Dominican Republic to abolish indigenous people

Just got this from Intercontinental Cry

A new piece of legislation has been proposed in the Dominican Republic that would effectively erase the country's Indigenous population---the Taino.

According to a recent article on Dominican Today, the "Dominican Republic Electoral Law Reform" Bill identifies just three ethnicities for the country's new citizen ID cards. Those ethnicities are Mulatto, black and white.

While the country's Indigenous population has been reduced by roughly 98 per cent since 1492, according to some estimates, that population continues to exist.

An emergency petition has been set up to stop to the Bill from being ratified.

You can sign the petition at http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/tainotikiskeya2011/

Dominican Legislation Eradicates 'Indians'

Mulatto, black and white will be the only colors among Dominicans and will be stated thus in the citizens ID cards (cedula), effectively eradicating the nation's "Indians."

The bill "Dominican Republic Electoral Law Reform" states that in the master file of cedulas the color of Dominicans will be established by their ethnic group, and as such only three colors.

The Spanish Royal Academy of Language defines ethnic group as "a human community defined by racial affinities."

Organization of American States (OAS) and Central Electoral Board (JCE)technicians drafted the legislation to reform Electoral Law 275-97, and will be debated by the JCE prior to being submitted to Congress in the next few days.

The bill also states that in addition to the person's ethnic group, in the cedulas master file information must figure the serial number for each municipality, the specific identity number, a citizen's blood type, their father's and mother's full names, their digital photo and fingerprints, among others.

The measure announced late Thursday drew quick rebuke Friday morning, with prominent media figure Teo Veras asking the JCE to "leave that as is," because in his view, it could only stoke "ill feelings."

Although nearly all Taino Indians perished early during Spanish colonization, the term "Indio" lingered from the many remaining descendants of mixed blood also called mestizos.

The term over time came to describe a person whose color is neither black, white nor mulatto, the latter often called "moreno."

Article Source: http://www.dominicantoday.com/dr/local/2011/11/11/41602/Legislation-eradicates-Dominican-Indians

Osborne biofuel expansion will kill!

Dear friends,

the UK Government is consulting on the level of subsidies for all types of electricity which they class as renewable – including biomass power stations and electricity from biofuels (including palm oil). Their proposal is to continue to support biomass on an unlimited scale – even more than at present as far as co-firing of biomass with coal is concerned. They also propose  to support the burning of up to 400,000 tonnes of biofuels for electricity per year (on top of the large-scale use of biofuels for transport).  If all those biofuels were palm oil – a realistic prospect given that this is by far the cheapest vegetable oil – then 110,000 hectares of new oil palm plantations would be needed.

Those subsidies mean more deforestation and climate change, more land-grabbing for tree plantations and thus more human rights abuses and more people going hungry.  At the same time, the Government is drastically cutting subsidies for solar PV and are proposing to cut back on subsidies for onshore wind which, according to Friends of the Earth, would harm small-scale and community wind projects.

Please go to www.biofuelwatch.org.uk/2011/rocs-alerts/ [ http://www.biofuelwatch.org.uk/2011/rocs-alerts/ ] and let the government and your MP know that renewable energy support should go to clean, sustainable real renewables, not to destructive biomass and bioliquid electricity. Please note that there are two separate email actions on the same webpage. Please help spread the word about those alerts. Many thanks!

Best regards,



Almuth Ernsting
Biofuelwatch
biofuelwatch@ymail.com

Economic Democracy for the Occupy generation

A number of us are supporting a motion to support Economic Democracy for the next Green Party conference in the spring,  Peter Tatchell has set the ball rolling and thanks to his work we now have the following proposal:

To help prevent a repeat economic meltdown, we need greater economic democracy, participation, transparency, decentralisation and accountability. There are four ways we could achieve this:
* Make corporate negligence and recklessness an explicit criminal offence, to reign in big business sharks and ensure more responsible economic management. Bankers and company bosses should not be able to wreck whole economies and squander with impunity people’s jobs, pensions and savings. They ought to be held personally liable for damaging corporate decisions. This spectre of legal penalties is likely to result in more prudent corporate governance.
* Require medium and large-sized companies to be accountable to their employees and to the general public by including on their management boards employee-elected directors and independent directors to represent the interests of consumers. Employee and consumer directors could act as watchdogs and whistleblowers against corporate irresponsibility. Not being driven by the profit-motive, they could also push for company policies that are more socially inclusive and environmentally protective.
* Give trade unions a majority stake in the management of their members’ pension funds, to decentralise and democratise investment decision-making and to give it a social and ethical dimension. The £900 billion invested in pension funds is a sizeable counter-weight to the economic clout of big business. It could be invested in ways that help make the economy more fair and people-centred. Trade unions are less likely to invest in the arms trade and sweatshops. They would be more open to investment to meet people’s needs, including renewable energy, affordable housing and quality public transport.
* Grant employees the legal right to buy out their companies and turn them into workers cooperatives; possibly with funding from trade union-controlled pension funds. These coops would weaken the power of big corporations, localise economic decision-making and give employees incentives for greater productivity. Evidence shows that people who areemployed in worker-owned enterprises tend to have higher output, better job satisfaction and greater social solidarity.      

