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Posts tagged liberty

Nana Mouskouri Sings “Liberte” from Verdi 11:33 am / 18 March 2010 by Lila, at LILA RAJIVA: The Mind-Body Politic

Classically trained Greek popular singer Nana Mouskouri , whose father was part of the anti-Nazi resistance in Athens, sings “Je Chante Avec Toi,” using the music of “Va Pensiero” from Verdi’s opera Nabucco (Nebuchadnezzar).

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GM science funded by GM corporations!! 8:37 am / 18 March 2010 by ann arky, at annarky's blog.

    
      The European Commission has just approved growing genetically modified crops in the European Union for the first time in 12 years putting the GM lobby's profits over the health concerns of the public. Click below and help build a one million strong citizen's petition calling for independent research and strong regulation of GM foods: Caving to the GM lobby, the commission has ignored 60% of Europeans who feel they have to get the facts first before growing foods that could pose a threat to our health and environment.
     A new initiative allows 1 million EU citizens to make official legal requests of the European Commission. Let's build a million voices for a ban on GM foods until the research is done; they will be delivered to the President Barroso of the European Commission. Sign the petition and forward link to friends and family: http://www.avaaz.org/en/eu_health_and_biodiversity/?vl
     Consumers, public health, environmental and farmers groups have long rallied against a few international GM companies having such significant influence over European agriculture. Concerns about growing GM crops include: contamination of organic crops and the environment; their impact on climate due to the excessive need for pesticides; the destruction of biodiversity and local agriculture; and the effects of GM food on public health. EU member states have voiced strong opposition to last week's decision to authorise BASF's potato and Monsanto's maize -- Italy and Austria are opposed, and France said it would ask for further scientific research. There is still no consensus on the long-term effects of GM crops. And it is the GM industry, pursuing profits not public well being, that is funding the science and driving the regulatory environment. That is why European citizens are calling for more independent research, testing and precaution before crops are unleashed onto our land. Now, the "European Citizens' Initiative" gives 1 million EU citizens the opportunity to submit policy proposals to the European Commission and offers us a unique chance to drown out lobbyists' influence. Let's raise 1 million voices to put a moratorium on the introduction of GM crops into Europe and set up an independent, ethical and scientific body to research and determine the strong regulation of GM crops. Sign the petition now and then forward it widely: http://www.avaaz.org/en/eu_health_and_biodiversity/?vl         With determination, entire Avaaz team.
    
 More information:
Last Eurobameter Survey 2008 'Attitudes of European citizens towards the environment', page 66: http://bit.ly/aMkeVJ
The Independent, Fury as Brussels authorises GM potatoes: http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/green-living/fury-as-eu-approves-gm-potato-1915833.html Reuters, France blasts GM crop approvals by EU agency: http://uk.reuters.com/article/idUKTRE6241ZQ20100305
New Report: GMOs Causing Massive Pesticide Pollution:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/andrew-kimbrell/new-report-gmos-causing-m_b_362888.html
Summary of the International Assessment on Agricultural Science and Technology for Development, including critics of GMOs use in agriculture:
http://globalpolicy.org/social-and-economic-policy/international-trade-and-development-1-57/genetically-modified-organisms.html#key
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Categories: Anarchism
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THE STATE? WHO NEEDS IT? 3:02 pm / 17 March 2010 by ann arky, at annarky's blog.

