Home | Fri 30th September 2005 | Issue 514

WAKE UP! WAKE UP! IT'S YER MINISTRY OF TRUTH...

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NO NONSENSE | Crap Arrest of the Week | Bling Branches Out | SchNEWS in Brief | The Burning Issue | Bushwhackers | Inside SchNEWS | ...and finally...

NO NONSENSE
AT THE LABOUR PARTY CONFERENCE

All this week our town has been playing host to the corporate jamboree of the Labour party conference. A dumbed down Nuremburg rally inside a heavily policed exclusion ‘island’, Brighton’s very own “Green Zone”, with the police carrying out random stop and searches under the Terrorism legislation.

The whole world witnessed the Neo Labour governments toleration and “respect” as an 82-year-old man was dragged out of the conference by private goons in good North Korean style for uttering the word ‘nonsense’. (And how typical was it of the spinelessness of Labour delegates that only one of the hundreds assembled intervened.) Outside an atmosphere of intimidation by the police prevailed. Anybody gathering to demonstrate was photographed. One man was arrested under terrorism laws for wearing a T-Shirt saying “Free Omar, Jail Blair” and driven out of the area. Why the need to clamp down so fiercely on dissent? Well Tony’s speech gave us a few clues.

While the press picked over the bones of Tony’s offering and examined the entrails for omens and portents of the Blair/Brown soap opera, SchNEWS found it to be a remarkably honest appraisal of how the British people (sorry workforce) are to be shackled into the global economy, while the elites remain in power.

It’s made very clear that luxuries like human rights and the principle of innocence before guilt must go if the country is to become ‘strong’ and not be ‘overwhelmed’. Good leadership and discipline are necessary if we are to meet the challenges of globalisation. Let’s strip away some of the feelgood spin and see what the future holds for the proles of Airstrip One. Over to you, Tony:

We are the Changelings - Tony Blair

“I hear people say we have to stop and debate globalisation. You might as well debate whether autumn should follow summer. They’re not debating it in China and India. All these nations have labour costs a fraction of ours… In the era of rapid globalisation, there is no mystery about what works: an open, liberal economy, prepared constantly to change to remain competitive. The temptation is to use Government to try to protect ourselves against the onslaught of globalisation by shutting it out; to think we protect a workforce by regulation; a company by Government subsidy; an industry by tariffs”. (So we’re supposed to swallow the IMF medicine that so many third world countries have choked on. Forget any social principles or values, it’s rules out the window and hello unrestricted free market)

“We will publish proposals radically to reform (the) benefits for the future and help people who can work, back into the work force where they belong.” (so long as we know, noses to the grindstone everyone)

“For how much longer can countries like ours allow the security of our energy supply be dependent on some of the most unstable parts of the world? … and that means an assessment of all options, including civil nuclear power.” (Having stirred up a hornets nest in the Middle East, Tony&Co want to retreat to their nuclear bunkers - the reliance on a growth economy leaves us with a choice between Basra and Chernobyl)

“The same adjustment to the modern world challenges traditional thinking on law and order. The whole of our system starts from the proposition that its duty is to protect the innocent from being wrongly convicted… For 8 years I have battered the criminal justice system to get it to change... First a radical extension of summary powers to police and local authorities to take on the wrong doers. Second, we need a uniformed presence on the street in every community... We know we need strict controls. They are being put in place, along with Identity Cards, also necessary in a changing world.” (As people won’t be happy about being screwed over even more and discontent grows, our ‘nineteenth century legal system’ - you know habeas corpus and all that bleeding heart liberal fluff - will break down under the strain of differentiating between innocence and guilt, so we’re going to go with a bit more of a heavy-handed approach...)

“I never doubted after September 11th that our place was alongside America and I don’t doubt it now. This is a global struggle. (thanks to you, you fucker) Today it is at its fiercest in Iraq... Britain should also remain the strongest ally of the United States.” (a country where the first priority after a natural disaster is to shoot the looters. A country with two million people behind bars. The gaolers of Guantanamo Bay… sweet)

“Government is not a state of office but a state of mind. A willingness to accept the burden of true leadership.” (The scales fall off and the ghost of Nuremberg rears its ugly head)

CRAP ARREST OF THE WEEK

For Conspiracy To Street Theatre...