Don't ask is Ferguson a racist? (because he will sue your arse!)

Niall Ferguson is suing over the review of his latest book on the imperial legacy (see below).  Empires work by stealing peoples land, removing their rights and then lying about what has happened.  You can call this civilization if you like






You can judge Ferguson by this on indigenous peoples in America, where he notes simply:

The Apache and the Navajo had all sorts of admirable traits. In the absence of literacy we don’t know what they were because they didn’t write them down. We do know they killed a hell of a lot of bison. But had they been left to their own devices, I don’t think we’d have anything remotely resembling the civilisation we’ve had in North America.

He is also a modest guy as you can read here, 'it seems to be becoming de rigueur for mediocrities to build their fame on attacking those more successful than them." 


Any how read the review while you can (i.e before he closes the LRB) and see what you think:

‘Civilisation’s going to pieces,’ Tom Buchanan, the Yale-educated millionaire, abruptly informs Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby. ‘I’ve gotten to be a terrible pessimist about things. Have you read The Rise of the Colored Empires by this man Goddard? … The idea is if we don’t look out the white race will be – will be utterly submerged.’ ‘Tom’s getting very profound,’ his wife Daisy remarks. Buchanan carries on: ‘This fellow has worked out the whole thing. It’s up to us, who are the dominant race, to watch out or these other races will have control of things.’ ‘We’ve got to beat them down,’ Daisy whispers with a wink at Nick. But there’s no stopping Buchanan. ‘And we’ve produced all the things that go to make civilisation – oh, science and art, and all that. Do you see?’

‘There was something pathetic in his concentration,’ Carraway, the narrator, observes, ‘as if his complacency, more acute than of old, was not enough to him any more.’ The scene, early in the novel, helps identify Buchanan as a bore – and a boor. It also evokes a deepening panic among America’s Anglophile ruling class. Wary of Jay Gatz, the self-made man with a fake Oxbridge pedigree, Buchanan is nervous about other upstarts rising out of nowhere to challenge the master race.

Scott Fitzgerald based Goddard, at least partly, on Theodore Lothrop Stoddard, the author of the bestseller The Rising Tide of Color against White World Supremacy(1920). Stoddard’s fame was a sign of his times, of the overheated racial climate of the early 20th century, in which the Yellow Peril seemed real, the Ku Klux Klan had re-emerged, and Theodore Roosevelt worried loudly about ‘race-suicide’. In 1917, justifying his reluctance to involve the United States in the European war, Woodrow Wilson told his secretary of state that ‘white civilisation and its domination over the world rested largely on our ability to keep this country intact.’
Hysteria about ‘white civilisation’ gripped America after Europe’s self-mutilation in the First World War had encouraged political assertiveness among subjugated peoples from Egypt to China. Unlike other popular racists, who parsed the differences between Nordic and Latin peoples, Stoddard proposed a straightforward division of the world into white and coloured races. He also invested early in Islamophobia, arguing in The New World of Islam (1921) that Muslims posed a sinister threat to a hopelessly fractious and confused West. Like many respectable eugenicists of his time, Stoddard later found much to like about the Nazis, which marked him out for instant superannuation following the exposure of Nazi crimes in 1945.

The banner of white supremacism has been more warily raised ever since in post-imperial Europe, and very rarely by mainstream politicians and writers. In the United States, racial anxieties have been couched either in such pseudo-scientific tracts about the inferiority of certain races as The Bell Curve, or in big alarmist theories like Samuel Huntington’s ‘clash of civilisations’. It’s not at all surprising that in his last book Huntington fretted about the destruction by Latino immigration of America’s national identity, which is apparently a construct of ‘Anglo-Protestant culture’. As power ostensibly shifts to the East, a counterpoise to dismay over the West’s loss of authority and influence is sought in a periodic ballyhooing of the ‘trans-Atlantic alliance’, as in Philip Bobbitt’s Terror and Consent (2008), which Niall Ferguson in an enthusiastic review claimed will ‘be read with pleasure by men of a certain age, class and education from Manhattan’s Upper East Side to London’s West End’.

