I have been hearing reports of this for the past week: ‘In other news Thursday, nearly a week of labor violence in South Africa intensified as police fired on striking platinum miners, killing as many as 18 workers. Also, officials in Congo confirmed that a mining landslide killed at least 60 gold miners (16 August 2012)’.
In the New York Times, Lydia Polgreen writes that the South African “police fired on machete-wielding workers engaged in a wildcat strike at a platinum mine here on Thursday, [16 August 2012, ] leaving a field strewed with bodies and a deepening fault line between the governing African National Congress and a nation that, 18 years after the end of apartheid, is increasingly impatient with deep poverty, rampant unemployment and yawning inequality. In a scene replayed endlessly on television that reminded some South Africans of the days when the police of the apartheid government opened fire on protesters, heavily armed officers shot into a charging crowd of workers who walked off the job last Friday, [10 August, ] demanding higher wages. The strike has pitted the country’s largest mine workers union, which is closely allied with the governing A.N.C., against a radical upstart union demanding sharp increases in pay and faster action to improve the grim living and working standards for miners”.[1]
Following a year of occupying and sleeping rough, here is the intrepid Dennis Trainor, Jr.’s long-awaited Occudoc. Trainor is a writer and host of Acronym TV.[1] The equally intrepid David Swanson had this to say about Trainor’s latest: “we now have a film of our own. This is not amateur hour. This is a movie as well made, in technical terms, as anyHollywood blockbuster with Pentagon funding. But this is a movie with us in it. I don’t mean our little group of activist friends. I mean us, the people of this country, our stories, our hardships, our triumphs, our injustices, our tragedies, our humor. This is radically different from what you’ll see at your local movie theater”.
In Turkey this traditional celebration of the rights of the workers proceeded smoothly this year: ‘Thousands of people in Turkey are celebrating the Labor Day, also known as the International Workers’ Day, in all corners of the country on Tuesday [, 1 May 2012]. The Confederation of Revolutionary Workers’ Unions (DISK) and the Confederation of Public Sector Trade Unions (KESK) are celebrating the Labor Day in Istanbul’s Taksim Square while the Confederation of Righteous Trade Unions (Hak-Is) and the Confederation of Public Servants Trade Unions (Memur-Sen) are celebrating the day at Ankara’s Tandogan Square. A major celebration is also taking place in the north-western provinceof Bursawhere members of the Turkish Confederation of Labor (Turk-Is) and the Turkish Public Workers’ Union(Turkiye Kamu-Sen) have gathered together. People attending the celebrations were seen carrying banners supporting better work conditions and workers’ rights. For the first time in Turkey’s history, a movement called “Muslim Anti-Capitalists” joined Labor Day celebrations with leftist groups in Taksim, Istanbul. The members of the movement performed prayers in the Fatih Mosque before going to Taksim. Meanwhile, in a message released on Tuesday, Turkish Premier Recep Tayyip Erdogan wished all workers a happy Labor Day’.[1]
On a cold December morning in 1919, just aftermidnight, Emma Goldman, her comrade Alexander Berkman, and more than 200 other foreign-born radicals were roused from theirEllis Islanddormitory beds to begin their journey out of theUnited Statesfor good.
Convicted of obstructing the draft during World War I, Goldman’s expatriation came 34 years after she had first set foot inAmerica, a young, brilliant, Russian immigrant. For more than three decades, she taunted mainstreamAmericawith her outspoken attacks on government, big business and war.
Goldman’s passionate espousal of radical causes made her the target of persecution. Her sympathy for Leon Czolgosz, the assassin of President McKinley, brought down upon her the hatred of the authorities and the public at large. Feared as a sponsor of anarchy and revolution, she was vilified in the press as “Red Emma,” “Queen of the Anarchists,” and “the most dangerous woman in America.”[1]
While polite society is happily talking about India’s miraculous growth figures, its emerging middle Class and prospects of a bright future, Indian small farmers on the ground experience a different kind of reality: a ‘bumper harvest in one of India’s rice producing states has led to a rash of farmer suicides. It is due to the market being flooded by cheap rice, which has caused prices drop. Al Jazeera’s Sohail Rahman reports from the Burdwan District of West Bengal’.
Another aspect of Indian reality not receiving sufficient attention is the undeclared war between the government and Naxalite rebels controlling vast swathes of land. Here is a ‘montage of pictures of Maoists and Naxalites from India taken from the Internet and set to the song Naxalite by Asian Dub Foundation’.
