Irish Poet Kevin Higgins on Joe Higgins' impending retirement

"The Militant Tendency was, during the 1980s, the largest Trotskyist organisation in Britain and Ireland. It was feared by the establishment.  It led Labour Youth, the youth section of the Irish Labour Party; had the leadership of Liverpool City Council during the council’s struggle against the Thatcher government; and led the successful campaign against the poll tax, video footage of which is always shown during every television documentary about Margaret Thatcher’s downfall. These days it is called The Socialist Party and has many thousands of ex-members, quite a few of whom were treated shockingly by the Party’s entirely undemocratic internal apparatus. These ex-members include founding member of its Irish organisation, John Throne; TDs Joan Collins and Clare Daly; former leading member Dermot Connolly; and the author of this poem, Kevin Higgins. Kevin wrote this poem on the announcement of the impending retirement at the next General Election of Joe Higgins from the Dáil. Joe has a reputation for speaking up for people’s rights. One group on whose behalf Joe has never spoken up is the many ex-members of his own organisation whose reputations the Party has tried to destroy.

For more see here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VOKAfX52Nww
and here http://dublinopinion.com/2009/11/19/john-throne-on-the-cwi-and-expulsion/"

Irish Parliament’s Last Remaining Holy Man

Speaks On His Retirement

Tonight, I remember not the few

who stuck with me through

thin and thinner, but the many who,

long term, made stone mattresses

for their own backs by abandoning

me. Those politically

disembowelled on the quiet at meetings

I know nothing about, who left us

no alternative but to mutter

behind hands

about funds misappropriated; girls taken

advantage of on sofas

that weren’t fit for purpose; or

drainpipe trousers worn

without due care and attention

            on marches for

(or against) unemployment, war

            and death.

I was too busy doing what

The Congregation for the Doctrine

of the Faith told me

to know anything about anything

bad. To advance in this Party

all you needed do was be

reliable as old wardrobes,

or ready, when the moment came,

to do the thing everyone else wanted done

            but weren’t prepared to ruin

their fingernails doing themselves.

            To lend a dank hand

deleting the necessary names.  

Their eyes filling with nostalgia

as the breadknife goes in,

and their giblets spill,

like the worst serving of meatballs

ever to fall on a plate

this side of Mulhuddart.

Because of their vast

self-indulgence, I’ll spend

my remaining days

practicing self-denial on a rock

off the Atlantic coast,

crying into the turf smoke

at all those who left me.

KEVIN HIGGINS

Kevin Higgins was born in London in 1967 to Irish parents. He grew up in Galway, Ireland but lived in London in the late 80s/early nineties when he was active in the Anti-Poll Tax movement and chairman of Enfield Against The Poll Tax. He was expelled from the Labour Party in 1991 for his anti-poll tax activities and membership of Militant. He is now co-organiser of Over The Edge literary events in Galway, Ireland.  He facilitates poetry workshops at Galway Arts Centre; teaches creative writing at Galway Technical Institute and on the Brothers of Charity Away With Words programme. He is also Writer-in-Residence at Merlin Park Hospital and the poetry critic of the Galway Advertiser. 

He has published four collections of poems:  Kevin’s most recent collection of poetry, The Ghost In The Lobby, was launched at this year’s Cúirt Festival by Mick Wallace TD. His poems also feature in the anthology Identity Parade – New British and Irish Poets (Bloodaxe, 2010) and in the anthology The Hundred Years’ War: modern war poems (Ed Neil Astley, Bloodaxe May 2014).  His poetry was recently the subject of a paper titled ‘The Case of Kevin Higgins: Or The Present State of Irish Poetic Satire’ given by David Wheatley at a symposium on satire at the University of Aberdeen; David Wheatley’s paper can be read in full here http://georgiasam.blogspot.ie/2014/05/the-case-of-kevin-higgins-or-present.html . Mentioning The War, a collection of his essays and reviews, was published by Salmon in April, 2012.  Kevin’s blog is http://mentioningthewar.blogspot.ie/ . and has been described by Dave Lordan as “one of the funniest around” who has also called Kevin “Ireland’s sharpest satirist.”

