Vassilis Palaiokostas letter to the media
31/01/2010 rioter.info

Vassilis Palaiokostas is on the run, after his escape with a helicopter from Korydallos prison, on Feb. 22/2009, accused for robbing banks and kidnapping industrialists. It is worth to say, he has never harmed human life, not even cop lives to avoid an arrest.

“On the occasion of the upcoming jury on the kidnapping of the industrialist G. Mylonas, that begins on Tuesday February 2, I would like to clarify certain issues.

Through different periods of my life I have been a first line fugitive, nearly 12 years in total an escapee (I hope there’s more of that coming) and 8 years a prisoner.

All those years that I had been and even now that Iam still hunted by the official state, there wasn’t found even one snitch to deliver me to the hands of my prosecutors. Even though, during my first escape, in August 1991, there was also a large reward for that, from the -generous to snitches- Greek state. On the contrary, I met people with troth, honor in their words, and dignity. People that opened their door for me, provided cover and help, often without even minding the risk they took for themselves. People that helped me in hard times for me (as in a prison escape) endangering their own lives, people that prove that in this country there aren’t only resigned, submissive fellows, but also many (so many I am surprised) people that honor the traditions of honor and solidarity to the hunted. Pride people that despise snitching, servitude and the constable.

I publicly express my gratitude to all those remarkable persons for their valuable help and for giving me the joy of having met them.

Two of them are Vaggelis Chrisohoides and Polys Georgiades, each one of them stood by me in his own way, at the time I needed them, without expecting personal gains, but only acted upon their conscience.

Declaring my solidarity to this two young men, the state strangles everyday knowing their only “crime” was their solidarity to the hunted, I would expect to see for once the magnitude the Republic of Greece takes prides in. Because for its petiness, I consider myself more than competent to describe: It’s an Abyss.

I will say nothing more. I only adress to those that care to retain some pleas of justice and dignity. And everyone should do what his sense of honor and his conscience tells him to do.

On 4/14/09, afternoon around 20:00 while driving on the central coastal road of Alepohori, suddenly three cars blocked my way and another two stuck on the back of my own car. Among them was a black Audi A4, a Peugot Rally and an Opel Athens Taxi. Each one of them with three persons (15 in total), all in plain clothes. All of them got instantaneously out, pointing at me, the drivers with H&K MP5 sub-machine guns with double cartridge, nad the other with Glock and H&K U.S.P semi-automatic handguns. I instantly understood these armed mercenaries of the Greek state where on a prowl for blood.

This same moment on my right, through an invisible from the main road, alley, comes another car with the driver standing aghast and stopping on the crossroad with the main road. Without second though I turned the wheels right and let it rip. Slightly hitting the other car (given the alley could barely take my jeap), I got right in the alley without knowing where it gets to. From my initial speeding to getting 20-30 meters in the alley, bullets where dancing on my car’s cabin. Those guys opened fire with their machine guns and handguns aiming right at me (the only thing undamaged was my car’s tires).

From my μeasurable experience in intense conditions, I am more than certain that they shot more than 150 bullets in 15 seconds (the whole scene didn’t last any longer). Most probably, some of them also found the unwary civilian’s car, while he was inside it.

These unscrupulous, blind shooters of EL.AS [transl: the Greek police] where determined to carry out fully the order they had take from their natural and political leaders. Find and kill.

In this case, they can blame their bad luck, since luck is female and cares for the daring. [transl. see latin: "Fortuna Favet Fortubus"]

The reason I refer to this incident is to show the contemptible way the Mass Media report such cases. The car I was riding and left 100 meters from the scene, because the alley was a dead-end, was full of bullets. This fact was not reported and the car never appeared anywhere, it magically disappeared. Just like the other car (hit and possibly with bullet holes), together with its misfortunate owner, the only witness that actually took part in the scene, withous his will ofcourse, watching the whole thing from the begining to the end.

So, instead of inquiring all these important facts to show what exactly happened in that scene, the daring and ingenious reporters of the Greek Mass Media gathered inside the room I was living in, and in exclusive reporting were waving around my unwashed underpants, informing screaming of tension the weak, ignorant, speachless tv-viewer.

This fact reveals clearly the “journalist community’s” compliance to keep silent, essentialy consenting to the criminal activity of EL.AS’ desperados and their head responsibles, in full cooperation with them. “We will allow you to enter the house for an exclusive report, but you ‘ll keep your mouth shut about everything else”. Such was the filthy deal between the two sides. The media would get their money, since underpants worth more in their stockmarket of values than the life of their owner. As long as he is “notorious”. And finally, who cares about how the police acts? If the police and their leadership believe a man just because he is wanted is to be killed, why should we disagree? Whenever we [the Media] needed some information, the police’s head officer provided it -they actually brag about it-. While, the hunted man has no phone. And even if he has one, it will be turned off or without a signal.

This is the way our daring and independant journalists think.

My congratulations, the future belongs to you. May I suggest the two organizations, police and media, could even integrate in own, for functional reasons. It’s both innovative and carries many advantages. Then, it won’t be for nothing that you elected a police correspondent as president of ESIEA (journalists-editors union).

If these ingenious reporters, with the same eagerness the show on mine and not only, underpants, cared to carry a constant control, denouncing to the Greek citizens that:

* 13.000 humans are in a state of captivity (under the pretext of illegality), living a total exploitation of themselves and their families, from the official state. That after passing the symplegades [transl: mythical deadly clashing rock of the argonaut campain] of a corrupt police and an even worst justice system, end up with heavy penalties in medieval conditions, by which this rotten system strives to control and then annihilate whatever dares to make a mockery of it.

* The armed guardians of the Greek state killing in cold-blood citizens (preferably the young) in the middle of the street, in front of the citizen’s own eyes. Humiliating and torturing to death people in the police stations. Setting up wilfully indictments sending “guilty” humans in jail for years. Setting a whole network of criminal activities not controlled by anyone.

* If they really cared to exercise some control over the modern Pirates of the political system, that helped by the gimmickery of the election system and the blessings of the Mass Media take over the Parliament, turning it into the headquarters of full domination on their voters citizens. Into a nest of intertwining interests, dealing transactions, bribes. Into a “terrorist hideout” where the loots from pillaging are divided around. A loot every citizen dares to question, becoming an obstacle in their plans will feel upon him the brutal democratic violence of a blood-thirsty repressive organization. He will feel the revengefulness, the revanchism, and the deep hatred the Greek state has for all those that rejected the status of an obidient citizen that understand his personal liberty as a necessity to do what he’s told to, but remain human with free will and claim an opinion on what’s going on around them with their own actions.

* If they revealed the great responsibility of this criminal organization for the establishment of a police state in Greece, through which they exercise an unbearable psychological violence to the citizen with hundreds of road blocks with cops armed-to-the-teeth with “survivor”-style weaponry, and the same menacing, numb look they had back in the junta days. The thousands of policemen one faces wherever he turns the eye (not to count the undercover ones). The dozens of head-hunters that prowl the mountains acting on their own taste, reminding of the begining of the 20th century, though with a modern name.

* If they denounce these and innumerable other things that de facto cancel the “social state” and “justice state” notions, as their role supposes, then today’s regime, they eagerly guard and name democracy, would be incomparably more humain, qualitative, and certainly more just.

You ‘d now say I am not the most adequate person to give recommendations, even less for matters of the regime.

That’s correct. In the place democracy was born, they can do whatever with her, even burry her if they wish so. It’s a good thing to die where in the place you where born. But, they shouldn’t go hard to the kids when they throw stones to her. They see her old and rotten, it’s stones she’s gonna get.

These insticts are primitive, though inerrable.

Because the kids are more honest and upstanding than the grown-ups.

Nobody would want to grow up just to find a dead body in the closed his parents have been hiding there to eat of her pension. They desire something more than a body in formol, and be sure they ‘re gonna get it, no matter how many dreads you put in their street.

On what concerns me, it is my absolute belief and surely of thousands others conscious people, that the damage caused to the social body by one shiny tv-presenter in one and only news bulletin (preferably the 8 o’ clock one), I can’t make it, even if they give me 10 lives to spare.

What’s the damage my drop-fire gun [transl. use of an old term for light arm guns of the mountain thieves and left-wing insurgents in Greece]. I have never turned it to an other human, much less to an other human’s mind.

Now, why am I with this drop-fire the prosecuted one that risks his life by any enraged death-squad, and those with their lucrative superweapons degenerate and devitalise the spirit of a whole people, leading them to mental necrosis, become my judges and my hunters, is my question too.