Neither the democratically elected communist government that has ruled West Bengal since 1977 nor the center-left federal government has brought the villagers long-promised relief, despite India’s expanding economy. Concerned by terrorism and geopolitics at India’s borders with its nuclear-armed neighbors, Pakistan and China, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh nonetheless has identified the Maoists as his nation’s biggest internal threat. Investors, including global steel giants, are wary of placing money in the areas dominated by Maoists, who are gaining in strength in the rich mining areas of eastern India. The Maoists, who hold sway over vast swaths of forestland and rural pockets in 22 of India’s 28 states, dominate Lalgarh and its surrounding areas. They have created a long Red Corridor, stretching across several states through jungles, over hills and into mineral-rich terrains and remote tribal villages plagued by hunger, police brutality and underdevelopment. The rebels, said to number about 22,000 by official estimates, live in the forests with the latest weaponry and raise their army of men and women who intermittently attack police officers. The youngsters join them — driven by poverty or radical ideologies. They have ambushed police posts, killed government supporters, kidnapped officials, hijacked trains, triggered land mines and melted into the deep forests with their cache of weapons. In April [2010], the Maoists killed 76 security personnel in one of the biggest strikes at Dantewada in Chhattisgarh state of central India. That raid was preceded by the killings of about 25 security personnel at the Silda police camp near Lalgarh in West Bengal. “The rebels rule the area. We hope we can now at least protect us,” says an official in the Lalgarh police station, where authorities regained control in June after it had been captured and held for months by well-armed rebels. “The tribal people inhabit in the mineral- and other natural-resource-rich areas, but they have no property rights. On the other hand, the global demand for resources are displacing them from their own land. The Maoists have not made their dens in a day. This is the result of irresponsible, sleeping government, which has suddenly woken up after the eagle eyes of the corporates fell on those mineral-rich lands of tribal people,” Mr. Patel says. “There was virtually no governance in these areas. So Maoists became their friends.” Mr. Singh, the prime minister, has conceded as much himself: “We cannot overlook the fact that many of areas in which such extremism flourishes are underdeveloped, and many of the people, mainly poor tribals, who live in these areas have not shared equitably in the fruits of development,” Mr. Singh said last month’. The just-quoted text and the below video clip were made by The Reality of India.
Tent cities have sprung up all over America and poverty has a key role in the increasing numbers. Homeless people have been forced to seek refuge in camps in the woods over the last 5 years. What will it take to make places like these obsolete? Richard Eskrow, senior fellow at The Campaign for America’s Future, helps us answer this tough question (7 December 2011).
While Occupy Wall Street tents have been popping up all across the U.S., homeless people have been forced to Occupy a camp in the woods over the last 5 years. RT’s Anastasia Churkina reports from New Jersey’s Tent City — and finds out why the homeless haven’t been joining the protests (7 December 2011).
In fact, somebody, probably Pastor Steve Brigham, has even ensured that Tent City has an internet presence now: ‘2005 started out a few people homeless trying to find shelter. Now known as Tent City a makeshift village in the woods near Lakewood, New Jersey has approximately 70 people seeking shelter. Now six years later it’s a battle to be able to call this place home for some. With eviction notices from the township on its doorstep. Tent city is in need of community support’.[1]
One of the Tent City dwellers, a certain Elwood E. Hyers, has said this about living in Tent City: “Instead of being depressed that you’re homeless, at least this way you’re going inside and saying ‘wow’. You shut the door and don’t feel homeless”.[2]
A small business owner and independent investor, as well as blogger and propagandist Mac Slavo writes that “[w]hile Americans [seem to] argue amongst themselves over wages, union bargaining rights, government spending, monetary easing, and a host of other issues, including who’s to blame for the country’s malaise, Minister Brigham and his community [at Tent City] trudge on, despite what’s happening outside of their neighborhood microcosm. As millions struggle to hold on to the American Dream, the residents of this New Jersey “Tent City” have already experienced loss, and the emotional roller coaster that inevitably follows. They’ve gone through the first four stages of loss – denial, anger, bargaining, depression. In a situation where everything has been lost, and hope seemingly doesn’t exist, only the fifth stage, acceptance, becomes applicable. These individuals and families have accepted what has happened, and understand that they have a choice. Either give up and wallow in regret and blame. Or, empower oneself, and those around you, and move forward by whatever means are available”.[3]
Another way to look at the situation is to assume that the fifth stage would be resignation, which would be anathema to the American Dream and its championing of the underdog striving hard to overcome adversity and emerge victorious.
A vast new protest wave has swept through New York, as some 20-thousand people marched demanding better jobs and economic opportunities. The demonstration was organised by labour unions, but the rhetoric borrowed liberally from the Occupy movement, which has been protesting in the U.S. for months.
Thom speaks with an Occupy Philadelphia protestor recently released from Jail and gets the latest developments on the Occupy Los Angeles movement. Later Thom Debates his two conservative guests in the Lone Liberal Rumble.
