Elected as Green Party International Coordinator

Thanks for your support, great news for those of us on the left of the Green Party!  Hope Romayne and Will win as leader and deputy but will also be good news if its Peter Cranie and Alex Phillips, their result on monday at 11pm

The result of the International Co-ordinator election is as follows:

2945 ballot papers returned, of which 388 were spoilt (mostly blank), giving a total valid vote of 2557 and a quota of 1278.6

First preferences were:

1182 - Wall

872 - Power

477 - Street

26 - RON

No one achieves quota and so Street is eliminated and his votes are redistributed to give the following figures:

1375 - Wall

1068 - Power

70 - RON

44 - non transferable

Derek Wall is therefore elected as International Co-ordinator

Congratulations to Derek and many thanks to you all 

Jon

--
Jon Nott
Electoral Returning Officer

ero@greenparty.org.uk

Au contraire, Monsieur Hardin!

Whether studying California groundwater basins, North Atlantic fisheries, African community forests, or Nepalese irrigation systems, scientific case studies frequently seem to answer:  Au contraire, Monsieur Hardin!  There may be situations where this model an be applied, but many groups can effectively manage and sustain common resources if they have suitable conditions, such as appropriate rules, good conflict-resolution mechanisms, and well-defined group boundaries (Hess and Ostrom 2011: 11)

Elinor Ostrom is best known for her work on common pool property resources better known as commons.  Even before the 1968 publication of Garrett Hardin's 'Tragedy of the Commons' paper in the journal Science, it was generally assumed by academic that collective management of a resource would lead to chaos.  Property was either private or state owned.  Commons was non property and as such open to all it would be abused and degraded.  Using the analytical tools from experiments to satellite surveys to participant observation Elinor Ostrom found that far from being a free for all, commons were often regulated and often regulated in a sustainable way.  Drawing on numerous case studies she published Governing the Commons in 1990.  This looked at why some commons succeed and others failed, using the IAD framework, to construct some hypothesis about the conditions that were best able to make commons work well.  Between 1990 and her death in 2012 she collaborated with other researchers using the wide variety of methods discussed in chapter three to find out more about the commons.  Her earliest research and indeed that of her husband Vincent Ostrom dealt with common pool resources.  Vincent looked at ranching which was managed communally in Oregon and they both studies water management in California.  However at this point they had not considered that they were studying something called the commons.

Resistance to ATOS (video

The Conservatives and Lib Dems are attacking those with disabilities just as the paralympics celebrates their achievements.

All the money the government save from driving those with disabilities into poverty helps with their tax cuts for corporations.

I wonder whether Nick Clegg offers to push people in wheel chairs and then propels them into the local canal?

Its shocking to be in Con Dem Britain, so good to see some protest.  Hope these people roll up to the Lib Dem conference.

Venezuelan Presidential election film

A group of British socialists are planning to make a film of the Venezuelan Presidential election in October.

Hugo Chavez looks is if he will win but the US government continue to try to destabalise Latin American governments and the mainstream media tend rather than looking at the real strengths and weaknesses of the left in Venezuela to follow the line of the established powers.

So alternative voices are vital

Using our video team from London, our plan is to capture the process in Venezuela, documenting as much as possible in order to spread the inspiring example of the Bolivarian Revolution far and wide.

 

It seems that the British corporate media (including the BBC) have pre-set plans to slander the Venezuelan people and their struggle for democracy (see link).

 

We aim to smash the British media blockade by bringing real news and real reporting to explain the Venezuelan process to people in Britain. Not only will we be uploading short clips and interviews as we record them across Caracas, but we will use the footage of the amazing people we meet on this journey to make a full documentary on our return.

 

We have experience of filming both short and long form projects through our work in Britain and we aim create a dynamic video blog, regularly updated right here, with information on our progress with the production of our documentary.

We need your help to ensure this project lifts off and becomes a success. 

 

Once our videos get online, we need you in our network of supporters to promote, blog, Facebook and Tweet our videos to all your friends and followers. This way we can ensure the truth is being spread about the success of the Venezuelan process, undermining the corporate media which has no time for real democracy, people power or the creation of true equality.

Knowledge is power! We demand the truth!

FUTHER DETAILS HERE


And do look at their previous

Cuba documentary up in full on youtube now - 

http://www.revolutionarycommunist.org/index.php/venezuela-2012/2649-check-out-our-cuba-documentary

Women of the Oglala Lakota nation march against White Clay liquor store

Just got this from Intercontinental Cry do follow them http://intercontinentalcry.org/white-clay-a-town-where-kids-get-pepper-sprayed-for-saying-no-to-alcohol/

Photo: Deep Green Resistance

On August 26, women of the Oglala Lakota Nation stood alongside allies to send a message to the predatory liquor vendors in White Clay, Nebraska.

