratified by the Senate. But the USTR and the Administration have consistently maintained that ACTA is a sole executive agreement negotiated under the President’s power. On that theory, it does not need Congressional approval and thus ACTA already became binding on the US government when Ambassador Ron Kirk signed it last October.
But leading US Constitutional Scholars disagree. Professors Jack Goldsmith and Larry Lessig, questioned the Constitutionality of the executive agreement classification in 2010:
The president has no independent constitutional authority over intellectual property or communications policy, and there is no long historical practice of making sole executive agreements in this area. To the contrary, the Constitution gives primary authority over these matters to Congress, which is charged with making laws that regulate foreign commerce and intellectual property.2
(And by the way, we agree [pdf].)
Senator Ron Wyden has been asking these questions for years, first demanding an explanation from USTR ambassador Ron Kirk, President Obama, and now the administration’s top international law expert Harold Koh. The distinction between executive agreement and treaty should not be lost on this administration: as a Senator, Vice President Joe Biden used the same argument to require the Bush administration to seek Senate approval for an arms reduction agreement.
Public interest groups and informed politicians have long lamented these problems with ACTA. But the impact of dubious backroom law-drafting is getting fresh attention in light of the powerful global opposition movement that has emerged out of last week’s Internet blackout protests. Activists and netizens all around the world have woken up to the dangers of overbroad enforcement law proposals drafted by monopoly industry lobbyists, and rushed into law through strategic lobbying by the same corporate interests that backed SOPA and PIPA. Tens of thousands are protesting in the streets in Poland as their ambassador signed the agreement in Tokyo. The EU Parliament’s website and others have come under attack for their involvement in these laws. The Member of the European Parliament who was appointed to be the rapporteur for ACTA in the European Parliament, Kader Arif, quit yesterday in protest. In a statement he said:
I want to denounce in the strongest possible manner the entire process that led to the signature of this agreement: no inclusion of civil society organisations, a lack of transparency from the start of the negotiations, repeated postponing of the signature of the text without an explanation being ever given, exclusion of the EU Parliament’s demands that were expressed on several occasions in our assembly…
…This agreement might have major consequences on citizens’ lives, and still, everything is being done to prevent the European Parliament from having its say in this matter. That is why today, as I release this report for which I was in charge, I want to send a strong signal and alert the public opinion about this unacceptable situation. I will not take part in this masquerade.
We couldn’t have said it better ourselves. ACTA may have been signed by public officials, but it’s crystal clear that they are not representing the public interest.
It is now up to the collective will of the public to decide what to do next, and for individuals to ask themselves what they want their government to look like. Do you believe in democracy? Do you believe that laws should be made to reflect our collective best interests, formulated through an open transparent process? One that allows everyone, from experts to civil society members, to analyze, question and probe an agreement that will lead to laws that will impact potentially billions of lives? If we don’t do anything now, this agreement is going to crawl itself into power. With the future at stake like this, it’s never too late to fight.
~
If you live in Europe, follow these links to learn how you can take immediate action and stay informed on the latest updates:
La Quadrature du Net (@laquadrature): How to Act Against ACTA
European Digital Rights (@EDRi_org): Stop ACTA!
Open Rights Group (@OpenRightsGroup): ACTA: signed, not yet sealed – now it’s up to us
Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure (@FFII): ACTA Blog
For those in the U.S., you can demonstrate your opposition to the dubious decision to negotiate ACTA as a sole executive agreement to bypass proper congressional review by signing this petition on the whitehouse.gov website, demanding the Administration submit ACTA to the Senate for approval.
EFF will continue to monitor ACTA’s global implementation and watch for efforts to use ACTA to broaden US enforcement powers.
- 1. United States, Australia, Canada, Japan, Morocco, New Zealand, Singapore, and South Korea
- 2. (See also here [pdf] and here).
Related articles
- ACTA anger: Protesters hopeful as official resigns (rt.com)
- Follow Up of the Day: EU ACTA Chief Resigns (geeks.thedailywh.at)
LA protesters rally against tax dodgers
Press TV – January 26, 2012
Hundreds of protesters in Los Angeles have taken out to the streets of Hollywood to rally against loopholes in legislation on corporate tax in the United States, Press TV reports.