On BBC’s Newsnight, the ever-aloof Jeremy Paxman hosted an unlikely couple to debate the current political malaise in the U.S. Teabagger Sharon Angle and comedian Lee Camp talk about the Republican wanna-be candidates for the 2012 presidential elections and the accompanying gaffes.[1] In an effort to provide some context, last year Angle declared the following: the “Federal Department of Education should be eliminated. The Department of Education is unconstitutional and should not be involved in education, at any level”,[2] proving that Rick Perry is not completely on his own.
All the while the Occupy Movement continues unabated, albeit that the police and other agencies are trying very hard to extinguish the flames of resistance in the Land of the Free. As written by Wonkette Jr. on the eponymous website: back in the day when the Bush administration was in charge “people were freaking out over the Patriot Act and Homeland Security and all this other conveniently ready-to-go post-9/11 police state stuff, because it would obviously be just a matter of time before the whole apparatus was turned against non-Muslim Americans when they started getting complain-y about the social injustice and economic injustice and income inequality and endless recession and permanent unemployment? That day is now, and has been for some time. But it’s also now confirmed that it’s now, as some Justice Department official screwed up and admitted that the Department of Homeland Security coordinated the riot-cop raids on a dozen major #Occupy Wall Street demonstration camps nationwide yesterday and today”.[3] Wonkette’s source is Minneapolis-based Rick Ellis who writes that according to an unnamed “Justice official, each of those [anti-OWS] actions was coordinated with help from Homeland Security, the FBI and other federal police agencies”, particularly referring to conference calls made just prior to crackdowns.[4] In other words, as I wrote last year in Today’s Zaman, “the quickly passed Patriot Act clearly limit[s] the much-valued constitutional rights of US citizens as well as ‘aliens’ deemed threats to US national security. To date, the Obama administration has not revoked this legal measure” and now the Act seems to have been put to good use suppressing the Occupy Wall Street movement.[5] In an effort to boost the credibility of his story, Ellis adds that his “original source for the story (who still works at the Justice Dept.) stands behind the original story and we’re working to flesh it out in more detail today”.[6] Moreover, here is Keith Olbermann shedding light on this and other topics on Friday, 18 November.
Meanwhile in Egypt, the revolution that in some ways sparked the current wave of protest movements worldwide, is undergoing a kind of revival, due to the fact that the ouster of Mubarak did not usher any tangible change but merely solidified the military’s grip. Tahrir Square has been the scene of violent repression since last Friday, 18 November. The Daily Telegraph reports that on ‘a fourth morning of violence in Cairo, Tahrir Square protesters report police firing live rounds but remain firm in their beliefs as they demand that Egypt’s military name a date on which they will hand over power to elected officials (22 November 2011’.
And now, it seems that something has changed in the state of Egypt, as reported by RT: ‘Egypt’s government has resigned amid huge protest in Cairo’s Tahrir Square. Since Friday up to 33 have died in clashes between protesters and security forces, with riot police firing tear gas and rubber bullets against stone-throwing demonstrators (22 November 2011)’.
Following the forceful eviction of protesters and occupiers, the ‘Occupy Wall Street’s encampment is gone, but the movement lives on. No one knows, however, just how long it can survive without a literal place to call home. Police cleared Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan early Tuesday [, 15 November] and although protesters are being allowed to return, they can bring only a small bag with them. No tents or sleeping bags are being allowed’.
South African Strike Turns Deadly
I have been hearing reports of this for the past week: ‘In other news Thursday, nearly a week of labor violence in South Africa intensified as police fired on striking platinum miners, killing as many as 18 workers. Also, officials in Congo confirmed that a mining landslide killed at least 60 gold miners (16 August 2012)’.
In the New York Times, Lydia Polgreen writes that the South African “police fired on machete-wielding workers engaged in a wildcat strike at a platinum mine here on Thursday, [16 August 2012, ] leaving a field strewed with bodies and a deepening fault line between the governing African National Congress and a nation that, 18 years after the end of apartheid, is increasingly impatient with deep poverty, rampant unemployment and yawning inequality. In a scene replayed endlessly on television that reminded some South Africans of the days when the police of the apartheid government opened fire on protesters, heavily armed officers shot into a charging crowd of workers who walked off the job last Friday, [10 August, ] demanding higher wages. The strike has pitted the country’s largest mine workers union, which is closely allied with the governing A.N.C., against a radical upstart union demanding sharp increases in pay and faster action to improve the grim living and working standards for miners”.[1]
[1] Lydia Polgreen, “Mine Strike Mayhem Stuns South Africa as Police Open Fire” The New York Times (16 August 2012). http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/17/world/africa/south-african-police-fire-on-striking-miners.html?_r=1.
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Africa, Current Affairs, Democracy, Labour Relations, Political Commentary, Uncategorized