Green Party endorses Ken Livingstone

Its vote Jenny and transfer to Kenny, no doubt the Evening Standard will be spinning for the bankers they love Boris and don't want fares cut and they are very happy with Bozzer's 50p tax cut victory.

The Green Party in London has made me proud, lets all get out and work for Jenny and transfer the votes to Ken.

Vote Jen 1, Ken 2, says Green Party

Vote decides Livingstone as second preference candidate
Photocall

Who: Mayoral candidate Jenny Jones and Ken Livingstone

What: launch of Green Party’s recommendation of Livingstone as second preference candidate

Where: Rooftop, 56-64 Leonard Street, Development House, London, EC2A 4LT

When: 2pm Wednesday 28 March 2012
An extraordinary meeting of the London Green Party this week decided to recommend Ken Livingstone as second preference choice for Mayor after first choice Jenny Jones.
Livingstone spoke to around 70 members at the Party’s Headquarters on Leonard Street and fielded questions on his record and policies.
After over an hour of discussion, a vote in favour of recommending Livingstone as second choice carried with a clear majority.
Green Party Mayoral candidate Jenny Jones said: "The voting system gives Londoners a chance to make a positive Mayoral first choice for a more equal, healthier and affordable London.
“However, should I not be counted among the top two candidates after the first round, then I want a Mayor who will work with Green Party Assembly Members to deliver on pay equality, less pollution and cheaper fares.
“Ken Livingstone is far from perfect, but we know from his last time as Mayor that we can work with him to make positive changes in a way that would be impossible with either Boris Johnson or many other senior Labour politicians.”
Livingstone said: ”What we are seeing is that as we get closer to the election a broadening alliance of people wants a fairer London.
“The Green endorsement for second preferences is a key building block to winning change on May 3rd. I am very pleased that the Green Party has decided to encourage their supporters to cast their second preference votes for me.
“I look forward to working again with Green Assembly Members, including tackling air pollution, creating a fairer London, and improving pedestrian and cyclists’ safety.”
Discussions focused on the clear desire among members to help prevent a further four years of Boris Johnson’s Mayorship, and the clear differentiation between recommending the Labour Party and Livingstone as a candidate, the man himself frequently opposing Labour Party policy.
Members emphasised that the priority of the campaign was to increase the number of Greens elected to the London Assembly in order to best hold the successful Mayor candidate to account.
Members raised particular concerns over Livingstone’s record on road building, the poorly regulated financial sector and air pollution.
However, the meeting meeting voted to support the recommendation after hearing pledges to curb top pay at City Hall, help the lowest paid workers, end cheats and evasions over air pollution used by the current Mayor and Government and financially support boroughs wanting to introduce 20mph zones.

Sterile sectarianism versus obedient compromise with evil

Sometimes all the models look wrong, the British far left are excluded and marginal but those who compromise are soon swept away too.  Its easy to point to leftists without influence to justify participation with what ultimately is evil.  Its also easy for those who reject such compromises to justify their own impotent failure which too is an acceptance of what is wrong.  Of course some decisions, one thinks of the Irish Green Party coalition with notoriously corrupt Fianna Fail, are obviously untenable.  Achieving necessary change is not easy in European politics at present, what we have has failed and creating an alternative means profound change.  Anyway my almost continuous meditation on this was rewoken when I read the following paragraph:

Here lies the dilemma of the revolutionary within a society unripe for revolution. If he stands aside from the main currents of social change, he becomes purist, sectarian, without influence. If he swims with the current, he is swept downward by the flow of reformism and compromise.

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Mumia Abu-Jamal on Fanon.

Mumia Abu-Jamal on Fanon. Essential, very important video essay, listen, learn, share.

Cuba solves climate change (video)

Great video from my friend Roberto!