The protesters, including unemployed workers, members of labor unions and “Occupy LA” activists, staged the rally to show their anger at a recent report showing that 249 of the country’s largest and most profitable corporations paid less than the US corporate tax rate.
The protesters said local communities are unable to afford vital public services such as health care and services provided by police officers, fire fighters due to the failure of these rich corporations to pay their fair share of taxes.
Demonstrators occupied one of Hollywood’s busiest intersections, forcing police to order them to disperse. Protesters say the display was necessary to make sure people understand what is going on in the US.
Jacob Hay, one of the organizers of the rally, told Press TV that the protest is targeting companies such as shipping giant FedEx, which he says is one of the largest corporate tax dodgers in America.
“Over the last few years they paid less than one percent in federal taxes despite earning 5.2 billion (dollars),” Hay said.
Between 2008 and 2010, FedEx spent USD 46,000 a day lobbying in the Congress, which is about USD 14 million more than it paid in taxes, Hay added.
Protesters say FedEx is just one of the hundreds of corporations that are taking advantage of Americans.
A recent study, conducted by Citizens for Tax Justice and the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, shows that 30 US companies are paying no federal taxes at all.
Related articles
- OWS knocks on US billionaires’ doors (alethonews.wordpress.com)
- 29 Companies That Paid Millions For Lobbying (And Didn’t Pay Taxes) (forbes.com)
Lying About the Harlem Protest Against Obama
A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Glen Ford | January 24, 2012
Last Thursday’s demonstration, in New York’s Harlem, against President Obama’s foreign and domestic policies was a great success, with about 400 protesters massed across the street from an Obama fundraiser at the Apollo Theater. But, you would not know that from reading the Daily Kos or In These Times, or from watching Democracy Now! That’s because these outfits represent the left flank of Obama’s apologists and protectors, whose self-assigned job is to perpetuate the fantasy that the First Black President is not a servant of Wall Street and the Pentagon. These publications and programs are also in thrall to another fantasy: that they have some kind of entree or influence with the Obama administration, when in fact, this White House is an annex of finance capital.
Nellie Bailey, the veteran Harlem organizer and member of Occupy Harlem, has already set the record straight: that this was a Black-led demonstration called for by Occupy Harlem, which enlisted the support of the larger Occupy Movement, Stop Stop-and-Frisk, MoveOn, the Black Is Back Coalition, and other progressive organizations. The turnout was larger than even the organizers had hoped, and heavily Black and Latino. But Democracy Now!, whose politics has undergone a palpable turn to the right during Obama’s time in office, told its audience that only about 100 people protested, when in reality, the MoveOn section of the demonstration alone approached that number. In this sense, Democracy Now! is worse than the police at reporting demonstrations it doesn’t support.
Daily Kos, which often behaves like an arm of the administration, published the rantings of someone calling himself Brooklyn Bad Boy, who admits he isn’t a “fan of street protests” but goes ballistic over the effrontery of protesting Obama. He claims the demonstrators ignore the pro-banker policies of Republican candidates. But then, the Brooklyn Bad Boy doesn’t show up at too many demonstrations, by his own admission, so how would he know? No matter, his pro-Obama stance qualifies for space on Daily Kos.
Allison Kilkenny’s In These Times article was the most insidious example of a hit-piece. She offered no crowd estimate, but made reference to a “handful” of Occupy Wall Street activists, thus belittling the turnout. Much worse, Kilkenny highlighted the uninvited presence of a few Lyndon LaRouche supporters in order to tar the whole demonstration – as if Occupy Harlem can dictate who shows up on the street. Then Kilkenny – a white woman – argues that white people from Occupy Wall Street should have stayed away from Harlem, on the grounds that their presence did not take “into account the city’s tense race relations” and the fierce gentrification of the neighborhood – gentrification fueled by Wall Street bankers.
