Rio statement 'take back the commons'

 

An impatient Trade Union Assembly in Rio on 11-13 June adopted a statement which represents an important step forward, in which it realises "that our current profit-driven production and consumption model, identified as the source of rising social inequalities and environmental degradation, must be replaced if a truly sustainable development is to be achieved".

It further demanded that "the Commons, natural and energy resources are brought and kept under public ownership, securing their public preservation and administration with social control."

In order to replace the existing model, the trade union movement must play "a decisive role in fighting for an alternative development model for our societies, grounded on peoples' needs, on solidarity, on economic democracy and on a fair distribution of wealth".

In this struggle, the trade union movement must "make use of our organisational capacity and our experience of past struggles to form a strong, organised global movement in a bid to spur governments and corporations, who are reluctant to act, into taking appropriate measures to tackle and stop climate change."

This is something to live up to! Find the entire statement here:social inequalities and environmental degradation, must be replaced if a truly sustainable development is to be achieved".

http://www.ituc-csi.org/IMG/pdf/assemblyresolution_eng_tc_rev.pdf

 

All the best

Asbjørn Wahl

Adviser of the Norwegian Union of Municipal and General Employees, and

Chair of the Working Group on Climate Change of the International Transport Workers’ Federation

Notes from the Borderland: Essential Green Left Reading

 I have had the pleasure of knowing Larry O'Hara since around 1989, he is one of the pillars of the left in the Green Party and a man with a Phd on the British far right.  He is also one of the network that puts together Notes from the Borderland, well yes its controversial stuff and yes the articles are long with lots of footnotes and yes its quite cutting about the personalities involved.   Nonetheless its essential reading in my book.  This is what they say about themselves:

Welcome to Britain's premier parapolitical investigative magazine Notes from the Borderland (NFB). We have been producing the magazine since 1997 but some published material before then.
Our political perspective is Left/Green, but we welcome truth-tellers, whatever their affiliation. Research interests include the secret state (MI5/MI6/Special Branch) & their assets, including those in the media. We are resolutely anti-fascist, and to that end investigate the far right and state infiltration of various milieus.

This issue includes a lengthy analysis of the Searchlight/Hope not Hate split, which I must admit I had been hardly aware of and much else besides.  NFB is also a long standing critic of 7/7 and 9/11 conspiracy theory campaigns.

A growing distaste at bizarre conspiracy theories the 9/11 cult propagate, in particular anti-semitism.  Claims by Shayler (New Statesman 11/9/06) that 9/11 was a 'Zionist' conspiracy are two-a-penny--yet we rarely hear the phrase 'Saudi conspiracy' with far more evidence for such.  Lurking in the wings are the usual racist snake-oil salesmen (or in David Icke's case lizards) eager to blame the 'Jews'.  The venomous & often anti-semitic reaction to criticism by Jewish journalist Jon Ronson in November 2006exemplifies this. A relevant subtext is the sheer disbelief non-US citizens could have organised 9/11 without US government assistance--racism by another (subtle) name.  MORE HERE

Have a click here and look at the Notes From the Borderland site.  And if its not your cup of tea fair enough....ha ha not sure about the video with the crying child but it gives you the idea.

Oh and did I mention the coverage of the mystery of the death of MI5 Gareth Williams and the mystery of why we believe anything in the Evening Standard!

join GreenParty before 29th June and you can vote for our new leader to replace Caroline Lucas

If you join the GreenParty before 29th June and you can vote for our new leader to replace Caroline Lucas.

And its only £5 if you are a young person or student.

I am very much of the polycentric i.e pluralist left, good luck to left not in the Green Party and to greens who maybe not ecosocialists!  However we have to build.  Internal politics matter, think of how the lib dems were taken over by the Orange book group or how Labour is being targetted by Progress.  Political parties have a role and internal party politics is part of the work we need to do, although from culture change to non violent direction action there are other vital dimensions.

Caroline Lucas has done a brilliant job setting the agenda and pushing a no cuts anti-austerity approach based on serious action on climate change.

She will continue to do so as MP but having a good leader and deputy are important.