Caroline Lucas condemns budget for billionaires which wrecks environment

-        
‘Environment versus economy’ rhetoric and tax breaks for oil and gas
show Osborne still doesn’t get it
-        
Coalition to bulldoze ahead with ‘growth at any cost’ planning reforms
-        
Toxic 50p tax cut for the rich exposes Lib Dem failure to dilute Tory
dogma
-        
Budget offers little for part time workers and people on lowest incomes
The 2012 Budget will do nothing to deliver a greener or more prosperous
economy – and shows the Coalition completely failing the fairness test, said
the UK’s Green MP today.
Caroline Lucas, leader of the Green Party and MP for Brighton Pavilion,
said:
"This true blue Budget is the nail in the coffin for this Government’s
‘greenest ever’ pledge.
"The determination to plough ahead with growth-at-any-cost planning
reforms and aviation expansion, throw money at North Sea oil and gas, and
ignore the potential of green energy shows that this administration’s
environmental policy is blue, not green.
"The Chancellor’s stubborn refusal to accept that investment in clean
renewable energy and energy efficiency can simultaneously tackle the
environmental crisis, stabilise the UK economy and create jobs is depriving
this country of a more prosperous future."
Lucas continued: "Meanwhile, Osborne’s toxic tax cut for the richest is a
slap in the face for the millions of working people across the country fighting
a losing battle against falling wages, job insecurity, rising living costs and
severe public spending cuts.
"Having failed to secure either a genuine mansion tax or a tycoon tax to
compensate for the Tories’ unfair 50p rate cut, disillusioned Liberal Democrat
MPs must once again be asking themselves what purpose they are serving in this
Coalition.
"The fact that public sector net borrowing hit £15.2bn in February is clear
proof that Osborne’s destructive austerity drive is failing even on its own
terms. And given the increasing levels of joblessness, the
Government’s blind belief in the private sector to compensate for huge public
sector job losses – 270,000 last year – looks increasingly delusional.
"We have a youth unemployment crisis of staggering proportions and a
whole section of society trapped in low paid work. While there were some positive
measures to tackle this in today’s Budget, it’s clear that the Government needs
to do far more."
The Green MP concluded: "This Budget is a regressive document from a regressive
Government. It will do nothing to deliver a fairer or more prosperous UK
economy – and it certainly won’t deliver a greener one."
ENDS
News from The Green Party website: http://www.greenparty.org.uk/news/budget-2012-true-blue-is-nail-in-coffin-for-green-government-pledge.html

Don't poison us say SalvaTierra

Please spread the word.

http://salvatierrard.wordpress.com/

Activists demand to ban cyanide in Dominican Republic

The protest took place in front of the offices of Barrick, which prepares to operate the Pueblo Viejo gold and silver mine next year

Dominican Republic.- The group SalvaTierra took a non-violent direct action this morning in front of the building where the multinational mining corporation Barrick has part of its offices in capital city, Santo Domingo. It declared its support to dozens of environmental and social groups that have already expressed their opposition to megamining in the country and joined the campaign by the Latin America Mining Conflicts Observatory (OCMAL) to ban cyanide in the whole region.

In their statement, the group warns that: “Mega open pit mining is an activity whose enormous scale entails major environmental impacts, such as the destruction of large forests, the massive consumption of fresh water and electricity, the production of acid drainage, and above all the use of large amounts of highly toxic substances”. Amongst the latter they highlighted cyanide, which Barrick is planning to use for processing 24,000 tons of mineral daily in the Pueblo Viejo mine currently under construction.

The activists of SalvaTierra asserted that the terrible disasters cyanide has already caused in different parts of the world evidence that there is no way of having absolute safeguards against spills of this toxic substance. They highlighted the cyanide spill that occurred in Romaina in 2000, which motivated a ten years debate that concluded with the ban of cyanide for mining purposes in the whole of the European Union; and that of Ghana, in 2009, which took place in a gold mine certified by the International Cyanide Management Code, which Barrick now pretends to use as a guarantee against spills in Pueblo Viejo.

While a 20 percent of the Dominican population has no access to water according to the United Nations Program for Development (UNDP), the Pueblo Viejo mine is planning to consume 2,500 cubic meters of water per hour. The mine is also putting in risk of pollution with cyanide and acid drainage the Hatillo dam, the largest of the Caribbean region. SalvaTierra expressed their concerns about these facts, specially when it has been announced that climate change could decrease the water supply of the nation up to a 60 a percent.

