Re: [Biofuel] Johann Hari: You are being lied to about pirates
Sorry but we haven't been able to serve the page you requested - please try again www.independent.co.uk -- Initial Header --- From : [EMAIL PROTECTED] To : sustainablelorgbiofuel@sustainablelists.org Cc : Date : Fri, 17 Apr 2009 13:59:24 EDT Subject : [Biofuel] Johann Hari: You are being lied to about pirates Johann Hari: You are being lied to about pirates _http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/johann-hari-y ou-are-being-lied-to-about-pirates-1225817.html_ (http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/johann-hari-you-are-being-lied-to-about- pirates-1225817.html) Some are clearly just gangsters. But others are trying to stop illegal dumping and trawling Monday, 5 January 2009 Who imagined that in 2009, the world's governments would be declaring a new War on Pirates? As you read this, the British Royal Navy - backed by the ships of more than two dozen nations, from the US to China - is sailing into Somalian waters to take on men we still picture as parrot-on-the-shoulder pantomime villains. They will soon be fighting Somalian ships and even c hasing the pirates onto land, into one of the most broken countries on earth. But behind the arrr-me-hearties oddness of this tale, there is an untold scandal. The people our governments are labelling as one of the great menaces of our times have an extraordinary story to tell - and some justice on their side. Pirates have never been quite who we think they are. In the golden age of piracy - from 1650 to 1730 - the idea of the pirate as the senseless, savage Bluebeard that lingers today was created by the British government in a great propaganda heave. Many ordinary people believed it was false: pirates were often saved from the gallows by supportive crowds. Why? What did they see that we can't? In his book Villains Of All Nations, the historian Marcus Rediker pores through the evidence. If you became a merchant or navy sailor then - plucked from the docks of London's East End, young and hungry - you ended up in a floating wooden Hell. You worked all hours on a cramped, half-starved ship, and if you slacked off, the all-powerful captain would whip you with the Cat O' Nine Tails. If you slacked often, you could be thrown overboard. And at the end of months or years of this, you were often cheated of your wages. Pirates were the first people to rebel against this world. They mutinied - and created a different way of working on the seas. Once they had a ship, the pirates elected their captains, and made all their decisions collectively, without torture. They shared their bounty out in what Rediker calls one of the most egalitarian plans for the disposition of resources to be found anywhere in the eighteenth century. They even took in escaped African slaves and lived with them as equals. The pirates showed quite clearly - and subversively - that ships did not have to be run in the brutal and oppressive ways of the merchant service and the Royal Navy. This is why they were romantic heroes, despite being unproductive thieves. The words of one pirate from that lost age, a young British man called William Scott, should echo into this new age of piracy. Just before he was hanged in Charleston, South Carolina, he said: What I did was to keep me from perishing. I was forced to go a-pirateing to live. In 1991, the government of Somalia collapsed. Its nine million people have been teetering on starvation ever since - and the ugliest forces in the Western world have seen this as a great opportunity to steal the country's food supply and dump our nuclear waste in their seas. Yes: nuclear waste. As soon as the government was gone, mysterious European ships started appearing off the coast of Somalia, dumping vast barrels into the ocean. The coastal population began to sicken. At first they suffered strange rashes, nausea and malformed babies. Then, after the 2005 tsunami, hundreds of the dumped and leaking barrels washed up on shore. People began to suffer from radiation sickness, and more than 300 died. Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, the UN envoy to Somalia, tells me: Somebody is dumping nuclear material here. There is also lead, and heavy metals such as cadmium and mercury - you name it. Much of it can be traced back to European hospitals and factories, who seem to be passing it on to the Italian mafia to dispose of cheaply. When I asked Mr Ould-Abdallah what European governments were doing about it, he said with a sigh: Nothing. There has been no clean-up, no compensation, and no prevention. At the same time, other European ships have been looting Somalia's seas of their greatest resource: seafood. We have destroyed our own fish stocks by overexploitation - and now we have moved on to theirs. More than $300m-worth of tuna, shrimp, and lobster are being stolen
Re: [Biofuel] Artisanal Cars