Ferguson himself is homo atlanticus redux. In a preface to the UK edition ofCivilisation: The West and the Rest, he writes of being seduced away from a stodgy Oxbridge career, early in the 2000s, to the United States, ‘where the money and power actually were’. The author of two previous books about 19th-century banking, Ferguson became known to the general public with The Pity of War (1998), a long polemic, fluent and bristling with scholarly references, that blamed Britain for causing the First World War. According to Ferguson, Prussia wasn’t the threat it was made out to be by Britain’s Liberal cabinet. The miscalculation not only made another war inevitable after 1919, and postponed the creation of an inevitably German-dominated European Union to the closing decades of the 20th century, it also tragically and fatally weakened Britain’s grasp on its overseas possessions.
This wistful vision of an empire on which the sun need never have set had an immediately obvious defect. It grossly underestimated – in fact, ignored altogether – the growing strength of anti-colonial movements across Asia, which, whatever happened in Europe, would have undermined Britain’s dwindling capacity to manage its vast overseas holdings. At the time, however, The Pity of War seemed boyishly and engagingly revisionist, and it established Ferguson’s reputation: he was opinionated, ‘provocative’ and amusing, all things that seem to be more cherished in Britain’s intellectual culture than in any other.
In retrospect, The Pity of War’s Stoddardesque laments about the needless emasculation of Anglo-Saxon power announced a theme that would become more pronounced as Ferguson, setting aside his expertise in economic history, emerged as an evangelist-cum-historian of empire. He was already arguing in The Cash Nexus, published a few months before the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, that ‘the United States should be devoting a larger percentage of its vast resources to making the world safe for capitalism and democracy’ – if necessary by military force. ‘Let me come clean,’ he wrote in the New York Times Magazine in April 2003, a few weeks after the shock-and-awe campaign began in Iraq, ‘I am a fully paid-up member of the neoimperialist gang.’

Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World (2003), Ferguson’s next book, appeared in America with a more didactic subtitle: ‘The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power’. The word ‘empire’ still caused some unease in the US, whose own national myths originated in an early, short-lived and selective anti-imperialism. An exasperated Ferguson – ‘the United States,’ he claimed, ‘is an empire, in short, that dare not speak its name’ – set out to rescue the word from the discredit into which political correctness had apparently cast it. Britain’s 19th-century empire ‘undeniably pioneered free trade, free capital movements and, with the abolition of slavery, free labour. It invested immense sums in developing a global network of modern communications. It spread and enforced the rule of law over vast areas.’ ‘Without the spread of British rule around the world,’ he went on, in a typical counterfactual manoeuvre, colonised peoples, such as Indians, would not have what are now their most valuable ideas and institutions – parliamentary democracy, individual freedom and the English language.

MORE HERE 

TIME FOR A GREEN PARTY TRADE UNION LIAISON OFFICER

I have decided to support this motion to go to the next Green Party of England and Wales conference in the spring.

GREEN PARTY TRADE UNION LIAISON OFFICER

This conference believes that the Green Party England Wales (GPEW) shares
many positive common aims and objectives with individual Trade Unions and
the Trade Union movement as a whole in defending workers conditions and
public services.



We further recognise that the workers movement is becoming more open to our
ideas on the need to change society to one that is sustainable economically,
including the Green New Deal and our campaign for 1 million green jobs as
against that of unfettered capitalism that is so wrecking people's lives.



We note that some local parties and candidates have received positive
support from a number of trade unions including moral, practical and
financial support for our campaigns and individual candidates, but recognise
that while this is an excellent development the party could gain further
support if we were to established a dedicated Trade Union Liaison Officer in
the Green Party (GPEW) at a national level and at some point also in the
regions.



This Conference therefore agrees to the creation of an elected Trade Union
Liaison Officer on GPEX to co-ordinate the building of links with the Trade
Union movement and individual Trade Unions including working closely with
our own Green Party Trade Union Group.

Feed the world tour continues!

November 20 Glasgow Hosted by Scottish Socialist Party 2pm, Creation Studios16 Trongate Glasgow G1 5EU

November 21 Newcastle hosted by Newcastle University International Development Society, 6pm at Room 2.22 at the Old Library Building (Research Beehive), Newcastle University ( entrance from Queen Victoria Rd near and opposite RVI – also possible from Claremont Rd or Claremont Walk.

