Brazil‘s landless workers call for agrarian reform
FEMALE landless workers occupied Brazil‘s agriculture ministry, a vital port, a farm owned by a paper company and other property on Monday to demand faster agrarian reform.
The Landless Rural Workers Movement (MST) and the Via Campesina activist group issued a statement saying that the women’s demonstrations were a call for Brazil to stimulate its domestic market instead of relying on exports.
Authorities began evicting people from a sprawling settlement near Sao Paulo on Sunday after riot police stormed the private land that landless peasants took over eight years ago: here.
A short film of the demonstration on the streets of London in February 2007. Thousands marched from Hyde park to Trafalgar square to protest against the government’s proposed renewal of Britain’s nuclear arsenal, and against the continued intervention in Iraq.
ONE hundred MPs protested against foolish Whitehall mandarins and ministers on Tuesday who are conspiring behind closed doors to waste £75 billion on a new generation of nuclear weapons.
They warned that a crucial new stage in the upgrading of the Trident missile system is likely to be foisted upon the nation while Parliament is closed down for the summer recess.
The MPs signed a Commons motion headed by Labour MP Jeremy Corbyn, who said it was “simply crazy” at a time of dire economic crisis to be even thinking about spending such huge sums on weapons of mass destruction.
HOUSING campaigners predicted on Tuesday that new Labour’s policy would collapse and housebuilding will soon plunge to its lowest level for 88 years: here.
NEW Labour politicians are spectacularly “out of touch” with voters’ demands for nationalisation, a new poll reveals on Wednesday: here.
RAIL workers will deliver a strike vote on Wednesday in a stinging rebuke to their “dishonest, disingenuous and shabby” privateer bosses’ demands for job cuts: here.
FURIOUS journalists condemned an announcement by Guardian Media on Tuesday that half of the reporters that it employs in the Manchester area are to be made redundant: here.
PRIME Minister Gordon Brown said on Tuesday he took responsibility “for everything that’s happened” in his time in office, but again declined to apologise for the economic crisis: here.
NEW Labour’s handling of the economy took a further turn for the worse on Tuesday after official figures showed that the manufacturing sector had contracted at an “alarming” pace in January: here.
A new international report reveals that mental health problems are far worse in ‘rich’ nations, such as the UK, that are socially unequal – and that individual treatment is not the solution. Mary O’Hara reports: here.
THE latest inflation figures are bad news for pensioners trying to scratch a living on barely £90 a week, the National Pensioner Convention warned on Tuesday: here.
“Popular anger around the world is growing as a result of rising unemployment, pay cuts and freezes, bailouts for banks, and falls in house prices and the value of savings and pension funds”: here.
Poor people will not be sharing the government’s relief that the rate of inflation has fallen.
One side effect of the recession is that the poor are paying out relatively much more than the rich.
In the government’s own figures the food inflation rate was 9.9 percent in January. Household fuel inflation was a shocking 35.1 percent.
Ordinary people are hit far harder by rising fuel and food costs, while the rich gain from cuts in mortgage rates and falling petrol bills.
Furthermore, costs are going up for people in rented accommodation. Rent rises average 4.7 percent for private renters, but 6.1 percent for local authority tenants.
Many people face much higher price hikes.
Inflation for the richest fifth of households currently averages at minus 1 percent. But for the poorest fifth it is 5.3 percent.
Worst hit are pensioners. People aged 70 to 79 face an average inflation rate of 5.6 percent. This rises to 7.1 percent for those over 80.
The statistics show what most of us feel every week. We are being made to pay for the crisis while the wealthy are doing just fine.
Newspaper headlines that talk of zero inflation are masking two crucial facts – prices for many essential goods are rising fast, and the poor are paying a bigger proportion of their incomes for them: here.
World Bank predicts first decline in global output since WWII: here.
The state budget deal passed in California imposed spending cuts in public education, which have prompted demonstrations throughout the state: here.
Threats by the New York state government to carry out massive budget cuts and layoffs to offset its deepening fiscal crisis brought tens of thousands of workers, parents and students to a rally last Thursday at City Hall in New York City: here.
Britain: Dundee packaging factory occupied: here. And here. And here.
In an interview with the British newspaper The Mail on Sunday, Binyam Mohamed, who was recently released from the United States detention camp in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, discussed his treatment while in American custody and renewed his claim that he was tortured.
In the interview, Mr. Mohamed described in detail some of the treatment he says he endured while being held and interrogated in Pakistan, Morocco and Afghanistan before being sent to Guantánamo Bay.
According to Mr. Mohamed, the worst part of his seven years in captivity was not being slashed with a scalpel in Morocco, but the time he spent at “a secret C.I.A. prison in Afghanistan” in 2004, where, he said, he was kept in total darkness 24 hours a day, while being forced to listen to a single rap album played over and over again at high volume:
There were loudspeakers in the cell, pumping out what felt like about 160 watts, a deafening volume, non-stop, 24 hours a day. They played the same CD for a month, “The Eminem Show.” It’s got about 20 songs on it, and when it was finished, it went back to the beginning and started again.