It wasn't long before the police came to rescue the blight of a town. White Clay only has a population of 14, yet it has 4 liquor stores and sells approx. 12,500 cans of beer each day. They sell those cans to anyone, be they bootleggers, intoxicated people or minors. They also trade beer for sexual favors. They need to be shut down.

Jessica Garraway of Deep Green Resistance Great Plains reports.

Women’s March and Day of Peace Turns Violent– Protesters Arrested

Women of the Oglala Lakota nation along with activists from Deep Green Resistance, AIM Grassroots, Un-Occupy Albuquerque, Occupy Lincoln, and Rocky Mountain Peace and Justice Center took part in a march from Billy Mills Hall in Pine Ridge into White Clay to protest against the predatory liquor industry present there.

White Clay has a population of 14, yet 4 liquor stores in the town sell 12,500 cans of beer each day. The stores have been documented repeatedly selling to bootleggers, intoxicated people, minors, and trading beer for sexual favors.

“For over 100 years the women of the Oglala Lakota nation have been dealing with an attack on the mind body and spirit of their relatives”, says Olowan Martinez who is a main organizer of the event and resident of Pine Ridge. “The Oglala have been silenced through chemical warfare waged by the corporations who are out to exploit and make a profit off of the suffering and misery of our people. The time has come to end this suffering by any means necessary.”

Debra White Plume, a Lakota activist and resident of Pine Ridge who spoke at the event proclaimed, “A sober Indian is a dangerous Indian. We have to send a message to Nebraska and its citizens that we are not going to tolerate business as usual. This is the Women’s Day of Peace but that peace will soon be over”.

After the march and speeches members of Deep Green Resistance locked down and blockaded the road into White Clay.

Less than a half hour after the lockdown began a police officer rolled down their window and indiscriminately pepper sprayed into a crowd. Up to 12 people were pepper sprayed including the 10 year old son of a Lakota woman who helped organize the march. Also, an elder Lakota woman, Helen Red Feather, reported having her leg hit by a police car in motion. Medics with the protest treated pepper spray injuries.

At 7:39, the five activists who participated in the lock down were hauled off in a horse trailer to the Sheridan County jail in Rushville. They have since been released on their own recognizance.

Today, justice is far from complete, since White Clay continues to enable and enact the destruction of the Oglala Lakota and the people of Pine Ridge. The continued subjugation of the Oglala Lakota of the Pine Ridge Reservation will not end as long as the liquor stores in White Clay continue to operate.

Chants of “As long as it takes!” began by those locked down and the people standing with them in the crowd at the beginning of the lockdown. The struggle continues.

For press inquiries, please contact Jessica Garraway:

Email: garrawaj@riseup.net

Phone: (253) 906-4740

Liberties and Commons for All

I have been cracking on with my book about Elinor Ostrom so blogging less but this is a great piece from Peter Linebaugh on commons.
Liberties and Commons for All Weekend Edition August 24-26, 2012  Preface to the Korean Edition of Magna Carta Manifesto  Liberties and Commons for All
  http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/08/24/liberties-and-commons-for-all/ by PETER LINEBAUGH Of the aristocratic and stylish six Mitford sisters, Jessica provides us with the Lazy Interpretation of Magna Carta beloved by sluggards everywhere. As a lovely communist (two of her sisters were fascists) she was disowned by her family and fell from the social peaks of English aristocracy to the Dickensian depths of the Rotherhithe docks in London in 1939. Unable to pay the rent she and her husband lived in fear of the process-server who they avoided by going in disguises which the process server soon came to recognize. "Esmond had a theory that it was illegal and in some way a violation of Magna Carta to serve process on people in bed." So they stayed in bed all day and then all night, and again all the next day, and all the next night under the covers, before deciding to emigrate to America. (Tom Paine, too, thought that independent America was a realization of Magna Carta). Once we stop smiling, we see the wisdom of rest. William Morris's wonderful utopian novel, News from Nowhere, is called in its sub-title "An Epoch of Rest" and the story actually begins in bed! The Bible solemnly orders that the earth itself be given a rest every seven years. This of course made sense agronomically at the time to prevent soil exhaustion. And it makes sense today than ever. Because earth, air, water, and fire, formerly common, are utterly exhausted by the world's privatizers who call their exploitation "business."

