Apr 2016 – Page 4

Meghan Murphy on the liberal backlash against feminism

Meghan Murphy is at the centre of a battle going on between feminists who argue that porn and prostitution (‘sex-work’) is somehow liberating for women and those like Meghan Murphy and Rachel Moran who say women are victims of the sex industry, that ‘neo-liberal’ feminists are acting like trolls for sexists and patriarchy, and who support the ‘Nordic’ model of penalizing pimps and customers of prostitutes (johns).from feminist current, with thanks. This interview was conducted and translated into French by Francine Sporenda for the website, Révolution Féministe. It has been edited for clarity and length.

Francine Sporenda: What are your thoughts on French Parliament’s recent vote to criminalize the purchase of sex in France?

Meghan Murphy: The recent vote in French parliament to adopt the Nordic model is not only an important and historic win for France, but for all of the EU (and, more broadly, for the world), as it sets a precedent for other countries. That parliamentarians have acknowledged prostitution as a form of violence against women and as inherently coercive is enormously impactful — this is exactly the kind of feminist analysis that industry lobbyists and sexist, entitled men have worked so hard to silence (for obvious reasons).

Rachel Moran: It is high time we women stood up and asked ourselves why we are accepting an enormous global human rights violation whereby almost all of those exploited are female and almost all of those exploiting them are male. see article here: Women to force ban on Buying Sex in Ireland

The continued existence and social acceptance of prostitution relies on the ability to erase the reality of the industry — to erase the real women and girls impacted and to erase the actual idea of prostitution, in and of itself. The sex industry depends on our ability, as humans, to say, “It’s fine, it’s safe, it’s a choice, it’s harmless — just a neutral ‘job’ like any other ‘job,’” and to ignore what is happening to real women in the industry. Continue reading “Meghan Murphy on the liberal backlash against feminism”

Barcelona: In solidarity with our Comrade arrested and imprisoned in the last Repressive Operation

– April 17th, 2016 Last Wednesday 13th of April, at 5 o’clock in the morning, the Mossos d’Esquadra started an operation in which they raided two houses and a social center in La Salut neighbourhood, «los Blokes Fantasma», where around twenty people that live in the building were detained for twelve hours.

In addition to the looting and destruction that comes together with a police raid, the operation ended with the arrest of a comrade who had already been imprisoned due to the Operation Pandora police raids, and who was under an European search warrant that was issued the 11th of April accused of participating in different bank expropriations in the German territory.

After being transferred to the Spanish Audiencia Nacional, the judge Eloy Velasco has ordered the preventive prison for our comrade, who has been transferred to the prison of Soto de Real. Given that she is also charged in the Pandora process (currently in preliminary investigation) and she herself has declared her will for not being extradited to Germany, our defense has asked for a “conditioning” to the European order of extradition, claiming that she serves the preventive prison in the Spanish State until the pending trial that she has here is held.

In a maximum period of 2 months (which can be extended one month more), the Audiencia Nacional will decide if they stop temporary or not the extradition of our comrade to the German authorities. From the news published in the German press, we have learned that she is imputed of a expropriation that happened two years ago in the city of Aachen, during which -always according to the press- the assaulting group could take a big amount of money from the bank without causing any personal damage or injuring anybody.

However the court process evolves, we want to make public our support to the comrade, claiming as ours her revolutionary political aims, her struggle and her militant activity.

The people that know her closely we know that she deserves the solidarity from all of us. We are talking about a fighting and anarchist person, active since years in different anti-racist, feminist and libertarian projects in Barcelona, always being in solidarity with the repressed people, always ready to help wherever she could, always in the street, always being generous, happy and smiling with the people around her, always intransigent and hard against everything she considers unjust.

The media attempt to portray her as a public enemy could not be more vicious. Specially when this operation of media manipulation implies the representation of the banks as victims, changing completely the reality dignifying those who are stealing, exploiting, defrauding, evicting and cutting us for years, while they criminalize who rebels against them and dares to attack them. It makes no difference for us if the comrade is really responsible or not for these robberies.

A bank expropriation is an ethically fair and politically legitimized practice, a method of struggle that is part of the history of every revolutionary movement.

Indeed, despite of the continuous attempts from the Power to reduce this method to the ‘common crime’ frame, done by personal interest and individual greed, the truth is that the expropriation of these places of accumulation of capital is a constant practice in our history: from the anarchosyndicalist groups that in the early XX century used to rob banks to support the strikes or to help the families of the comrades in prison, to the different autonomous groups from the 70s-80s like the MIL, the OLLA o the ERAT (formed by the workers of the SEAT factory) that sent the money hold by the rich to the different projects of the fighting exploited, through the maquis groups like the ones of Sabaté or Facerías that during the postwar period used to practice robberies to finance the resistance against Franco’s dictatorship.