November 22 Wigan hosted by Wigan Green Socialists, Socialist Resistance and Green Left : Tuesday, 7:30pm – 10:00pm Friends’ Meeting House, 76 Swinley Lane (see Map @ http://www.quaker.org.uk/wigan)

November 24 Oxford 7.30pm , Oxford Town Hall St Aldate’s, 40 Pembroke Street, Oxford OX1 1BX

Tour of Philipina Ecosocialist

We live in a world where soil erosion, desertification and famine is an ever-increasing reality for millions of poor people. At the same time the profits of large landowners and supermarkets continue to soar.

The issues of food production and food sovereignty – who controls the production, sale and distribution of food – have never been more crucial.

In November 2011 Socialist Resistance and Green Left will be hosting a national tour to let audiences in British cities hear an activist for whom this is a matter of life and death.
Our keynote speaker will be Maria Neri B. Pampilo from Mindanao in the Philippines. Maria is a longstanding activist and ecosocialist. She will share her powerful experiences in the struggle for land reform and ecologically sustainable food production.

Monoculture – the industrial growing of a single cash crop – is a major contributor to soil erosion and desertification along with forest clearance for farming multi-nationals.

Agribusiness calls for ever-increasing yields that may give short-term benefits but at a devastating long-term cost including pesticides polluting rivers and oceans.
The cost to human communities is also immeasurable – peasants are thrown off their farms as land reform is reversed in the insatiable search for profit. Millions are forced to migrate to unsustainable cities – living in shantytowns with no infrastructure.

Samir Amin, the economist and writer on development issues, has argued that agriculture is one of the new frontiers for capital. Over the last few years appreciable amounts of speculative capital has moved into food production forcing food prices up. At the same time there has been a massive expansion of an unprecedented phenomena – the land grabbing, particularly in Africa, by both private and state capital, for the production of both food and agrifuels.

There is resistance – from the growth of militant peasant and indigenous organisations in many parts of the globe, the pioneering of organic agriculture in countries as diverse as Cuba, Venezuela and the Philippines and of guerilla gardening in the deserts of post-industrial cities in the United States such as Chicago.

The opportunity for ecosocialists in Britain to explore these topics in depth doesn’t come often and we hope you won’t miss this opportunity

OCCUPY BRISTOL' CAMP OUT ON CAPITA PICKET LINE

ANTI-CAPITALIST PROTESTORS FROM THE 'OCCUPY BRISTOL' CAMP AT COLLGE GREEN HAVE CAMPED OVERNIGHT ON THE ANTI-CAPITA PICKET LINE OF 500 CWU MEMBERS ON STRIKE AT THE TEMPLE MEADS-VICTORIA STREET ROUNDABOUT SITE.

CWU Bristol Branch Secretary Dave Wilshire said:

"'Occupy Bristol' and our Bristol Capita members are fighting the same battle. Capita is a money-rich employer that is forcing many of its workers to survive on a minimum wage when they are making profits of a million pounds a day. So far as the CWU is concerned, 'Occupy Bristol' can camp out at Capita for as long as they like. We salute thier idealism and determination. 3,500 CWU members in Bristol and District, including our Capita strikers, have already made the link between anti-capitalism and anti-Capita, and we invite others to visit our picket-line camp to support us today."

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Capita TVL facing Third one day strike by CWU members in Bristol .

Nationally members of the CWU employed by Capita are fighting for a decent pay rise and this Friday 18th they are taking their third day of strike action. In Bristol there are 350 workers involved.

We have a great record in Bristol of solidarity support and we are needed again.This time it’s CWU members at Capita who run the TV Licence contract. Capita are raking in a massive £ one million per day, EVERY SINGLE DAY!

Please find attached a summary of the dispute and what we can do to help by Dave Ward CWU.

 

What we can do in solidarity with the srtikers.....................

1] Send a meassge of support.

2] Visit the picket line (100 Temple Srteet, (far end) near Temple Me ads 07.30 to 10.30

3] Invite a CWU Capita striker to speak at any of your meetings. 

4] Make a donation to the strike fund Cheques made payable to 'CWU Bristol and District' and send to 'Capita Strike' C/O CWU Office 20 Church Road, Lawrence Hill, Bristol; BS5 9JA 

See below links to the CWU web site with info and articles and a video. For more information tel: 0790 952 5740

http://www.cwu.org/news/archive/tv-licensing-hit-by-a-second-strike.html

http://www.cwu.org/news/archive/capita-tvl-strikers-deserve-better-says-cwu.html

Yours in solidarity,

David Wilshire Bristol CWU Branch Secretary

‘Victory to the CWU in their fight against Capita(lism)’!