As Occupy Harlem’s Nellie Bailey writes, Kilkenny is talking like old school southern white racists, accusing whites in Occupy Wall Street of being “outside agitators.” Kilkenny doesn’t think Black progressives have the right to ask white and Latino progressives to attend Black-led demonstrations in Black neighborhoods. She wants a segregated Occupy Wall Street movement, in which Blacks that oppose Obama’s corporate policies would get no meaningful solidarity from whites in the movement. Or, maybe she’ll just say anything to avoid confronting the corporate president.
BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com.
Zionist fabrications, smears intensify ahead of Penn BDS conference
Does this look like “incitement” to you?
By Ali Abunimah | The Electronic Intifada | January 24, 2012
In the run-up to the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) conference at the University of Pennsylvania in early February, at which I will be spearking, the defamation and fabrication machines of anti-Palestinian groups have gone into over-drive.
In December, StandWithUS attempted to smear me as an “anti-Semite” with fabricated quotes.
And just yesterday, my colleague Ben White was subjected to prominent smears that he is an “anti-Semite” in the Israeli press. That in turn is part of an escalating campaign against human rights and equality champion Haneen Zoabi.
The latest smear against me comes in a column by Emily Schrader in The College Fix which slyly accuses me of “incitement to violence against Israelis.” Schrader is identified only as “a senior at the University of Southern California.” Here’s what Schrader writes:
Among the presenters scheduled to speak are Palestinian human rights attorney Noura Erakat, Jewish-American author Anna Baltzer, and the keynote speaker, co-founder of Electronic Intifada, Ali Abunimah. Abunimah in particular is highly controversial, having repeatedly condemned a two-state solution, and having gone on record with comments that sound a great deal like incitement to violence against Israelis.
In 2002 he told the Washington Post, “If Israel is going to maintain a military occupation over millions of people by nothing but brute force, then no power on earth is going to stop some of these occupied people responding in kind. The only way to end the violence is to end the occupation.”
It is assumed that by “occupied territories” Abunimah is referring to the land acquired by Israel in the 1967 war. But he ignores the fact that there were a remarkable number of terror attacks against the Jewish state prior to Israel’s acquisition of the “occupied” territories.
This quote is taken from the transcript of online chat I did with Washington Post readers on 8 May 2002, at the height of the second Intifada. It makes me chuckle to think that the writer had to go back ten years to find a quote that she could distort into a smear. Seriously Emily, 2002?
Here’s the first exchange in the transcript:
Minneapolis, Minn.: Don’t suicide bombers prevent any prospect peace process from being successful?
Islam forbids suicide – then why do suicide bombers commit this act in the name of religion?
Ali Abunimah: I think that all violence against innocent civilians diminishes the prospects of peace, and this is certainly true of suicide bombings like the one we just saw. Such bombings are horrific and need to stop. What we need to add however is that most of the violence directed against innocent civilians has come from Israel. While several hundred innocent Israelis have been killed by Palestinians, five times as many innocent Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces. Israel says that this is merely an “accident” and that it is acting in self-defense. Every human rights group that has examined Israel’s actions, however, has found very deliberate targeting of civilians, wanton and deliberate use of force, and other grave abuses, such as torture. We will never know the full truth of what happened in Jenin because Israel blocked the UN Security Council-mandated inquiry, but both Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch found evidence of Israeli war crimes. All of this Israeli violence which is designed to maintain Israel’s military occupation of 3.5 million Palestinians is what is provoking and producing the violence. As long as Israeli chooses violence as its only way of addressing the Palestinians, then there will always be some Palestinians who choose violence in response. The only way to break this devastating cycle is a political process that quickly ends Israel’s occupation and gives the Palestinians their freedom.
Does that sound like “incitement” to you? If you read through the rest of the transcript let me know if you find anything else that fits the description.
Who is behind this?
Schrader it turns out, learns from the best. Here she endorses the “Israel Advocacy Mission” of Christians United for Israel (CUFI), a group founded and run by the fanatically Islamophobic Pastor John Hagee.
Oh, and Schrader apparently works for notorious quote fabricators StandWithUs.
Why do they do it?
