Home | Friday 3rd June 2005 |
Cor Blimey it's Issue 500!!!

WAKE UP!! IT'S YER DO THEY KNOW IT'S XMAS...

SchNEWS
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Story Links:
GRRRrrr8 – IT AIN’T | Crap Arrent of the Week | SchNEWS at Strawberry Fair | Battle of the Beanfield | Get on board the Resist G8 Trains! | G8 Events | DON'T BELIEVE THE TYPE | Local Newsletters for Local People | ...and finally...

GRRRrrr8 – IT AIN’T

"The harmful effects of the corporate globalisation project have led to mass popular protest and activism in the South, later joined by major sectors of the rich industrial societies, hence becoming harder to ignore. For the first time concrete alliances have been taking shape at a grassroots level. It is fair to say, I think, that the future of our endangered species may be determined in no small measure by how these popular forces evolve.” - Noam Chomsky, author, academic and general trouble maker.

For five hundred issues SchNEWS has been providing information for action to people involved in fighting for a better world. In that time we’ve covered hundreds of campaigns and struggles from across the world and learnt a simple lesson from all of them - without breaking the rules, the fight against injustice is a waste of time.

It’s a lesson quickly learnt by anyone involved in the biggest single issue campaign in history - anti-capitalism. Well paid propagandists are always telling us how corporate capitalism is the only way of running things and that any other way of organising society simply won’t work. But people in power have always said that – from the Roman Emperors to Hitler with his Final Solution and thousand years Reich. The individualistic, consumerist culture based on ever expanding credit that capitalism created in the second half of the 20th century has made things quite nice for large middle classes in the US, Europe and elsewhere - but only on the basis of sweatshops, poverty and war in the majority world*. And it’s completely unsustainable.

The United States is easily the strongest military power in the world but its increasingly selfish and warlike nature is a sign of weakness, not strength. USA inc. runs a $500bn annual trade deficit – US citizens consume $10bn more a week than they create. The ‘American way of life’ is a credit-based bubble subsidised by the rest of the world - as well as an increasing number of Americans forced into poverty - and is only maintained by the threat of overwhelming military force. It can’t go on.

And then of course there’s climate change. At the heart of capitalist culture is a massive denial of the fact that economic growth, on which all its economic prosperity is based, is entirely unsustainable. Blair and the boys may be talking about it at upcoming G8 Summit at Gleneagles but capitalism’s inbuilt need for ‘growth’ means they’ll be entirely incapable of doing anything to prevent it.

By the time children alive today are hitting middle age, for instance, the Himalayan glaciers will be disappearing, causing droughts that will threaten the rice production that feeds one third of humanity. That’s just for starters. Capitalism can’t solve these problems - only popular anti-capitalist movements uniting worldwide can. And the good news is there are lots of them.

As reported in SchNEWS over the years, anti-capitalism is alive and kicking across the majority world*. From the slums of Venezuela and Bolivia to the anti-occupation uprisings in Palestine and Iraq, people are organising against poverty, privatisation and injustice. Anti-capitalism, in a hundred forms, isn’t a choice for millions of people in the South*. It’s a necessity.

There are important lessons we need to learn from these struggles, most importantly the need to build solid, local campaigns about the things that concern people most. The privatisation of basic services, casualisation, the endless growth of eco-cidal consumerism are things most people in Britain outside fatcat areas oppose. We need to show people how direct action can resist them and win.

But living in the heart of the beast, surrounded by the boardrooms and hotels where deals shattering the lives of millions are made, also gives us special responsibilities. We can expose these deals and sometimes stop them by invading the gatherings of gangsters making them. The people in the countries affected can’t do this. It’s important that we do.

DECAPITALTATE

Those in power can handle people going on the occasional police-controlled march. They can also, let’s be honest, handle small groups of people doing actions that no one else gets involved in. What they can’t handle is people making alliances, building links, supporting and learning from each other through action. We’ve always been at our best when we’ve joined up with others – supporting the Liverpool dockers when their union deserted them, shutting down the World Trade Organisation in Seattle alongside NGOs, faith groups and many others - and been at our worst when we’ve retreated into subcultures that revel in being different from everyone around us.

That doesn’t mean we should never do anything that offends people who think you can change the world by asking politicians nicely. But most people wanting to resist capitalism (as opposed to talking about it) know instinctively that you’re not going to achieve anything if you play by capital's rules.

Thousands of young people these days are getting involved in politics through development charities, anti-war groups and environmental campaigns because they hate the obscenity of poverty, war and a capitalist system that is killing our planet. It would be a crime if the only people talking to them were sects telling them that police-approved marches and listening to speeches mark the limits of anti-capitalist activity.