While that was happening, a lot of the time, for hour after hour, they had me shackled. Sometimes it was in a standing position, with my wrists chained to the top of the door frame. Sometimes they were chained in the middle, at waist level, and sometimes they were chained at the bottom, on the floor.
The longest was when they chained me for eight days on end, in a position that meant I couldn’t stand straight nor sit. I couldn’t sleep. I had no idea whether it was day or night.
Mr. Mohamed also told The Mail’s interviewer, David Rose: “In Kabul I lost my head. It felt like it was never going to end and that I had ceased to exist.” It was, he added, “a miracle my brain is still intact.”
While there is no obvious answer to the question, why Eminem?, the blogger Daniel Radosh pointed out in another context that “The Eminem Show” does contain references to the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. In the song “My Dad’s Gone Crazy,” for instance, Eminem raps about flying planes and attacking high towers, before claiming that there is “more pain inside of my brain/ than the eyes of a little girl inside of a plane/ aimed at the World Trade.”
Eminem, of course, like any decent human, opposes the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. Attacks in which not any Iraqi, or any Afghan, participated. Eminem also is an opponent of George W. Bush and his wars. So, using Eminem music for torture is adding insult to international crime by the Bush regime.
In 1989, when U.S. forces in Panama were trying to force Gen. Manuel Antonio Noriega to leave his sanctuary in the Vatican’s diplomatic mission in Panama City and surrender, they blasted loud rock music from speakers outside the Nunciature. The New York Times’s Robert Suro reported at the time that Vatican officials “said the apparent effort at psychological warfare was ‘ludicrous’ and ‘childish.’”
In 2003, Adam Piore of Newsweek, while traveling with soldiers from the United States military’s Psychological Operations Command (known as Psyops) in Iraq, witnessed American soldiers blasting Metallica’s “Enter Sandman” into shipping containers where detainees were held. In the May 19, 2003 issue of Newsweek, Mr. Piore wrote that a member of the Psyops unit described the tactic as part of an effort to “break down” the detainees:
The idea, explains Sgt. Mark Hadsell, is to break down a subject’s resistance through sleep deprivation and annoyance with music that is as culturally offensive and terrifying as possible. Hadsell’s personal favorites include “Bodies” from the “XXX” soundtrack and Metallica’s “Enter Sandman.” “These people haven’t heard heavy metal before,” he explained. “They can’t take it. If you play it for 24 hours, your brain and body functions start to slide, your train of thought slows down and your will is broken. That’s when we come in and talk to them.”
The kind of stress Mr. Mohamed says he endured in [sic; "is"] no laughing matter, and the military clearly takes the treatment seriously enough that it has been reportedly been used at Guantánamo Bay, as well as in Iraq and Afghanistan.
But since the idea that being forced to listen to a certain song or record can be described as “torture” often strikes people hearing about it as funny, reports of the tactic are often cast in a comic light.
Mr. Piore later told the British writer Jon Ronson that when he called his editor at Newsweek from Iraq to describe the use of loud music on detainees, “I was told to write it as a humorous thing.” After Mr. Piore filed his report, Newsweek stressed the fact that one of the songs blared at detainees in Iraq was the theme from the children’s television show “Barney” and added a comic kicker to his the [sic] story:
The sledgehammer riffs of Metallica, that’s understandable. But can children’s songs really break a strong mind? (Two current favorites are the “Sesame Street” theme song and the crooning purple dinosaur Barney — for 24 hours straight.) In search of comment from Barney’s people, Hit Entertainment, Newsweek endured five minutes of Barney while on hold. Yes, it broke us, too.
Bob Singleton, author of the Barney song, does not agree with the Newsweek bigwigs’ pseudo-humour on this; the abuse of his song for torture fits in with any music becoming unbearable if played loudly and for a long time, he wrote.
In Jon Ronson’s book on the American military’s development and use of psychological operations, “The Men Who Stare at Goats” (soon to be a major motion picture, starring George Clooney, Kevin Spacey and Ewan McGregor), he writes that while loud music was used on detainees in Guantánamo, other sorts or sounds were deployed as well, often in puzzling ways.
Jamal al-Harith, another British man who was released from Guantánamo, told Mr. Ronson that recordings of loud screeches and bangs, “jumbled noises,” were played by his interrogators — and also that at one stage during his interrogation, he was asked to listen to songs played at normal volume for no apparent reason. According to Mr. Harith, an interrogator baffled him by playing CDs including one by a Fleetwood Mac cover band, another with a selection of Kris Kristofferson’s greatest hits, and an album by Matchbox Twenty. As Mr. Ronson notes in his book, Matchbox Twenty was one of the bands Mr. Piore found listed on the PsyOps playlist in Iraq.
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