Thousands of coffee workers stage walkout

Colombian coffee growers have launched an open-ended strike demanding better prices for their product and policies that benefit the people.
Thousands of workers, as well as farmers from small and medium-sized plantations, have joined swelling industrial unrest in the Latin American country.
In the western Tolima province activists clashed with police on Monday when officers tried to prevent a demonstration going ahead.
Protesters insisted that they would camp out in provincial capital Ibague until at least tomorrow to press their demands.
Telesur journalist Milton Henao said peasant demonstrators had been marching peacefully when police attacked them.
He stressed that the farmers remained unintimidated.
Growers have been hit hard by falling global prices in coffee beans, pointing to a 55 per cent drop in the price of arabica beans since a 30-year high in 2011.
Farmers are now paid around £190 for a load, or 125 kilos, of beans, but production costs them more than £230 per load.
The growers are calling for an increase to their £20-a-load government subsidy.
Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos branded the strike "inconvenient and unnecessary" and he was backed up by National Coffee Growers Federation president Luis Genaro Munoz.
Mr Munoz supported the setting up of a new government commission for the industry and rejected the use of roadblocks to press demands.
But Tolima leader Danilo Lopez said that the federation needed to be democratised to serve small and medium farmers.
He said the protests were the "awakening of the Colombian people against capitalist exploitation" and claimed the fight was a political one against bosses and the anti-popular policies of the government.
Mr Lopez added: "What we want is a minimum support price of 800,000 pesos (£290) per load for coffee and to curb the cost of inputs.
"We continue to negotiate other aspects of agrarian and peasant security."
Elsewhere negotiations to end a strike at one of the world's largest open-cast mines in northern Colombia kicked off today.
Directors from Cerrejon coal and representatives of union Sintracarbon agreed a draft agreement to end the 19-day strike.
Workers are calling for health and safety improvements and wage rises.
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Gerrard Winstanley: The Digger's Life and Legacy

Gerrard Winstanley: The Digger's Life and Legacy
by John Gurney (Pluto Press, £11.50)
Sunday 10 February 2013 by Alan Lloyd Printable Email
The latest addition to Pluto's Revolutionary Lives series, this is an eminently readable and very welcome biography of the Digger's leader Gerrard Winstanley.
A revolutionary intellectual rated so highly by the Bolsheviks that his name was one of just 19 such figures carved in 1918 on the memorial obelisk in Moscow's Alexander Gardens, Winstanley is little known or lauded in his own country.
His recorded writings and actions took place over a brief period from 1648 to 1652 around the time of the English revolution, and they are as worthy of debate and consideration now as they were nearly 500 years ago.
Winstanley's publication The New Law Of Righteousness argued that there is enough land in England for all and, by ensuring that the "earth is a common treasury," no-one need ever go hungry.
His central tenet was that we should "abandon private property and embrace community." Along with a group of like-minded Diggers, he set one up on the common land of Saint George's Hill in Walton-on-Thames.
His actions encouraged other settlements in places such as Wellingborough, Cobham and Iver, which sadly lasted little over a year
Their success alarmed the vested interests of the ruling class, particularly the local landowners who eventually destroyed the communities and drove the Diggers off the land.
This led Winstanley to pen The Law Of Freedom, described by political theoretician Eduard Bernstein as outlining a "communist utopia."
It also prompted a continuing debate as to whether his practical experience as a Digger changed Winstanley's outlook from libertarian to authoritarian.
This debate, along with one on the differences between the Diggers and the Levellers, are cleverly outlined by the author without slowing the pace of the book.
In an age when the difference between rich and poor continues to widen and the need for decent homes for working people becomes ever more urgent, so Winstanley's ideas retain their relevance and perhaps continue to suggest solutions.
This well referenced book is an excellent starting point for anyone wishing to learn about this remarkably far-sighted radical.