      
  Is the State necessary? We the ordinary people of this country, as in all countries, have a choice, we can continue to allow ourselves to be governed by the State that will always put the corporate business world first. Will always protect big business as it rapes and pollutes the planet in its quest for ever bigger profits. Will stand by and watch the corporate world create wide spread poverty as it continually seeks ever cheaper labour and resources for the benefit of its share holders. Or we can call a halt to this madness, mayhem and plunder by taking control of our own lives. Because the exercise of freedom is morally valuable, the burden shifts to the State to justify the use of the law to constrain or control it. If we build our societies on federated communities based on free association and voluntary co-operation that justification cannot be made. At best the State becomes redundant, at worst, as it is at present, a hindrance to freedom. The State has no place in matters of personal choice, it is an autocratic institution whose main purpose is to maintain the status quo, making sure that power and wealth stay where they are. The State will always fight its people when they try to take its authority away and take control of their own lives. To do this it continually introduces legislation to control its people not to protect them. The State is a hierarchal system, a power structure, which in itself is a contradiction of freedom. The State institutions of all the developed countries represent the multi-nationals, the corporate world, the world of finance, not the people. The State has lead working class youth into war after war slaughtering working class youth from other nation States. Always the guise is the defence of freedom, whose freedom? It is the freedom of one power block to wrest control of markets and resources from another power block. Freedom to wage war to tighten that grip on those markets and resources.
      If we care to look beyond the shopping malls and the mainstream media we can see that corporate capitalism with the blessing of the State, is responsible for countless thousands of deaths from poverty, not because there isn’t enough to go round, it is just simply that there is no profit in it. In the world today twenty two children die from starvation every minute of every day while excess food in the developed world is stockpiled. Have you ever asked yourself “Why?”. What kind of system would tolerate such blatant cruelty, what kind of people would tolerate such a system? The answer is of course, the State and corporate capitalism is the system, we are that people. How much longer can we allow this to continue? We can stand by and watch this world being dominated, exploited and destroyed, its peoples being divided, slaughtered and impoverished to the advantage of the privileged few, or we can stand up, claim it is our world, link hands, resist, organise, agitate, and revolt so crushing and sweeping away this festering corrupt marriage of corporate finance and State power.If we wish a fair and decent world for our children and grandchildren we have to put an end to the continual greed for profit and power and shape the world according to our needs with the preservation of the planet in mind. We must come together as individuals and communities and break this cycle of State/corporate/business/exploitation/profit/power. We have the ability and the resources to make this world a fair and just place for all, the choice is ours. We have to decide, it is their world or it is ours. The ordinary people across the world have a common cause, the final war must be the class war that abolishes the Nation State. Advocating peace between nations will only allow the exploitation of people to continue. The State will always come up with some pretext or other to call its people to arms, big business will demand it to increase its markets and resources. Big business and the State need the people to produce the profits that continually increase their power over us. The people who produce everything do not need the State nor big business. We are capable of producing and distributing everything we need in a much more fair and just manner with no thought to profit and share holders. We don’t need Kings, Presidents, Leaders or sweaty-hand share holders to tell us how to live our lives, their track record is one of wars, greed and exploitation. Let’s sweep them away into the dustbin of history. We the ordinary people must be the decision makers and organise for an era of mutual aid across all cultures, organise at community level in federation with other communities. Let’s see an end to the Nation State and with it national wars, patriotism and boundaries, a free and colourful world that belongs to free and colourful people. The anarchist principles of free association, voluntary co-operation and mutual aid are the only basis for such a society.
 
 
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Categories: Anarchism
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GLASGOW ANARCHISTS. 9:33 am / 14 March 2010 by ann arky, at annarky's blog.

      
       Anarchism in Glasgow has a long tradition and can trace its roots back to the late 1800s. Since then Glasgow anarchists have been involved in all the major struggles of the Glasgow people. Whenever Glasgow’s citizens have been in conflict against exploitation, oppression, injustice the Glasgow anarchists have been at the forefront of that struggle. The support for anarchism, its ideas, its practice and theory have gone in waves, rising and falling as circumstances within society have changed. Today, in common with the rest of the world, Glasgow is seeing a revival of anarchist ideas.
       It is not difficult to understand why there is such a revival. More and more people are becoming completely disgusted at the blatant greed and deceit of the very politicians who are supposed to be their representatives. They are angry at a party political system that sees the power of the party and it’s “leaders” as more important than the people. A system that is in cahoots with and does the bidding of the corporate world whose greed is running rampant across the world destroying our communities and the environment in the name of profit.
     Anarchists have always pointed out the fact that the party political system will always fail the people, as it removes power from the people to an elite group. Changing the party or the leader will not interrupt the power of the corporate world as they fund the politicians.
      If you are aware of this corruption and deceit, of this plundering and rape of our planet, and you want a better world for all our children and our grandchildren then why not join us in trying to create an alternative, based on the will of the people. Based on free association, voluntary co-operation, mutual aid and sustainability
ann arky's home.