Praise for Kevin Higgins’s poetry:

“His contribution to the development of Irish satire is indisputable…Higgins’ poems embody all of the cunning and deviousness of language as it has been manipulated by his many targets... it is clear that Kevin Higgins’ voice and the force of his poetic project are gaining in confidence and authority with each new collection.” Philip Coleman

“It is a profound compliment to the quality of Kevin’s writing that you can disagree with the content and yet find yourself still reading on and appreciating the style. You’d have to say that he is one of the lead poets of his generation in Ireland at this stage.” Clare Daly T.D.

“Comedy is part of his poetics, and what I especially like in his work is its swiftness of wit, its tone of buoyant contrarianism and jubilant disappointment”, Eamonn Grennan, The Irish Times

 “good satirical savagery”. The Cambridge Introduction to Modern Irish Poetry, 1800-2000

“Fluent and often as laugh-out-loud funny as Paul Howard's Ross O'Carroll-Kelly.” John McAuliffe, reviewing The Ghost in The Lobby, Irish Times August 2014

Significance of Swing to Anti-EU Party in UK by-elections

by Pat Byrne, reprinted from The Socialist Network

With nearly 60% of the vote, this week saw the election of the first member of the British parliament from the right-wing anti-European UK Independence Party (UKIP). This follows on from UKIP's strong showing in last May's European elections where it emerged as the leading single party with four and a half million votes and 24 out the UK’s 73 seats in the European parliament. With such a strong level of public support, readers may not understand why this should be UKIP’s first member of the British parliament.

This can be explained by four main factors. Firstly, the European elections in Britain are run on a common Euro-wide proportional representation system which directly allocates seats according to a party’s share of the vote, while elections to the British parliament (like the USA) are run on a peculiar first-past-the-post system which heavily discriminates against minority parties.

The second factor is that many voters have often seen the Euro elections as an opportunity to cast their votes for fringe parties as a protest against the mainstream parties which they usually return to in their national elections. Sometimes there is similar factor at work in by-elections to the British parliament to fill vacancies created by the death or resignation of existing members of parliament.

A special factor in the Clacton by-election was that UKIP’s candidate was already the local member of parliament there and following his defection from the Conservative Party to UKIP had resigned his seat in order to test his level of support as a candidate for his new party. Thus UKIP’s candidate already had big name recognition in the area and a local personal following.

Media Support for UKIP
Last but not least, UKIP’s victory has been greatly helped by the blanket media coverage that British television and newspapers have been giving to UKIP for a long time. They have clearly been doing so as to provide a handy right-wing, racist, anti-establishment safety valve for the rising discontent of the majority of the British population. In this way they have sought to prevent the majority of voters shifting over to Labour or even going further to the Left.

It is significant that UKIP’s propaganda in this election was not only against Europe and immigration but also against the cuts in health spending and the out-of-touch mainstream parties in Westminster. For the latter, UKIP is calling for political reform including the introduction of rules allowing people to recall and replace their members of parliament between elections when they feel that they have broken their election pledges or disgraced themselves thought corruption and so on. This is something the Left have also called for in the past but in common with other democratic issues has not been a priority in the Left’s agenda.

Typical of UKIP’s populist propaganda was their leader Nigel Farrage’s comment on the by-election victory “We have a career political class of college kids who have never had jobs in their lives with absolutely no connection to ordinary people and how they are struggling. We need new people. We need change, real change.” This could be straight out of the Labour Left’s critique of the Labour Party’s elitist parliamentary setup.

Labour Woes
On the same day as the Clacton by-election there was another parliamentary election up in Manchester following the death of the local Labour MP. In a strongly working class area UKIP came close to defeating the Labour Party candidate in a very low turnout of voters. In this case Labour’s share of the vote went up slightly from the General Election in 2010 while most of Conservative and Liberal voters swung behind UKIP. While Labour did win the seat it was nowhere near the kind of result that promises an outright victory in next year’s General Election. Indicating this, John Mann, centre-left Labour MP and previous supporter of the Labour Leader reacted to last Thursday’s election results with a tweet: “If Ed Miliband does not broaden the Labour coalition to better include working class opinion then we cannot win a majority government.”

