Jordan Flaherty writes: A couple months before
New Orleans flooded, I remember walking through my neighborhood on a beautiful
weekend afternoon and hearing music.
I
followed the sound a couple blocks, to where about thirty people, all of them
Black, followed a few musicians through the streets. They were mourning the death of a loved one,
New Orleans-style. Most folks were wearing custom t-shirts with a picture of
the deceased. Next to the photo were the
words “sunrise” along with the date of his birth, and “sunset,” above the date
of his (recent) death - he was 20. Also
on the shirt were the words, “No More Drama.”
José Bové has once more been sentenced to four months in prison for uprooting genetically
modified crops with a group of the "voluntary harvesters"
["Faucheurs volontaires"]. To protest this iniquitous prison sentence,
go here: www.josebovelibre.fr.st/
In case
you’re wondering who José Bové is, go here and here
Corporate
Europe Observatory in association with LobbyControl, Spinwatch and Friends of
the Earth Europe invites you to vote for this year’s most offensive case of
corporate lobbying in the EU capital Brussels.
This
is your opportunity to decide which of the ten nominated cases of dubious
lobbying deserves to be remembered as the most ruthless influence peddler, the
fastest spinner of spin, the grand master of disguise, in short who will become
the EU Worst Lobby Award 2005 champion! Go to: http://www.corporateeurope.org/worstlobby/
First of all, peace activist Milan Rai is currently in prison for Defacing the British Foreign Office. Please send messages of support to Milan Rai, HMP Lewes, 1 Brighton Road, Lewes, East Sussex, BN7 1EA. He's keeping a prison diary which can be viewed here.
Secondly, with the COP 11 (the Conference of the Parties to the Climate Change Convention) in Montreal coming up from 28 November to 9 December, it's worth checking out www.carbontradewatch.org. Their new book Trouble in the Air: Global Warming and the Privatised Atmosphere is edited by Patrick Bond and Rehana Dada and can be downloaded from here.
And finally... it seems that the British neo-cons are getting organised.
In case you missed it, here's The Guardian's apologetic response to Noam Chomsky's complaint after they published a fairly muck-raking and highly inaccurate profile of him last week. A MediaLens point-by-point response is here.
Interestingly, the Guardian itself has removed the original article from it's website but Chomsky still has it on his. Perhaps he's making a point about freedom of speech?
London's School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) has announced
that it is to sell all of its investments in arms companies, reports the Campaign Against Arms Trade. The campaign also recently released an 'Ivy League' of university arms investors, which makes for interesting reading.
The following statement is from
various trade unions, left political parties and civil liberties groups in
France.
Joint
Communiqué, Paris, November 8th, 2005. Confronted by a revolt born from
the accumulation of inequalities and discrimination in the “banlieues” (suburbs
of Paris) and the poor areas, the French government has just passed a new and
extremely serious threshold in the escalation of security measures. Even in May
1968, when the situation was a lot more dramatic, the public authorities did
not use the extreme measure of declaring a state of emergency. The proclamation
of the state of emergency is the answer to a revolt whose causes are profound
and well known even at the level of state repression.
Jordan
Flaherty writes: It’s bittersweet being back in New Orleans. Although the architecture is the same, and it’s
a relief to walk the streets and reunite with old friends, already this is a
very different city from the one I love. It’s a city where some areas are quickly rebuilding and other parts are
being left far behind. A city where
people who have lived here for generations are now unwelcome in a hundred
different ways.
White New Orleans is steadily
coming back, and Black New Orleans is moving out. A grassroots organizer with New Orleans
Network tells me she has been speaking to people in every moving truck she
sees. She reports that in every case, “they’re
Black, they are renters, they’re moving out of New Orleans, and they say they
would stay, if they had a choice.”
Justin Alexander writes: Today marks an ignoble aniversary. On 8 November 2004 the US military,
with approval and support from Britain, began the systematic
destruction of a city of 200,000 people in an operation originally and
appropriately codenamed "Thanksgiving Massacre". When I visited 5 months later the 1000+ bodies had been buried and the blood had been washed away, but the devastation remained.
Reading
that 60% of the buildings had been seriously damaged is one thing,
looking around a once populous neighbourhood and seeing only rubble in
all directions is something else entirely. The people of Fallujah were
promised large amounts of compensation and reconstruction but my
friends at Christian Peacemaker Teams who visited a few days ago
testify that a year on the situation remain dire.