So put your shoulder to the struggle, these things matter and Green Party internal elections can be very close!

Membership details here, do click and join http://join.greenparty.org.uk/membership/index.html

Romayne Phoenix to chair Coalition of Resistance national rally

Tuesday 19th June Coalition of Resistance, Public meeting


Friends Meeting House, Euston Road, London, 6.30pm

Speakers include Tony Benn, Wendy Savage of Keep our NHS Public, Len McCluskey of UNITE, Christine Blower NUT and the chair of the event is Romayne Phoenix, London Green Party. This meeting is a preparation for the TUC day of action to be held 20th October 2012.

PROTEST at the PERUVIAN EMBASSY Friday 15 June 1-2pm

PROTEST at the PERUVIAN EMBASSY PLANTÓN frente a la EMBAJADA del PERÚ Friday 15 June 1-2pm 52 Sloane Street, London SW1X 9SP Knightsbridge Tube 520 years after Colombus and Pizarro’s genocide for gold, the movement in Peru demands an end to domestic slavery and gold mining.  A year ago, after decades of organising, domestic workers won the historic Convention 189 of the International Labour Organisation (ILO) which recognises their rights as workers. Governments must now ratify the Convention. So far, despite promises by President Ollanta Humala’s party during the election campaign, the Convention has not been ratified. On Friday, Lima’s domestic workers’ trade union SINTTRAHOL will take to the streets to demand immediate ratification. Impoverishment drives thousands of women and children from Indigenous and other rural areas to the city, where they are forced to take domestic work in slave conditions – unending hours; denial of wages, benefits or pensions; rape and other violence.   Leddy Mozombite, SINTTRAHOL’s General Secretary says:“Convention 189 is a great victory for women, whether we are remunerated or not, domestic workers or housewives, because it recognises the value of work in the home which has been kept invisible until now. Every country should include the economy of caring work in their public policies.” President Humala is breaking other promises. Before he was elected he promised to fully consult the population on the gold mining Conga Project in the Cajamarca region. Instead he is giving the go-ahead to US multinational Newmont and other mining companies which threaten to destroy the environment and pollute the water supply. But Cajamarca, where Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro murdered Inca leader Atahualpa, is rebelling against this latest colonization. Despite the government sending in the army and killing protesters, the population of Cajamarca has been on general strike since 30 May: children have refused to go to school, there have been massive marches, and communal kitchens feed the strikers.  With SINTTRAHOL and the Cajamarca movement, we call on President Humala to: RATIFY Domestic Workers’ Rights Convention 189 – ¡RATIFIQUEN Convenio 189!  STOP CONGA Now – ¡CONGA No Va! ¡Agua Si, Oro No! –Yes to Water, No to Gold! ¡Si a la vida, No a la mina! – Yes to Life, No to Mines! ¡No a la militarización de Cajamarca! – Stop the militarisation of Cajamarca! Called by: Collective of Peruvians in London colectivodeperuanosuk@gmail.com Global Women’s Strike  gws@globalwomenstrike.net  Tel: (020) 7482 2496 Women of Colour, GWS    SINTTRAHOL is affiliated to the GWS

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Elinor Ostrom (RIP): A personal appreciation

To an outside observer, my career may look rather successful at the current time. Has it always been this way? To be honest, the answer is no. My entry into an undergraduate major in political science was almost accidental. Fortunately, I had a short business career before starting my graduate program or I might have been discouraged by the advice I was given when I applied to graduate school. My research interests took me down a long and interdisciplinary path to the study of complex social-ecological systems—a path that many colleagues in political science strongly criticized.

I was deeply interested in how institutions were initially crafted, and then how they affected the incentives and outcomes of human interactions in many settings. Although the theory I participated in developing was general, most of the settings where I conducted empirical research were viewed by some in my home discipline as being irrelevant to political science. Why was I studying local governance and policing, or irrigation systems in Nepal, or peasants, or forests? A political scientist was expected to study the parliaments or bureaucracies of national or international regimes and not the design, operation, and adaptation of rule systems at lower levels.

