Development finance helps China win friends and influence American allies

[Each day brings news of the every-sharpening contention between imperialist powers, who have long cooperated but are now more-ready to seize advantage at the expense of each other, and place burdens of more aggressive exploitation and more oppressive conditions on working people inside the imperialist countries (from US/EU to Chinese/Russian and others scrambling to expand their profits at each others expense).  One day, it is the seizure of energy resources, then it is trade routes and shipping, then monetary dominance, then credit dominance and wars, then military eyeball face-offs and surrogate/proxy hotspots, then it is digital battles and cyber wars.  There is no stopping this contention, nor any way for the people to see it but to raise the people’s struggles against all imperialism and all reaction.  Between these imperialists, working people have no horse in this race.  —  Frontlines ed.]

The Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank

Mar 21st 2015 | SINGAPORE | From The Economist

 

STRATEGIC rivalry between America and China takes many forms. Rarely does a clear winner emerge. An exception, however, is the tussle over China’s efforts to found a new Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB). China has won, gaining the support of American allies not just in Asia but in Europe, and leaving America looking churlish and ineffectual. This month first Britain and then France, Germany and Italy said they hoped to join the bank as founding shareholders. China said other European countries such as Luxembourg and Switzerland are thinking of joining the queue.

Yet America has been sceptical about the AIIB. Its officials claim they have not “lobbied against” it, but merely stressed how important it is that it abide by international standards of transparency, creditworthiness, environmental sustainability, and so on.

UK Hunger Strike Continues Over Refugee Detention Centersrmondsworth Detention Center: Asylum seekers’ hunger strike spreads

[As hundreds of millions of workers and peasants are driven by hunger, desperation, oppressive conditions and displacement to migrate in search of livable and workable conditions, governments worldwide stigmatize, harass, and force into desperate lives, all the better to divide the working class, heighten xenophobia, and exploit in slave-like conditions.  In the UK, migrants, refugees, and asylum-seekers are rounded up and stuffed into detention centers–prisons, by all estimates.   But the migrants have organized and waged collective protests, as prisoners do, because “where there is oppression, there is resistance.”  Here is a report on the huge hunger strike in centers across Britain. — Frontlines ed.]

Source: http://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/Hunger-Strike-Continues-Over-UK-Refugee-Detention-Centers-20150319-0034.html.

http://www.teleSURtv.net/english, 19 March 2015   

 

Harmondsworth detention center, from where up to 100 detainees were deported to Pakistan this week. | Photo: AFP

The protests began last week, and have spread across several detention centers around the country, with hundreds of refugees reported to be taking part.

Migrants across the United Kingdom continued hunger strikes Thursday in protest against the horrendous treatment of asylum seekers in detention centers.

According to asylum seeker advocacy group Detained Voices, which records stories of the experiences of refugees in detention centers, a number of refugees were sent back to their home countries Wednesday. A source, known only as “Chowdery,” told RT that detainees were calling  for the cancellation of a deportation flight to Pakistan, while another said that 100 asylum seekers were due to be deported.

The Caribbean case for Reparations from Britain

Reparations: a case for settlement

[A Rastafarian man holds up a cardboard placard calling for reparations during a demonstration as Britain’s Prince Harry visited the non-governmental organisation RISE in Kingston on March 6, 2012. – AP]

Courtenay Barnett, Guest Columnist, The Gleaner (Jamaica, West Indies), Sunday, June 30, 2013

This month, Her Majesty’s Government (HMG) was required to pay 19.9 million pounds in compensation to some 5,000 elderly Kenyans who were tortured and abused during the Mau Mau uprising in the 1950s. This case bears lessons for the Caribbean and it also has much to teach about the true nature of the British Empire.

The British imposed themselves in Kenya and confiscated land. In 1948, a quarter-million Kenyans were confined to 2,000 square miles, while 30,000 English settlers lived on 12,000 square miles of the most fertile lands in Kenya. Africans under an apartheid and colonial policy were forbidden to enter certain areas and confined away from the most arable land.

Not surprisingly, the Kenyans rebelled and started a violent campaign against the white settlers in 1952. The colonialists responded, and the Kenya Human Rights Commission estimated that 90,000 Kenyans were executed, tortured or maimed. There was the use of literal concentration camps as a nationwide network of detention for some 160,000 who were detained in the most appalling conditions.