On second thoughts maybe the law on weapons should change. Whoever holds a fire-drop gun should be prosecuted for a capital offence!!!

Now, since it’s the first time I intervene with a public statement, I wouldn’t want it to end in a dispiriting way. So, let me add an allegoric enigma-quiz, I find it won’t trouble you much to solve.

What is the name, of a deputy sheriff of some mountainous and remote village of Utah, USA, overjoyed to his award winning by the FBI, for heroically and always risking his life arrested and gave to justice some dangerous elements to the order of his village? Who, apart of that precious award, also fed the ambition to have his triumphous achievement turn into a big Hollywood move, with George Clooney acting as him, something that pissed off his american patrons so that they exiled him, reducing him to the ranks of minister of “Citizens Protection” of some independent Balkan state. Who, to my exclusive information keeps fantacising about and anxiously sweeping for new “troublemakers”!

To make it even easier for you, I can also add some of his favorite words: Democracy, Revolutionary Fund, Ghetto, Communicating Vessels, Destabilization, Zero Tolerance, Organized Crime, They will be arrested and prosevuted.

He is also a devoted fan of snitching and loves “rats” and his hobbies include setting prices for the heads of wanted.

Keeping in mind though, that one of his many qualities is revanchism, I come to clarify that any similarity to real person or events is totally unintended.

Every police reporter that solves the quiz, enters a lottary for an exclusive interview.

My militant regards to all those that don’t surrender the weapons the chose to fight with, for the life they dream of.

PS. Some oil guys, they do rust.”

Vassilis Palaiokostas

Three Pussy Riot members are currently imprisoned and awaiting trial on hooliganism charges, after they performed wearing bright-colored homemade ski masks, inside Moscow's historic Christ the Savior Cathedral in late February and belted out a protest song against church leaders' support for then candidate Vladimir Putin.


Pussy Riot : Statement in Response to Patriarch's Speech on 24/03/2012
26/03/2012

“Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”

Your Holiness, Patriarch-

A fervent and sincere prayer can never be a mockery, no matter in what form it occurs, therefore it cannot be said that we jeered at, or mocked, the shrine.

We are plagued by the thought that the very shrine, which you consider so defiled, is inseparably linked to Putin, who in very words, brought it back to the Church. And because the of our prayer, asking our Holy Mother to drive out those who defile the brightest ideals of human life in Russia and all possible precepts of the Orthodox Faith, you are perceived as a mockery of the sacred.

In prayer it is evoked that , as millions of Christians were seriously grieved that you allowed the Church to become a weapon in a dirty campaign of dirty intrigues, urging the faithful to vote for a man whose crimes are infinitely far from God's Truth. We simply cannot believe the representative of the Heavenly Father if he acts contrary to the values for which Christ was crucified on the cross. As said by Pushkin, “ It is impossible to pray for King Herod; the Mother of God forbids it.”

You were endlessly wrong in saying in your sermon that we do not believe in the power of prayer. Without belief in the power of prayer and of words, we would never have offered our prayers so desperately and fervently, in anticipation of the serve persecution that could be dealt to us and our loved ones. The repressive powers that simply waited for the right moment to take revenge on our group for our tough Civic positions we have taken with our art. The power and truth of our prayer did not shame the Faithful, for surely the faith of a true believer, as the feelings of Christ, are too deep and universal -too filled with love- to be shamed. Our prayer shamed only Putin and his henchmen, and now three women have been thrown in prison, taken away from their young children, and now daily calls for arrests and punishments are issued forth from the higher bureaucracies. It It is Putin -not a believer- who, through domination and division, needs to keep the women in jail.

You say that we believe only in propaganda, the media, lies and slander, money and weapons, but we don't have faith in any of those things, as we have no faith in anything entity equal the brute powers of King Herod. You encouraged the Russian people to vote and pray for these powers, in whose name you have tried to link with prosperity of the Russian land.
First the pervasive and false propaganda on state television wrested from the people a victory for Putin. Now, through outright falsehood opposition and detractors at least is trying to assure the people that women with young children should be kept in the custody for "for violation of the laws of the Church.” On whose side are propaganda, media, lies and slander? On whose side is the belief in money? On which side are the performers of Pussy Riot, whose lives are close to the asceticism necessary for any creative thinking? Or is the belief in money on the side of those who invested the empty values of unprecedented governmental luxury in the code of conduct for any high-ranking man? Who has faith in weapons? Perhaps those who call for the killing in the name of religious feelings? On whose side were the dozens of armed men who, shouting and wielding their weapons, commanded a raid on March 3rd, having been sent to arrest two women suspected to have been in the temple- suspected of having asked Mother of God, loudly, get rid of Putin?

Pussy Riot




Pussy Riot, offshoot of Russian anarchist art group Voina, pisses off both church and state
--deathandtaxesmag.com--
By DJ Pangburn 4 days ago


Over the last few years, Voina, a Russian anarchist art collective, has been rather busy. They’ve painted a cock on a draw bridge; thrown cats inside a Moscow McDonald’s; had an un-simulated “fuck action” in a Russian museum; and overturned cop cars. Such is their reputation that the mysterious street artist Banksy himself bailed out members Oleg Vorotnikov and Leonid Nikolayev.

More recently, an all-female Riot Grrrl offshoot of Voina, Pussy Riot, has been playing impromptu, Dada-esque punk rock shows in various public locations: Red Square, subway stations, a ritzy boutique, amongst others. But it is Pussy Riot’s most recent stunt that is attracting the most attention for the feminist group, recalling the type of response that could only come from heathen-hating Christians.

The group played inside Moscow’s main Russian Orthodox cathedral, in an area usually reserved for priests, calling on the Virgin Mary to chase Vladimir Putin away. Deacon Andrei Kurayev, whose response to the group was at once enlightened and condescending, drew the wrath of the more radical, reactionary strains of Christendom, with one member of a Christian foundation calling for “those bitches” to burn in hell. Divine.

Pussy Riot’s response? They called the church “a tool in dirty electoral intrigues,” while member Nadezhda Tolokonnikova allegedly invited the Orthodox Church spokesman Vsyevolod Chaplin to visit her in jail to debate the group’s actions.

One, of course, has to situate Voina and Pussy Riot within the context of Russia’s so-called democracy. While many artists are politically-neutered or spade, so to speak, Voina and Pussy Riot put their lives on the line with their radical art and calls for liberty. Their work preceded both the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street, and one could seriously argue they helped give birth to a new radical sentiment in Russia. It’s art at it’s finest: something worthy of early 20th century art movements like Dada, Surrealism and Futurism.

Meanwhile, the group’s supporters are protesting the detainment of and possible charges against two group members, Tolokonnikova and Maria Alyokhina, with signs emblazoned with the beautiful double-entendre, “Free Pussy Riot.”

For radical art and politics, the means of communication could not be any more sublime. And I’ll be damned if Pussy Riot isn’t the most interesting band in all the world. Not one American band would have the, well… ovaries to do this work.

Chinese See Communist Land Sales Hurting Mao’s Poor to Pay Rich
November 02, 2011, 5:34 AM EDT - Bloomberg.com

Oct. 24 (Bloomberg) -- Bulldozers razed Li Liguang’s farmhouse four years ago after officials in the Chinese city of Loudi told him the land was needed for a 30,000-seat stadium.

What Li, 28, says they didn’t tell him is that he would be paid a fraction of what his plot was worth and get stuck living in a cinder-block home, looking on as officials do what he never could: Grow rich off his family’s land.

It’s a reversal of one of the core principles of the Communist Revolution. Mao Zedong won the hearts of the masses by redistributing land from rich landlords to penniless peasants. Now, powerful local officials are snatching it back, sometimes violently, to make way for luxury apartment blocks, malls and sports complexes in a debt-fueled building binge.

City governments rely on land sales for much of their revenue because they have few sources of income such as property taxes. They’re increasingly seeking to cash in on real estate prices that have risen 140 percent since 1998 by appropriating land and flipping it to developers for huge profits.

“The high price of land leads to local governments being predatory,” said Andy Xie, an independent economist based in Shanghai who was formerly Morgan Stanley’s chief Asia economist. “China’s land policy is really screwed up.”

The evictions are alarming the nation’s leaders, who have taken steps to tackle the problem and are concerned about social stability. Land disputes are the leading cause of surging unrest across China, according to an official study published in June. The number of so-called mass incidents -- protests, riots, strikes and other disturbances -- doubled in five years to almost 500 a day in 2010, according to Sun Liping, a sociology professor at Beijing’s Tsinghua University.