An Uncertain Future
Looking ahead to the General Election due to be held next May, it is difficult to predict the outcome. For one thing, there is still nine months to go and even a week can be a long time in politics. Obviously, the ongoing state of the economy will heavily influence the mood of next year’s electorate. In comparison to many countries in mainland Europe, Britain has been experiencing an economic recovery. But this is extremely weak and fragile with August’s manufacturing output only showing a growth of 0.1% which is down from July’s pathetic 0.3% increase. Indeed, Britain’s recovery hasn’t even brought production in real terms back to its pre-Great Recession level of 2007.

More importantly, while the rich elite in Britain are celebrating massive gains working people are not feeling the benefit of the recovery. Quite the opposite. With the exception of some lucky home-owners benefiting from low interest rates on their mortgages and a bubble in housing prices, most people have seen a steady fall in living standards along with major cuts to their welfare services from the Conservative-led coalition government.

The Cameron-Clegg government and their media mouthpieces have pulled off a massive confidence trick in convincing a large section of the public that Britain’s main problem is its public debt which can only be solved by cutbacks in welfare spending. In this they have been acting in common with governments across the European Union. As Thomas Fazi in his book ‘The Battle for Europe: How an Elite Hijacked a Continent’ put it, the ruling class in Europe have managed to take a “crisis of neo-liberalism and unregulated finance” and transform it into “a crisis of excessive government spending and unstainable welfare systems.”

However, despite all its cuts the Conservative government have hardly been able to reduce the deficit, and keep having to put off into the distant future the planned date for achieving its spending targets. What has become clearer and clearer is that the government’s budget cuts are part of a strategy of further transferring wealth from the mass of British people over to the tiny majority who own and control society.

Labour refuse to take the Lead
This situation should be a gift to the Labour Party leaders who only have to point out the obvious nature of the cuts and promise to completely reverse this course, to rule in favour of the majority rather than the few. This would be tremendously popular with the majority of British people and cut across the opportunist appeal of protest parties like UKIP.

But the Labour leaders are still stuck in the right-wing social democratic mould, accepting neo-liberal arguments and more fearful of upsetting the rich ruling establishment and its media servants than in actually winning votes and power. The Labour leader, Ed Miliband, has actually said as much, admitting that by promising to reverse the cuts Labour could gain temporary popularity and win the next election. But he says that he doesn’t “want to make promises he can’t keep”. What a principled stand! So instead the Labour leadership has defied all the pressure from the labour movement and community organisations across Britain and refused to give a commitment to reverse the cuts. Even accepting that they will have to “honour” (!?) them once in power.

With a “lead” like this is it any wonder that Labour’s support in the opinion polls has fallen back so far to the point where they are neck and neck with the Conservatives? The increasingly frustrated and discontented electorate see too little difference between the two main parties.

Perspective for 2015
The high level of support for UKIP in the European elections and these recent by-elections will no doubt fall back in the General Election next year as protest votes in the past have always done. But it may not collapse as much as has been expected especially as another Conservative MP who joined UKIP has also resigned and must be expected to win the forthcoming by-election. So UKIP may hope to continue its winning run close to the election and thereby give it an unusual level of momentum. The key thing is whether UKIP can convince the voters, especially those against Europe and the Westminster establishment, that voting for it will not end up being a wasted vote under Britain punishing electoral system. Another factor will be the media. It will be interesting to see what line they take in the election. That said the 2010 election showed that the new social media was having a much bigger impact and the pro-conservative media much less so. This trend is likely to be even more pronounced in next year’s election.

The situation is especially dangerous for the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats. Despite all its claims, UKIP’s core support is among conservative voters and sections of disillusioned Liberals. Normally, the dramatic fall in Liberal support would be expected to help the Conservatives more than Labour, but in this situation the better that UKIP does in next year’s election the more likely it will damage the Conservatives and help Labour. Certainly, we can expect that UKIP will do far better than the 3% that Goldsmith's anti-EU Referendum Party achieved in the 1997 election. And this could be enough to create a small Labour majority or a hung parliament with the nationalist parties (from Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland) holding the balance.

