Red Pepper News

Fighting for New Orleans

Jordan Flaherty, New Orleans. A month after Hurricane Katrina, many of those dislocated and displaced from New Orleans are still trying to reunite with family members, still trying to find out information about their homes and belongings, still grieving over their losses. Parents are still trying to find a school district for their kids, and local schools are over full and some are not welcoming. One Louisiana school suspended all New Orleans students as punishment for the actions of one child.

IMF attacks democracy

 

Jo Kuper in Washington writes: In an extraordinary demonstration of the IMF’s habitual bullying of poor countries, and its opposition to democratic scrutiny of its activities, senior IMF staff threw two MPs out of the meeting of the Group of 24 Ministers from Developing Countries on Friday 23 September. Dr. Dradjad Wibowo MP from Indonesia and Hon. Mohammed Jagri MP from Ghana had been invited to attend the meeting by the G24 Secretariat to present a petition calling for democratic oversight of World Bank and IMF policies, and to question World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz and IMF Managing Director Rodrigo Rato. The petition has been signed by over 1000 MPs from 54 parliaments and is supported by a broad range of civil society groups.

Sacked by Gate Gourmet

The Gate Gourmet workers sacked in August have a website where you can pledge support and read workers' stories. It's well worth a look, and a dip into your pockets to help the hardship fund if you can. Corporate Watch also has an interesting interview with one of the sacked workers.

Over at British Airways (BA), where unofficial strike action was held in solidarity with the Gate Gourmet workers, two Transport & General Workers' Union (T&G) shop stewards have been suspended from work.

Stop the WTO corporate agenda before Hong Kong

The Geneva Peoples’ Alliance (GPA), an NGO and social movement coalition from across Europe, is calling demonstrators to Geneva on 15 October to coincide with the forthcoming meeting of the WTO General Council. It is the last chance to voice popular protest against the WTO ahead of December’s round of trade talks in Hong Kong, which are aimed at further liberalising the global economy. Read on for the GPA statement.

Video and TV jukebox

War on Want took Scottish Band Belle and Sebastian to Palastine to raise awareness about the Stop the Wall campaign. The video they made is now online and can be downloaded here.

Meanwhile, if you want to brush up on your Spanish, you could do far worse than watch Telesur, the new pan-South American TV station broadcasting from Venezuela. It is now being streamed on the internet here.

New ‘Left Party’ wins 54 seats in German Parliament

James O’Nions.  The Linkspartei, the new party to the left of the ruling ‘Red-Green’ coalition, has won 8.7% of the vote in Germany’s general election and a provisional 54 seats in the Bundestag.  The elections themselves have created deadlock with neither the social democratic SPD nor the conservative CDU able to command a majority, even with their traditional partners on board, the Greens (51 seats) in the case of the SPD, and the ultra neo-liberal Free Democrats (61 seats) in the case of the CDU.

Formed only in July, the Linkspartei is a fusion of the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS), the successor to the east German communists, and the Labour and Social Justice Party (WASG), which was itself only recently formed by disaffected leftwing SPD members, trade unionists and some smaller leftwing organisations.  The WASG’s profile was given a boost when charismatic former SPD finance minister Oskar Lafontaine joined and became a leading spokesperson.  Now as the other parties attempt to make alliances to form a government, the Linkspartei is celebrating a result which  makes them both a serious force in German politics, and a leading light in the ‘left of the left’ across Europe.

MoD invites human rights abusers to London Arms Fair

James O'Nions. The Defence Export Services Organisation, the part of the Ministry of Defence which markets UK weapons abroad, released the list of official invitees to the DSEi arms fair on Sunday. Defence Systems and Equipment International is one of the world's largest Arms Fairs and from 13-16 September will host companies selling everthing from fighter jets to small arms to cluster bombs.

The list of invitees includes seven countries (Colombia, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, Russia, Vietnam and China) which were featured in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office's 2005 Human Rights Report as major human rights black holes.   It also includes mutually hostile India and Pakistan, and newly friendly Libya.

Greens embrace software freedom

Oscar Reyes. Saturday 10 September was Software Freedom Day, ‘a global, grassroots effort to educate the public about the virtues and availability of Free and Open Source Software’. If you can’t tell your OpenOffice from your Gimp, that’s probably not an occasion to send you wild with excitement. But it should at least catch your attention.

On the streets of Thessaloniki

Yannis Almpanis writes: About 20,000 people demonstrated yesterday in Thessaloniki against the neoliberal policies of the Greek conservative government. It was the biggest national demonstration in Thessaloniki since the June 2003 EU summit.

Alternative media for victims of Katrina

Oscar Reyes. Sometimes I think there should be a ban on the phrase ‘grassroots activism’, since its far more said than done. But here’s a great example from the US.

Independent media activists in Texas are launching a community station to serve refugees from Hurricane Katrina. The station will be based in the Houston Astrodome, where thousands of evacuees have been relocated. The Prometeus Radio Project, which is committed to not-for-profit broadcasting and the democratisation of the airwaves in the US, is behind the project, with the help of Houston Indymedia.