Final Insult

There’s more to come. Some 60 million farmers will be uprooted over the next two decades as the urbanization that propelled China to the world’s second-largest economy gathers pace, according to an estimate by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing. In many cases, officials take land they don’t use, an August report from the academy said.

That was the final insult for Li. The rice and bean plot his family farmed for generations still lies empty, weeds sprouting from the red earth. Villagers are convinced that the city has sold it to developers, even though they can’t point to any documentation to prove it.

“They flattened the land and still haven’t used it,” says Li, a wiry man with short-cropped hair, sitting inside the hut he built in a garbage-strewn alleyway across a main road from the stadium. “They sold it for I don’t know how many millions of yuan.”

Officials in Loudi, located in central China in Mao’s home province of Hunan, wouldn’t answer questions about whether plots in Li’s village were sold or what they will be used for.

50 Million Evicted

Li is among 50 million farmers who’ve lost their homes over the past three decades since Deng Xiaoping began breaking up Mao’s collectivized farms to make way for factories, roads and airports, according to numbers from the academy. Turning people like him into more economically active citizens is part of an urbanization policy that has swelled city dwellers to about 50 percent of the population, from 21 percent in 1982, according to official census data.

Termed “chaiqian” in Chinese, the demolition and relocation of communities has become increasingly controversial. Cities have been grabbing land to finance operations and pay back or restructure mushrooming debt that reached at least 10.7 trillion yuan ($1.68 trillion) by the end of 2010. Almost a quarter of that is backed by land, according to China’s National Audit Office.

The money paid for the building spree that was designed to maintain China’s economic growth in the wake of the global recession. Loans were obtained through more than 10,000 financing vehicles cities created to get around laws prohibiting them from borrowing, according to a central bank count.

Low Compensation

Cities may have to accelerate land sales as they struggle to repay the debt, said Victor Shih, a professor at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, who studies China’s local- government finances. There’s also an incentive for officials to keep payments to farmers as low as possible, he said.

“Without suppressing land compensation, local governments can’t make the margins to pay back the banks,” Shih said. “In essence, they are the engines of inequality in China. Land development is the redistribution of income from average households to rich households.”

Loudi is one of 186 local authorities from Guangxi on the Vietnamese frontier in the south to Heilongjiang on the Russian border in the north that issued bonds or short-term notes through financing vehicles in the first nine months of this year. Some 105 of them said they engage in “chaiqian,” according to their prospectuses.

Rights Violated

The seizures frequently lead to local officials violating farmers’ rights that the national government has sought to improve since 1998 when it gave them 30-year tenure over their land, said Gao Yu, China director for Landesa, a Seattle-based group formerly known as the Rural Development Institute that studies global land issues.

Rules that prohibit authorities leaving land like Li’s idle for more than two years are also often broken, Gao said. Across China, compensation given to farmers is at least 15 times lower than prices for land sold to development, according to Landesa.

“The local governments earn a lot of money from the price difference between what they compensate farmers and villagers for their land and what they sell to developers,” said Wang Erping, a scholar at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing who studies social unrest. “This is really objectionable, but these governments don’t have any alternative to raise money.”

Collision Course

Land sales make up 30 percent of total local government revenue and in some cities account for more than half, according to Wang Tao, a Hong Kong-based economist for UBS AG.

That’s putting city bosses on a collision course with national leaders who were already struggling to contain lending to local governments and reverse rising property prices. A central government circular in April said some local governments took excessive land for property development, resulting in the forced eviction of farmers. Such evictions are considered a “gross violation of human rights” by the United Nations.

President Hu Jintao said in August that developers should stop using arable land for building new projects, while Premier Wen Jiabao in September criticized the role local officials are playing in land grabs, according to state media.

Premier’s Criticism

“Right now, some areas just brutally destroy farmers’ homes without paying attention to their rights, and put the farmers in apartment blocks,” Wen, 69, said at a symposium in Beijing to discuss the safeguarding of China’s cultural traditions, according to the account in the state media. In March, Wen called for urbanization to be accelerated.

A crackdown has led to 57 officials being punished for 11 demolitions that resulted in deaths of residents so far this year, the government said on Sept. 25.

Videos of people being forced out of their homes, sometimes by gangs wielding sticks, have caused public outrage when posted online on websites.

One farmer from the city of Fuzhou in Jiangxi province, first took his anger out on weibo, China’s version of Twitter. Qian Mingqi wrote that he had lost 2 million yuan because of inadequate compensation after he said officials illegally demolished his home to make way for a highway.

Then, on May 26, he detonated three bombs by government buildings killing himself and two others, the official Xinhua News Agency reported.

Fuzhou’s investment vehicle went to the country’s bond market this year for the first time, raising 800 million yuan to build sewage treatment works and flood control works. In its prospectus, the company said its main business included construction, land development and “resettlement.”

‘Avalanche of Demolitions’

“Forced evictions are one of the biggest sources of public unrest and public dissatisfaction with the government because they are unstoppable,” said Phelim Kine, a senior Asia researcher with New York-based Human Rights Watch. “We’ve seen an avalanche of forced evictions and illegal demolitions.”

The trend is also exacerbating rural-urban wealth disparity that Landesa’s Gao says is the greatest challenge confronting China’s leaders today. Incomes in cities are now more than three times those in rural areas, wider than at any time since Deng started economic reforms.

The government is working on ways to increase farmers’ income, Zhou Qiang, the Communist Party secretary in Hunan Province where Loudi is located, said in an interview in Beijing on Oct. 19. That includes providing skills training to make them employable in cities and ensuring farmers are adequately covered by social security, he said.

Land acquisition and relocation must be done according to law and there are “clear policy and legal provisions” to protect farmers’ interests, he said.

Artificially High prices

One problem is that the value of urban land is artificially inflated because it’s kept scarce by China’s quota of maintaining 1.8 billion mu (120 million hectares) of arable land, says analyst Xie.

Officials in Loudi have run up more than 4 billion yuan in debt, expanding a provincial town into a city of 4 million people with a new railway station, six-lane expressway and a white colonnaded government building.

Where Li and about 70 other villagers for generations tended plots in Dawu village, now sits the freshly built stadium, a bulb-shaped gymnasium and a wavy-glass-covered aquatic center where kids line up to swim.

Family of Nine

Li’s family of nine -- including his wife, first child, parents and brother’s family -- had lived in a 400-square-meter two-story farmhouse on almost a half-acre of land. He said he didn’t worry about feeding them, and he was able to pay for extras by selling his vegetables a couple times a month in the city and doing odd jobs.

“It was a reliable income,” said Li. “Before we had food to eat. Now if I don’t work as a laborer, we don’t have anything.”

Then came the evictions. The sports bureau took about 47 acres of land in Dawu and another village, issuing notices -- and verbal threats -- in 2006 saying it was needed for the stadium.

“They told us that if we didn’t move, they would send a lot of people to destroy our house,” Li said. “If you didn’t agree they would detain you.”

Villagers were initially relocated to the alleyway where they built shanties with tarp and corrugated-tin roofs. The only bright notes are the red scrolls bearing the Chinese characters for good fortune that adorn some front doors.

From the lane, Li can see the stadium gleaming at one end and new luxury high-rise buildings to the other.

Temporary Home

Li’s shelter was supposed to be a temporary home while he builds a house on the 70-square-meter (754 sq. ft) plot the city gave him about 100 meters further south. He said his family of nine received 280,000 yuan in compensation, not enough to finish construction of their new home. Unable to get bank loans, he borrowed 100,000 yuan from family and friends.

That still wasn’t enough, putting Li in a Catch 22: without a loan he can’t finish his house, and without a house he has no collateral for a loan.

Most of Li’s income is spent on groceries, he said. Food inflation in China was running at 13.4 percent in September.

“The renminbi is appreciating everywhere in the world, but in China it’s depreciating,” Li said one late August evening, smoking a White Sand cigarette and sipping bootleg liquor in a restaurant overlooking paddy fields.

Putrid Stream

The only beans the family grows now are cultivated by Li’s mother on a four-square meter plot behind the temporary home, where the stench of a putrid bright green stream hangs in the air. Stooped, with gray hair, she recalls the well water they had access to before that was so clean she could wash with it.

Officials say the development is benefitting Loudi residents as it seeks to cash in on its location on a major high-speed rail route linking Shanghai in the east to Kunming in the west. The stadium was partly funded by a 1.2 billion yuan bond issue in March by the city’s financing vehicle -- Loudi City Construction Investment Group Co. -- that pledged to repay with proceeds from selling land.

“People’s lives have improved,” Yang Haibo, an official at the city’s financing vehicle, said during an interview at his office in June. Yang wouldn’t talk in follow-up calls and the company didn’t respond to faxed requests for comment. The city government also didn’t respond to calls and faxes.