But business is the opposite of rest. The sub-title of this book, Liberties and Commons for All, expresses two aspects of the ancient English Charters of Liberty; first is the restraint on political power of the King, second is the protection of subsistence in the commons. The former are legal issues – rule of law, trial by jury, prohibition of torture, habeas corpus; the latter are economic principles – neighborhood, subsistence, commons, reparations, and travel. How have they fared since the book was published? A world-wide crushing financial crisis of austerity has been met with new demands in the Occupy Wall Street movement and anti-capitalist mobilizations in Greece, Spain, Egypt, and a renewed push-back against nuclear power. Can the Magna Carta and its sister companion, the Charter of the Forest, contribute to these discussions? How to put the commons into the constitution, and the constitution into the commons? Can the centuries of human wisdom found in these Charters help the people of Jeju Island preserve the last pristine commons on earth from the inevitable destruction entailed by the construction of a U.S. naval base in its bid for Pacific hegemony? The book was conceived at a time of the systematic devaluation of the working-class of the world. The U.S.A. gloated in its imagined omnipotence and one after another destroyed the internal restraints on that power, and eliminated the external restraints with endless global wars. War provided the shock for devaluation and enclosure.

From nurses and doctors health care was turned over to insurance profiteers; from carpenters and masons housing or shelter was turned over to bankers; from gardeners and farmers food was turned over to genetic engineers; and from librarians and scholars knowledge was turned over to machine operators. Work was as much alienated drudgery as ever, only now as "jobs" became a desperate social desideratum to have one was to be privileged. "Jobbery" once was scorned as corrupt careerism second only to stockbrokers in vile repute, instead it has thoughtlessly become the ultimate good. Prison has become a mass experience. They have combined to destroy self-respect, creativity, wellness, clearness of thought, probity of mind, and actual usefulness. They undermine integrity, and re-enslave mind, body, and soul.

 The Gwangju People's Uprising of May 1980 occupied a central city square renaming it Democracy Square. Some commentators stress three aspects of that uprising, the struggle for truth, the transcendence of secular life, and the creation of a historical community. George Katsiaficas compares it to the Paris Commune. One might also compare it to The Commons Rebellion of 1381 in England both for those three aspects and for the occupation of central urban spaces, and for the miracle of mobilization, accomplished at least in the 13th and 14th centuries by "murmuring." Knowledge of previous struggles for justice is transmitted in many ways through the law and extra-legally. Among the latter are commemorations, such as July Fourth commemorating the declaration of independence of the 13 American colonies in 1776 or Fourteenth of July commemorating the storming of the Bastille and the beginning of the French Revolution in 1789. The commemoration itself may become an occasion to renew the struggle of the past in the present of the events it commemorates, though this is dangerous. Nostalgia or official piety is the safer course. "All men are created equal" sounds good, as does liberté, égalité, et fraternité though the actual process of equalization, actual real equality, entails a perilous, though necessary, historical course of redistribution, confiscation, and leveling.
 The spectre of the commons has haunted the long arch of British history. The leader of the Commons Rebellion of 1381 was Wat Tyler who forced the King to negotiate the return of expropriated commons. He was massacred on 15 June 1381. The fact that 15 June was the date when King John was forced by civil war to succumb to limitations on his power in Magna Carta in 1215 was not mentioned by the chroniclers of 1381. The archive of human knowledge is controlled by the rulers. This is not to argue that the class war of the Commons Rebellion of 1381 and the civil war leading to the armistice of Magna Carta in 1215 were either the same issues or led by the same social forces. In the latter the barons and nobility were enjoined to restrain the King, while in the former this was left to the commons. Yet both acted for the commonweal, or the common good as we might say. The concept of the commonweal emerged after the Commons Rebellion of 1381 whose insurgents included craftsmen, proletarians, and vagabonds in addition to the peasants who were the most numerous and fundamental. Ever since the semantic field of the "commons" includes this association with rebellion. David Rollison shows that "weale" derives from the Anglo-Saxon term wele itself meaning wellness, welfare, or well-being. Riches, or the accumulation of commodities, undermines well-being, as all the world's religions once taught. At best, properties can be instruments for the attainment of wellness; at worst, they impeded it. The English State in its 16th century depended on the centralized monarchy and established religion to oppose the commons. Thomas Elyot, Renaissance humanist, clerked for the King's Council and did business for Star Chamber. He wrote The Book Named the Governor (1531) and dedicated it to King Henry VIII and it was published by the King's printer. It went through eight editions in the 16th century. Its second paragraph is an argument against communism. People have mistaken "republic" for a "commonweal." The English word, "republic" derives from two Latin words, res publica, which means things belonging to the populous, or the public, which is to be distinguished from the plebeia, or common people. Plebs is Latin for English commonality and plebeii is commoners. Res plebeia thus should be translated as the "commonweal." Those who make this mistake, claims Elyot, do so "that every thing should be to all men in common." "… if there should be a common weale, either the commoners only must be wealthy and the gentle and noble men needy and miserable, or else excluding gentility, all men must be of one degree and sort, and a new name provided." He feared the Biblical text requiring Christians "to have all things in common." Why was the argument against commons conducted on philological or semantic grounds? It had to do with the control of language, and thus the control of understanding, as Latin was giving way to the vernacular English during the period of the formation of a national market in commodities (traffic). The clerical, or priestly, caste was losing its monopoly on political discourse. It no longer was the exclusive voice of the nation. Latin was the soft-ware code, as it were, of what they called "the republic of letters." Those letters, as Marx wrote, were "letters of blood and fire," that is the expropriation of the commons. They did not want the subject to be generalized from local practices, nor did they want the struggles against expropriation to be linked as they had been at the time of the Commons Rebellion of 1381, any more than do the powers-that-be want the struggle at Gwangju or Jeju Island generalized.
Whispering and "murmuring" were means of communication among the people who were wise enough to express themselves just short of the coherent articulation that rulers could understand, and yet all the more ominous for that. The ruling class wished to exclude such voices and thus to control the human archive upon which the human story is based. Thomas More, the same King's loyal servant, was late in delivering the manuscript of Utopia (1516) to his printer and made excuses by blaming his wife, his children, and his servants. Written and published in Latin it was not translated into English until 1551. The translator, Raphe Robinson, rendered More's Latin excuse for not having the time for writing, "For when I am come home, I must common with my wife, chat with my children, and talk with my servants … ." Common with his wife! Communism was not a dream! Utopia was not nowhere, it was right here at home! So much is implied with this translation. It occurred just after Kett's Rebellion in Norfolk, the largest effort in that century to preserve English commoning. Three years later (1562) the English monarchy established the famous 39 Articles of the Church of England. Preached from every pulpit, studied by every child, from that century on, the penultimate, 38th article, flatly stated, "The Riches and Goods of Christians are not common…." The control of the pulpit was as jealously guarded by the state as the internet is against Wikileaks. In the following century another effort to secure the commons and gain access to the pulpit, led by Levellers and Diggers in the English Revolution, gave the ruling class a lasting fright.

