TBF
TBF's JournalWomen-Led Resistance against False Development in Guatemala
Written by Deepa Panchang and Jessica Hsu
Wednesday, 20 August 2014 17:58
An Interview with Aura Lolita Chavez Ixcaquic, Maya K’iche from the Mayan Women’s Movement, Guatemala
As a member of the Mayan Women’s Movement which is a part of the Council of K’iche People, we have joined forces to generate action from the people, the community. We are in the midst of change where we are defining our needs, what actions we need to take, what power we have, what our way of looking at the world is. And to say no to corporations, while saying yes to life.
I am from the Western region of Guatemala, called Iximuleu in Mayan, in the department called K’iche. I am the spokesperson [of the Mayan Women’s Movement] and was elected at an assembly process where 87 communities and six rural and urban areas were involved. I have a mandate from the people, and explain the feelings of the women, the men, and the children. We must unmask false development and challenge the world powers involved, even though they might be Guatemala’s millionaires or the army. I have done so in political councils and they don’t like that. I have 21 charges against me where I am accused of just about everything: being noisy, conflictive, and much more. The latest is that I am a threat to national security, a terrorist of sorts. I was [recently] sent a report saying that I’m under an injunction from Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. They want to take away my protective measures [IACHR Precautionary Measures] and send me to jail.
We have had huge mobilizations and have made decisions to not allow mining here. The companies are upset and they have done all kinds of things. But, still to this day they have not entered. We have stopped mining and hydroelectric licenses.
They want to exterminate us, but they will not be able to achieve it. We have a lot of energy, a lot of strength ...
More here: http://upsidedownworld.org/main/guatemala-archives-33/5006-guatemala-women-led-resistance-against-false-development-in-guatemala
Who is an “Outside Agitator”?
Who is an “Outside Agitator”?
by Richard Seymour
The media bashing of “outside agitators” in Ferguson plays into the hands of the Right.
In Ferguson, Missouri, there are “outside agitators.” On this, the reactionaries and liberals agree.
Of course, there are all sorts of racialized rumors flying around in the guise of reporting about what is taking place in Ferguson. We are well used to this — we remember Hurricane Katrina. There will be time to properly sift through and catalog all that. For now, I simply want to ask a quick question: what is an “outside agitator?”
The metaphor of exteriority, of being outside, has two important connotations. First, one is transgressing the spatial ordering of the state. States constitute social spaces like districts, wards, and counties — a process that is historically far from racially innocent in the US.
Second, is that one’s political being is “outside,” and thus traitorous and disloyal. It is not just that one traveled from one city to another — that’s fine, provided the political agenda one brings is benign for the system — but that one brought ideas that are not only not native to the destination, but actually foreign to the nation, the free world, civilization itself.
Understandably, then, this language is common in situations of high racial tension. The “outside agitator” line reeks of good old boy vigilantism, the commingling of race-baiting and red-baiting that was typical of Southern counterrevolution in the dying days of Jim Crow. Because racial situations unfold in heavily structured political spaces in which the definitions and boundaries of the “local” serve existing forms of dominance ...
More here: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/08/who-is-an-outside-agitator/
Richard Seymour's Blog (Lenin's Tomb): http://www.leninology.co.uk/
The second assassination of Mike Brown
The unarmed Black teen killed in Ferguson, Mo., has suffered a political and media smear campaign, reports Elizabeth Schulte--like so many other victims of police.
August 19, 2014
MIKE BROWN was assassinated by a police officer who shot him down in broad daylight on a street in Ferguson, Mo. Then the mass media took aim, and he was assassinated all over again--on a variety of outlets, at every hour of the day or night.
Six days after he shot the 18-year-old African American, police finally released the name of the white police officer who killed Mike Brown: Darren Wilson. But the cops had another announcement to deliver that day: they suspect Brown was involved in what they called a "strong-arm robbery" earlier on the day he was murdered.
Ferguson Police Chief Thomas Jackson's announcement included a 19-page police report on the alleged theft of a package of inexpensive cigars--and next to no details about the shooting, in which the unarmed teen was shot down dead in the middle of the street ...
< snip >
Of course, the only possible reason for releasing the video was to paint the victim of a horrific police murder as a criminal--not the college-bound teenager his family had been mourning, but the kind of person who deserves to get gunned down in the street by police.