In such circumstances Labour will form a minority government with echoes of Labour's crisis-ridden administration of 1974-1979. In such circumstances, rather than the perspective which has been raised of a Left version of UKIP emerging under Labour (a party which will get none of the media publicity that has been decisive in building up UKIP's support), there are possibilities for a revolt within Labour along similar lines that are developing within the French Socialist Party. Interestingly, Labour leader Ed Miliband appears to be cast from the same mould as French President Francois Hollande and may face the same fate of shattered credibility and humiliation as his counterpart across the English Channel.

Britain: Media mud over UKIP

Image not with accompanying comments. Source

by Michael Roberts

I don’t usually comment on political events as this blog is for economics. But I just could not stop myself responding the British media’s distorted account of the recent by-elections (i.e. elections between the general election) for two MPs.

The British media is engaged in talking up a petty-bourgeois right-wing Eurosceptic party, UKIP, at every opportunity. UKIP has just got its first MP in a by-election in Clacton. But not really. The UKIP candidate was the sitting Conservative MP who defected to UKIP, so he was ahead from the beginning.

There was another by-election at the same time in central Manchester because the sitting Labour MP had died. This was a relatively safe Labour seat and in the by-election Labour held the seat narrowly by just over 600 votes from the UKIP candidate, from a 6000 majority in the general election in 2010. Apparently there was swing from Labour to UKIP of 17.5%.

The media reported that this showed Labour too was in trouble from surging UKIP support, just as much as the incumbent Conservative party was. But if we analyse the result properly, this is nonsense.

First, the turnout for the Manchester by-election was hugely down. It was only 57.5% in May 2010. Now it was just 40%. But this is the rub. Labour’s share of the vote actually ROSE from 40.1% of the turnout in May 2010 to 40.9% in the by-election. The Labour vote was not affected by UKIP.

What happened was that the non-Labour vote all went to the UKIP (apart from a small vote for the ecological Green party). The Conservative vote collapsed from 27.2% share to 12.3% and the junior partner in the current government, the Liberal Democrats, saw their vote disappear from 22.7% in May 2010 to just 5.1%. Actually, if you add up the combined voting share for the Conservatives, Liberal Democrats and UKIP, it was 52.5% in May 2010 and in the by-election it was 56%. That’s hardly a surge. Indeed, if you include the vote for the fascist BNP in May 2010, the share going to the anti-Labour vote FELL from 59.5% to 56%.

The media does not want to report the facts because it is determined to weaken the popularity of the Labour party and ensure its defeat next May. It may succeed, given the craven and pathetic leadership of the Labour elite. The Labour party has failed to galvanise the British people’s undoubted disgust and disappointment with the policies of the Conservative-Liberal government. So any electoral opposition has gone to a Eurosceptic, anti-immigration party, as it has in many European countries and did in the recent Euro elections.

So Labour has not ‘lost’ any share of its vote to UKIP. For this reason, the chairman of Conservative party is right. A vote for UKIP increases the chances that the Conservatives will lose seats to Labour in the general election, given the British ‘first-past-the-post’ system. That is why I expect the UKIP ‘surge’ to melt away next May.

UK Elections: Are Conservatives following the fate of the Liberals?

Source: New Statesman

From: Dan Armstrong in Germany

Not only did the UKIP party in Britain  win the Clacton constituency by-election yesterday - by dint of the sitting MP crossing over into the other camp - but more importantly Labour nearly lost Heywood and Middleton, Manchester. The latter had had a strong Labour majority but Labour only held the seat by around 600 votes, nearly being ousted by the UKIP candidate. Here the turnout was an appallingly low 36% which basically means that five or six thousand Labour supporters just stayed at home; given the latest awful performance at the Labour's recent conference, the party should be grateful to get any votes at all.

In both cases, something else is happening: the Conservative Party is seeing its support melt away and its voters in their thousands are turning towards UKIP. Pundits are comforting themselves by saying that by-elections do not produce typical results and that UKIP will return by next May's General Election to its erstwhile 10-12%.  But how certain can they be about this?

Before  the First World War, the great Liberal Party was split over Irish Home Rule. After 1914 it found itself hopelessly compromised by its vacillations towards the war effort and towards the question of whether to form a coalition with the conservatives. Between 1919 and 1922 its support began to melt away and the young Labour Party actually became the official Opposition. By the end of the twenties, the Labour Party was firmly established.