A small protest at the start of the EU Justice & Home Affairs ministers meeting in Newcastle earlier this month was stopped before it even got going, after cops nicked all six people for “conspiracy to commit criminal damage.”

The plan was for protesters to dress in orange boiler suits with bar-coded foreheads, and a 12 square foot ID card to highlight the increasing restrictions on civil liberties being considered by ministers under the pretext of fighting the “War on Terror”.

But before they could even protest about our civil liberties being eroded they were er, arrested. One woman whose daughter was nicked then had her home raided by a vanload of cops who took amongst other things a Green Party magazine, a flyer for a T-shirt company picked up at the Make Poverty History rally and a leaflet by Cures without Cruelty!

BLING BRANCHES OUT

Southend based road campaigners Parklife are taking direct action once again (See SchNEWS 508). As part of their campaign to stop the controversial F5 (A127/A1159) road scheme, they have constructed and occupied an urban tree camp right in the heart of town. The protestors are strategically located on the route of the proposed road and railway bridge, and above the recently discovered Anglo-Saxon burial site containing the ‘Prince of Prittlewell’ – naturally nicknamed locally as the ‘King of Bling’ for the shiny things unearthed with him. They have named it ‘Camp Bling’ in his honour. Resident and campaigner Shaun Qureshi declared, ‘The F5 white elephant is massively over budget, significantly behind schedule, and very much unloved by the people of our town. The Department of Transport must surely now recognise the level of public opposition, and should act accordingly by cancelling all funding for the road. This is our time to take action, and we hope that we inspire others to join us here.’

If the Department haven’t twigged yet – they must be barking!

Contact Parklife at the site: 07929 595 761 or 07929 595 766 www.savepriorypark.org

SchNEWS in brief

• Critical Mass bike ride in Brighton today (Friday 30th) 6pm at the Level http://groups.yahoo.com/group/criticalmassbrighton
• This Saturday (1st) there’s a national demo Against Section 9 of the Asylum & Immigration bill - yet another immigration crack down measure, this one leading to families deemed to have failed in their asylum claim being denied state benefits, made homeless and even having their children taken into care. Meet 12 noon Lever Edge Lane CP School, Bolton, BL3 3HP 07976 476181
• On the same day at 10.45 am there will be a demo in London against Section 9 outside Communications House on Old Street, just west of Old Street Station
• There’s an Argentinean solidarity night this Saturday (1st) organized by the Anarchist Federation, with a speaker from Buenos Aires 7pm LARC, 62 Fieldgate Street, Whitechapel, London E1 1ES www.afed.org.uk
• 7-9 Films On The Edge - Three Days of radical and anarchist films and discussion at the 1 in 12 Club, Bradford next weekend (7-9th) 01274) 734160 www.1in12.go-legend.net
  

THE BURNING ISSUE

“History has seen attempts to commodify land, food, labour, forests, water, genes and ideas. Carbon trading follows in the footsteps of this history and turns the earth’s carbon-cycling capacity into property to be bought or sold in a global market. Through this process of creating a new commodity – carbon - the Earth’s ability to support a climate conducive to life and human societies is now passing into the same corporate hands that are destroying the climate.” – Durban Declaration on Carbon Trading.

There’s a company in Brazil that’s a good example of agribusiness at its most vicious. It leased its land from the military dictatorship in the sixties, ignoring the fact that indigenous, Afro-Brazilian and peasant communities already living there were driven off the land by company militias. Thousands of hectares of forest and savannah, which had been used for hunting, small-scale farming, gathering food and medicine were stripped away to make way for huge monoculture plantations. The surrounding lands and rivers have been sucked dry, or contaminated by agrotoxic chemicals from the plantations. The company uses illegally out-sourced labour, child labour and slave labour. Most people from the area are forced to accept these brutal conditions or relocate to urban slums. People who resist suffer intimidation and surveillance.