More here - http://socialistworker.org/2014/08/19/assassinated-a-second-time
Myths of capitalism: the myth of scarcity
Myths of capitalism: the myth of scarcity
by: Scott Hiley
August 14 2014
"We have to make the hard choices." "If we raise the minimum wage, unemployment will increase." "If we spend money on social programs, our grandchildren will pay for it." "If we don't decrease benefits, Social Security will become bankrupt."
How often have we seen these ideas, splashed across the editorial pages of newspapers, dribbling from the corporate mouthparts of the pundit class, or floating in the muck of right-wing plans to "reform" us back to the Gilded Age?
All of these ideas offer a "hard choice," an either/or: EITHER we have living wages OR we have jobs; EITHER we foot the bill OR our kids will; EITHER today's senior citizens give up some of what they earned OR tomorrow's seniors will get nothing. In other words, EITHER we hurt the working class OR we hurt the working class.
In philosophy, this kind of argument is called a false binary: a fallacy where someone offers two choices as the only possibilities, deliberately excluding other options.
In the case of these right-wing talking points, the option no one wants to mention is taxing the rich and cutting corporate subsidies to invest in social welfare, good jobs, and education ...
More here: http://www.peoplesworld.org/myths-of-capitalism-the-myth-of-scarcity/
When Will They Shoot?
When Will They Shoot?
by Peter Frase (Jacobin ~ 8.17.14)
Lots of people are at risk on the job. But when it comes to cops, they’re mostly a danger to others.
Policing is not the country’s safest job, to be sure. But as the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries shows, it’s far from the most dangerous.
The 2012 data reports that for “police and sheriff’s patrol officers,” the Fatal Injury Rate — that is, the “number of fatal occupational injuries per 100,000 full-time equivalent workers” — was 15.0.
That includes all causes of death — of the 105 dead officers recorded in the 2012 data, only 51 died due to “violence and other injuries by persons or animals.” Nearly as many, 48, died in “transportation incidents,” i.e., crashing their cars.
Here are some occupations with higher fatality rates than being a cop:
Logging workers: 129.9
Fishers and related fishing workers: 120.8
Aircraft pilots and flight engineers: 54.3
Roofers: 42.2
Much more here: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/08/when-will-they-shoot/
Protests stifled in 2014
Around the world in tear gas: Protests stifled in 2014
August 14, 2014 1:13PM ET
With social media comparing Ferguson to scenes in Middle East, we present visual typology of year's incidents thus far
As a suburb of St. Louis, Missouri, seethes with anger after the murder of an unarmed black teenager over the weekend, images of demonstrations are reminiscent of protest zones across the globe. With security forces lobbing tear gas canisters at people to quell unrest, individuals sometimes simply pick up the devices intended for crowd control and throw them back at the riot police.
The images below show similar circumstances in many different locales where political discourse is expressed in street clashes. From anti-occupation rallies in the West Bank and sectarian protests in Bahrain to anti-government agitation in Ukraine and Venezuela, marchers are often eager to turn law enforcement's own techniques against police.
While such photographs may be familiar in unstable Egypt, perhaps they are more shocking emerging from the Midwest of the U.S. ...
Article w/many images here: http://america.aljazeera.com/multimedia/2014/8/around-the-worldinteargasprotestsof2014.html
Foreign oil workers evacuated from Kurdistan as Islamic State advances
(In case you had any doubt as to what is really going on)Oil company shares fall ahead of Al-Qaeda-linked group's movements toward Erbil in Iraqi Kurdistan
August 8, 2014 7:48AM ET
Oil companies in Iraqi Kurdistan began withdrawing more staff Friday as Islamic State (IS) fighters closed in on the regional capital and the United States authorized airstrikes against the group.
U.S. energy companies Chevron and Exxon Mobile said Thursday that they were evacuating some staff from Kurdistan, while industry sources said the Kurdistan Regional Government’s oil pipeline — which has been pumping oil to Turkey since December — was operating normally Friday.
Shares of London-listed oil firms active in northern Iraq fell for a second day as other field closures and staff evacuations became more likely in a region seen until now as relatively secure compared to the rest of the country ...