FROM A LONG POLYCENTRIC JOURNEY

I was devastated to hear that Professor Ostrom died today of pancreatic cancer.

She was the first women to win a Nobel Prize for economics for her work on commons.

She argues that people can come together and find ways of managing resources in an environmentally sustainable way.

She would declare 'No Panaceas', sometimes commons failed,  and didn't like to advise governments because she believed academics often got it wrong.

Her work has been one of my major inspirations.  I have just today been writing an article for Green World the Green Party magazine about her and I met up with her twice in the spring when she was in London.

A towering intellectual but a modest one, she was almost embarrassed to gain the Nobel because she insisted her work was a collaboration with both her husband Vincent Ostrom and with a network of colleagues.

I sincerely believe that, despite her modesty, if human beings are to prosper we need to learn from her work and that of her network of scholars across the world.

To my understanding her work had a number of key themes:

1. Commons, there are different ways of owning property that work in broadly ecological and democratic ways, there is property beyond the private and the state.  Property rights she argued in reference to John Commons the institutional economist, were bundles of rights.

2. Craft.  Politics isn't just about government its about how we humans craft institutions for governing ourselves right down to community rules for keeping using forests.

3. Polycentricism.  From her husband, who survives her, Vincent Ostrom and Michael Polanyi she continued to argue that in a messy world, different over lapping systems worked best, this extends to social science theory and method.

4. Inter-disciplinary work.  She was a political economist inspired by such varied figures as Douglas North and John Commons but worked with anthropologists, biologists, mathematicians.  Her work was most famous for case studies but ranged from experiments to the use of satellites to survey forests.

5. Ecological sustainability.  This was key to her work but based on local and global action on the creativity of people not just top down rules (although somethings these were needed too she argued).

6. Indigenous.  She was a great supporter of indigenous people and would repeat the Iroquois's Seven Generation Rule that in policy matters we should think of the next seven generations.

7.  Economic isn't just about money and markets.  Rules shape all economic systems even ones that don't use money or markets or over lap with systems that do. Agnes Varda's film The Gleaners and I is a good illustration of this point.

8. Academic practice.  Hailed as a libertarian and indeed drawing strongly on Hayek her practice shames most academics who claim to be on the left, she shared, she worked to promote free exchange of knowledge, she gave her prize money away to fund research and was a great advocate of social justice and compassionate living.  She was a collectivist in the best sense of networking with others, despite,  or perhaps, even because of her 'individualist' roots.

She place 137 of her articles on the web for free all part of a Digital Library of the Commons she created with Vincent and her colleagues, how many academics work to make sure their findings are disseminated for free and not enclosed in exclusive expensive 'academic journals'.

The Digital Library of the Commons that provides free universal access to thousands of full-text commons papers, articles, and dissertations—it is hard to imagine how challenging it must have been in the formative years. In a letter dated June 20, 1984 Vincent wrote: “We have struck a sensitive and hostile response where our work has not confirmed the predispositions and aspirations of other scholars. We have had great difficulty in securing publications; and we have a great reservoir of important work that has never seen the light of day.” 

FROM

Her complex work, micro political economy, isn't properlydescribed by the labels people normally use, her work and that of her husband is something else.  Normative concerns with environment, indigenous peoples, anti-racism, feminism, equality were rarely given labels and were combined with an intellectual heritage which might be seen as liberatarian and market based.  To repeat key to her work and that of her husband was the idea of humans designing their own political systems and a scepticism of top down control whether from states or corporations.

Her autobiographical article A Long Polycentric Journey' is important to read especially about her struggle against the barriers women faces in the 1950s, 60s and 70s to becoming academic

She gave us many gifts, we need to keep giving them away, a generous and beautiful soul, I was privileged to meet her.

50 reasons to oppose ACTA (Green Party campaign video)

While you could put a rizla paper between my ecosocialist politics and that of say the German Green Party, its superb that the Greens in the European Parliament are fighting ACTA.

The Pirate Party sits with the Greens in the European Parliament, good stuff from one of their Swedish members on the video above.

Today June 9th is anti-ACTA Day, please spread the word,