The day the nazis lost

February 2 1943 is the date of the Red Army victory at Stalingrad. From the moment of near-certain defeat the previous year the defence of the city had been turned into an encirclement of the German forces and their eventual humiliating surrender.
Up to this point in early 1943, despite the reverses in north Africa and the failure to launch an invasion of Britain, the nazi blitzkreig had appeared virtually invincible. Hyped up by the Goebbels propaganda machine German morale was at its height and the Allies could see no obvious end to the war. Stalingrad changed all of that, decisively.
This was a victory which all committed to the anti-fascist war could celebrate. Stalingrad inspired those working underground in the resistance throughout nazi-occupied Europe.
King George VI commissioned a sword that Churchill himself presented to Stalin. On its blade the inscription read: "To the steelhearted citizens of Stalingrad a homage of the British people."
The Communist Party was meanwhile engaged in what without doubt was the biggest and broadest campaign in its history, for a second front to relieve the awful pressure that the nazi onslaught continued to impose on the Russian people.
Almost all of this history was to be hidden first by the onset of the cold war in the late 1940s and then again during the second cold war of the 1980s era of Thatcher and Reagan. At the time Scottish folk singer Dick Gaughan put the need to reclaim this past from the rewriting of the history books rather neatly in his song Think Again: "Do you think that the Russians want war? These are the parents of children who died in the last one."
But the sentiments that Gaughan turned into such a moving song were not only submerged under the weight of the second cold war, they also had to contest with a bitter division in the Communist Party that revolved sharply around attitudes to the Soviet Union, while the Trotskyist left defined itself by how it would classify its critique of the USSR. Stalingrad and all it represented became almost lost.
The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 was celebrated at the time by right-wing commentators as the "end of history." Neoliberalism - then at its height - would of course produce the present economic crisis and the austerity we are being forced to endure and resist as a consequence.
But 1989 had another perhaps less obvious after-effect. Unburdened by the cold war rhetoric that had adopted the so-called Iron Curtain as a means to divide the world into the free and the unfree the true legacy of WWII could be revisited by historians who previously might have been wary of according the eastern front the vital place it occupied in the defeat of nazi Germany.
Anthony Beevor's epic book Stalingrad, first published in 1998, was a surprise and runaway bestseller. This helped to establish a popular mainstream understanding of the epic heroism the Red Army victory at Stalingrad represented and more broadly the key role of the eastern front in the eventual defeat of nazi Germany.
However, the breakthrough in understanding that Beevor's book began was soon to be reversed by the aftermath of September 11 2001, the so-called "war on terror," the invasion of Iraq and the occupation of Afghanistan.
The popularisation of the "Help for Heroes" message has facilitated the militarisation of national culture - the FA Cup is carried on to the Wembley final pitch nowadays by uniformed members of the armed forces, while Remembrance Sunday has effortlessly connected Afghanistan to WWII and WWI with no distinction made of the causes served by these vastly different conflicts.
WWII has become an epic of nostalgia entirely disconnected from the cause of anti-fascism, the sacrifices made by the Red Army - the eastern front once again hidden from history. Stalingrad, forgotten, scarcely meriting a mention in the mainstream media despite its fixation with all things WWII.
Saturday February 2 2013 therefore represents an important opportunity to mark the 70th anniversary of victory at Stalingrad in a way that could form the basis for a much bigger celebration - in two years time - of the 70th anniversary of the Red Army's role in the eventual defeat of nazi Germany in May 1945.
Combining ideas, film and photography from the era with fiercely committed music the Victory at Stalingrad night out at east London's Rich Mix Arts Centre is nothing if not bold, ambitious and innovative.
Organisers Philosophy Football, in association with anti-fascist campaigners Hope not Hate, have teamed up military historian Geoffrey Roberts - author of Stalin's General: The Life of Georgy Zhukov - and writer Seumas Milne to discuss the meaning of Stalingrad. Thee Faction will provide the socialist R&B anthems to march or dance to supported by the infectious 13-piece spectacle that is the Trans-Siberian March Band. It all adds up to an evening with a difference, with the ambition of making a difference too.