Between 1551 and 1684 commoning had considerably diminished, with the defeat of many rebellions, riots, and revolution. The patriarchy was unable to common. The domestic system of production was also diminished as the workshop or manufacture advanced as a separate establishment from the family. The attack on women proceeded with multiple burnings and torture. So, it should not surprise us that Gilbert Burnet, the complacent defender of the Whig Establishment after the restoration of monarchy should translate Utopia anew in which commoning between husband and wife has disappeared to be replaced by "discourse." In the U.S.A. neither aspect of Magna Carta has flourished, despite important attempts. The Afro-American, T. Thomas Fortune wrote in 1880s in the depths of the Jim Crow segregation of the American south installing slavery under another name, "that land is common property, the property of the whole people." He too reached deep into the human past, "The fires of revolution are incorporated into the Magna Carta of our liberties, and no human power can avert the awful eruption which will eventually burst upon us as Mount Vesuvius burst forth upon Herculaneum and Pompeii. It is too late for America to be wise in time. `The die is cast.'" Franklin Roosevelt sought to be wise in the crisis of capitalism during the 1930s, and to cast the dice again. At his 3rd inauguration as President in January 1941 he reminded America that "the democratic aspiration is no mere recent phase in human history … it blazed anew in the Middle Ages. It was written in Magna Carta." In the context of the Four Freedoms, and the explanation of Freedom from Want was provided by the commoner and proletarian, Carlos Bulosan. Bulosan had worked the succulent cornucopia of mother earth: in the orange groves, flower fields, asparagus rows, winter peas, vineyards, Wyoming beets, plant cauliflower, picked hops, lemon farms – but working as a proletarian he suffered beatings, gambling, prostitution, drugs, homelessness. As for the commons, this became a memory of family life in the Philippines.

MORE HERE

ARCTIC SEA ICE DEMONSTRATION AT DOWNING STREET

Confirmed TOMORROW - Sunday 26th 1pm!

ARCTIC SEA ICE IS CRASHING. To mark the breaking of the all time record minimum for arctic sea ice extent, we will meet outside Downing Street with a block of ice carved to represent an iceberg and, authorities willing, will hand in a letter to Number 10.

When you think that the actual minimum for this season is unlikely to be reached till mid September or possibly later then you begin to realise how much of a bombshell this really is - we could see the all-time low

record not just broken this year but obliterated....!!!

This means that an ice free arctic ocean could very rapidly become a reality and the consequences could be profound....for the effect that the warming arctic is already having on global weather patterns - with devastating impact on global food supplies.

http://www.facebook.com/events/457942897560258/