Categories: Anarchism
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IT’S ALL FOR YOUR OWN GOOD??? 3:32 pm / 12 March 2010 by ann arky, at annarky's blog.

      
      We in the West tend to think that other regimes are much more repressive than our "free", "democratic" Western societies. However, all the research that comes out seems to paint a different picture. Perhaps our noses are too close to the picture to grasp the reality of the scene. The information is out there. The following very interesting extract is taken from: secure.cryptohippie.com/pubs/EPS-2010…  where the full article can be read.
The United States, with the UK and France close behind, have now caught up with Russia and are gaining on China, North Korea and Belarus. The key developments driving this are the following:

● The USA has negated their Constitution’s fourth amendment in the name of protection and in the name of “wars” against terror, drugs and cyber attacks.

● The UK is aggressively building the world of 1984 in the name of stopping “anti-social” activities. Their populace seems unable or unwilling to restrain the government.

● France and the EU have given themselves over to central bureaucratic control.
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Categories: Anarchism
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Bakunin’s “Political Theology of Mazzini” 1:22 am / 11 March 2010 by Shawn P. Wilbur, at Out of the Libertarian Labyrinth

There are still lots of gems hidden in the pages of Liberty, and some of them are not, perhaps, quite what you would expect to find. For instance, Sarah Holmes translated Bakunin's lengthy essay, "The Political Theology of Mazzini and the International," and Tucker serialized it in his paper. I've collected the text in the Libertarian Labyrinth archive and will be releasing a pamphlet version (part of the "Liberty2.0" project) at the Bay Area Anarchist Book Fair next weekend. It's a very interesting read. Give it a look.

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ASYLUM SEEKERS DEATHS. 2:49 am / 09 March 2010 by ann arky, at annarky's blog.

     Three people fell to their death on Sunday morning from one of the tower blocks in Red Road. We understand they were asylum-seekers who had received a negative decision from the UK Borders Agency (UKBA). They are thought to have lived in Red Road for two months. Questions must be answered not the usual waffle and whitewash. This is a family wiped out in one tragic moment, why? What pressure were these people under? What support were they getting?  UKBA must be forced to reveal all the circumstances in this tragic case, what was their full involvement with this family, the details must be made public.

*** 11am Tuesday 9 March - Protest outside the Home Office, Brand Street, Glasgow - called by the Unity Centre, Glasgow (0141 427 7992, info@unitycentreglasgow.org )

*** 6pm Tuesday 9 March - come to Petershill Drive, Glasgow with banners demanding freedom and safety for all asylum seekers. - requested by a residents of Red Road Flats.

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Categories: Anarchism
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This Week in Libertarian Movies and Misguided Laws 2:31 pm / 08 March 2010 by cherylcline, at der Blaustrumpf

No, not Hurt Locker, at least not until I’ve watched it.  (When will Kathryn Bigelow be recognized for her real achievement, her work on Point Break?)  Over at The Agitator, Radley Balko has a poll on the “best liberty-themed movie of all time.”  I reflexively clicked on Braveheart, as I accidentally overlooked Cool Hand Luke, which I have reviewed in a previous post.  (Please, if you read the review, kindly overlook my incorrect usage of “beg the question.”)

The poll is here:  Monday Morning Poll: Oscar Edition | The Agitator.

You can also write in an option.  My vote for the best feminist libertarian movie of all time is Dirty Pretty Things, in spite of its highly misleading, eroticized poster.  The movie doesn’t seem to get a lot of attention, even though it starred Audrey Tautou of Amélie fame, probably because the public prefers to see her, and probably most actresses, in the role of apolitical sprite.