In the light of this historical experience, we may be tempted to ask whether the Conservative Party, with bad experiences in relation to the economy, towards its coalition with the Lib Dems, a perilously close run thing over independence for Scotland, splits and bombast over the European Union with over half the parliamentary party classifiable as Euro-Sceptic , i.e. close to UKIP, whether indeed the Conservative Party is not about to follow the fate of the old Liberal Party in the 1920s and is heading towards semi-oblivion, to be replaced by the upstarts in UKIP, either before or following next May's election ....

Benny Adams. An obituary.

Death of Benny Adams. Revolutionary Socialist N.Ireland

by John Throne

I have had four people and now Benny who were close to me die in the last two months. As a man who is politically backward, Willie Nelson, but musically gifted, said: "Funny how time just slips away." That is what seems to be happening.

I always thought of Benny Adams as "Wee Benny." A term of endearment and friendship and Comradeship. I first met Benny in a Comrade's house in Belfast in the early 1970's. I was a full timer at the time for the CWI. I was told that I needed to come along to meet these three guys, I think all from Protestant backgrounds, and from Ballymena. They already had their own wee group, the three of them. My memories is they were already organized as a group even to the extent of collecting regular subs. I think if my memory is right we had a discussion about amongst other things that it would not be a good idea to take physical action against one of them who was falling behind in paying. We explained the usual position. Discipline comes out of consciousness and the need to raise the Comrade's consciousness. I think we succeeded in convincing the Comrades. It was not a bad achievement to come out of Ballymena as a small socialist group. Wee Benny was the main man.

Benny. Men and Women cannot live by bread alone. But the left seems to think they can. They think that the revolutionary movement can live on perspectives and program and tactics and organizational details. This is not so. Why do we not think more about these giant churches and their hundreds of millions of members in spite of their garbage ideas. They use music, they use drama, they use art. Not so much dance as this can get out of hand and be too hard to control and too sexual. Why am I bringing this up in relation to Benny? What a great musician he was. I can always remember him with his guitar singing Waltzing Matilda, the anti war version. He would bring the room to silence. He would leave us all reflecting on ourselves and our world. He would make everybody there want to come back to the next meeting and social and struggle we organized. 

Thank you Benny. I am very sorry that I will not hear you sing and play again. 

The Futility of Bombing ISIS

Add caption

We share this article from the Independent UK for the interest of our readers.

Is There a Plan B?

by ROBERT FISK

Is there a “Plan B” in Barack Obama’s brain? Or in David Cameron’s, for that matter? I mean, we’re vaguely told that air strikes against the ferocious “Islamic State” may go on for “a long time”. But how long is “long”? Are we just going to go on killing Arabs and bombing and bombing and bombing until, well, until we go on bombing? What happens if our Kurdish and non-existent “moderate” Syrian fighters – described by Vice-President Joe Biden last week as largely “shopkeepers” – don’t overthrow the monstrous “Islamic State”? Then I suppose we are going to bomb and bomb and bomb again. As a Lebanese colleague of mine asked in an article last week, what is Obama going to do next? Has he thought of that?

After Alan Henning’s beheading, the gorge rises at the thought of even discussing such things. But distance sometimes creates distorting mirrors, none so more than when it involves the distance between the Middle East and Washington, London, Paris and, I suppose, Canberra. In Beirut, I’ve been surveying the Arab television and press – and it’s interesting to see the gulf that divides what the Arabs see and hear, and what the West sees and hears. The gruesome detail is essential here to understand how Arabs have already grown used to jihadi barbarity. They have seen full video clips of the execution of Iraqis – if shot in the back of the head, they have come to realise, a victim’s blood pours from the front of his face – and they have seen video clips of Syrian soldiers not only beheaded but their heads then barbecued and carried through villages on sticks.

Understandably, Alan Henning’s murder didn’t get much coverage in the Middle East, although television did show his murder video – which Western television did not. But it didn’t make many front pages. Mostly the fighting between jihadis and Kurds at Ein al-Arab (Kobane) and the festival for the Muslim Eid – and the Haj in Saudi Arabia – dominated news coverage. In general, the Arab world was as uninterested in Henning’s murder as we have been, for example, in the car bomb that killed 50 Syrian children in Homs last week. Had they been British children, of course…

But I’m struck by friends who’ve asked me why we are really carrying out air strikes when we won’t put soldiers on the ground. They have noted how the families of American hostages – fruitlessly seeking mercy for their loved ones – keep repeating that they cannot make Obama do what they want him to do. Yet, don’t we claim that our democratic governments can be influenced by individuals, that they do what we want?