But that will happen if we always look for differences to argue about with new people rather than points of agreement to act on. An instinct for unity in action is the breath that keeps anti-capitalism alive. Without it we might as well give up.

Social centres can be important places for building links with local communities. But when they become home to a lifestyle proud to be cut off from others they represent a retreat, not a success. If everyone is white and under 35 and no one’s talked to the people at the mosque across the road because muslims are ‘hierarchical’ it’s probably time to get out more.

NEO - CABER TOSSERS

Tony Blair recently said that “it would be very odd if people came to protest against this G8… I don’t quite know what they’ll be protesting against.” If we want to wipe the smile off this lying, duplicitous war criminal, we have to make our protests against this mafia get together effective.

If a few small actions against the G8 get picked off while big demonstrations do what they’re told by the cops Blair and Co will sleep comfortably in their five star beds. But if we start convincing the mass of protesters that demonstrations need to break the rules to be effective we can send a message of anti-capitalist solidarity around the world. Let’s do it.

* vocab watch- ‘majority world’ and the ‘South’ meaning the vast amount of the planet screwed over by the minority world (western world’s) greed.

Crap Arrest of the Week

For not wanting to fall off a cliff!
At the demo against Brighton arms manufacturers EDO this week police corralled 50 people into a thin strip of land between a road and a crash barrier in front of a 50 foot drop onto a railway line. Anyone daring to step into the road was arrested for breaking an injunction, police also pushed people back towards the cliff!

www.smashedo.org.uk

National Demo - noon, 11th June, The Level, Brighton.

SchNEWS Marquee At Strawberry Fair

2pm: Legacy Of The Battle Of Beanfield (see below) - Talk by Andy Worthington
3pm: FILM - SchNEWS AT TEN - The Movie. Screening
4.15pm: FILM - Auchtapalava - SchMOVIES visits town next to Gleneagles
6pm: Have I Got SchNEWS For You - Live interactive infotainment show.

In the proper paper version of SchNEWS (how many people didn't know that SchNEWS is printed on 2 sides of A4 paper every week and distributed about the city/country/world?) this is a double issue with 3 months worth of the Party and Protest guide in the middle pages. You lot reading this online or on email can check out the whole Party & Protest Listings here. You can even print out your own paper copy of from the PDF link at the top of the page. If yer really keen you can copy it and give it out to anyone you might think may be interested. Aren't we nice!

BATTLE Of The BEANFIELD - 20 YEARS ON

June 1st was the 20th anniversary of the Battle of the Beanfield, a notoriously brutal one-sided confrontation between 450 unarmed travellers – including many women and children – and a quasi-military police force of over 1,300 police and MoD. Bolstered by a mandate from on high, and some dodgy injunctions, preventing 83 named individuals from approaching Stonehenge, the police brought to a violent end the 11th annual Stonehenge Free Festival, and set about ‘decommissioning’ the new Travellers’ movement.

For the festival and the travellers had joined the ranks of Thatcher’s ‘enemies within.’ With the eviction of squats in the late ‘70s and widespread unemployment, thousands of people bought old buses and trucks and took to the roads each year. Many found a living on the free festival circuit, whose central focus was the gathering at Stonehenge, which had become an alternative state of 100,000 people by 1984.

Despite four months’ planning, the police operation was a shambles. Plans to stop the convoy at a roadblock near the A303, blocking it at the front and back, collapsed when an outrider spotted the roadblock and directed the convoy down a side road, where they met a second roadblock. After a first wave of violent assaults by the police, in which windscreens were smashed and the occupants dragged out screaming, most of the vehicles broke into a neighbouring field, derailing the police plan still further.

For the next four hours, there was an uneasy stand-off, while Lionel Grundy, the officer in charge, insisted that everyone was to be arrested under the pretext of finding out who had committed a number of alleged crimes earlier in the day (the theft of some petrol and a bit of shoplifting). ‘That’s crazy,’ said one of the travellers. ‘If you had a couple of football hooligans in a football stadium, you wouldn’t arrest everybody in the stadium just to get at the hooligans.’

But Grundy wasn’t listening. The final assault began at 7 pm, when the police arrested men, women and children with indiscriminate violence, pursuing the stragglers as they fled into a neighbouring Beanfield. Nick Davies of The Observer saw what happened when the police surrounded the last vehicle: ‘They were like flies around rotten meat… there was no question of trying to make a lawful arrest… They just crawled all over that vehicle, with truncheons flailing, hitting anybody that they could reach. It was extremely violent and very sickening.’

By the end of the day, 537 people had been arrested – 420 at the Beanfield, and most of the rest at Stonehenge itself, where a separate gathering was also broken up. All were dispersed to holding cells throughout southern England, dozens of women were strip-searched, and social services took children into care. At the Beanfield, the remaining vehicles were systematically looted and smashed.