The group concluded by saying that the decision to take the Dominican Republic on the path of megamining development is not the result of a consensus based on a democratic debate, but rather seeks particular interests and privileges. In addition, they stated that there is crucial information which has been kept from the public, such as the amount of cyanide that Barrick is planning to use in Pueblo Viejo. For all these reasons, they demanded more transparency and access to information from the mining corporations and the government, and the ban of cyanide for mining purposes.  

Capitalism: A Ghost Story (complete movie)

Capitalism is destroying the planet. The two old tricks that dug it out of past crises—War and Shopping—simply will not work http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?280234



Is it a house or a home? A temple to the new India, or a warehouse for its ghosts? Ever since Antilla arrived on Altamont Road in Mumbai, exuding mystery and quiet menace, things have not been the same. “Here we are,” the friend who took me there said, “Pay your respects to our new Ruler.”
Antilla belongs to India’s richest man, Mukesh Ambani. I had read about this most expensive dwelling ever built, the twenty-seven floors, three helipads, nine lifts, hanging gardens, ballrooms, weather rooms, gymnasiums, six floors of parking, and the six hundred servants. Nothing had prepared me for the vertical lawn—a soaring, 27-storey-high wall of grass attached to a vast metal grid. The grass was dry in patches; bits had fallen off in neat rectangles. Clearly, Trickledown hadn’t worked.
But Gush-Up certainly has. That’s why in a nation of 1.2 billion, India’s 100 richest people own assets equivalent to one-fourth of the GDP.
The word on the street (and in the New York Times) is, or at least was, that after all that effort and gardening, the Ambanis don’t live in Antilla. No one knows for sure. People still whisper about ghosts and bad luck, Vaastu and Feng Shui. Maybe it’s all Karl Marx’s fault. (All that cussing.) Capitalism, he said, “has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, that it is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells”.
In India, the 300 million of us who belong to the new, post-IMF “reforms” middle class—the market—live side by side with spirits of the nether world, the poltergeists of dead rivers, dry wells, bald mountains and denuded forests; the ghosts of 2,50,000 debt-ridden farmers who have killed themselves, and of the 800 million who have been impoverished and dispossessed to make way for us. And who survive on less than twenty rupees a day.
Mukesh Ambani is personally worth $20 billion. He holds a majority controlling share in Reliance Industries Limited (RIL), a company with a market capitalisation of $47 billion and global business interests that include petrochemicals, oil, natural gas, polyester fibre, Special Economic Zones, fresh food retail, high schools, life sciences research and stem cell storage services. RIL recently bought 95 per cent shares in Infotel, a TV consortium that controls 27 TV news and entertainment channels, including CNN-IBN, IBN Live, CNBC, IBN Lokmat, and ETV in almost every regional language. Infotel owns the only nationwide licence for 4G Broadband, a high-speed “information pipeline” which, if the technology works, could be the future of information exchange. Mr Ambani also owns a cricket team.
RIL is one of a handful of corporations that run India. Some of the others are the Tatas, Jindals, Vedanta, Mittals, Infosys, Essar and the other Reliance (ADAG), owned by Mukesh’s brother Anil. Their race for growth has spilled across Europe, Central Asia, Africa and Latin America. Their nets are cast wide; they are visible and invisible, over-ground as well as underground. The Tatas, for example, run more than 100 companies in 80 countries. They are one of India’s oldest and largest private sector power companies. They own mines, gas fields, steel plants, telephone, cable TV and broadband networks, and run whole townships. They manufacture cars and trucks, own the Taj Hotel chain, Jaguar, Land Rover, Daewoo, Tetley Tea, a publishing company, a chain of bookstores, a major brand of iodised salt and the cosmetics giant Lakme. Their advertising tagline could easily be: You Can’t Live Without Us.
According to the rules of the Gush-Up Gospel, the more you have, the more you can have.
The era of the Privatisation of Everything has made the Indian economy one of the fastest growing in the world. However, like any good old-fashioned colony, one of its main exports is its minerals. India’s new mega-corporations—Tatas, Jindals, Essar, Reliance, Sterlite—are those who have managed to muscle their way to the head of the spigot that is spewing money extracted from deep inside the earth. It’s a dream come true for businessmen—to be able to sell what they don’t have to buy.

MORE HERE