And watching David Cameron on my Beirut television last week, I asked myself why it was really necessary for the RAF to bomb the “Islamic State”. He knows very well that our four – or is it two? – clapped-out Tornadoes are not going to make the slightest difference to any assault on jihadi forces. Indeed, he was prepared to delay RAF strikes until the Scottish referendum was over. If so, why did he not defer them altogether to save British lives?

But it was obvious at the Tory party conference that Cameron’s greatest threat came not from a man in Mosul called Abu-Bakr al-Baghdadi, but from a man in Bromley called Nigel Farage. Thus he waffled on about how Britain would “hunt down and bring to justice” Henning’s killers and do “everything we can to defeat this organisation in the region and at home”, using “all the assets we have to find these [remaining] hostages”. By “all the assets”, he must mean ground troops – because the RAF is already being used – and this we are not, I think, going to do. “British troops held hostage by Islamic State” is not a headline he wants to read. Thus I fear we are going to do nothing except bomb. And bomb. And bomb. Farage can’t beat that.

Like all Western leaders faced with a crisis in the Middle East, Cameron does not want to deal with it – or explore why it happened. He wants to know how to respond to it politically or, preferably, militarily. Our refusal to broadcast the “Islamic State” beheading videos is understandable – absolutely in the case of the actual murders – but by preventing Brits from actually seeing these horrors, the Government avoids having to respond to the public’s reaction: either a call for more air strikes or to demand their annulment.

This secrecy means the hostages do not exist in our imagination; they only emerge from the mist into the horrible desert sunlight when that grisly video arrives. In the region itself, hostages become public property at once, relatives giving interviews and demanding action from their governments. As I write, the families of 21 captured Lebanese soldiers faced with beheading are blocking the main Damascus- Beirut highway. A Qatari envoy has arrived to help (presumably with lots of cash).

Perhaps we need to reframe our understanding of the “Islamic State”. British Muslim leaders have said, quite rightly, that Muslims show mercy, and that the “Islamic State” is a perversion of Islam. I suspect and fear that they are wrong. Not because Islam is not merciful, but because the “Islamic State” has nothing at all to do with Islam. It is more a cult of nihilism. Their fighters have been brutalised – remember that they have endured, many of them, Saddam’s cruelty, our sanctions, Western invasion and occupation and air strikes under Saddam and now air strikes again. These people just don’t believe in justice any more. They have erased it from their minds.

If we had not supported so many brutal men in the Middle East, would things have turned out differently? Probably. If we had supported justice – I hesitate to suggest putting a certain man on trial for war crimes – would there have been a different reaction in the Middle East? In the Syrian war, they say that 200,000 have died; in Gaza more than 2,000. But in Iraq, we suspect half a million died. And whose fault was that?

The “Islamic State” are the real or spiritual children of all this. Now we face an exclusive form of nihilism, a cult as merciless as it is morbid. And we bomb and we bomb and we bomb. And then?
Robert Fisk writes for the Independent, where this column originally appeared. 

A Response to the ILWU International’s Statements on ZIM Protests

Photo: Paul Chinn, The Chronicle

 A statement from the Transport Workers Solidarity Committee

Recent ILWU press releases and public statements are misleading and conflict with well-established ILWU policies and positions on Palestine and Israel. The editor of the ILWU newspaper, The Dispatcher, at the direction of the ILWU President, can not overturn those policies and positions without a vote by Convention delegates.

 The Israeli Consulate’s statement that the ZIM Pireaus sailed from the port of Oakland on August 20 after completing cargo operations is untrue. But for the ILWU Communications Director, Craig Merrilees, to make that same statement, reaffirming the Zionist’s self-serving distortion places the ILWU on the side of those responsible for the recent slaughter of over 2,100 Palestinians, most of them innocent Gazan civilians. The false statement implies that the 5-days of picketing by thousands of protesters had no impact on cargo operations. The original call for a mass protest on August 16 and 17, mobilizing a few thousand was made by a coalition, Block the Boat, initiated by the Arab Research and Organizing Committee. However, subsequent picketing on August 18, 19 and 20 that stopped the ship’s cargo operations was done spontaneously by a smaller group of Bay Area activists, including the Transport Workers Solidarity Committee.