The movie is a dramatic example of how laws that protect the vulnerable in theory are in practice instrumental to their destruction.  Tautou plays Senay Gelik, an illegal Turk immigrant in Britain who hopes to make her way to America.  Because undocumented immigrants are illegal, Senay fears immigration service thugs, who terrorize her at her own home.  Her employer, a sweatshop owner, extorts sexual favors from her in return for employing her under the table and for concealing her illegal status.  In her quest for a forged American visa and passport, she is again sexually exploited by the unscrupulous Juan, who then attempts to harvest her kidney for sale in the illegal organ trade. Throughout the movie, we are shown how Juan profits handsomely from organs sold to him by poor donors who are then left without proper medical attention.

There is an unlikely plot twist in which Juan is drugged and his kidney removed instead, perhaps to relieve the unrelenting grimness of the tale (Senay’s story is only one of several anguished threads), and eventually Love Conquers Most, but the main points remain:  laws allegedly intended to protect the vulnerable, such as women in danger of sexual exploitation and poor people desperate enough to sell an organ for cash, ultimately facilitate the exploitation of the weak.

For more on a misguided law in keeping with this theme, see this paper on prostitution, “An Empirical Analysis of Street-Level Prostitution” by Steven D. Levitt and Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh (h/t Chris Rasch):  “There is a surprisingly high prevalence of police officers demanding sex from prostitutes in return for avoiding arrest. For prostitutes who do not work with pimps (and thus are working the streets), roughly three percent of all their tricks are freebies given to police…A prostitute is more likely to have sex with a police officer than to get officially arrested by one.”  In Dirty Pretty Things, what amounts to Senay’s forced prostitution would be nominally illegal, but obviously an illegal immigrant would have no recourse, and would herself be the most likely target for prosecution.

This movie by no means presents an exhaustive list of the laws that are passed in the interest of the poor and vulnerable.  To my knowledge, however, it’s the best recent dramatization of the ways that such laws inadvertently jeopardize women in unexpected ways, such as coerced prostitution.


Filed under: Anarchocapitalism, Feminism Tagged: anarchism, Feminism, liberty, movies, organtrade, prostitution, reviews
Categories: Anarchism
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KICK BACK, IT’S SELF DEFENCE. 1:42 pm / 08 March 2010 by ann arky, at annarky's blog.

   
    The media is now full of all those well heeled “experts” calling for deep cuts in government spending. We are bombarded with headlines reading; “Business leaders have demanded that the government start making public spending cuts this year to reduce the UK's £178bn deficit.” Not only are they calling for deep cuts but they want them now, or even yesterday. At least two employers’ groups, the CBI and the Institute of Directors have spouted that faster cuts in government borrowing are needed to restore credibility in public finances.
      It sounds all very scientific and fair, except that there is no science behind these statements, just greed. Savage cuts in government spending means more out-sourcing to the private sector, (the CBI mob) and of course eventually less tax for them to pay as government spending drops. As for the “fair” part, well, not one of those mouthing off about cuts in government spending will be in the least hurt by those cuts. No that honour falls on you and I, we are the ones that will suffer under any government spending cuts, health, education, pensions, social benefits, the young, the elderly, the unemployed, (and that army is set to grow) the low paid, even those who may think they are reasonably comfortable, they also will feel the pain. Yet not one of those who will be harshly treated by these cuts is in any way responsible for the government’s debt. The debt is there because a bunch of greedy sleaze groomed parasites blew billions in their blind quest for pots of cash for nothing, sometimes called fancy accounting. They blew it, they screwed up big time, and it looked like some of them would go out of business. So their minders, the equally sleazy parliamentarians, over burdened with their expenses, came running to the rescue and handed them billions of our money. Our generosity is now to be repaid with a kick in the balls, to which we are supposed to say,”thank you kind sirs, for saving the financial spivs, of course this should be said with a slight curtsey.
     Well why don’t we kick back and refuse to accept any cuts in our living standard, refuse to accept working longer to get our reduced pensions, refuse to see our kids education going done the tubes, refuse to see our national health system decimated and privatised, refuse to accept wage freezes or wage cuts that would return this generation and the next back to the Victorian era. What would function in this world if it was not for the working class, we built this world, it is our world, it’s time to take it back.
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Categories: Anarchism
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Molly’sBlog 2010-03-07 15:07:00 3:07 pm / 07 March 2010 by mollymew, at Molly'sBlog