‘Hoarding Land’

Some Dawu villagers say their lives have gotten worse, not better.

Wu Zifei, 27 and a father of two, takes out a compact disc with pictures of his old house one July afternoon in his family’s store in the new Dawu village. Li likes to play cards there with friends on days when they can’t find work.

“The older place was much better,” said Wu, a thin man who waves his arms as he talks. Wu continued to use the old family plot -- which like Li’s has been left unused behind a mound of earth at the edge of the stadium construction site -- until June, when a mudslide killed his crop of corn.

“They are hoarding land, waiting for the prices to rise,” he said. “I really can’t stand the way authorities do things.”

Other Dawu residents say they were left homeless because they weren’t allocated any city land. Zou Fuqiu’s home was demolished in 2010, following an eviction order in August 2009.

“It breaks my heart that they demolished my home,” said Zou, 59, a stout man who rolls his white shirt up above his stomach to cool himself from Hunan’s mid-summer heat. “It was the best house in the village, but they didn’t compensate us accordingly.”

Wife Cried

He went to see the village cadre at his office to plead for land, where he says his wife sat crying beside him for three hours. It was no use. Instead, Zou built a shack on unoccupied wasteland where he hangs two old black and white photos of his parents in revolutionary jackets and a portrait of Mao, near a small Buddhist shrine.

“They tore my house down with no regard for where I would live, but they themselves live in high-class homes,” said Zou of the officials. Behind him in the dusk, a chandelier turns on inside one of the stadium buildings.

Loudi city officials work in a building with five white domes and an archway entrance, nicknamed “the White House” by locals. There have been two separate purges for corruption in the past five years, including the removal of 16 officials in August, according to the official Hunan Daily newspaper.

Hundreds of meters from the main entrance to the building, a small door has a gold plaque that says petitioners can be received there. Petitioning is the practice dating from imperial times by which people take their complaints either to local officials or directly to the capital.

Low Compensation

The compensation that Dawu villagers say they received works out at about 6 percent of what the city was selling land for in 2008, a year after they were evicted. Dawu natives said they received 38,000 yuan per mu, a Chinese measure of land that is about one-sixth of an acre. That’s less than half the average of 85,420 yuan the Loudi city government says it paid, according to a notice on the website of its land resources bureau.

The land is worth many times even the higher figure. Loudi city in 2008 sold its land to developers for 600,000 yuan per mu, according to the bond prospectus. A similar plot to Li’s near the stadium sold in March for 1.2 million yuan per mu, according to the website of the city’s State Land Resources Bureau.

It would take Li 92 years to earn enough to buy back his still-vacant plot at that price based on his present wage rate as a day laborer.

Daily Struggle

Li’s focus is on the daily struggle to feed his family and finish his new home. He wishes officials would start building on his land, giving him the chance to pick up some work. Ultimately, he hopes to use the home as collateral to borrow money to buy a digger so he can earn more money at construction sites.

In his hut, where the only decoration is a vase of yellow plastic flowers and a 2009 calendar celebrating the 60th anniversary of the Communist state, he laments the loss of his old, simpler way of life.

“Our house was not like this before,” he said. “Five years ago I had my own house, and everything surrounding it was mine.”

--Henry Sanderson, Michael Forsythe. With assistance from Bob Ivry in New York and Neil Western in Hong Kong. Editors: Neil Western, Melissa Pozsgay.

To contact Bloomberg News staff for this story: Henry Sanderson in Beijing at hsanderson@bloomberg.net. Michael Forsythe in Beijing at mforsythe@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Melissa Pozsgay at mpozsgay@bloomberg.net. Peter Hirschberg at phirschberg@bloomberg.net Shelley Smith at ssmith118@bloomberg.net

Video shows Phoenix officer slam teen into wall
By AMANDA LEE MYERS
--AP--Friday, May 6, 2011 10:44 AM MST

The Phoenix Police Department has launched a criminal investigation into one of its officers after learning of a YouTube video that shows the on-duty officer slamming an unarmed 15-year-old girl into a wall and her slumping to the ground, a department spokesman said Thursday.


Caught on Tape: Houston Teen Beaten By Police
By OLIVIA KATRANDJIAN
Feb. 3, 2011

A surveillance video shot almost a year ago apparently shows Houston police officers relentlessly beating, kicking and stomping on a teen burglary suspect was just released to the public.

May Day, support Workers Rights, support Labor, support Unions


The happy idea of using a proletarian holiday celebration as a means to attain the eight-hour day was first born in Australia. The workers there decided in 1856 to organize a day of complete stoppage together with meetings and entertainment as a demonstration in favor of the eight-hour day. The day of this celebration was to be April 21. At first, the Australian workers intended this only for the year 1856. But this first celebration had such a strong effect on the proletarian masses of Australia, enlivening them and leading to new agitation, that it was decided to repeat the celebration every year.

In fact, what could give the workers greater courage and faith in their own strength than a mass work stoppage which they had decided themselves? What could give more courage to the eternal slaves of the factories and the workshops than the mustering of their own troops? Thus, the idea of a proletarian celebration was quickly accepted and, from Australia, began to spread to other countries until finally it had conquered the whole proletarian world.

The first to follow the example of the Australian workers were the Americans. In 1886 they decided that May 1 should be the day of universal work stoppage. On this day 200,000 of them left their work and demanded the eight-hour day. Later, police and legal harassment prevented the workers for many years from repeating this [size] demonstration. However in 1888 they renewed their decision and decided that the next celebration would be May 1, 1890.

In the meanwhile, the workers’ movement in Europe had grown strong and animated. The most powerful expression of this movement occurred at the International Workers’ Congress in 1889. At this Congress, attended by four hundred delegates, it was decided that the eight-hour day must be the first demand. Whereupon the delegate of the French unions, the worker Lavigne from Bordeaux, moved that this demand be expressed in all countries through a universal work stoppage. The delegate of the American workers called attention to the decision of his comrades to strike on May 1, 1890, and the Congress decided on this date for the universal proletarian celebration.

In this case, as thirty years before in Australia, the workers really thought only of a one-time demonstration. The Congress decided that the workers of all lands would demonstrate together for the eight-hour day on May 1, 1890. No one spoke of a repetition of the holiday for the next years. Naturally no one could predict the lightning-like way in which this idea would succeed and how quickly it would be adopted by the working classes. However, it was enough to celebrate the May Day simply one time in order that everyone understand and feel that May Day must be a yearly and continuing institution [...].

The first of May demanded the introduction of the eight-hour day. But even after this goal was reached, May Day was not given up. As long as the struggle of the workers against the bourgeoisie and the ruling class continues, as long as all demands are not met, May Day will be the yearly expression of these demands. And, when better days dawn, when the working class of the world has won its deliverance then too humanity will probably celebrate May Day in honor of the bitter struggles and the many sufferings of the past.


Rosa Luxemburg (1894)

MLB Speaks Out
Players, managers, and officials across Major League Baseball have been been courageously speaking out against SB 1070:

Carlos Beltrán (New York Mets–OF)

“I’m against this law. There are a lot of Latinos who come here and try to have a better future. It’s hard for the people who come here from Mexico to this country.” — July 20, NY Daily News

Albert Pujols (St. Louis Cardinals–1B)

“I’m opposed to it. How are you going to tell me that, me being Hispanic, if you stop me and I don’t have my ID, you’re going to arrest me? That can’t be.” — July 12, USA Today

Yovani Gallardo (Milwaukee Brewers–P)

“If the game is in Arizona, I will totally boycott.” — July 12, Associated Press

José Valverde (Detroit Tigers–P)

“To me, it’s the stupidest thing you can ever have. [...] Us Latinos have contributed so much to this country. [...] We’re the ones out there cleaning the streets. Americans don’t want to do that stuff. [...] As a public figure and with the heart I have, this affects me a lot. Because they’re not thinking about the children this effects. We’ve accomplished our goals. But what about the young kids who have only been here for a year or for months? They’re unable to make their way in the world.” — July 12, MLB.com

Miguel Batista (Washington Nationals–P)

“Because I have an accent, you have a right to ask me for my papers? Because I’m not blonde with blue eyes? What do you actually base the stereotype on to have to ask me for my papers?” — July 12, ESPN

Jerry Hairston Jr. (San Diego Padres–2B/SS)

“It’s not right. I can’t imagine my mom — who’s been a U.S. citizen longer than I’ve been alive, who was born and raised in Mexico — being asked to show her papers. I can’t imagine that happening. So it kind of hits home for me.” — July 12, ESPN

