Harry's Place

The IUF is inviting signatures to a petition against human rights abuses in a Thailand shrimp factory which is also a major supplier to Walmart:

The workers, from Cambodia and Burma, protested the seizure of their passports by factory owners in Thailand. Police were called. Shots were fired.

It wasn’t just the passport seizure that incited the workers’ anger – it was management slashing wages again. Their wages already failed to cover the most basic needs, and this latest action put workers deeper into the factory’s debt. Many of them are still legally and financially trapped at the factory, victims of human trafficking.

This is not an isolated incident. Also in Thailand, workers at a pineapple factory recently held similar protests over wage reductions. There are now reports of human trafficking involving children under 15, bought and sold to work there. More than 73% of this factory’s shipments to the USA go to Walmart.

Here is a link to the petition.

In China, of course, tweeting messages that certain people don’t like can get you in a lot more trouble than it can in the UK.

In April 2011, retired forestry official Fang Hong posted a scatological tweet, mocking a powerful Chinese politician, Bo Xilai, the Chongqing party secretary.

Fang had been critical of Bo in the past. But last year, he was fired up by what he considered the injustice of a court case taken against lawyer Li Zhuang, who’d been defending an alleged gangster during Bo’s clampdown against the mafia. In the heat of his outrage, Fang posted his tweet, which also mocked the powerful police chief, Wang Lijun.

After that, Fang went out to buy vegetables and didn’t think about the tweet. He estimates only around 90 people saw it that day. But despite its limited influence, that night he was summoned to the Fuling public security bureau and asked to delete the tweet, which he did.

The next day, more than 20 police officers came to his house to arrest him.
…..
Without a trial, Fang was sent to a re-education-through-labor center for a year.

And yet another reminder for those of us in the West who serenely buy Chinese-made products:

When Fang was inside the camp, he worked for as many as 14 hours a day. Initially he made Christmas tree lights for export to Germany.

“A skilled worker at the company welds 4,300 lights a day, but we welded 6,500 lights a day each,” he says. “If you didn’t finish, you weren’t allowed to eat meat, buy cigarettes or sleep at night, and your sentence might be extended. We earned one U.S. dollar, 25 cents a month.”

Those who did not make their quota were sometimes even beaten, he says, with the pressure rising in the summer when orders had to be filled for export in time for Christmas. Later he made wiring for laptop computers.

At Socialist Unity (or should I say “Corporatist Unity”?), Andy Newman wrote:

The difficult task for socialists today is to envisage how to make transformative change in a globalised world where the power of multi-national corporations is outwith the reach of state sovereignty.

The tasks before us are how we acheive sustainable economic growth, which requires a model for finding a win-win relationship between a left government exercising economic and political sovereignty on the one hand, and private multi-national corportations on the other. China has shown this can be done.

Well, yes, I suppose you could say that.

Unfortunately the folks at SU have decided that don’t want us linking to them anymore. If you click on the Socialist Unity link under “Stoppers” in the lefthand column, you’ll see what I mean.

So you’ll have to copy and paste if you want to see the original:

http://www.socialistunity.com/lessons-bradford-west-labour-respect-debate/#comment-606878

A reader, who wishes to remain anonymous, located in the vaults and kindly sent in a copy of the Young Liberal Songbook from September 1967. They correctly assessed that I would find it of interest. I copy below a song from that book ridiculing the Labour Party for a perceived inability to get rid of Trotskyist infiltrators. “Harold” was the then prime minister and Leader of the Labour Party, Harold Wilson. “George” was the then Foreign Secretary and Deputy Leader of the Labour Party, George Brown. I hope some of you are amused as I was.

THERE’S A TROT IN OUR PARTY

Tune: There’s a Hole in My Bucket

There’s a Trot in our party, dear Harold, dear Harold,
There’s a Trot in our party, dear Harold, a Trot.
Then expel him dear George, dear George, dear George.
With what shall I expel him, dear Harold, dear Harold?
With a block vote, dear George, dear George, dear George.
And where shall I find it, dear Harold, dear Harold?
In the unions, dear George, dear George, dear George.
But union leaders are elected, dear Harold, dear Harold.
Then rig the elections, dear George, dear George.
With what shall I rig them, dear Harold, dear Harold?
With Catholic action, dear George, dear George, dear George.
And where shall I find it, dear Harold, dear Harold?
In Glasgow, dear George, dear George, dear George.
But that’s where the Trots are, dear Harold, dear Harold.

