North Korean slaves in Poland

Poland is the shithole of Europe in way too many aspects but here there is one that was not exposed yet: for decades and still today Poland uses North Korean slave labor while everybody, in Warsaw as in Brussels pretends not to know.

I recall that when our unionized shipyard was closed by the occupant regime of Spain, under guidance of NATO-EU back in the 80s, it was said that it could not compete with Polish and Korean shipyards. It was obvious the barely camouflaged intent of subsidizing Walesa's yellow Christian-Fundamentalist "union" as part of the Reaganist plot against the Soviet bloc but I never really got the "Korean" part, after all South Korean unions were as hardy as ours, if not even more combatant.

Now I understand: what they had in mind all the time was not South Korea but North Korean slave labor in Poland.

Today, with the Communist Party forbidden and with Poland totally becoming an ultra-capitalist Fascist regime, the situation remains the same. Where are those "unions" defending the rights of North Korean workers? Nowhere: they were always a fake, a sockpuppet of the worst and most criminal Capitalism the World has known in many many decades!

Shame on you: Europe!

Death of two literary giants: Eduardo Galeano and Günther Grass

In the very same day, yesterday April 13th, two of the greatest writers of our time left us. 

Eduardo Galeano (Montevideo, 1940) is arguably the greatest author in Spanish language in the second half of the 20th century. His masterpiece Open Veins of Latin America[full PDF text at e-reading club] is a must read, so "must" that Hugo Chávez gifted it to Barack Obama in 2009. It is not just a literary masterpiece but also a most valuable history work, quite comparable to Zinn's A People's History of the United States but surely better in its truly amazing literary quality.

It begins this way:

The division of labor among nations is that some specialize in winning and others in losing. Our part of the world, known today as Latin America, was precocious: it has specialized in losing ever since those remote times when Renaissance Europeans ventured across the ocean and buried their teeth in the throats of the Indian civilizations.

Update (Apr 20th): 10 Galeano books freely available online in Spanish (BGD).

Günther Grass (Danzig/Gdansk, 1927) was certainly less radical initially (he was for long an SPD member) but his work is nevertheless very enjoyable. However he did evolve towards more determined positions in the anti-war movement of the 1980s and was hostile to reunification of Germany in 1991, fearing that it could only lead to a renewed German imperialism, which he opposed.

In 2012 he published the poem What must be said, against the German military support of the Zionist terrorist state and its overly dangerous nuclear capacity.

His most famous work is The Tin Drum. He got the Nobel Prize in 1999.

Global worker protest against Banco Santander

Anarchosyndicalist unions of many countries are coordinating global protests against Banco Santander because of their labor policies caused by outsourcing.

The conflict began in August at the Santander subsidiary ISBAN (computer services), when CNT-AIT denounced the illegal traffic of workers between companies. ISBAN quickly fired the union delegate, sending him to another company, Panel Sistemas. 

In response anarchosyndicalist unions from around the World replied with protests wherever Banco Santander has offices.

The protests took place in Brazil, Poland, Uruguay, Portugal, Norway, Spain and other places.

The farewell of a laid out union delegate

In Brazil, the protests have been going on for weeks already.

Picket in Brazil

In Warsaw, Poland, the pickets were violently repressed. But the denounce could not be silenced.

Bilingual posters in Warsaw

In Montevideo, Lisbon, Porto and Oslo there have also been informative actions. Even in countries where Banco Santander keeps no visible offices, like Russia or France, unions have issued communications of solidarity. 

But naturally one of the states where most protests have taken place was Spain. Madrid, Barcelona, Zaragoza, León, Salamanca, Ciudad Rodrigo, Villaverde... are some of the towns where workers have protested, not without police repression.

In some places, there have also been sabotages:

ISBAN controls many "meat suppliers" companies, which provides them with a cheap and precarious force of more than 10,000 workers, which are leant to Banco Santander and its subsidiaries at whim, and fired equally at whim, with no cost for the bank, because they are not formally their workers. 

This situation of quasi-slavery, where workers fear to be laid out at the smallest grudge, allows for brutal work journeys, lots of extra hours, compulsory displacements, ranks and salaries well under their real functions and many other abuses. 

Hundreds of irregular redundancies have already been denounced by CNT-AIT. These redundancies have affected the worse off workers: those illegally ceded between companies, mothers with reduced journey and workers sent overseas. 

Banco Santander is the largest financier entity of Spain and one in the global list of so-called "too big to fall". Its top bosses, Emilio Botín, Alfredo Saénz, Jose María Amusategui, etc. have been often denounced for illegal practices, and sometimes even indicted but they have never been actually punished. Recently they hired the infamous Rodrigo Rato, former economy minister under Aznar, former IMF Director in the days of the 2007 collapse and former CEO of rotten privatized savings bank Bankia, whose loses have been "socialized" by means of a EU-sponsored rescue of € 40 billion.