All those arrested were charged with obstruction of the police and the highway, but most of the charges were dismissed in the courts. The travellers’ unexpected saviour was the Earl of Cardigan, whose family owned the forest where the convoy had stayed the night before. On the day, Cardigan had tagged along out of interest, and his descriptions of a heavily pregnant woman being clubbed, and of riot police showering a woman and child with glass, prevented what would otherwise have been a severe miscarriage of justice.

20 years on, what happened at the Beanfield remains relevant in a number of ways. Without the events of that day, the steady erosion of civil liberties over the last two decades would not have been so easily achieved. Gypsies and travellers have been targeted in particular, but you can see the chain of events that leads from the Beanfield to the 1986 Public Order Act, the 1994 Criminal Justice Act and the legislation dreamt up by the current government, that the repercussions of that dark day for British justice – on our right to gather, to party, to protest, to dissent – are still being felt.

For the full story, see the new book ‘The Battle of the Beanfield’, edited by Andy Worthington www.andyworthington.co.uk

Get on board the Resist G8 Trains!

The G8 Summit takes place in Gleneagles, Scotland from the 6th-8th July 2005. However, there will be many events, demos and direct actions around Scotland in the days leading up to the summit. The South East Assembly has chartered two trains to take people up to the protests. This will also include the huge Make Poverty History march on July 2nd in Edinburgh. Every day there will be different protests at nuclear bases (Faslane July 4th), detention centres (Dungavel July 5th) and several other initiatives which need support. The trains will depart early morning from London Kings Cross and arrive in Edinburgh where accommodation (bring sleeping bags and tents!) will be provided for free.

Tickets are £50 - BUT you must buy your tickets NOW: www.resistg8.org.uk or www.dissent.org.uk

DON'T BELIEVE THE TYPE

“News is what someone does not want you to print - the rest is advertising,”
- Randolph Hearst, publisher

Frank Luntz is a happy man. He’s staring at two lines on a computer generated graph: red for Republicans and green for Democrats and they’re starting to merge. He dashes excitedly into a room full of people hooked up to his computer system. They are told to turn a dial to indicate when they feel good or bad about what a water company executive has to say about privatisation. With the merging of the lines on his graph Luntz can see that both the Republicans and Democrats in the room just love words like ‘new’, ‘responsibility’ and ‘changing from old to new energy sources’. This PR generated speak is the strategy to convince people across the political spectrum of the ‘benefits’ of privatisation.

Luntz is a corporate propagandist, pollster and political consultant to the Republicans, his specialty is testing language and finding words that will help his clients sell their product or opinion. “Don’t talk like economists. Words like ‘capitalist’ turn the average voter off. I am sorry to say that emotion beats intellect” he tells his fans. Instead they should emphasize “the value and benefits of a free market economy. Capitalism reminds people of harsh economic competition that yields losers as well as winners. Conversely, the free market economy provides opportunity to all and allows everyone to succeed.”

Luntz’s work – helping clients choose the right language for their discussions with the press and adding a resultant shine to corporate power - is a growth business that is destroying our news content. In Britain, members of the Public Relations Consultants Association saw incomes rise from £18m in 1983 to over £400m by 2001. Ideally news becomes press releases - providing a publishable article that an over-worked (or lazy) journalist can use with minimal effort. And more and more newspapers and other media outlets are acquiring content from press agencies such as Reuters or the Press Association, companies which themselves are closely linked to the PR industry. One of the Press Association’s 27 shareholders is United Business Media; they own PR Newswire, a major propaganda tool for corporate interests. On the day French voters said ‘Non’ to the European constitution and another British soldier was killed in Iraq, PR Newswire broke one of the day’s key news developments even we, at SchNEWS towers, missed out on: the release of guide book issued by one of its clients, none other than “A Total View of the US Adhesives and Sealants Industry Today”. Good to hear that someone’s covering the big stories!

At the DSEi arms fair in 2003 at least two exhibitors were flogging Depleted Uranium shells - radioactive weapons shown to cause cancer and nervous system defects, used in the War on Iraq (sorry, I mean War on Terror), deliberately flouting a United Nations resolution which classifies the munitions as illegal weapons of mass destruction. So with our glorious leaders fighting an illegal war with illegal weapons, what did the BBC have to say about the UK government supporting the sale of weapons right in the middle of London? Not much. Their online business editor Tim Weber must have been too happy to notice as he cheerfully reported that organisers were allowing ‘open’ media access to the event for the first time. Facing such a golden journalistic opportunity, Tim climbed into a BAE Piranha II fighting tank, not asking the arms dealer whether they were selling to despotic regimes, but whether the vehicle “had a new tank smell”. And don’t bother switching channels for another perspective. ITN share an office with the Corporate Television Network (CTN). Half owned by ITN and PR giant, Burson-Marsteller, CTN used the same ITN staff to make misleading corporate videos for clients like Shell (NOT drilling for Oil but exploring for energy) as those reporting on events like the hanging of Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight Ogoni rights activists, arrested for their part in demonstrations against Shell’s environmentally destructive investments in Nigeria. Mmm, fair and balanced? Oh well, there’s always Sky…!