It has become more and more clear that as the message is getting out that BDS is a tactic to help bring about universal human rights, it is very difficult for anti-Palestinian groups to defame us using the standard stereotypes of violent, angry terrorists that Israel has relied on for so long.
So increasingly pro-Israel advocates must resort to outright fabrications and laughable distortions in the hope that if a lie is repeated enough it will become the truth.
But the amateurish way these lies and fabrications are done and the speed with which they are exposed only discredits their authors and strengthens us.
Related articles
- Right-wing attack group caught fabricating quotes in effort to smear critics of Israel (alethonews.wordpress.com)
- Israeli Consul General wants to rescue US town from ‘foreign’ influence (alethonews.wordpress.com)
- Olympia Food Co-op fights back against Israel-backed anti-boycott lawsuit (alethonews.wordpress.com)
- In blow to Israel, French BDS activists acquitted of crime in calling for boycott (alethonews.wordpress.com)
New Sabra hummus ad uses images of Arabs, Africans to cover up Israel army connection
By Ali Abunimah | The Electronic Intifada | January 24, 2012
The Strauss Group, the company that openly supports the Israeli army and makes Sabra brand hummus, is trying a new advertising strategy to hide its Israeli connections and combat a growing boycott movement.
It is to depict Arabs and Muslims in its ads as a form of cover. Should we call this “Arabwashing?”
An EI reader wrote to us this week after seeing the ad on a children’s cable channel in the US:
On Nick Jr. this morning they had a commercial with hijabi women [Muslim women wearing a head covering] in it and I was excited to see that! They showed some other multicultural people (I remember a rastafarian looking group) and back to the Muslims weighing chickpeas etc. Everyone gathers at a huge table in a beautiful field and they reveal the commercial is for Sabra hummus.
The 30-second ad is called “Sabra World Table” and can be found on YouTube.
Stock characters at the service of consumer desires
The ad begins with a young, blonde woman ringing a bell outside a beautiful suburban home – this presumably is the person with whom the ad viewer is supposed to identify.
As she rings the bell, an Arab woman in a far-away market place hears it and is summoned to action, rather like a genie hearing the call of its master. The marketplace looks strikingly like the markets of Hebron or the Old City of Jerusalem, which Israel has invaded, settled and done its best to place off limits to indigenous Palestinian inhabitants, merchants and customers.
Then another man, who looks like a character from Fiddler on the Roof hears the bell in what appears to be a caricature of an east European shtetl – except that he lifts up a basket of olives.
Other “colorful” ethnic characters – including Africans and Asians – leap into action at the sound of the white woman’s bell and bring “the fresh flavors of the world” to her suburban backyard.
The boycott is biting Sabra hummus
There’s a number of messages from this ad:
- It makes no mention of Israel, even though the Strauss Group notoriously supports the Givati and Golani brigades of the Israeli army which have been responsible for occupation and war crimes over many years.
- It presents hummus, Sabra’s main product, as simultaneously “ethnic” and exotic but also not belonging to any specific culture. This functions as a continuation of Israel’s attempt to appropriate specifically Arab foods, which have typically targeted hummus, falafel, maftoul (“Israeli coucous”) and most recently Palestine’s traditional olive oil culture and production and to erase their origins.
- The presentation of Sabra as harmonious with a happy feast among people of every background is grossly inconguous given the reality of rampant racism against Africans in Israel, and the continued ethnic cleansing of Palestinians whose traditional ways of life this ad both caricatures and purports to celebrate.
The ad also indicates that the growing movement to boycott Sabra over its support for the Israeli army is having an impact – hence this sort of desperate messaging.
Students all over the US have raised awareness about Sabra’s support for the Israeli army. In May last year, for example, students at Chicago’s DePaul University voted by a huge margin to ban Sabra hummus.
Most recently, Illinois high school student Nadine Darwish wrote about her successful effort to have her school offer an ethical alternative to Sabra-brand hummus.