Edwin Rodriguez (Florida Marlins–Manager)

“I will tell you, as a minority, I’m concerned about the law.” — July 12, ESPN

Heath Bell (San Diego Padres–P)

“If Adrian is voted in next year and doesn’t go, I wouldn’t be surprised if I wouldn’t go to stick up for my teammate. [...] I have a lot of friends that are not white. Sometimes you need to stick up for your friends and family.” — July 12, ESPN

Jose Bautista (Toronto Blue Jays–OF)

“We have to back up our Latin communities.” — July 12, Associated Press

Joakim Soria (Kansas City Royals–P)

“They could stop me and ask to see my papers. I have to stand with my Latin community on this.” — July 12, Associated Press

Jorge Cantú (Florida Marlins–3B)

“This hits me in the heart. I do not accept it. It’s a shame. It is sad news for my country, but not only Mexicans. Latin people. It’s just a shame for all those people here looking for a better life. They are looking for a better standard of living, and this knocks down their dreams. It is really upsetting.” — May 17, Miami Herald

Augie Ojeda (Arizona Diamondbacks–SS)

“If I leave the park after a game and I get stopped, am I supposed to have papers on me? I don’t think that’s fair.” — May 17, Miami Herald

Michael Young (Texas Rangers–3B)

“You can quote me. It’s a ridiculous law. And it’s an embarrassment for American citizens.” — May 12, Sporting News

Frank Francisco (Texas Rangers–P)

“I put myself in that situation and it is scary. No way you are going to carry your passport everywhere you go because that is a very important document and, if you lose it, you endanger your ability to work. This [law] does not feel like America to me.” — May 12, Sporting News

Alexei Ramírez (Chicago White Sox–SS)

“I’m against it.” — May 6, Sports Illustrated

Adrian Gonzalez (San Diego Padres–1B)

“It’s immoral. They’re violating human rights. In a way, it goes against what this country was built on. This is discrimination. Are they going to pass out a picture saying “You should look like this and you’re fine, but if you don’t, do people have the right to question you?’ That’s profiling.” — May 1, San Diego Union-Tribune

Ozzie Guillén (Chicago White Sox–Manager)

“I’m not going. I have to support my people, people I believe in.” — May 1, NY Post

César Izturis (Baltimore Orioles–SS)

“It’s a bad thing. Now they’re going to go after everybody, not just the people behind the wall. Now they’re going to come out on the street. What if you’re walking on the street with your family and kids? They’re going to go after you.” — May 1, ESPN

Rod Barajas (New York Mets–C)

“If they happen to pull someone over who looks like they are of Latin descent, even if they are a U.S. citizen, that is the first question that is going to be asked. But if a blond-haired, blue-eyed Canadian gets pulled over, do you think they are going to ask for their papers? No.” — May 1, NY Times

Scott Hairston (San Diego Padres–OF)

“I definitely disagree with it, can’t really see anything positive about it, and I just hope it doesn’t lead to a lot of chaos. It just wasn’t necessary to pass a bill like that.” — May 1, San Diego Union-Tribune

Joe Saunders (Los Angeles Angels–OF)

“We’re behind you guys 100%.” — May 1, LA Times

Bobby Abreu (Los Angeles Angels–OF)

“You’re not going to be on the street every time with your passport, because you’re afraid you might lose it.” — May 1, LA Times

Yorvit Torrealba (San Diego Padres–C)

“This is racist stuff. It’s not fair for a young guy who comes here from South America, and just because he has a strong accent, he has to prove on the spot if he’s illegal or not. [...] I don’t see this being right. Why do I want to go play in a place where every time I go to a restaurant and they don’t understand what I’m trying to order, they’re going to ask me for ID first? That’s bull. I come from a crazy country (Venezuela). Now Arizona seems a little bit more crazy.” — May 1, San Diego Union-Tribune

Adrián Beltré (Boston Red Sox–3B)

“For an older guy, we can handle it. But you have guys 17 or 18 years old there for spring training. If they forget their papers, something could happen.” — May 1, FGNPR

José Guillén (Kansas City Royals–DH)

“I’ve never seen anything like that in the United States, and Arizona is part of the United States. I hope police aren’t going to stop every dark-skinned person. It’s kind of like, wow, what’s going on.” — April 30, Yahoo Sports

Kyle McClellan (St. Louis Cardinals–P)

“The All-Star game, it’s going to generate a lot of revenue. Look at what it did here for St. Louis. It was a huge promotion for this city and this club and it’s one of those things where it’s something that would definitely leave a mark on them if we were to pull out of there. It would get a point across.” — April 30, CBS News

MLB Players’ Association President Michael Weiner

“The Major League Baseball Players Association opposes this law as written. We hope that the law is repealed or modified promptly. If the current law goes into effect, the MLBPA will consider additional steps necessary to protect the rights and interests of our members.” — April 30, CNN

2011 Readout of the President's Meeting with Stakeholders on Fixing the Broken Immigration System

The White House
Office of the Press Secretary
For Immediate Release April 19,

In a meeting in the State Dining Room this afternoon, the President and members of his Cabinet and senior staff met with a broad group of business, law enforcement, faith, and former and current elected leaders from across the political spectrum to hear their ideas and suggestions on how to tackle our shared challenge of fixing our nation’s broken immigration system in order to meet our 21st century economic and security needs.

The President reiterated his deep disappointment that Congressional action on immigration reform has stalled and that the DREAM Act failed to pass in the U.S. Senate after passing with a bipartisan majority in the U.S. House in December. The President listened to stakeholders describe a variety of problems that result from the broken system, including: educating the best and brightest but then shipping that talent overseas; concerns over the ability of businesses to reliably hire and retain a legal workforce; and the need to level the playing field for American workers by ending the underground labor market. In addition, local law enforcement officers expressed concern that without reform, enforcing federal immigration laws is a distraction from their important public safety and crime fighting mandates to keep their local communities safe, and faith leaders highlighted the damage to families and communities when families are separated, including parents who are taken away from their U.S. Citizen children.

The President reiterated his commitment to comprehensive immigration reform that both strengthens security at our borders while restoring accountability to the broken immigration system, and pointed out that perpetuating a broken immigration system is not an option if America is to win the future.

The President made it clear that while his Administration continues to improve our legal immigration system, secure our borders, and enhance our immigration enforcement so that it is more effectively and sensibly focusing on criminals, the only way to fix what’s broken about our immigration system is through legislative action in Congress. The President noted that he will continue to work to forge bipartisan consensus and will intensify efforts to lead a civil debate on this issue in the coming weeks and months, but also noted that he cannot be successful if he is leading the debate alone. The President urged meeting participants to take a public and active role to lead a constructive and civil debate on the need to fix the broken immigration system. He stressed that in order to successfully tackle this issue they must bring the debate to communities around the country and involve many sectors of American society in insisting that Congress act to create a system that meets our nation's needs for the 21st century and that upholds America's history as a nation of laws and a nation of immigrants. The President further committed that his Cabinet and White House team will follow up with each participant to maximize the outcome of this meeting in order to elevate the immigration debate.

Workers must unite for better immigration policy
By Richard Trumka - 04/28/11 09:22 AM ET
--thehill.com--

Arizona and Wisconsin may seem like a world apart. But they have more in common than you think. In these states and many others, working people – immigrant and native-born alike – are under fierce attack by corporate-backed politicians.


From Arizona laws that mandate racial profiling to Wisconsin laws that strip workers’ rights to collectively bargain for a middle class way of life, working families everywhere are under assault. Corporate CEOs and the politicians they finance benefit from creating a toxic environment where immigrants, public employees and working men and women are scapegoated for all the problems we face. They tell us immigrants steal our jobs – hoping we forget the millions of American jobs they ship overseas. They say firefighters and policemen are overpaid – hoping we ignore Wall Street’s colossal bonuses, million-dollar salaries and endless corporate greed. They say immigrants don’t pay taxes – hoping we don’t notice that corporations like GE and Exxon Mobil rake in billions in profit and pay nothing in taxes.

Never mind the $11.2 billion in taxes immigrants just paid in 2010 alone. For years, immigrant families have been unfairly targeted and scape-goated. We should never forget that today’s immigrants are tomorrow’s new Americans. The policies and attitudes that divide working people only set us further back.


As we work together to achieve common-sense immigration reform, we must also ensure that today’s immigration enforcement policies treat our nation’s immigrants with the respect they deserve. We need to support them when they take the same steps new immigrants have always taken when they arrive in this country – improving our economy by obtaining an education, enriching our nation’s workplaces by working hard and having a collective voice, and bettering our communities by advocating for safe neighborhoods.