Faced with news based on corporate press releases and the buy-off of journalists by PR companies, Luntz advises his clients to make the most of such a favourable situation. But they have to be cautious: “Speak in threes” he urges them, “any more than three facts confuses the issue.”

At SchNEWS we can sum it in up in one sentence: “It’s a load of old bollocks and its far better to write your own news than rely on this bunch of wankers for info.”

LOCAL NEWSLETTERS FOR LOCAL PEOPLE

Here’s a few simple tips to starting yer own newssheet…

Think of a good name. For example, saying that ‘On The Bog’ from Little bogweed is published by the South Bogshire Emiliano Zapata Revolutionary Militia Propaganda Outreach Cell would probably be an own goal.

Keep it simple. Two sides of A4 every month should do the trick and not overstretch a few mates. Hey, you can even nick our format - we won’t charge.

Try and make it funny. Don’t get bogged down with long words or try to be too clever - nobody cares that you went to university and read lots of books by men with beards who died years ago.

Keep it free – ask for donations, but keeping it free means that people you don’t know might actually get to read it!

Write about local issues so people can relate to stuff in it - then try and link it to the bigger picture.

Before you start we reckon its best to check out some of the other publications – but as Worthing’s Porkbolter crew told us “Just do it, keep doing it and don’t give up, it’s a cumulative effect and you’ve got to be patient. It’s not like a revolution has happened in Worthing because of the Porkbolter, but I do feel it’s been worthwhile. Stuff we put out in our newsletter and at our meetings hopefully is normalising our views as opposed to the media and government’s plans which are to marginalise and criminalise protestors.”

In fact Worthing’s ‘Porkbolter’ is a great example of how to do it well. A pun-tastic newssheet that’s been shit stirring in this sleepy seaside resort for the past seven years, full of local news and very good at linking these to the bigger picture. They’ve also got a ‘How to set up your own newsletter’ on their website at www.eco-action.org/porkbolter

Walthamstow Anarchist Group produce ‘The Underdog’ a quarterly newsletter, “presenting items of local interest with a decidedly radical slant”. The latest issue covers councillors’ scams which leads to a piece about direct democracy; there’s a big article on bullying at work, stuff on the Olympic bid and how it will affect the borough plus the regular ‘Wot Anarchists Think’ column. www.walthamstowanarchy.org.uk

‘The Bristolian’ has been publishing in Bristol on and off for the past few years getting rid of thousands of copies per issue. It’s in-yer-face, full of swearing and politician baiting, and people lap it up, with headlines like ‘Wankface McNulty sensation’... They’re currently taking a holiday trying to encourage more local scandal sheets around the country. Good luck to them! localnews4us@yahoo.co.uk www.bristolian.freeservers.org

In fact there’s a depressing lack of local radical newsletters, and far too much web based stuff that only reaches a limited audience. The only ones that SchNEWS can find are Haringey Solidarity Groups ‘Indypendent’, Brighton’s ‘Rough Music’, Cardiff and Gwent Anarchists ‘Gagged’, Bristol quarterly newspaper ‘Bristle’, Norwich’s irregular ‘Now or Never’ and Newcastle’s long running newsheet ‘Think Globally Act Locally.’ Hopefully we’ve missed some out, but come on we can can do better than this!

Something cool happening in your area – let us know! www.schnews.org.uk/pap/yourarea.htm

...and finally...

As the world is forced to sit back and watch science react to the devastating consequences of global warming, some Germans have decided that we can actually cunningly outwit nature.

They reckon that the effects of the gaping hole in the ozone layer can be dramatically overcome by swaying physics in our favour. Introducing ‘World Jump Day’ meaning that if everyone jumps at the same time (given you live within the correct ‘jumpzones’), we can knock the world off its axis, nudge it out of heat’s way and not have to worry about all that longwinded reducing pollution bollocks. Yes really! SchNEWS proposes ‘World Yawn Day’ - if everyone yawns at once we can muster up a tornado to blow all those petrol stations, cars and German scientists into orbit.

* To find out your nearest jump zone visit www.worldjumpday.org

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