Expropriation, whether it is a tactical expression of a political struggle in general, or in the form of social banditry trough which we take back what the banks steal from us in order to free ourselves from the slavery chains of the work exploitation and unemployment, we don’t think is something reprehensible, but the opposite. The existence of people who are tired of being pushed around and exploited systematically by the legalized mafia proves us that ”we are not just goods in hands of politicians and bankers” and that humanity resists to accept submissively the dictatorship of the capital over our lives.

The police and media hunt deployed due to these robberies in Germany, should not make us neither lose our perspective nor get confused of who is our enemy. The real public enemy is the power represented by criminals like Wolfgang Schäuble and Angela Merkel, the power that didn’t empty a couple of safety boxes, but the social wealth of entire peoples and territories. It is the power of the transnational elites that have doomed millions of people to misery in order to impose the functional austerity measures for their neoliberal and imperialist project.

Our comrade’s arrest is only one more reason to fight against these elites and the system that they represent, a system solely moved by the accumulation of money in a few hands at the cost of the suffering, dispossession and exploitation of the rest of the people. Neither the police persecution not the massive propaganda of the regime can hide what is clear for the whole world, and like the poet said, what is the robbing of a bank compared to the funding of a bank?

Immediate release for the imprisoned comrade in Madrid!

Stop the extradition process!

Solidarity with the CSO blokes fantasma and with all the persecuted fighters!

As long as there is misery, there will be rebellion!

Comrades of the imprisoned one. 15Th of April, 2016.
Barcelona

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Is Climate Chaos triggering Earthquake Disasters?

Last week we heard that the Earth’s wobble has changed due to massive ice-melt already in April. This week 5 massive earthquakes have struck in 2 days…

Climate change will shake the Earth

A changing climate isn’t just about floods, droughts and heatwaves. It brings erupting volcanoes and catastrophic earthquakes too.

As the Earth’s crust buckles, volcanic activity will increase.

reblogged from The Guardian The idea that a changing climate can persuade the ground to shake, volcanoes to rumble and tsunamis to crash on to unsuspecting coastlines seems, at first, to be bordering on the insane. How can what happens in the thin envelope of gas that shrouds and protects our world possibly influence the potentially Earth-shattering processes that operate deep beneath the surface?

The fact that it does reflects a failure of our imagination and a limited understanding of the manner in which the different physical components of our planet – the atmosphere, the oceans, and the solid Earth, or geosphere – intertwine and interact.

‘GPS measurements reveal that the crust beneath the Greenland ice sheet is already rebounding in response to rapid melting, providing the potential – according to researchers – for future earthquakes, as faults beneath the ice are relieved of their confining load.’

If we think about climate change at all, most of us do so in a very simplistic way: so, the weather might get a bit warmer; floods and droughts may become more of a problem and sea levels will slowly creep upwards. Continue reading “Is Climate Chaos triggering Earthquake Disasters?”

Shock: Monsanto could lose Europe Glyphosate Battle

”All in all this is adding up to a refreshing popular revolt against the GMO death industry. Hooray for those of us who wish to live”.

by F. William Engdahl Last month three EU member states unexpectedly refused to go along with the decision of the EU Health and Food Safety Commissioner and the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) to re-approve the world’s most widely used weed killing chemical, Glyphosate.

This dramatic and encouraging developments suggest that for the first time the power of GMO agrochemical giants like Monsanto and Syngenta, Dow and DuPont, BASF, Bayer could undergo a devastating defeat.

Were this to happen, it could well be the death knell for the misbegotten Rockefeller Foundation Genetic Manipulation project that has destroyed much of Western farmland and poisoned hundreds of millions of GMO fed farm animals and humans.

Dismantling neoliberal education: a lesson from the Zapatistas

from Roar… AUTONOMY & ANARCHISM book cover

The non-hierarchical education of the Zapatistas cries dignity and suggests that the suffering of the neoliberal university can be withstood and overcome. by Levi Gahman

I’ve said it before—in contrast to those traditional stories that begin with ‘Once upon a time…’ Zapatista stories begin with ‘There will be a time…’

— Subcomandante Galeano (formerly Marcos)

Excerpted from Levi’s chapter ‘Zapatismo versus the Neoliberal University: Towards a Pedagogy against Oblivion’, in the forthcoming book The Radicalization of Pedagogy, edited by Simon Springer, Marcelo Lopes de Souza and Richard J. White.

The story of the Zapatistas is one of dignity, outrage, and grit. It is an enduring saga of over 500 years of resistance to the attempted conquest of the land and lives of indigenous peasants. Continue reading “Dismantling neoliberal education: a lesson from the Zapatistas”