A stain on the world's conscience

A stain on the world's conscience
Monday 19 November 2012by John Wight Printable Email
As ever, the dominant narrative being presented to us on the current conflict in Gaza is that Israel is defending itself and its civilians against unprovoked aggression by Palestinian terrorists.
And as expected, it is the same narrative being pushed in Washington and London, as, like a well-rehearsed play, the actors involved perform their respective roles with the same old aplomb.
It is the same narrative we have been subjected to over countless years, one intended to paint Israel, that democratic outpost of Western civilisation surrounded by barbarian hordes intent on its destruction, as perennial victim.
But as in the past, so as now, it is a lie.
The truth is the current conflict has little if anything to do with Hamas or its rockets.
It does however have everything to do with the state of Israel's decades-long policy of occupation, embargo, siege, collective punishment, expropriation, ethnic cleansing and apartheid.
Israel's war is not with Hamas but with the Palestinian people in their entirety, both the 1.5 million in Gaza and the 2.5 to three million in the West Bank.
It is a war waged every hour of every day there is occupation, checkpoints, and settlements.
It is a war waged every hour of every day there is an economic embargo, siege, and collective punishment.
It is a war being waged every second of the indignity and humiliation suffered by its victims.
Yet despite the irrefutable facts of Israel's barbaric treatment of a people criminalised for daring to exist, we are treated to a constant inversion of the truth, which holds that the many and multiple depredations being suffered by the Palestinians do not amount to one of the most sustained and grievous crimes against humanity in history, but are the result of their intransigence and violence.
This is the song of colonialism. The victims always bring it on themselves. If only they would learn to bear their chains in silence.
As Golda Meir said, "We cannot forgive them for forcing us to kill their children."
And they are killing them, right now, even as the world looks on - again.
Worse, when we consider that Israel's treatment of the Palestinian people constitutes a clear and inarguable breach of international law, and has done for decades, the Western media's continuing policy of ascribing a moral equivalence between Israel, an oppressive settler colonial state, and the Palestinians, an oppressed colonised people, monumental insult is added to monstrous injury. There is no moral equivalence. Nor can there ever be.
Israel's latest military assault against the Palestinians of the Gaza Strip, which, at 40km long and 10km wide with a population of between 1.5 and 1.7 million people, is one of the most densely populated pieces of land in the world, goes by the biblical name of Operation Pillar of Cloud.
As with Operation Cast Lead four years ago, during which 1,400 Palestinians were killed, thousands more were wounded and war crimes, as adduced by the UN and the Red Cross, were committed wholesale, this latest military operation is designed to terrify the Palestinians into submission.
The major, though as yet unquantifiable, difference between now and then is Egypt.
Hosni Mubarak, Israel's man in Cairo, has been replaced by Mohamed Morsi, the first democratically elected president of Egypt and champion of the Muslim Brotherhood, and at time of writing the prime minister of Egypt has already visited Gaza to show solidarity and offer Egypt's rhetorical support to the Palestinians.
The question now is how this support will manifest if, as expected, Israel escalates its assault in the days ahead.
The answer could well have a bearing on the future not only for the Palestinians but the region as a whole.
The Obama administration, thus far supporting Israel in Washington's time-honoured fashion, will not relish the prospect of strained relations with the most populous Arab nation in the world.
Not now with the region still in a state of flux as a result of the Arab spring. And not even despite the fact that Israel is and remains the US's closest ally.
Former US president Ronald Reagan, with the candour of a man accustomed to making and breaking governments at will, said it best.
"The greatest security for Israel is to create new Egypts."
A new Egypt has been created, not by Israel or the US but by the Egyptian people. And it remains to be seen how this will affect Israel's ability to continue in the old way.
It is a question that is still to be answered. What we know for certain now is that oppression breeds resistance.
The rockets being fired against Israel from inside Gaza are the natural response of a people under siege for the crime of exercising their democratic right to elect a government of their own choice.
And when it comes to that government, Hamas's supreme crime, according to Israel and its apologists, is that in its charter it states its desire to see the destruction of Israel.