TORTURED

President Obama’s grandfather, Hussein Onyango Obama, happened to be one of those detained persons. He had pins placed into his fingernails and in his buttocks and his testicles were squeezed between metal rods. Other Kenyans were forcibly relocated in new villages. Within the camps, the British inflicted beatings, castrated, raped and performed other forms of sexual abuse and torture applying brutal interrogation techniques against the Kenyans.

It was against this background that elderly Kenyans who had suffered abuse when detained filed a claim in the English High Court. Two of the original five claimants had been castrated and an African lady who had been raped was included in the claim.

Margaret Thatcher’s death greeted with street parties in Brixton and Glasgow

Crowds shout ‘Maggie Maggie Maggie, dead dead dead’ during impromptu events

Barry Neild

guardian.co.uk, Monday 8 April 2013

Several hundred people gathered in south London on Monday evening to celebrate Margaret Thatcher‘s death with cans of beer, pints of milk and an impromptu street disco playing the soundtrack to her years in power.

Young and old descended on Brixton, a suburb which weathered two outbreaks of rioting during the Thatcher years. Many expressed jubilation that the leader they loved to hate was no more; others spoke of frustration that her legacy lived on.

To cheers of “Maggie Maggie Maggie, dead dead dead,” posters of Thatcher were held aloft as reggae basslines pounded.

Clive Barger, a 62-year-old adult education tutor, said he had turned out to mark the passing of “one of the vilest abominations of social and economic history”.

He said: “It is a moment to remember. She embodied everything that was so elitist in terms of repressing people who had nothing. She presided over a class war.”

Thousands protest education cuts in London

Student tuition fees protest passes off peacefully

Few incidents reported as police appear to outnumber students and activists marching in protest against fee increases

• Shiv Malik, Patrick Kingsley, Alexandra Topping and agencies
• guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 9 November 2011

Students protest over university tuition fees and public sector cuts. Photograph: Ray Tang / Rex Features

Thousands of students marched through central London on Wednesday to protest against fee increases and were met by large numbers of police but as darkness fell the demonstration appeared to be passing off peacefully.

As the protestors made their way through the City there were sporadic incidents involving bottles being thrown.

LONDON AFIRE, by Mumia Abu-Jamal

10 August 2011
After decades of political betrayal by the Labour Party, and the blatant attacks on the working class by the Tories (the
British Conservative Party), there has emerged an angry and bitter class that has rocked what was once the center of a
global empire: London.

Fires have erupted In Birmingham, Croydon, Bristol, Liverpool and Tottenham at last count, sparked by the very same
fuse that lit the explosions of the 1960s, and 1990s: police violence-this time against a 29-year old father of four, Mark
Duggan.

But while this cop violence may prove a spark, that doesn’t mean it was the reason. Years of cutbacks, joblessness,
slashed educational opportunities and plain old political mean-spiritedness aimed at the poor and the dispossessed,
immigrants and the like, left sour tastes in the minds of many. Especially in the midst of a city that became the financial
center of Europe, who were living a life of excess and plenty.

Guardian, UK: “There is a context to London’s riots that can’t be ignored”

Those condemning the events in north London and elsewhere would do well to take a step back and consider the bigger picture

by Nina Power, guardian.co.uk, Monday 8 August 2011

(Police in riot gear in Enfield, north London, on Sunday night. Photograph: Stefan Wermuth/Reuters)

Since the coalition came to power just over a year ago, the country has seen multiple student protests, occupations of dozens of universities, several strikes, a half-a-million-strong trade union march and now unrest on the streets of the capital (preceded by clashes with Bristol police in Stokes Croft earlier in the year). Each of these events was sparked by a different cause, yet all take place against a backdrop of brutal cuts and enforced austerity measures. The government knows very well that it is taking a gamble, and that its policies run the risk of sparking mass unrest on a scale we haven’t seen since the early 1980s. With people taking to the streets of Tottenham, Edmonton, Brixton and elsewhere over the past few nights, we could be about to see the government enter a sustained and serious losing streak.

British workers strike against pension cuts

Marchers in London carry placards during a nationwide day of strikes Thursday. Hundreds of thousands of people participated. / LEFTERIS PITARAKIS/Associated Press

BY JILL LAWLESS

ASSOCIATED PRESS

LONDON — British teachers and public-sector workers swapped classrooms and offices for picket lines Thursday as hundreds of thousands walked off the job to protest pension cuts.

Airport operators warned there could be long lines at immigration entry points because of walkouts by passport officers, but most of Britain’s airports, including Heathrow and Manchester, said it was business as usual.