The truth is that after failing to gets its cargo worked at the SSA terminal, ZIM Lines tried to fool protesters that the ship was sailing to Russia, but longshoremen knew otherwise. The ship departed August 19, headed out the Golden Gate at night then abruptly reversed course, made a Williamson turn and headed back to the Port of Oakland, this time to Berth 22.  Ports America, the employer, tried to shift longshore workers from another ship to work the ZIM Pireaus but there already was a picket line at the terminal gate. Some ILWU Local 10 members refused to work the ship. Those that reluctantly worked it, despite pressure from the employer and union officials, rebelled by slowing down cargo ops to a crawl. One crane operator boasted that barely 1% of containers was actually moved before the ZIM ship was forced to sail.

 On September 27,  another ZIM ship, the Shanghai, was picketed on the day and night shifts at SSA by 200 protesters mobilized by the Stop ZIM Action Committee and the Transport Workers Solidarity Committee. Three of the organizers were Local 10 retirees, veterans of ILWU’s 1984 anti-apartheid action in San  Francisco. Again, Merrilees put out untrue statements, claiming longshore workers were threatened by picketers and were standing by on safety. Actually, an appeal was made in the union hiring hall that morning asking longshoremen not to work the ZIM ship and informing them of a picket line. In a show of solidarity all longshoremen refused Zim jobs except for one. In the evening SSA agreed to remove police from the picketing area if the union would dispatch the jobs. With no police presence it was the picketers and longshore supporters vs ZIM and SSA. We won hands down!

On September 27, the ILWU International issued a press release falsely stating “ the leadership and membership of the ILWU have taken no position on the Israel/Gaza conflict.” The truth is that ILWU passed a Convention resolution in 1988 characterizing Israeli oppression of Palestinians as “state-sponsored terrorism”. ILWU’s 1991 resolution condemns Zionist “suppression of basic freedoms of speech and assembly” of Palestinians and calls for the “right of self-determination”.

 Israel has blockaded the port of Gaza since 1967, stopping all ships and putting port workers and longshoremen out of work for nearly 50 years. In 2002, Local 10 officers signed a statement “For International Labor Solidarity to Stop Zionist Repression and Build a Just Peace” to protest the Zionist bombing of the headquarters of the Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions in the West Bank city of Nablus.

 The Journal of Commerce (August 20), the maritime bosses’ newspaper, quoted Communications Director Merrilees: “ILWU members felt threatened by the large number of demonstrators” and made a similar statement regarding the September dock protest. But the truth is the threat to longshoremen comes from the police not protesters. As Local 10 president Melvin Mackay told the San Francisco Chronicle, longshoremen would not work the ship “under armed police escort—not with our experience with the police…”

In a 2003 court case against the Oakland Police Department for shooting so-called “non-lethal” weapons at longshore workers and anti-war protesters, ILWU attorney Rob Remar meticulously documented coordinated police violence against longshore workers since the 1934 Maritime Strike in which two strikers were killed by cops, provoking the San Francisco General Strike. Nowadays ILWU International officers try to deny our militant history and undermine any semblance of class struggle on the docks, especially in the midst of the current contract negotiations. With no contract in place longshoremen can take job actions during negotiations to bolster the union at the bargaining table but the “top down” bureaucracy has reigned in the ranks, preventing the union from flexing its muscle.