More here: http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/8/8/kurds-iraq-oil.html
WHO Statement Regarding the 2014 Ebola Outbreak in West Africa
(Note: thought this was worth keeping an eye on. We all know it's not the 1% lying dead in the streets in Liberia.)WHO Statement on the Meeting of the International Health Regulations Emergency Committee Regarding the 2014 Ebola Outbreak in West Africa
8 August 2014
The first meeting of the Emergency Committee convened by the Director-General under the International Health Regulations (2005) [IHR (2005)] regarding the 2014 Ebola Virus Disease (EVD, or “Ebola”) outbreak in West Africa was held by teleconference on Wednesday, 6 August 2014 from 13:00 to 17:30 and on Thursday, 7 August 2014 from 13:00 to 18:30 Geneva time (CET).
Members and advisors of the Emergency Committee met by teleconference on both days of the meeting1. The following IHR (2005) States Parties participated in the informational session of the meeting on Wednesday, 6 August 2014: Guinea, Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Nigeria.
During the informational session, the WHO Secretariat provided an update on and assessment of the Ebola outbreak in West Africa. The above-referenced States Parties presented on recent developments in their countries, including measures taken to implement rapid control strategies, and existing gaps and challenges in the outbreak response ...
More here: http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/statements/2014/ebola-20140808/en/
Medical ethicists to meet on use of experimental Ebola drugs
WHO announcement comes after controversy over two Americans – but no Africans – being treated with Ebola drug
August 8, 2014 8:41AM ET
by Courtney Brooks @courtneyrbrooks
Medical ethicists will meet next week to discuss the use of experimental medicines in the West Africa Ebola outbreak. The World Health Organization (WHO) announced the talks in the wake of a controversial decision to treat two infected American aid workers with an Ebola “serum,” never before tested on humans, called ZMapp. The move sparked debate over whether using experimental Ebola treatments is ethical — and why Africans have not been offered the same option.
“We are in an unusual situation in this outbreak. We have a disease with a high fatality rate without any proven treatment or vaccine,” Marie-Paule Kieny, assistant director-general at the WHO, said in a Thursday statement announcing the meeting. "We need to ask the medical ethicists to give us guidance on what the responsible thing to do is.” The statement did not give a location for the meeting ...j
More here: http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/8/8/ebola-ethics-drugs.html
Obama on Net Neutrality:
Obama on net neutrality: My administration is against Internet fast lanes
By Brian Fung August 5 at 6:47 PM
U.S. President Barack Obama addresses the U.S.-Africa Business Forum in Washington August 5, 2014. (REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst)
The last time President Obama weighed in on net neutrality, it was to offer a vague, tepid response — claiming to support the idea without really defining how he understood it. It was a big contrast from what he'd previously said on the campaign trail in 2008.
On Tuesday, however, Obama offered a much more forceful defense of net neutrality, more clearly describing what activities he viewed as antithetical to the open Internet. Addressing reporters at a summit for African leaders in Washington, Obama said making the Internet more accessible to some at the expense of others was against his administration's policy:
One of the issues around net neutrality is whether you are creating different rates or charges for different content providers. That's the big controversy here. So you have big, wealthy media companies who might be willing to pay more and also charge more for spectrum, more bandwidth on the Internet so they can stream movies faster. I personally, the position of my administration, as well as a lot of the companies here, is that you don’t want to start getting a differentiation in how accessible the Internet is to different users. You want to leave it open so the next Google and the next Facebook can succeed.
More here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2014/08/05/obama-strikes-a-populist-tone-on-net-neutrality/
(source: MoveOn.org on Facebook):
Lady Warsi resigns over UK’s ‘morally reprehensible’ stance on Gaza
Lady Warsi resigns over UK’s ‘morally reprehensible’ stance on Gaza
Patrick Wintour, political editor
The Guardian, Tuesday 5 August 2014 07.39 EDT
Lady Warsi, the senior Foreign Office minister, has resigned from the government in protest at its policy on Gaza, describing it as “morally indefensible”.
Warsi announced her departure on Twitter on Tuesday, saying: “With deep regret I have this morning written to the Prime Minister & tendered my resignation. I can no longer support Govt policy on #Gaza.”
In her resignation letter, Warsi said the government’s “approach and language during the current crisis in Gaza is morally indefensible, is not in Britain’s national interest and will have a long term detrimental impact on our reputation internationally and domestically”.
She said the UK’s stance was “not consistent with the rule of law and our long support for international justice”, adding: “The British government can only play a constructive role in solving the Middle East crisis if it is an honest broker and at the moment I do not think it is.” ...
More here: http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/aug/05/lady-warsi-resigns-government-gaza-stance?CMP=fb_gu
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