Heard it all before? So have we – except that the company in question, Plantar S.A., is a card-carrying ‘environmentalist’, being touted as a model of ‘sustainable development’ and a major part of the solution to global warming. Its plantations produce Eucalyptus timber, which is turned into charcoal for fuel. It’s been in this business for years. Now, with the backing of the World Bank, it’s applying for 10 million carbon credits from the Kyoto Protocol’s Clean Development Mechanism. This scheme allows industrialised countries to avoid reducing their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by paying for ‘carbon offset’ projects in ‘developing’ countries. Plantar is applying for credits on two counts: first, because the trees soak up GHGs, and, second, because charcoal is supposedly used to replace more harmful fuels like coal. But hang on, how can the trees soak up CO2 when they’re being burnt as charcoal? Erm, dunno, ask the World Bank.

OLD KING COAL

So, apart from the environmental devastation and slave labour and fraud n’all that, what’s the problem with carbon offset projects? For a start, there’s no way of accurately measuring how much they reduce greenhouse gases. For plant-a-tree projects, the margin of error for working out how much GHG they absorb is as much as 50%. Companies who apply for carbon credits come up with their own ways for calculating the value of their schemes, and the ‘validators’ who are paid by the Kyoto bureaucrats to assess the applications also work as consultants for companies looking to get credits. No conflicts of interest there, then.

But the main problem is that the Kyoto Protocol has as much chance of doing anything to stop global warming as the proverbial snowball does in hell. The only thing it will do, and the only thing it was ever likely to do, is to make a lot of consultants, traders, agribusinesses and construction firms rich off the new trade in pollution, and give the rest of us the brief illusion that capitalists give a fuck about global warming. Scientists have been saying for years that we need a 50-70% reduction in GHGs straight away to offset the effects of global warming. The 5% target set by Kyoto doesn’t even make a dent, and the countries expected to release the most CO2 in the next few decades, the US and China, aren’t part of the agreement. As one scientific journal put it, if we leave it to negotiations like Kyoto to slow global warming, we’ll be waiting 300 years for reductions that are needed in a decade.

But as the carbon trade proves, states and companies have no intention of reducing fossil fuel consumption when they can buy time to continue polluting. The truth is that the choice for them is between an economic collapse and an environmental one, and that’s no contest. The International Energy Agency estimates that to keep the global economy going over the next 25 years fossil fuel consumption will have to increase by a third. The Kyoto country that has been most successful in reducing its GHGs since 1990 is Russia – not because it’s run by a bunch of solar power-loving hippies (it’s not), but because its economy fell apart in the early nineties. It’s GHGs dropped by a third. All that twatting about with ‘carbon sinks’ and ‘Joint Implementation projects’ has achieved is a brief distraction from the fact that economic growth and the environment don’t mix.

Now even Kyoto’s biggest cheerleaders are admitting its not going to work. Earlier this year prime sinister Blair said he was going to use “the UK’s G8 and EU Presidencies to make a breakthrough on climate change”. After six months when fuck all has happened on climate change, he’s now even backing away from the pathetic targets set at Kyoto. As he told a conference in New York last month: “The truth is no country is going to cut its growth or consumption substantially in the light of a long-term environmental problem.” Since Blair got into power in 1997 Britain’s CO2 output has risen.

Meanwhile, the Plantar project isn’t the only one of its kind that stands to cream buckets of cash from the carbon trade con. The World Bank’s Prototype Carbon Fund which backs the scheme has become a major player in the new market for carbon offset projects. They’ve got industrial plantations, landfills and dams on the books, but few renewable energy projects. The fund is backed by cuddly hippies like BP and Mitsubishi who stand to pocket millions from their investment in cheap carbon dumps in poor countries.