Standing alone and shorn of any historical or actual context, it is a desire that cannot be understood or accepted by any reasonable person.
But add this context, in the shape of the previously mentioned decades-long occupation and policy of apartheid, ethnic cleansing and national humiliation - is it really beyond comprehension that the people suffering this oppression may develop along the way a hatred of their oppressor, however irrational it might seem to us who don't live under this kind of oppression and consequently could never understand its dehumanising impact?
In the last analysis, the only way Israel will ever be able to guarantee its security is if it guarantees the security of the Palestinians.
This will first of all require an end to the inherent racism that exists in the heart of every coloniser towards those being colonised.
The Palestinians are not subhumans. They are not products of a lesser culture or race.
They are a people who have suffered six decades of injustice that continues as a stain on the conscience of the world.
Incinerating their children in the name of civilisation and democracy renders both meaningless.
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Comment
Marching for real change
Friday 19 October 2012 Printable Email
David Cameron entertained his backbenchers this week - it doesn't take much - by ridiculing Ed Miliband's decision to speak at today's A Future that Works protest in London.
Cameron chortled, as only privately educated beneficiaries of inherited, tax-dodged wealth can do, that the Labour leader was ingratiating himself with his trade union paymasters by attending "the most lucrative sponsored walk in history.
What a card and what a loss to the world of stand-up comics when Cameron renounced comedy for politics.
This braying ass and his back-bench sycophantic gigglers wouldn't understand in a month of Sundays why hundreds of thousands of people are taking to the streets of London, Glasgow and Belfast.
The short answer is in opposition to the Tory-Liberal Democrat government policies, but a more detailed response would cover a catalogue of crimes committed by this conservative coalition and its own corporate paymasters.
It won't just be trade unionists protesting, although they have reasons enough to do so.
Whether in the public or private sector, workers have seen job losses, pay restraint, attacks on pension schemes and plans to undermine trade union representation.
Council tenants and the homeless will also take to the streets because they see a government intent on fleecing working people to suit its friends, the property speculators, private landlords and banks.
There are 4.5 million people on council housing lists, but, instead of investing in a new generation of local authority homes, the government pushes further privatisation and housing benefit cuts to drive poor people out of better-off areas of our cities.
Ministers take refuge in their natural prejudice against claimants by increasingly equating them to scroungers on society.
Justifying their campaign to slash benefits they seek support from "hard-working families," juxtaposing their economic hardship in the current crisis with supposed featherbedding of the unemployed, as though most, or even many, don't work through choice.
It is classic Tory divide-and-rule tactics, as Liberal Democrat leaders would once have pointed out before their backsides became so cosily moulded to their ministerial easy chairs.
Marchers know that it wasn't claimants, public service workers, trade unionists, pensioners, single parents, asylum-seekers, the long-term unemployed, young people or any other convenient scapegoat that caused capitalism's crisis.
It was sparked by private banks that gambled on subprime mortgages, worthless financial packages and commodity speculation.
When the going was good, the rewards were excellent for company directors and shareholders, but, unlike other gamblers who stand their own losses, the banks insisted on being bailed out, refinanced and allowed to start again.
Britain's finance sector wasn't unlucky. It was corrupt and crooked. Instead of being bailed out, the banks should have been nationalised and the people running them should be in jail.
Barclays has just set aside a further £700 million to cover its "mis-selling" saga, making £2,000 million so far.
What other business could engage in fraud on this scale and still be allowed to operate?
Yet politicians of all stripes still bow down to the banks, euphemising them as "markets" or "investors," and tell workers to pull together and bear the pain of paying for the crisis.
That's not acceptable from the Tories and Liberal Democrats. Nor will it be from Miliband. He should be told that today.
Workers are not marching today against Tory austerity with no better aim than embracing austerity-lite from Labour. They want real change.
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(Robert)Bob & wife Doris

1979