Too many of today’s immigration enforcement policies run counter to these important goals. Last year, ICE deported almost 393,000 people from the U.S.– at a cost of nearly $5 billion. The current administration has deported the highest number of immigrants in the history of the United States—separating mothers from their children, expelling college students and tearing apart America’s working families. When we deport a DREAM Act-eligible student, destroy a unionized workplace, or deport a mother pulled over for going 35 mph in a 25 mph zone because of ICE’s misnamed “Secure Communities” program, we tear up the foundation that allows tomorrow’s new Americans to have the opportunity to achieve their own American success stories and contribute to our great nation.


While President Obama’s commitment to comprehensive immigration reform is vitally important, so much more can and should be done now to help ensure a solid foundation for tomorrow’s new Americans. The president can announce a policy of allowing DREAM Act-eligible young people to stay in America until Congress passes comprehensive immigration legislation – so we can stop deporting the next generation of America’s doctors, teachers and engineers.


President Obama can direct ICE not to interfere in workplaces where workers have fought to improve conditions or are currently doing so. ICE should target employers that exploit workers, not employers trying to do the right thing. And the President can implement a humane and common-sense new prosecutorial discretion policy in keeping with ICE’s existing enforcement priorities.


For five years now, immigrant communities around the country have responded to the scapegoating and broken policies by taking to the streets on May Day to demand fair treatment, respect and a voice. These events have brought out hundreds of thousands of people — immigrants, clergy, and working families – everywhere from small towns to our largest cities. These rallies are driven by the same spirit of activism and commitment that drives working people in Wisconsin and every other community that is now fighting back against partisan, political attacks.


Now, as in past years, working people from Arizona to Wisconsin are standing together on May Day to remind the President and Congress that the fight for workers’ rights and immigrant rights are cut of the same cloth. On May 1, working people – immigrant and native born alike – will speak in one voice to fight for better wages and benefits, job security and safer workplaces for everyone. Together, we urge the President to use his power and provide the leadership to fix these broken immigration policies.


We have a choice to make: Do we want a generation of new Americans who will become our nation’s workers, leaders, neighbors, and voters to succeed? Or the tragedy of denied Americans – immigrants who do the right thing, but are denied the opportunity to become new Americans by our broken immigration policies?

Richard Trumka is the president of the AFL-CIO.

State ignorance confused for State rights
--politico--
SCOTT WONG | 4/27/11 3:13 PM EDT Updated: 4/28/11 12:38

“It is a mistake for states to try to do this piecemeal. We can’t have 50 different immigration laws around the country,” Obama said Tuesday in an interview with Atlanta-based WSB-TV. “Arizona tried this and a federal court already struck them down.”

The ACLU, one of a handful of groups that sued Arizona last year to block the law from taking effect, has vowed to legally challenge attempts by states to pass so-called “copycat” immigration legislation. And other SB 1070 opponents are warning cash-strapped states that they’ll have to dig deep into their coffers to defend the laws.

Thanks to the controversy surrounding the Arizona immigration law that allows authorities to ask for proper documentation if a person appears to be in the country illegally, some Major League Baseball players - many of whom are Hispanic - have said they will boycott the All-Star game if the situation is not resolved.

By Dominic Genetti
Hannibal Courier-Post
Posted Apr 19, 2011 @ 03:07 PM

A note to fans of the Arizona Diamondbacks, bring your cameras to the games and take a lot of pictures because you may not see your favorite player in the All-Star Game.

For those fans who are curious, the “Mid-summer classic” will be held in Phoenix this season but the turnout in the stands won’t be an issue as much as the turnout on the field. Thanks to the controversy surrounding the Arizona immigration law that allows authorities to ask for proper documentation if a person appears to be in the country illegally, some Major League Baseball players - many of whom are Hispanic - have said they will boycott the All-Star game if the situation is not resolved.

And I don’t blame them one bit.

Phoenix is a very diverse city and for a law to be in place that would allow police or any public authority to ask for proper papers is wrong, wrong, wrong. It is racist and stereotypical for lawmakers to even consider such a law and for the stars of Major League Baseball to come out and say that they would boycott the 2011 All-Star game is very noble. It’s one thing for citizens to come out and protest, but when popular athletes of such a diverse game like baseball step up to the plate and say that they won’t participate in the All-Star game just because Arizona government is considering the immigration law is quite the statement. Cardinals first baseman Albert Pujols is one of the players said to be avoiding the game.

But what really grinds my gears is that the head honchos of baseball wouldn’t even take the concerns of fans and players to heart when they said the All-Star Game would not be relocated. The statement will be huge if Hispanic ballplayers stick to their word and avoid the game entirely, but think of the statement that will be made if MLB removed the game from Phoenix all together. It won’t happen.

Big baseball fans like myself have to be reminded from time to time that our widely loved national pastime does have a business side and at this point especially MLB as a business more than likely has put too much money into having the All-Star Game at Phoenix’s Chase Field (the home stadium of the Diamondbacks) and to move the game to another city would be very costly. There are logos, marketing and local events that go into promoting the All-Star Game along with countless other things. A relocation is now, unfortunately, out of the picture.

Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig received a 100,000 signed petition to have the All-Star Game moved out of Arizona - and while I see the business side of his decision to keep the game in Phoenix - the commissioner could’ve at least considered it. Instead he put his foot down immediately and didn’t even go over the pros and cons. The game is scheduled for Phoenix and that’s where it’ll stay. He could’ve told reporters that he’s considering moving the event to another city; Kansas City would’ve been a nice relocation since they’re hosting the game in 2012. And there were plenty of other options. Washington, D.C. hasn’t hosted an All-Star Game since the second generation of the Washington Senators played there before leaving for Texas; the Florida Marlins and Tampa Bay Rays haven’t even hosted an All-Star Game since they came into existence in the ‘90s.

The newer stadiums have been the top picks recently for the All-Star Game, but considering the situation in Arizona, any stadium would’ve done just fine, even if the ballparks in Florida are shared with football and played under a dome. Washington has a new stadium, again, a perfect setting, the nation’s game from the nation’s capitol.

I’m disappointed in Selig because he showed no sensitivity to the issue, but I loudly applaud the Hispanic players. Their absence will say much more than anyone could imagine. I hope a solution comes soon, Monday’s upholding of the Arizona immigration law in federal court in San Francisco already says a lot, but it’s not enough, the law needs to disappear.

You have my sympathy Arizona baseball fans, just be sure to clear the cards in your camera and take tons of snapshots, chances are some of the players that only come to Arizona for one road trip a year won’t be back, even if elected an All-Star.

Address of the International Working Men's Association to Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States of America --marxist.org--
Written: by Marx between November 22 & 29, 1864
First Published: The Bee-Hive Newspaper, No. 169, November 7, 1865;

Sir:

We congratulate the American people upon your re-election by a large majority. If resistance to the Slave Power was the reserved watchword of your first election, the triumphant war cry of your re-election is Death to Slavery.

From the commencement of the titanic American strife the workingmen of Europe felt instinctively that the star-spangled banner carried the destiny of their class. The contest for the territories which opened the dire epopee, was it not to decide whether the virgin soil of immense tracts should be wedded to the labor of the emigrant or prostituted by the tramp of the slave driver?

When an oligarchy of 300,000 slaveholders dared to inscribe, for the first time in the annals of the world, "slavery" on the banner of Armed Revolt, when on the very spots where hardly a century ago the idea of one great Democratic Republic had first sprung up, whence the first Declaration of the Rights of Man was issued, and the first impulse given to the European revolution of the eighteenth century; when on those very spots counterrevolution, with systematic thoroughness, gloried in rescinding "the ideas entertained at the time of the formation of the old constitution", and maintained slavery to be "a beneficent institution", indeed, the old solution of the great problem of "the relation of capital to labor", and cynically proclaimed property in man "the cornerstone of the new edifice" — then the working classes of Europe understood at once, even before the fanatic partisanship of the upper classes for the Confederate gentry had given its dismal warning, that the slaveholders' rebellion was to sound the tocsin for a general holy crusade of property against labor, and that for the men of labor, with their hopes for the future, even their past conquests were at stake in that tremendous conflict on the other side of the Atlantic. Everywhere they bore therefore patiently the hardships imposed upon them by the cotton crisis, opposed enthusiastically the proslavery intervention of their betters — and, from most parts of Europe, contributed their quota of blood to the good cause.