INDIVIDUAL LIBERTY:
DON'T TOUCH THAT PILL- THE GESTAPO WILL GET YOU:
Here's a sad tale from the USA via the Care2 site about one student;s experience with that part of the working class whose product is pretty much social control. to be sure I have yet to get to this on this blog ie how I see little difference between teachers and prison guards and policemen. Rest assured I will get to describing my view of how people whose main function is to keep a segment of the population in one place through a good part of the day are in the same category as prison guards. Until then here's a horror story about political correctness gone wild.
PCPCPCPCPCPCPCPCPCPC
Seventh Grader Suspended For Touching Pill
Judy Molland
It all happened on February 23 at River Valley Middle School in Jeffersonville, Indiana. Seventh grader Rachel Greer was in the locker room during fifth period gym class when a fellow student walked in with a bag of pills.
"She was talking to another girl and me about them and she put one in my hand and I was like, ‘I don't want this,' so I put it back in the bag and I went to gym class," said Rachel. The pills were the prescription ADHD drug, Adderall, and after years of training under the DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) program, Rachel knew she had to "Just Say No.
"But that wasn't the end of it. During sixth period, an assistant principal came and took Rachel out of class. It turned out that the girl who originally had the pills and a few other students got caught. Then came the shocker: "We're suspending you for five days because it was in your hand," the administrator told Rachel. Apparently he told the girl that he was very sorry he had to do it, but the rules are the rules. District officials later said that if they're not strict about drug policies no one will take them seriously.
What lesson can Rachel learn here? Because she said NO to illegal drugs and told the complete truth about what happened in the locker room, she was punished. Presumably she would also have been punished if she had said YES, so maybe next time she'll choose that route.
What does it take for school administrators to use some common sense? A policy, zero tolerance or any other, is a guideline. Every situation is different, and school officials need to be able to approach each situation individually, and make an appropriate decision, based on the relevant facts.
After hearing the news, Patty Greer, Rachel's mother, went to school officials to complain. "That's not a good policy," Greer said. "We're teaching our kids if you say no to drugs you're going to get punished; it's not right."
District officials were not impressed. Martin Bell, COO of Greater Clark County Schools, replied that the girl should not have put out her hand. "Someone hands them a pill or a drug or something like that and they say well I said no I didn't participate. Well the act of saying no is not to be there, not to be involved in the handling the, you know, they didn't have to put their hand out." (In case you're wondering, I am quoting Mr. Bell verbatim here.)
According to Greater Clark County Schools district policy, even a touch equals drug possession and a one week suspension. Wanna get a five-day vacation from school? Just say no, and get yourself suspended!
And this just in: When Mason Jammer, a kindergarten student at Jefferson Elementary in Ionia, Michigan, curled his fist into the shape of a gun Wednesday and pointed it at another student, school officials suspended the 6-year-old until Friday, saying the behavior made other students uncomfortable. Really? Couldn't the school find any other way to teach Mason not to make a gun with his hand? When will this madness stop.
PCPCPCPCPCPCPCPCPCPC
What can I say ? Insofar as propaganda has any effect such liberal attempts at social engineering will have the definite effect of convincing young people that aggression is OK as long as it is mediated through authority . It will convince a subset of young people to become good Nazis. To another subset it will convince them that 'anything goes" provided they don't get caught. While I may disagree with the later possible effect it is better than aggression mediated through authority like what the social engineers want to "teach".
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