Source:

Mary Green and Michael Steed (compilers), After The Count Was Over: Young Liberal Song Book, (Salisbury Young Liberals, September 1967), p2.

No, of course Kerry McCarthy didn’t mean it, but – WTF?

She wrote: “Oaf on train drinking lager and playing techno music out loud. Everyone being very British about it and not complaining.”

She then described how he was wearing a T-shirt with an offensive message about his sexual prowess, adding: “Should have killed him when we had the chance before he could breed.”

She has explained that the tweet was ‘obviously flippant’.  So that’s all right then.

Here’s an apology in today’s JC:

On May 13 2011, we published an article entitled “Pears funded charity which hosted jihadist” which related to the Pears Foundation, a charity called Forward Thinking, and an individual called Tafazal Mohammed.

We have since accepted that Mr Mohammed is not a jihadist and have apologised to him, the Pears Foundation and Forward Thinking for this error. It follows that there was no basis for linking Forward Thinking’s director, Mr McTernan, to any jihadist. We apologise to Mr McTernan for the distress caused.

This is a lie.

The entire purpose of Forward Thinking is to advance the cause of jihadist groups from the Middle East. Have a look through our archives, and you’ll see.  In particular, these three items.

Forward Thinking is run by Oliver McTernan – an ex-Catholic priest whose interests include having sex with women and helping jihadist groups which want to kill Jews.

I was told an interesting story by a prominent pro-peace individual who had spoken on platforms with Forward Thinking. He stopped when it became clear to him that this was not simply an organisation which supported peace talks with Hamas. It actually supported Hamas, itself.

The problem with British libel laws is that it allows public figures and those engaged in high level political campaigning – like Oliver McTernan – to force small poor, small circulation newspapers to withdraw allegations which are transparently and demonstrably true.

Why?

Because if you sue – particularly on a “no win no fee basis” – it will almost always be cheaper to settle than to fight to trial: even if you win.

Claimants know this. They therefore routinely fire off letters before action, with the sole intention of preventing critical coverage of their activities. The worse you behave, the greater the opportunity to cry “libel” when your conduct is reported.

This is “Lawfare”: the use of litigation by supporters of extreme and vicious politics to advance their disgraceful cause.

In a somewhat related development, Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin renounced his U.S. citizenship, apparently to avoid a large tax payment.

Saverin, a native of Brazil, denied his decision to become an ex-American was related to taxes. But:

Two immigration lawyers said his explanation hardly passes the laugh test. Saverin’s move was timed to the initial public offering of shares of Facebook stock. The valuation of the Facebook IPO explodes Saverin’s stake in the social media company to some $3 billion, on which avoiding taxes could save him at least tens — if not hundreds — of millions of dollars. Nor does it help his case that he relocated to Singapore, which levies no taxes on those earnings.

A grimly amusing outcome of this is that leading members of the American Right, always pleased to question the patriotism of liberals, have denounced– not Saverin, but Democratic Senators Chuck Schumer and Bob Casey, who have introduced legislation aimed at penalizing those who would renounce their U.S. citizenship to dodge taxes.

(I vaguely remember a time when successful immigrants to the US considered it a privilege to pay taxes to the government of the country that helped make their success possible.)

Anti-tax activist Grover Norquist compared it to the actions of Nazi Germany.

“I think Schumer can probably find the legislation to do this. It existed in Germany in the 1930s and Rhodesia in the ’70s and in South Africa as well,” Norquist said, as quoted by The Hill. “He probably just plagiarized it and translated it from the original German.”

The Wall Street Journal editorial board derided the legislation as “Soviet-style exit taxes” that resemble “what oppressive and demagogic regimes do, and it’s humiliating to see U.S. Senators posture in such fashion.”

The Journal argued that the proposed Ex-PATRIOT Act would turn away the best and the brightest, bashing Schumer and Casey as “a pair of envy specialists” who are trying to “score political points by punishing the fleeing rich.”