BUSHWHACKERS

It’s annoying when some people just won’t get the message. A number of Kalahari Bushmen are simply refusing to accept the Botswana Government’s (Est. 1966) very reasonable decision to forcefully relocate them from their ancestral homeland that they’ve roamed and lived in for about, oh, 30,000 years. Despite a 17-year campaign to gently persuade them (with friendly bribes, intimidation, threats and promises) to leave the Central Kalahari Game Reserve (coincidentally rich in diamond and mineral deposits) and live in lovely new resettlement camps. For some reason not all the Bushman seem that keen to settle down to a life of Government hand-outs and alcoholism in the image of America’s Native Indian camps and a handful are still holding out inside the Reserve.

The government have understandably responded by sealing off the reserve, cutting off water supplies, confiscating radios, banning pesky journalists and NGOs, outlawing hunting and sending in armed goons (I mean, guards) to “protect the wildlife”. The last message sent by the Bushmen in the reserve read, “They are firing over our heads, they are beating us, we don’t know if we can hold out.” Nearly job done then, except that now a number of Bushmen, realising that they've been hoodwinked, are trying to re-enter their homeland to check on their relatives and raise awareness of their situation.

No worries though, armed police, firing tear gas and rubber bullets managed to stop and arrest an unarmed group of 28, including seven children, before they could cause too much bother. One bushman was shot in the jaw and is seriously injured. Hopefully this will send out a powerful message to any others having second thoughts, especially as those arrested include the leaders of the Bushman rights organization First People of the Kalahari. Detainees were beaten, held for four days and released on bail. Rafael Runco, Chair of Survival International, reports, “Botswana’s government seems to have gone totally off the rails. Faced with criticism from all quarters, it’s simply lashing out at the easiest targets - the Bushmen who it’s been persecuting for so long. What it’s doing now is coming perilously close to genocide - a systematic attempt to destroy an ethnic group.”

See www.survival-international.org for more.

* Hot off the press: The First People of the Kalahari have been just been awarded Sweden’s Right Livelihood Award, known as the ‘Alternative Nobel Prize’. The award has been given for the Bushmen’s ‘resolute resistance against eviction from their ancestral lands, and for upholding the right to their traditional way of life.’ Whilst they probably won’t be dusting off their DJs and crying through their acceptance speech anytime soon this is at least raising the issue of their plight internationally, even though they’d probably want more help than being given some plaque.

Inside SchNEWS

Laudelino Iglesias Martinez who spent more than 23 years in Spanish prisons will be speaking in Brighton next Tuesday (4th) Cowley Club, 12 London Rd. 6.30pm and at the Bradford 1 in 12 club on Thursday (6th) Laudelino will be talking about his experiences of the Spanish prison system, in particular the FIES regime, and share news of solidarity actions and prisoners’ resistance.

* So far a fifth of the cases against the G8 protestors have been dropped, leaving 240 cases still outstanding.

...and finally...

Glad to see that in Police State Britain that there’s at least one oppressed minority whose rights remain intact. Despite draconian laws imposed by an authoritarian government, the police have decided enough is enough, no more persecution of those who dress strangely and speak with funny accents.

Free from fascist repression fox hunters across the country have been given a nod, a wink and a funny handshake. Under a thin veneer of laughable legality (Hunting with Eagles or tortoises etc) hunting continues unabated. Police forces up and down the country have cited ‘lack of resources’ for their inability to police hunts. Cue hollow laughter from the sabbing brigade who’ve endured years of continual police harassment for daring to interfere with the aristocracy at play (riot vans , land rovers, scrambler bikes, cops on horses, helicopters and of course red faced fat coppers in Hi Vis floundering in the mud). So the deal between the cops and the hunt seems to be “You don’t say you’re breaking the law and we won’t enforce it”. SchNEWS hopes this spirit of tolerance on the part of the law will spread far and wide.

More evidence of a shift towards liberal attitudes is the number of riot coppers who have found themselves in the dock for being brutal to protestors in Parliament Square. But isn’t that what they’re paid for? Well yes but on this occasion they came face to face with the green welly brigade whose contacts in the establishment are slightly higher than those than of the usual riot monkey. September 2003's riot (in which 60 police were injured) saw police on charges ranging from Section 5 (alarm, harassment and distress) to ABH. OK they all got off but we all look forward to similar treatment the next time someone gives Churchill a mohican.

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