Unions estimated that up to 750,000 teachers and civil servants joined the one-day strike, which disrupted courthouses, tax offices, employment centers and schools. The government said the figure was lower.

Thousands of union members marched through London and other cities to demand that the government rethink plans to curb public-sector pensions. Small groups of anti-capitalist protesters scuffled with police and were cordoned in by officers.

Police said 37 people were arrested for offenses including drug possession, criminal damage and breach of the peace.

Thursday’s walkouts are the first salvo in what unions said they hope will be a summer of discontent against the Conservative-led government’s austerity plans.

Bristol, UK: Anti-corporate “direct action” protest against Tesco

Protesters set up barricades

Anti-Tesco protest boils over into riot / Police accused of attacking bystanders

The Independent (UK)

By Kunal Dutta and Oliver Duff

Saturday, 23 April 2011

Hundreds of people set up burning street barricades and hurled rocks at police as anti-Tesco protests in Bristol fast escalated into bloody running battles between officers and residents.

A Tesco Express store in the bohemian neighbourhood of Stokes Croft, in the north of Bristol, became the focal point for the violence, with police claiming that they had uncovered a plot to petrol bomb the store, which opened eight days ago to widespread hostility from the community.

More than 160 police in riot gear, officers on horseback and reinforcements from neighbouring forces fought with protesters for seven hours through the night until dawn yesterday. A swelling, increasingly angry crowd of 300 people upturned bottle banks to gather glass to bombard officers.

Huge turnout in London for protest against austerity measures

About half a million people marched through the streets of central London to protest against government spending cuts.

Michael Goldfarb

March 26, 2011

Police officers and protesters clash on Piccadilly during marches in protest at government cuts on March 26, 2011, in London, England. (Dan Kitwood/Getty Images)

LONDON, U.K. — About half a million people marched through the streets of central London today to protest against austerity measures.Protesters wove past all the major tourist attractions — Big Ben, Trafalgar Square, Piccadilly Circus before reaching Hyde Park. Many marchers held signs paying tribute to the protests in Egypt — one read, “Rise up, Protest Like an Egyptian.” Other signs displayed British wit: “You are tightening your belts around our necks.”

It was the country’s largest demonstration since 2003, just before the invasion of Iraq, when a million people turned out in protest.

UK: Schoolboy warned by “anti-terrorist” police over picket plan at David Cameron’s office

December 10, 2010

Police told schoolboy Nicky Wishart he would be arrested if his picket at David Cameron's office sparked unrest. Photograph: Virginia Phelps

The mother of a 12-year-old boy has criticised Thames Valley police for taking her son out of lessons because he was planning to picket David Cameron‘s constituency office today.

Nicky Wishart, a pupil at Bartholomew School, Eynsham, Oxfordshire, organised the event on Facebook to highlight the plight of his youth centre, which is due to close in March next year due to budget cuts.

The protest, which was due to take place today, has attracted over 130 people on Facebook, most of whom are children who use youth centres in Cameron’s constituency, Witney.

Wishart said that after the school was contacted by anti-terrorist officers, he was taken out of his English class on Tuesday afternoon and interviewed by a Thames Valley officer at the school in the presence of his head of year. During the interview, Wishart says that the officer told him that if any public disorder took place at the event he would be held responsible and arrested.

Speaking to the Guardian, Nicky Wishart said: “In my lesson, [a school secretary] came and said my head of year wanted to talk to me. She was in her office with a police officer who wanted to talk to me about the protest. He said, ‘if a riot breaks out we will arrest people and if anything happens you will get arrested because you are the organiser’.

London: Mass Protests by Students and Workers over budget cuts and fee hikes

December 09, 2010

The British parliament has just approved a bill to raise university tuition fees in England. The vote came amid mass demonstrations by thousands of students and trade unionists. It turned out the largest in a string of rallies against sweeping austerity measures and budget cuts across Europe. RT’s Laura Emmett is in London with the latest developments from the streets.

——————————————————————————–

British Parliament approves tuition hike despite widespread student protests

By Anthony Faiola
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, December 9, 2010

LONDON – British lawmakers pushed through a controversial hike in university tuition fees on Thursday, even as tens of thousands of angry students took to the streets of London and across the nation in protest.

The vote had become the most divisive issue to face the seven-month old coalition of the Conservative and Liberal Democrat parties. The measure passed by a narrower margin than the government had hoped, with half of the lawmakers from the Liberal Democrats – the coalition’s junior partners – voting against it or abstaining.

Two Liberal Democrats and one Conservative lawmaker resigned their government posts because of their opposition.