Rush Limbaugh lamented, “It’s this whole class envy thing rearing its head again.”

“[The] president’s out there demonizing successful people every day, targeting successful people every day, running a presidential campaign based on class warfare, trying to get the 99% of the country who are not in the top 1% to hate the 1%, to literally despise ‘em,” the radio host told his millions of listeners Friday.

My Lithuanian-born grandfather, who immigrated to the US in 1902, was a homesteader and coal miner in North Dakota and a plumber in Minnesota. As far as I can gather, it took him several years, and some bureaucratic hassles, to become an American citizen (here’s a copy of his declaration of intention). Even though he later became a Communist, I don’t think it ever would have occurred to him to renounce what he worked so hard to obtain.

I don’t know if any of our readers are fans of the TED talks that are posted on YouTube and are supposed to disseminate “ideas worth spreading.”

But there was one recent talk– by billionaire venture capitalist Nick Hanauer– that didn’t make the cut. Hanauer’s topic was income inequality, and TED “curator” Chris Anderson considered it excessively “political” and “a tedious partisan rehash.”

You may not agree with Hanauer’s take– although I think he’s in a better position than most of us to judge these things. But you can see for yourself:

Normally I’d put a post like this in the category of “Class warfare” (a category I created somewhat ironically). But if you watch to the end, you’ll see that what Hanauer advocates is anything but class warfare.

This is a cross post from the Jerusalem Post by Nic Schlagman Program Manager, ARDC Israel

Last night saw the culmination of weeks of national and local incitement against the African refugee/asylum seeker population in Israel. Hundreds of local residents and settlers from the West Bank settlements rampaged through South Tel Aviv neighborhoods attacking Africans and smashing African businesses.

Veronique Bibi, from Congo, was thrown to the ground and beaten after leaving her house to try and talk to demonstrators. Bibi, a well known activist back home in Congo, who had held talks, before she had to flee Congo, with Nelson Mandela said she ‘felt lucky to have escaped with her life’ after being set upon by a crowd of dozens.

Earlier in the evening at the start of the demonstration Likud MK Miri Regev said “the Sudanese were a cancer in our body.” And MK Danny Danon, head of the ‘Deportation Now’ movement called for the immediate removal of all Africans from Israel. This is the latest in a long line of incitement by our elected officials, including Interior Minister Eli Yishai, MK Michael Ben Ari and extreme settler leaders including Baruch Marzel. Human Rights groups have begun working on whether there is a case for incitement against them.

Approximately 60 000 asylum seekers have entered Israel since 2005. 80% of the asylum seekers are from Eritrea and 10-5% from across Sudan. Since 2005 less than 20 have received refugee status. Huge pressure has been placed on poor neighbourhoods in South Tel Aviv and peripheral cities in the South of the country, where the communities themselves are religious and conservative and very wary of a large foreign community suddenly living alongside them. Without the legal right to work, or access to any government services, the asylum seekers rely on the support of a number of small NGOs and a small UNHCR office in Tel Aviv.

Despite the circumstances they have gone through before their arrival, and the harsh conditions they face here in Israel, crime rates have consistently been below the national average in all years that statistics have been released (2005-2011). Hints by the current police chief that those numbers have increased since the start of the year were followed by his suggestion that asylum seekers must be given work permits, and also met by scepticism from refugee rights activists who claimed the numbers are being manipulated to help the Tel Aviv police get a larger allocation of the funds released by the finance ministry to deal with ‘infiltrators’.

Politicians in Israel are doing nothing to lower the tensions in the neighbourhoods worst affected, in fact they are regularly coming here to incite the local activists. Without clear and unequivocal statements from our elected officials against these senseless acts of violence the situation will continue to get worse. We now have to post overnight guards at our shelters for single mothers and children and are awaiting with trepidation the inevitable next round of escalation that could even lead to murder.

The writer is a program manager for the African Refugee Development Center. He is an oleh from London and a graduate of Noam UK.