While the workingmen, the true political powers of the North, allowed slavery to defile their own republic, while before the Negro, mastered and sold without his concurrence, they boasted it the highest prerogative of the white-skinned laborer to sell himself and choose his own master, they were unable to attain the true freedom of labor, or to support their European brethren in their struggle for emancipation; but this barrier to progress has been swept off by the red sea of civil war.

The workingmen of Europe feel sure that, as the American War of Independence initiated a new era of ascendancy for the middle class, so the American Antislavery War will do for the working classes. They consider it an earnest of the epoch to come that it fell to the lot of Abraham Lincoln, the single-minded son of the working class, to lead his country through the matchless struggle for the rescue of an enchained race and the reconstruction of a social world. [B]

Signed on behalf of the International Workingmen's Association, the Central Council:

Longmaid, Worley, Whitlock, Fox, Blackmore, Hartwell, Pidgeon, Lucraft, Weston, Dell, Nieass, Shaw, Lake, Buckley, Osbourne, Howell, Carter, Wheeler, Stainsby, Morgan, Grossmith, Dick, Denoual, Jourdain, Morrissot, Leroux, Bordage, Bocquet, Talandier, Dupont, L.Wolff, Aldovrandi, Lama, Solustri, Nusperli, Eccarius, Wolff, Lessner, Pfander, Lochner, Kaub, Bolleter, Rybczinski, Hansen, Schantzenbach, Smales, Cornelius, Petersen, Otto, Bagnagatti, Setacci;

George Odger, President of the Council; P.V. Lubez, Corresponding Secretary for France; Karl Marx, Corresponding Secretary for Germany; G.P. Fontana, Corresponding Secretary for Italy; J.E. Holtorp, Corresponding Secretary for Poland; H.F. Jung, Corresponding Secretary for Switzerland; William R. Cremer, Honorary General Secretary.

18 Greek Street, Soho.

Social Conservatism Based On Lies

By John P. Avlon, CNN Contributor
April 15, 2011 -- Updated 1740 GMT (0140 HKT)
New York (CNN)
This was the sound of the curtain coming back on what passes for political debate too often these days.

The now-infamous statement from Sen. Jon Kyl's office was released after he said on the floor of the U.S. Senate that abortions represent "over 90 percent of what Planned Parenthood does."

It turns out that the actual number is 3%, a mere rounding error of 87%. But it was presented to the American people and enshrined in the Senate Record as a means of arguing that Planned Parenthood should be entirely defunded in the current budget.

This has nothing to do with fiscal responsibility and everything to do with the disproportionate influence of social conservative activists.

Their most compelling argument is that the American people don't support federal taxpayer money paying for abortions, which is true -- and why federal funding of abortion has been banned since 1976.

But the facts are inconvenient, and so they are ignored. Instead, talking points taken from talk radio are repeated until they take on a life of their own and eventually get the validation of a U.S. senator.

The news wasn't that Kyl made a mistake; it was his staff essentially acknowledging that in the current hyper-partisan environment, facts are a secondary concern, even on the floor of the U.S. Senate, even when they are paraded as statistics. The important thing is to scare the hell out of people so that they remember your political point and pass it on.

Like the mirror image of some hippies of old, emotional truth is more important than literal truth. It creates a political tower of Babel.

In this absurd spin cycle, there's one dependable place to look for sanity: satire. And on cue came Stephen Colbert, who took Kyl's statement as a challenge and dialed it up to 11. Using the Twitter hashtag #NotIntendedToBeAFactualStatement, Colbert unleashed a steady stream of Jon Kyl mistruths with the requisite denial. Among my favorites:

• Jon Kyl developed his own line of hair care products just so he could test them on bunnies.

• Jon Kyl can unhinge his jaw like a python to swallow small rodents whole.

• Every Halloween Jon Kyl dresses up as a sexy Mitch Daniels.

• Jon Kyl sponsored S.410, which would ban happiness.

• Jon Kyl let a game-winning ground ball roll through his legs in Game 6 of the '86 World Series.

• Jon Kyl once ate a badger he hit with his car.

You get the idea. But the problem is much bigger than Jon Kyl. Colbert is going to have to get a bigger hashtag. Because we're heading to a strange place where Daniel Patrick Moynihan's truism "everyone is entitled to their own opinion but not their own facts" no longer applies.

Exhibit B this week: Donald Trump's re-enflaming of the thoroughly discredited birther conspiracy theory. When he repeats this falsehood in interviews, he is too often treated as a man with an unorthodox opinion, not someone repeating a lie on national television.

As a result, more people are duped and the country more divided, not on the many rational reasons to oppose President Obama's policy agenda but on paranoid fantasies cut out of whole cloth.

Perhaps not surprisingly, a man responsible for pushing the birther myth -- and a reported recent Trump adviser -- Joe Farah of the fringe website World Net Daily freely admitted to Salon.com this week that his site publishes "some misinformation."

"Misinformation" is a fancy word for lying with an ideological agenda in mind. It has become more acceptable and more influential with the rise of partisan media. It preys on the gullible and the stupid and the ditto-head alike.

The cycle of incitement that afflicts our politics ensures that this dynamic bleeds into both sides of the aisle. For example, the liberal Campaign for America's Future recently declared that "Congressman Eric Cantor wants to eliminate Social Security," a flat-out "pants on fire" lie, as described by indispensable PolitiFact.

A little-noticed local example of this strangeness caught my eye this week, courtesy of the website ThinkProgress. It seems that Texas state Rep. Leo Berman put forward a bill to ban sharia law in the Lone Star State.

When he was asked why such a step was necessary, he cited the city of Dearborn, Michigan, six times in testimony: "It's being done in Dearborn, Michigan ... because of a large population of Middle Easterners. The judges in Dearborn are using and allowing to be used sharia law."

This would indeed be troubling (and unconstitutional) if true, but when Berman was pressed about the source of his facts, here's what he told J. Patrick Pepper of the Press and Guide in Dearborn: "I heard it on a radio station here on my way in to the Capitol one day. ... I don't know Dearborn, Michigan, but I heard it on the radio. Isn't that true?"

No, it's not, as Dearborn Mayor Jack O'Reilly has been forced to make abundantly clear, stating that "these people know nothing of Dearborn, and they just seek to provoke and enflame their base for political gain."

But the misinformation percolating around the fringes of hyper-partisan media is creeping into state capitals and the U.S. Congress. Ignorance and incitement begin to blur, compounded by the civic laziness of speakers who don't care to fact-check.

"Not intended to be a factual statement" is an instant dark classic, a triumph of cynicism, capturing the essence of Michael Kinsley's definition of a gaffe in Washington: when a politician accidentally tells the truth.

No wonder "people are taking their comedians seriously and the politicians as a joke," as Will Rogers once said and Colbert increasingly embodies. But we can't keep depending on comedians to be the voices of sanity.

And don't be fooled. There are real costs to this careless courtship of the lowest common denominator. Without fact-based debates, politics can quickly give way to paranoia and hate. Our democracy gets degraded.

Americans deserve better, and we should demand better, especially from our elected representatives. Empowering ignorance for political gain is unacceptable.

Melee at Tripoli hotel after woman claims she was raped
March 27, 2011 - 10:27AM
--smh.com.au--

“They say that we are all Libyans and we are one people,” said the woman, who gave her name as Eman al-Obeidy, barging in during breakfast at the hotel dining room. “But look at what the Qaddafi men did to me.” She displayed a broad bruise on her face, a large scar on her upper thigh, several narrow and deep scratch marks lower on her leg, and marks from binding around her hands and feet.

Dramatic footage has emerged of western journalists caught up in a hotel brawl in Tripoli after a Libyan woman burst in announcing she had been raped by government troops. The woman was tackled by waitresses and government minders as she sat telling her story to the press. In a state of distress, she had rushed into the restaurant at the Rixos hotel, where a number of journalists were eating breakfast on Saturday. She told them troops had detained her at a checkpoint, tied her up, abused her, then led her away to be gang-raped - an account that could not be independently verified. She claimed she was targeted by the troops because she is from the eastern city of Benghazi, a rebel stronghold.

In response, a hotel waitress brandished a butter knife, a government minder reached for his handgun and another waitress pulled a jacket tightly over her head. The waiters called her a traitor and tried to stop her talking. The scene descended into chaos when the journalists tried to intervene to protect the woman and were pushed out of the way by the government minders. A British television reporter was punched and a CNN camera was smashed on the ground by the minders.