Related articles
- This is the editorial I was *planning* on turning in, regarding Sabra. (palestiniandreamer.wordpress.com)
Veolia must stop assisting the occupier and leave Jerusalem, says Hamas spokesperson
By Adri Nieuwhof | The Electronic Intifada | January 24, 2012
On his visit to Switzerland, Hamas spokesperson Mushir al-Masri unequivocally condemned the Jerusalem Light Rail project. French companies Veolia and Alstom should stop assisting the occupier and leave Jerusalem, he said.
Al-Masri headed a delegation of members of the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC) to the Inter-Parliamentary Union in Geneva. The Electronic Intifada reported on the first official visit of Hamas members to a European country since the 2006 PLC elections. I interviewed Al-Masri on Thursday, 19 January, about his views on the Israeli Jerusalem Light Rail project.
The first line of the light rail connects West Jerusalem with the illegal settlements of Pisgat Ze’ev and French Hill in occupied Palestinian East Jerusalem. Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank and the annexation of East Jerusalem are illegal under international law. This status has been confirmed repeatedly by numerous UN resolutions and the 2004 advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice on Israel’s wall in the occupied West Bank.
I wrote about the negative impact of the light rail on Palestinian Shuafat in my blog of 14 December. The first line of the light rail – for which two thousand square meters of land belonging to Shuafat resident Mahmoud al-Mashni have been confiscated – has three stops in Shuafat.
Jerusalem Light Rail stop in Shuafat, 30 December 2011, 11.50 am (Ibrahim Yousef)
According to Al-Masri, “This a dangerous project, well planned by the occupier to maintain, strengthen, change the image of Jerusalem. To destroy the historical monuments of Islam. The aim is to link West Jerusalem to East Jerusalem and to make sure that Jerusalem will be the eternal capital of Israel. It proves that Israel does not believe in peace.”
When I inform him that Veolia repeatedly states that the light rail is important for the Palestinians because they use it, he responds: “Any company that assists the occupier does not contribute to peace. They should leave Jerusalem. They should respect the resolutions of international organizations. Companies that support the occupation violate international law. If Palestinians use the light rail, it is not an argument. They maybe have to use it because it is a means of transport that is available. Veolia should not look for excuses for the occupation.”
Through its spokesperson Al-Masri, Hamas has joined the protests and criticism against the Jerusalem Light Rail and the two French companies involved in it: Veolia and Alstom. Palestinian non-governmental organizations, the PLO, the Arab League, international law experts, solidarity activists, churches, trade unions, city councils, socially responsible investment advisers and pension funds have called on Veolia to end their involvement in Israeli projects in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.
However, Veolia has chosen to continue its collaboration with the Israeli authorities in a project that was developed to serve the needs of the settlers in East Jerusalem. Veolia has therefore been targeted by the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions movement.
Veolia Israel’s CEO Arnon Fishbein commented on Veolia’s attempts to sell off its shares in the light rail to Egged in the Israeli magazine The Marker on 26 January. “There were pressures inside Veolia, because there are many among the group who believe the company lost a lot of contracts because of this project”, he admits. “One way or another, we will never leave a contract in the middle”, says Fishbein. (Translated from Hebrew)
It is unlikely that the deal with Egged will be approved because Israel requires the operator to be a foreign and experienced company. According to The Marker, banks are not happy to entrust the project in the inexperienced hands of Egged.
Fishbein sums up Veolia’s commitment to the Jerusalem Light Rail: “We are not running away from any contract. We made a business agreement. If it would be approved, we’ll be happy to carry on with it. If not – we won’t stop the train.”
Instead of listening to the voice of the Palestinians and respecting decisions of UN bodies, Veolia Israel’s CEO expresses clearly the company’s dedication to a project of the occupying power Israel. The global BDS Movement will therefore continue its activism against Veolia.
Related articles
- Veolia dumps Israel’s waste in Jordan Valley and wins Israeli army contract (alethonews.wordpress.com)
- Veolia Takes Severe Blow As It Fails To Win 485 Million Pound Contract In West London (alethonews.wordpress.com)
- Palestinian Freedom Riders to challenge segregation by riding settler buses to Jerusalem (alethonews.wordpress.com)
London: PROTEST NEXT SATURDAY 28 JAN, 2PM – HANDS OFF IRAN & SYRIA
The first major protest against an attack on Iran and Syria is scheduled for next Saturday, January 28, outside the US Embassy in Grosvenor Square, London.