http://rppe.wordpress.com/2008/11/26/sam-gindin-beyond-wage-cuts-beyond-the-bailout/ Beyond Wage Cuts, Beyond the Bailout The article reproduced below is an op-ed written by Sam Gindin for the Windsor Star Sam Gindin The global crisis quickly engulfing us threatens to become the worst since the Great Depression, and this means that past ways of doing things need to be fundamentally rethought. But Gord Henderson's focus on wage cuts for autoworkers (Windsor Star, November 20, 2008) is the absolutely wrong way to go ? that much we already learned from the 1930s, when competitive cuts in workers' wages only aggravated the depression. When Henderson responds to CAW President Ken Lewenza's defence of workers' wages with a glib Tell that to all those low-wage Mexican autoworkers, what exactly does this mean? In the face of the general concern that consumers are retrenching (and business consequently holding back investments), how much sense does it make to advocate autoworkers setting a pattern for lower wages and less purchasing power? And what kind of notion of progress and vision for the future does the target of Mexican wage standards suggest? The fact is that Canadian hourly compensation in the auto industry is now below the U.S., at about par with Japan and less than three quarters of hourly compensation in Germany (U.S. Bureau of Labour data for 2006, adjusted for current exchange rates). Because the industry is integrated into the American industry, Canada is affected by the higher costs in the U.S., particularly which of health care. But here, too, the answer is hardly to blame the workers, but rather to point to the social and economic stupidity of the U.S. not having the kind of single-payer public health care system that is common in the rest of the developed world. Union Shortfalls Where the union can be blamed is not in what it has achieved for working people, but in its refusal to play a leading role in challenging the direction of the industry, especially in terms of its laggard move to fuel-efficient, non-polluting vehicles. Saving future jobs ? and also addressing the thousands of lost jobs of former members whom the bailout won't bring back ? necessitates correcting that earlier shortcoming in two specific ways. First, as absolutely essential as the bailout is, it won't end the crisis in the auto industry even if the Detroit-based companies adjust their models. That's because the industry has so much excess capacity and slow growth will characterize at least the next few years, if not beyond. This means that even as the union lobbies to achieve the bailout, it needs to raise its perspective beyond auto. It needs to start thinking about the application of existing facilities and skills to a larger set of products. Here, the environment re-enters, but rather than being a threat to jobs it holds out the potential of adding jobs. If the environment is going to be seriously addressed in this century, it will mean changing not just the kind of cars we drive and how they are powered, but everything about how we work, consume, travel, live. To that end, auto's assembly, component and tool and die shops, along with its body of skilled and committed workers, are an asset that can be converted into producing wind turbines, solar panels, parts for mass transit vehicles, more energy-sensitive industrial machinery and more energy efficient home appliances. Second, we need to move from thinking about saving the auto industry to saving communities. The auto industry is concentrated into particular communities that, like Windsor, were in crisis well before GM asked for a bailout. What's at issue is not just hanging on to jobs in auto (which, as productivity grows, will continue to decrease over time even with a bailout) but also finding productive jobs for all those already unemployed or looking for their first job. To address this crisis in the community means not only introducing new car models and addressing the kind of conversions of Windsor's vast productive potential raised above, but also fixing and expanding Windsor's deteriorated infrastructure (like other municipalities, Windsor has a long list of such projects sitting on the shelf) and addressing the social needs that make cities into 'communities' (from resources for public facilities and sports, to converting vacant lots into green parks and gardens; from child-care to in-home assistance for the disabled and the aged). 'Leave it to the Market' or Democratic Planning? It should be obvious that none of this can happen if we 'leave it to the market,' or even with some ad-hoc patchwork government intervention. It requires serious national and city-level planning and planning that develops the democratic structures to encourage and facilitate popular participation. This takes us far beyond the auto industry and many might say 'sorry, I'm too busy surviving to think about
Re: [Biofuel] Johann Hari: You are being lied to about pirates