Nevertheless, Local 10 has tried to continue ILWU’s proud history of solidarity actions by introducing a resolution at the 2009 Convention  “commending the South African dockworkers union for taking a strike action against an Israeli ship in Durban to protest the massacre of 1400 Palestinians by the Israeli army in Gaza”.  A year after the Convention resolution passed unanimously, the Local 10 Executive Board voted to “call on the ILWU International officers to lend their voice in protest with other unions against this atrocity by issuing a policy statement in line with the ILWU’s past position on the question of Israeli repression of Palestinians and call for unions to protest by any action they choose to take.” That motion paved the way for Local 10 longshoremen in 2010 in collaboration with anti-Zionist demonstrators to conduct the first-ever job action by an American trade union protesting repressive Israeli government policies. Meanwhile, ILWU International officers have only  reaffirmed Israel’s press statements and run a biased pro-Israel article in The Dispatcher (January 2007) by International Secretary-Treasurer Willie Adams with no mention of the plight of Palestinians. It’s time for ILWU International officers to get on board: Oppose apartheid in Israel just as we did in South Africa. The rank and file have shown the way.

The daily police harassment of black males.

One thing so many cameras have revealed more so than catching the "official" criminals in the act is catching the legal criminals in the act, of brutalizing the public I mean, especially young black males. It is not a joke that young black men need to be very careful when they are in the presence of these guys. Their partners, children are also in danger at all times. Many groups in society track acts of racism and violence against them, Jews, Asians, gays etc. But this treatment of young black men is pervasive and nothing is really done about it.

In the face of all this, the uprising in Ferguson was a pretty mild response given the severity of the problem, you have to have the patience of Job to not want to blow everyone's head off. It is fitting that there has been links made between the people of Ferguson and those of Gaza and occupied Palestine. The beefing up of the police and their militarization has increased since the occupy Movement and there's no doubt the abuse and/or police murders that are being directed against black men in the main will occur more often in white communities as well.  There is something wrong with society and the state, the capitalist state, always responds to threats or potential threats to the regime with violence.

Australia: Murdoch paper's disgusting portrayal of murdered transgender woman

Rupert Murdoch's disgraceful cover of a gruesome murder

From friends of Facts For Working  People in Australia.
From Laura Szymanski Cotterall
Townsville North Queensland

 "Woman murdered and cooked by her chef husband." Pretty shocking, gruesome title for the front of a major Rupert Murdoch owned newspaper of a major city, the Courier Mail in Brisbane, Australia? But that was not the headline that this "newspaper" chose to use. Instead they close to call attention to the VICTIM Mayang Prasetyo's transgender status by using the title "Monster Chef and the She-Male" with a full-lengh bikini photo.

I have been disturbed for several years now by this lack of sensitivity towards victims of crimes as well as the sensationalizing of violent crimes by the media. This heading and the article that accompanies it (focusing on the victim's profession in the sex trade, etc.) further focuses a sense of shock and blame on the victim. There was recently a man here in Australia who murdered his wife and 3 children before killing himself. With comments about what a "nice guy" he was and how he must have been "really stressed out". Huh? This man makes the ultimate power play, the last show of dominance and abuse to his wife and he is garnering sympathy?

The only small glimmer of hope here is the outrage and backlash that this story has triggered among the readers. The Courier Mail has been inundated with comments berating and abusing them for the disgusting headline that they used. I am happy to read that among the garbage out there that the media spews out, there are still lots of decent people out there who are sympathetic to the fact that a fellow human being was killed in such a horrific way by a vile creature.  The response to the story has been significant and shows that among most human beings, compassion and solidarity is a very strong impulse.  Here are a few comments from FB:

Laura C: As someone else posted on the newspapers FB page, transgender people are already among the most marginalized at risk for suicide group out there--to treat her death like some trashy tabloid gossip fodder is insensitive and inexcusable.

Georgie D: Does someone behind the scenes in your newsroom have some kind of fetish? Is that why you keep on with these stories? Is it Rupert?

John B Still shaming victims today?...quick switch back too "terrorists everywhere"...you will do better Murdoch filth!

The other "facts" are just hurtful and malicious and shouldn't be a part of the front cover of a story. Shame on the Courier Mail, shame on Rupert Murdoch.

 Get UP, an Australian group that describes itself as: An independent, grassroots community advocacy organization, points out that: "More than 1 in 3 Australian women will experience physical or sexual violence by a man at some point in their lives. One woman is killed every week in Australia by a current or former partner. We need to tell these stories, and we need to tell them fairly and accurately." The group adds, "News reporting of domestic violence plays a critical role in setting the tone for community attitudes. When stories of domestic violence place blame upon the victim, society is told again and again that violence against women is justified and excuseable."