A gun was pulled out in front of a Sky News crew but was not pointed at anyone. Meanwhile, the cameras continued to roll and journalists tried to smuggle the footage out but said attempts were made to prevent this. Sky News foreign affairs correspondent Lisa Holland was among the reporters caught up in the melee, but Sky said none of its staff were injured. The fracas culminated in the minders overpowering the woman, leading her outside and shoving her into a car that sped away. At a hastily arranged press conference after the incident, government spokesman Moussa Ibrahim addressed the incident.

This story was found at: http://www.smh.com.au/world/melee-at-tripoli-hotel-after-woman-claims-she-was-raped-20110327-1cbki.html

(Some) Justice for Martine
How a young girl’s murder led to a boycott of Coca-Cola.
by Liv Buli-March 20, 2011
--newsweek.com--
Farouk Abdulhaq is wanted for the rape and murder of Martine Vik Magnussen.

The night of her murder began with a celebration.

On an early spring evening in 2008, Martine Vik Magnussen, a 23-year-old Norwegian beauty, curled her long, blond hair and accented her blue-green eyes with eye shadow, before heading to the smart London club Maddox with friends to celebrate upcoming holidays and high scores on her latest Regents College exams.

At the club in London’s Mayfair district was her friend Farouk Abdulhaq, the jet-setting son of a Yemeni billionaire, who, friends recalled later, had been feeling pressure from his father to clean up his party-boy image and, on this night, didn’t appear his usual lighthearted self.

Despite Abdulhaq’s peculiar mood, Magnussen left with him when the club closed, police believe. When she didn’t return to her apartment the next day, her friends became concerned. In a Norwegian documentary, they recounted how, reaching out to Abdulhaq over Facebook to see if he knew of her whereabouts, they noticed that he had changed his status around 4 that morning. “Farouk,” it said, “is home alone.” Soon after, Abdulhaq’s profile disappeared, they told the TV crew.

Police say they found Magnussen’s body in the basement of Abdulhaq’s apartment building two days later, partly covered with garbage. One of her earrings had been ripped from her ear, and her face was badly bruised. There was a blood trail from her body up the stairwell to Abdulhaq’s second-floor apartment, which showed signs of a struggle. A neighbor reported hearing strange noises in the middle of the night, and, by 2009, British authorities placed Abdulhaq on Scotland Yard’s Most Wanted list in connection with the rape and murder of Magnussen. They also issued an international warrant for his arrest. But, by then, Abdulhaq had left the country. Investigators found that he had left for Cairo just hours after the murder, flying onward from Egypt to Yemen on his father’s private jet.

Farouk’s father, Shaher Abdulhaq, is one of Yemen’s most powerful businessmen. At the time of the murder, his business empire included a range of luxury hotels and ownership of Yemen’s primary cellular network. He was also the main Mercedes importer and counted a large ownership stake in Coca-Cola bottling and distribution in the Middle East.

Since Yemen holds no extradition agreement with Great Britain, Magnussen’s father, Odd Petter Magnussen, tried diplomatic channels but with little luck. Meetings with the Norwegian foreign ministry and high-level British politicians brought promises but no results. Meanwhile, the Yemeni government offered to try Abdulhaq in country. The nation’s brutal and corrupt legal system, based on Sharia, punishes rape and murder with death; the convict is usually shot in the back of the head while laying facedown on the ground, and Magnussen’s father felt that neither that nor the unsolicited offer he got from strangers who suggested they’d fly to Yemen and kill Abdulhaq themselves would offer real justice for his daughter. What he wanted was for Abdulhaq to stand trial in Britain. “It is the only way to honor my daughter’s memory,” he told NEWSWEEK. “It can’t be possible to take a life in one place, get on a bus, and not have to suffer the consequences.”

Shaher Abdulhaq has so far declined media interviews but confirms through a PR person in London that his son is in Yemen. However, through his representative, he asserts that his son is not financially dependent on him; that he has encouraged him to return to Britain but that his son, so far, has refused; and that, in fact, the two have a strained relationship.

In Norway, meanwhile, the case has become a cause célèbre. In late 2010, seven Norwegian lawmakers drafted a series of letters to a number of multinational corporations connected with Shaher Trading, asking them to cut ties with the company on moral and ethical grounds. (Shaher Abdulhaq responded by threatening to sue the politicians for defamation and malicious falsehood.) Daimler-Benz subsequently dropped all business dealings with Shaher Abdulhaq but would not confirm that this was a direct result of the letters. Xerox started looking into the matter but Coca-Cola, effectively, said it wasn’t their problem. Communications director of Coca-Cola in Norway, Steir Rømmerud, told the Verdens Gang newspaper that while the company felt for the family, it was the responsibility of local and international police to solve the matter. “We have no ties to the suspect, and the suspect’s father is only indirectly involved in Coca-Cola as an investor in bottling operations,” he said, according to the paper. But a group called Justice for Martine wasn’t appeased and decided to take the battle against Abdulhaq online. Via a Facebook page, members encouraged a boycott of Coca-Cola products, starting March 1 this year. Within the first two weeks, more than 53,000 people signed up. “What we had hoped to achieve was to show Shaher Abdulhaq that this issue will not be swept under the table,” said Marcus Rolandsen, chairman of the foundation. (The foundation has also filed a civil complaint against the younger Abdulhaq in Norwegian courts for failing to respond to summons, and is considering further legal action in the United States.) While the boycott didn’t represent a massive economic impact on the behemoth company, the campaign was a potential threat to the Coca-Cola brand, and on March 14, the company released a statement announcing its decision to sever all ties with Abdulhaq. Joel Morris, spokesperson for Coca-Cola Europe, says Shaher Abdulhaq no longer holds financial interests in bottling operations in Libya or Egypt, has agreed to step down from the board of directors of the unit in Egypt, and is in the process of divesting his investments in Yemen. Morris adds that discussions on this matter began before the boycott, but that “our conversations with the campaign group did bring new urgency to the process.” The boycott’s success shows how Facebook and other social-media networks make it possible to take on multinational corporations, using a low-cost but very visual form of campaigning, says Clay Shirky, an author of several books on the effects of social media, “It’s not called good will in the balance sheet for nothing,” he says. Although the younger Abdulhaq remains at large, Magnussen’s father is optimistic that a solution is imminent. “You have to believe in the good in people, and that ethics will prevail in this case.”

Arab League asks for no-fly zone over Libya
By DIAA HADID Associated Press © 2011 The Associated Press
March 12, 2011, 12:12PM

CAIRO — The Arab League asked the U.N. Security Council Saturday to impose a no-fly zone over Libya to protect civilians from air attack by forces of Moammar Gadhafi's embattled government, giving crucial backing to a key demand of the rebel forces battling to oust the Libyan leader.

Foreign ministers from the 22-member Arab bloc, meeting in Cairo, also left the Libyan leader of more than 40 years increasingly isolated, declaring his government had "lost its sovereignty."

They also appeared to confer legitimacy on the rebel's interim government, the National Libyan Council, saying they would establish contacts with the umbrella group and calling on nations to provide it with "urgent help."

"The Arab League asks the United Nations to shoulder its responsibility ... to impose a no-fly zone over the movement of Libyan military planes and to create safe zones in the places vulnerable to airstrikes," said a League statement released after the emergency session.

League Secretary-General Amr Moussa stressed in remarks afterward that a no-fly zone was intended as a humanitarian measure to protect Libyan civilians and foreigners in the country and not as a military intervention.

That stance appeared meant to win over the deeply Arab nationalist government of Syria, which has smarted against foreign intervention into Arab affairs.

The Arab League cannot impose a no-fly zone itself. But the approval of the key regional Arab body gives the U.S. and other Western powers crucial regional backing they say they need before doing so. Many were weary that Western powers would be seen as intervening in the affairs of an Arab country if they began a no-fly zone without Arab approval.

Still, the Obama administration has said a no-fly zone may have limited impact, and the international community is divided over the issue.

Backing the rebel's political leadership, the League statement said it had faced "grievous violations and serious crimes by the Libyan authorities, which have lost their sovereignty."

The League's decision comes hours before the European Union's policy chief is set to arrive in Cairo to meet with the Arab bloc's leaders to discuss the situation in Libya.

Catherine Ashton said she hoped to discuss a "collaborative approach" with Arab League chief Moussa on Libya and the rest of the region.

Ashton said it was necessary to evaluate how effective economic sanctions imposed on Gadhafi's regime had been so far and that she was "keeping all options moving forward" regarding any additional measures.

German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle welcomed the EU's "very cautious" stance on possible military intervention.

"We do not want to be drawn into a war in north Africa — we should have learned from the events in and surrounding Iraq," Westerwelle said.

"It is very important that the impression doesn't arise that this is a conflict of the West against the Arab world or a Christian crusade against people of Muslim faith."