Sorry but we haven't been able to serve the page you requested - please try again www.independent.co.uk It's the correct link. Link urls often get broken in email transmission, to fix them delete the line-feeds (between ...about- and pirates-1225817.html) and try again. If not, delete the round brackets (...), they should be sharp brackets Try this: http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/johann-hari-you-are-being-lied-to-about-pirates-1225817.html Or this: http://snipurl.com/g4z0p Also: Why We Don't Condemn Our Pirates in Somalia By K'Naan, URB Magazine Can anyone ever really be for piracy? Well in Somalia, the answer is: it's complicated. http://www.alternet.org/story/136481/why_we_don't_condemn_our_pirates_in_somalia/ Ethiopia / USA / Somali Pirates' Cover-Up By Thomas C. Mountain April 16, 2009 Online Journal One of the best kept secrets in the international media these days is the link between the USA, Ethiopia and the Somali pirates. First, a little reliable background from someone on the ground in the Horn of Africa. http://informationclearinghouse.info/article22436.htm More: Somali Piracy and the International Response Rubrick Biegon | January 29, 2009 Foreign Policy In Focus http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/5827 Best Keith -- Initial Header --- From : [EMAIL PROTECTED] To : sustainablelorgbiofuel@sustainablelists.org Cc : Date : Fri, 17 Apr 2009 13:59:24 EDT Subject : [Biofuel] Johann Hari: You are being lied to about pirates Johann Hari: You are being lied to about pirates _http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/johann-hari-y ou-are-being-lied-to-about-pirates-1225817.html_ (http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/johann-hari-you-are-being-lied-to-about- pirates-1225817.html) Some are clearly just gangsters. But others are trying to stop illegal dumping and trawling Monday, 5 January 2009 Who imagined that in 2009, the world's governments would be declaring a new War on Pirates? As you read this, the British Royal Navy - backed by the ships of more than two dozen nations, from the US to China - is sailing into Somalian waters to take on men we still picture as parrot-on-the-shoulder pantomime villains. They will soon be fighting Somalian ships and even c hasing the pirates onto land, into one of the most broken countries on earth. But behind the arrr-me-hearties oddness of this tale, there is an untold scandal. The people our governments are labelling as one of the great menaces of our times have an extraordinary story to tell - and some justice on their side. Pirates have never been quite who we think they are. In the golden age of piracy - from 1650 to 1730 - the idea of the pirate as the senseless, savage Bluebeard that lingers today was created by the British government in a great propaganda heave. Many ordinary people believed it was false: pirates were often saved from the gallows by supportive crowds. Why? What did they see that we can't? In his book Villains Of All Nations, the historian Marcus Rediker pores through the evidence. If you became a merchant or navy sailor then - plucked from the docks of London's East End, young and hungry - you ended up in a floating wooden Hell. You worked all hours on a cramped, half-starved ship, and if you slacked off, the all-powerful captain would whip you with the Cat O' Nine Tails. If you slacked often, you could be thrown overboard. And at the end of months or years of this, you were often cheated of your wages. Pirates were the first people to rebel against this world. They mutinied - and created a different way of working on the seas. Once they had a ship, the pirates elected their captains, and made all their decisions collectively, without torture. They shared their bounty out in what Rediker calls one of the most egalitarian plans for the disposition of resources to be found anywhere in the eighteenth century. They even took in escaped African slaves and lived with them as equals. The pirates showed quite clearly - and subversively - that ships did not have to be run in the brutal and oppressive ways of the merchant service and the Royal Navy. This is why they were romantic heroes, despite being unproductive thieves. The words of one pirate from that lost age, a young British man called William Scott, should echo into this new age of piracy. Just before he was hanged in Charleston, South Carolina, he said: What I did was to keep me from perishing. I was forced to go a-pirateing to live. In 1991, the government of Somalia collapsed. Its nine million people have been teetering on starvation ever since - and the ugliest forces in the Western world have seen this as a great opportunity to steal the country's food supply and dump our nuclear waste in their seas. Yes: nuclear waste. As soon as the government was gone, mysterious European ships started appearing off the
[Biofuel] Health Canada Raids Natural Doctor
Health Canada Raids Natural Doctor (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SBCHlTxUqNMfeature=channel_page) PART ONE of a testimonial by Naturopathic Doctor, Eldon Dahl, describing his home and family being raided and held for 11 hours by Health Canada and the RCMP. (Check related videos for the other parts.) _http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SBCHlTxUqNMfeature=channel_page_ (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SBCHlTxUqNMfeature=channel_page) -- next part -- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: /pipermail/attachments/20090418/5e290ae7/attachment.html ___ Biofuel mailing list Biofuel@sustainablelists.org http://sustainablelists.org/mailman/listinfo/sustainablelorgbiofuel Biofuel at Journey to Forever: http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html Search the combined Biofuel and Biofuels-biz list archives (70,000 messages): http://www.mail-archive.com/biofuel@sustainablelists.org/