The prospect of a new war in the Middle East is growing. As well as tightening sanctions, covert operations, assassinations and cyber attacks on Iran there is clear evidence of hostile US troop movements in to the region. The right in the US is pushing hard for intervention and these kinds of provocations could spark war at any time. Meanwhile calls for intervention in Syria are getting louder and, as Jonathan Steele reported in the Guardian this week, there is a NATO backed military build up on Syria’s borders too.
We need to start mobilising the anti-war majority now to swing the argument away from war. We are asking our supporters to do everything possible to publicise this protest and organise other protests and meetings locally.
Invite friends on Facebook – http://on.fb.me/yR9Q3i
Tweet to spread the word – http://twitter.com/#!/STWuk
For more information or to help organise in your area please phone the office on 0207 801 2768.
Connect with the Palestinian Students’ Campaign for Academic Boycott of Israel
23 January 2012 | US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel
A collective of students in Gaza has formed the Palestinian Students’ Campaign for the Academic Boycott of Israel (PSCABI). These students are seeking to expand their collaboration and participation in events and activities with solidarity activists at international universities.
PSCABI members participate in many activities here in Gaza and are heavily involved in supporting the international student solidarity movements, especially with the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions campaigns. PSCABI members frequently write letters out of Gaza, some of which we have listed below, encouraging people to participate in the boycott and thanking people who have supported the Palestinian cause.
PSCABI members are available to share ideas, participate via Skype or other technology in remote events, organize and strategize together, hear about your activities and provide information and narratives as Palestinian university students for your distribution, and provide access to voices speaking directly from besieged Gaza.
If you are interested in:
- communicating with PSCABI
- hosting a Skype conference with a PSCABI member
- developing your organization’s relationship with PSCABI
please contact us at pscabi@usacbi.org.
Past Letters from PSCABI:
Obama Set to Use Military Intervention Against Longshoremen
By Ben Schreiner | Dissident Voice | January 23rd, 2012
A decisive struggle promising to shape the fate of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU), West Coast dockworkers, and all organized labor is swiftly nearing a climax in Longview, Washington.
Within weeks, if not days, the international conglomerate EGT Development will seek to commence operations at its new $200 million export grain terminal at the Port of Longview. In refusing to use ILWU labor, EGT is breaking the precedent in place since the 1930s, which holds that all public port docks up and down the West Coast are to be worked by the ILWU.
As ILWU Local 21 in Longview maintains, the union’s struggle against EGT’s scab facility is indicative of “the fight of working people everywhere.” It is, as the union continues, “a make-or-break struggle for all organized labor.”
Yet, as the ILWU and its allies ready to fight EGT’s union busting, the US military lies in wait to intervene on the behalf of the conglomerate.
As ILWU International President Rob McEllrath disclosed in a January 3 letter:
We have been told that this vessel will be escorted by armed United States Coast Guard, including the use of small vessels and helicopters, from the mouth of the Columbia River to the EGT facility.
The revelation that the Coast Guard (one of the five armed forces of the United States, and the lone military organization within the Department of Homeland Security) will be utilized to guard the EGT ship has drawn outrage and harsh condemnation from many within the labor community. A January 9 resolution from the San Francisco Labor Council, for example, read in part:
This is the first use of the US military to intervene in a labor dispute on the side of management in 40 years—not since the Great 1970 Postal Strike when President Nixon called out the Army and National Guard in an (unsuccessful) attempt to break the strike. The use of the Armed Forces against labor unions is something you expect to see in a police state. This is part of a disturbing trend where the US military, acting as enforcers for the 1%, is poised to be used against our own people, as exemplified by the new law [the National Defense Authorization Act] allowing the military to imprison US citizens without trial…
…We condemn this use of the military as part of a union-busting campaign to lower the cost of labor on the waterfront and destroy the union.