These "businessmen" are known by mafioso practices like the irregular purchase of banks such as Banesto or Totta, millionaire compensations to top managers, money laundering in Switzerland, junk mortgages, home evictions, usury, dirty business with universities, participation in weapon industries and financial mismanagement of the Spanish prison system. 

The group got € 2.26 billion as profit in the first half of 2013, almost 30% more than a year ago. 

Sources[es]: Webguerrillero, CNT-AIT.

Poland: massive protests going on for days

This photo was taken on Saturday in Warsaw, when the protests were already in their fourth day:

Surprisingly I had got no word of these massive demonstrations, affecting a major European country before today and I swear I have been watching the news in several channels, what says very little in favor of our so-called "free media" (corporate and state, extremely authoritarian and antidemocratic, and usually also boring, media).

The trigger has been the labor law reform, together with the already rampaging unemployment and underemployment. Another issue is the retirement age, moved to the age of 67. 

The protesters demand the resignation of PM Donald Tusk. 

Source: Webguerrillero[es].

Protest in Katowice, Poland, against the European Economic Congress

The people of Eastern Europe is angry and wary of the future of our continent being discussed behind closed doors, as if the word "democracy" ("people's power" in Greek), would have lost all meaning. Therefore they are going out to the streets in protest:

Source: Contra Info.

More info (in Polish language) HERE.

Warsaw: Elba squat attacekd by mercenary thugs (Contra Info)

Elba squat was raided on March 16th, 2012, by henchmen of a private security company who received assistance from the Polish police. The project was established in 2004. The Finnish company Stora Enso (the owner of the premises) has been well aware of Elba’s existence and activity and, after protests two years ago, the presence of the squatters in the area was accepted. No user of the building was notified of a scheduled date of eviction, so the incursion came as a total surprise for the people living in the squat, which is the biggest and oldest active social and cultural centre in Warsaw.

Shortly after 11am, guards hired by the ‘Skrzecz’ security agency broke into the building. They didn’t present an eviction warrant and used violence against squatters in order to force them to leave the property. The squatters resisted, and one person barricaded himself in his room and at least six others occupied the roof of the building. They issued an urgent call for help and support. Soon, police units arrived at the place. The fact that the attempted eviction was illegal was ignored by the police, who instead started to block the solidarity demo.

... full story and videos at Contra Info.

Race and intelligence

Found at Protestation.org blog.

There's been major racist Neonazi agitation in Poland just after the anniversary of the Night of Broken Glass. The institutional media like BBC and such depict it as a clash between factions and do not give it the relevance it deserves but for the antifascist media[es] it was the fascists terrorizing Warsaw in the name of "white Europe", of Polish nationalism, of homophobia, of judeophobia and of generic xenophobia.The clashes ended with more than 200 people arrested and severe material damage. 

The main difference between this and the Kristallnach is that there was resistance. Go antifascist Poland! Go antifascist Europe!

Tenants' movement activist murdered in Poland

Protest held in Jola's memory

It happened a month ago but this is the kind of news that does not make first pages, not even Warsaw, where the authorities, clearly colluding with the criminals, are trying to hide it under the pretext of "suicide". Nobody suicides by completely burning herself in a hidden forest, so we must declare the authorities in Warsaw accomplices of this crime, just out of common sense, the same that they are accomplices of the privatization without notice or protection of any sort of the homes under dispute. 

Jolanta Brzeska, 64, was identified as the body, burnt beyond recognition, found in a forest in the outskirts of Warsaw early in March. She was a leading activist in the association of tenants who are trying to defend the rights acquired when Poland was still a socialist state against the speculative privatization of their homes. 

She was particularly confronted with one of the most infamous slumlords, Marek Mossokowski, and was the last tenant refusing to leave what was a valuable piece of real state... but also her home. An apartment that was public property until 2006. 

Sources: Polish Union of Syndicalists (ZSP)[en], CNT newspaper (print edition)[es]

Antfascist actions in Warsaw and Nancy

This past week has witnessed attempts by fascists gangs of demonstrating in the streets of several European cities. Local antifascists have tried to impede them from doing it, because with fascists there is no possible dialogue: it is them or you.

Warsaw

In Warsaw (Poland) some 700 neonazis enjoyed from massive police protection and could end their parade through the center of Warsaw on November 11, while the thousands of antifascists were violently repressed, resulting in some 33 arrested.

Later a protest was called before the police station. 

Nancy

In Nancy (Champagne, France) instead some 300 self-called "autonomist fascists" (who insultingly imitate some of the iconography from left-wing Autonomists) eventually decided to cancel their parade instead.

It is not the first time fascists copy left-wing iconography and even slogans, remember that Hitler's party was called National Socialist Workers' Party and that Spanish Falange copied nearly everything from the then successful Anarchist union CNT. More recently the kidnapping of the rude boy aesthetic (originally of Anglo-Jamaican brew) or now the sucking of Autonomist icons demonstrates their lack of imagination.

Source[es]: La Haine: Warsaw (with videos) and Nancy.