This is a guest post by Eyal

Regular readers of this blog will probably be aware that for the last decade or so, Israel has been experiencing an immigration wave unlike any before. What began as a trickle of asylum seekers, fleeing the atrocities in Darfur, has turned in recent years into a flood of mostly work-immigrants crossing the border from Sinai, each paying thousands of dollars to Egyptian smugglers in search of better opportunities. An estimated 60-80 thousands have already crossed the border, with 500-1000 arriving every week. For a nation of about 7 million people – that’s a lot.

As a result, increasingly large numbers of immigrants Sudan, Eritrea, Ethiopia, and other African countries have been amassing in the already impoverished and neglected neighborhoods of southern Tel-Aviv. Local residents have seen their neighborhoods transformed in front their eyes, crime rates go up, and in some cases their jobs lost in favor of cheaper foreign labor.

This is a complex national, legal, and human issue involving genuine refugees fleeing persecution in their countries (and protected by international law), work immigrants seeking better opportunities, and local residents who bear the burden of years of governmental neglect and lack of direction. Although authorities have begun to take some measures, much remains to be done.

Alarmingly, however, a number of right-wing politicians have begun exploiting this issue, fanning already heated tensions and raising the ugly head of blatant racism.

Meet MK Dani Dannon, of the ruling Likud party and self-appointed leader of the anti-immigration movement: earlier this week he proudly announced he was forming a new movement called “Deportation Now!”, aimed at combating illegal immigration. I don’t know what is more disheartening: the fact that a member of parliament would think of such a title for his movement, or the fact that he would be so proud of it.

Not one to confine himself merely to words, he took part in a demonstration last night against illegal immigration, along with a number of other MK’s from Likud and other right-wing parties.
This is what he updated on his Facebook page:

“At the demo in Tel-Aviv against the infiltrators. It’s time to make it clear to all the do-gooders – Israel is at war! An enemy state of infiltrators has been created inside of Israel, and its capital, southern Tel-Aviv. An end must be put to it – deport all of the infiltrators before it’s too late!”

MK Miri Regev, another Likud member to take part in the demonstration, was just as eloquent, stating:

“We won’t let this threat grow like a cancer in our body”

Some of their followers have been even more forthcoming and direct about what they mean. Below is a picture of one of the demonstration participants. The writing on her shirt reads “Death to the Sudanese”.

Photo by Uri Misgav, Ha’aretz

There should be no mincing about it – the language and rhetoric used by Danon and his fellow “anti-immigration” activists is one of outright racism of the worst kind. It is identical to language used elsewhere by the most extreme and reactionary elements in society. Had the same words been directed at Jews, these very same politicians would be the first to cry out “anti-Semitism!”

Sadly, however, not only don’t they see the similarities, but seem to be completely unashamed at keeping at it.

Danon and his fellows all claim they are against violence and for working within the limits of the law, but following the demonstration a number of African workers were assaulted in the street and several demonstrators were arrested for rioting.

Isn’t it funny how words have a way of turning themselves into actions?

This is a cross post from False Dichotomies

It is true that Jewish history does not necessarily mean that Israel should have a special responsibility to care for African refugees. It is also true that the residents of South Tel Aviv are right to complain that the burden of dealing with the refugees seems to be falling exclusively on their shoulders. And it is also true that residents of more privileged neighbourhoods should not respond to these complaints by accusing them of racism.

However, wherever you stand on this debate, there is no excuse for the demagoguery and incitement that we saw last night in South Tel Aviv. At a rally in HaTikvah neighbourhood, Likud MK Miri Regev said that “the Sudanese are a cancer in our body”. Her Knesset colleagues Danny Danon and Michael Ben-Ari expressed similar sentiments. Inevitably, this led to attacks on Africans and their businesses. In short, a pogrom.

The MKs who spoke at the rally should be charged with incitement. They said the same things that anti-Semites said about my great-grandparents when they arrived in London, and – yes – we do have a special responsibility in the world’s sole Jewish state to ensure that, however difficult the circumstances, we do not use this kind of rhetoric, because we know what the results will be.

Let’s debate the issue, try to form a responsible policy, and stop the incitement.

Gene adds: I’m not a fan of Knesset Speaker Reuven Rivlin, but he got this right:

“It’s OK to protest and demand a solution from the government but once cannot be dragged into incitement and use words the anti-Semites use against us,” he said.