Other labor organizations, meanwhile, have sent letters to President Obama in protest. As a letter sent by the South Central Federation of Labor in Wisconsin states in part:
Use of our tax dollars and our military to assist such union busting is horrifying. Mr. President, as Commander in Chief, we call upon you to order the Coast Guard to stand down, to not interfere on the side of management in this labor dispute.
Mr. Obama’s willingness to deploy military force ought, though, to be of little surprise. Despite his campaign promise to “walk on that picket line with you as President of the United States of America,” Mr. Obama has consistently shown himself to be no champion of organized labor. The president, after all, was all too content with leaving labor’s prized Employee Free Choice Act to unceremoniously rot in a Democratically controlled Congress.
But as President Obama clearly sides with management in Longview, the national AFL-CIO and its president, Richard Trumka, continue to maintain an indifference stance on the whole matter.
For its part, the AFL-CIO has maintained a virtual blackout of the Longview struggle, with no coverage of the dispute appearing on the federation’s website or blog. As a frustrated reader commented on the federation’s blog, “It would be nice if the AFL-CIO Blog gave workers a voice by reporting on the struggle in Longview, Washington by ILWU Local 21.”
Mr. Trumka, on the other hand, has made just one statement on the matter, coming back in July. In it, he deemed the struggle a mere “jurisdictional dispute.” Trumka’s remarks were prompted by an Oregon AFL-CIO Executive Board resolution condemning the actions of International Union of Operating Engineers (IUOE) Local 701—an AFL-CIO affiliate currently crossing ILWU pickets to work the EGT terminal—as “scab labor.”
Given that both unions reside within the national federation, Trumka went on to note that no AFL-CIO body had “the authority to intervene or take sides.” He did clarify, however, that “this should not be construed as a judgment on the merits of the dispute.”
For Trumka, choosing to cloak his muteness in such a technicality may very well stem from the fact that the IUOE provides substantially more in annual membership fees to the AFL-CIO than the ILWU.
But if such a financial incentive is indeed driving Trumka’s public indifference, it is rather shortsighted. For no matter the national AFL-CIO’s apathy, the struggle in Longview is proving to be a rather seminal event, bringing together organized labor, the Occupy movement, and an assortment of other activists in a direct fight against corporate greed.
And with such widespread support, coming from both within and without the house of labor, ample incentive and political cover would seemingly be in place for Trumka to step forth and take a firm stand against the jurisdictional raiding and corporate colluding of an AFL-CIO affiliate union.
Yet, as labor activist Harry Kelber writes, AFL-CIO leaders to this very day continue to “prefer a passive membership, rather than a militant one that might call for reforms.” However, continuing to cling to such conservative pragmatism, while ignoring the broad working class militancy and solidarity presently unfolding around the Longview struggle, is a posture Trumka can ill afford to maintain. For in doing so, Trumka only promises to relegate the AFL-CIO to further irrelevancy.
Thus, as President-“I’ll walk on that picket line with you”-Obama readies to send in the military against longshoremen in Longview, the time has come for all to take sides. The struggle can no longer be credibly held as a jurisdictional matter; rather, it is a fight for all organized labor. So, in the words of Florence Reece, the time has come to ask Mr. Trumka: Which side are you on?
Ben Schreiner is a freelance writer living in Salem, Oregon. He may be reached at: bnschreiner@gmail.com.
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From the Archives
Alarmist climate science as a textbook example of groupthink
By Paul MacRae | May 1, 2012
A while ago, I received an email from a friend who asked:
How can many, many respected, competitive, independent science folks be so wrong about [global warming] (if your [skeptical] premise is correct). I don’t think it could be a conspiracy, or incompetence. … Has there ever been another case when so many ‘leading’ scientific minds got it so wrong?
The answer to the second part of my friend’s question—“Has there ever been another case where so many ‘leading’ scientific minds got it so wrong?”—is easy. Yes, there are many such cases, both within and outside climate science. In fact, the graveyard of science is littered with the bones of theories that were once thought “certain” (e.g., that the continents can’t “drift,” that Newton’s laws were immutable, and hundreds if not thousands of others).
Science progresses by the overturning of theories once thought “certain.” … continue
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