Bangladesh: 50,000 march for labor rights in textile industry

Some 50,000 people marched through Dhaka in demand of a salary increase of 5000 takas ($70). Workers also blockaded road access to the capital and caused damages to dozens of textile factories. 

The government rejects the salary demand on the pretext that multinational corporations want cheap products. The textile sector generates 80% of Bangladeshi GDP and employs four million workers.

Source: Webguerrillero[es].

Bangladesh: fascist war criminal sentenced to death

Mohammad Kamaruzzaman, 59, former pro-Pakistani militia commander and currently Assistant Secretary-General of the reactionary fundamentalist Jamaat-e-Islami party, sponsored by Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Great Britain, the USA, etc., was sentenced to death by a Bangladeshi court today.

The notorious war criminal turned fundamentalist politician was found guilty of leading his troops to murder at least 183 civilians in his home district of Sherpur. He had formed the death squad Al Badr in collaboration with the Pakistani army with the goals of murdering civilians and raping women. 

Kamaruzzaman was 19 at the time of the crimes but like the kapos of the Nazi death camps his crimes against Humankind can never prescribe.

Sadly enough it is not common that a criminal of this kind has to face justice and, even in Bangladesh, this trial has taken way too long to happen: forty years!

This is just the tip of the iceberg, Jamaat murdered some three million civilians and raped some 200,000 women, in the Bangladeshi Liberation War, working for the neocolonial Pakistani oppressor. Some days ago another notorious war criminal of the same fascist organization, Abdul Quader Mollah, was sentenced to life in prison, a punishment deemed too benevolent by many, considering his crimes (murder of 345 civilians, including a poet, and raping an 11 years old girl).

Massive worker protests sweep Bangladesh

Riots swept through the two main Bangladeshi cities of Dhaka and Chittagong in angry protests against the Capitalist tolerance for slavish working conditions which caused thousands of victims in the collapse of a factory days ago. At least two factories have been burned in these riots of clear class war nature. 

Quoting from the World's Socialist Web Site (K. Ratnayake):

Labels for the world’s largest retailer, Wal-Mart, the Spanish chain El Corte Inglés and JC Penney have been found in the rubble. Web sites for the factories in the building indicate that they also supplied Germany’s Kik, Belgium’s C&A, Benetton UK, Spain’s Mango, Canada’s Trimark and Premark in Ireland, to name a few.

This illustrates how this is not at all a merely local problem but that those murders, as the Information Minister described them, are caused by global Capitalism and that the same companies, like the infamous El Corte Inglés, which demolish worker rights in the Capitalist Core, do exactly the same in the Capitalist Periphery with the only goal of satisfy their bottomless greed at the expense of workers.

The overriding concern of the government and employers is to ensure that the country’s thousands of garment factories, which account for 80 percent of Bangladesh’s exports, continue operation as usual. They are acutely aware that any improvement in wages (on average $US37 a month), or to the appalling conditions confronting millions of garment workers, could undermine the country’s competitiveness.

...

The health, well-being and lives of workers are constantly sacrificed to the relentless drive for profit, not only in the sweatshops of Asia, Africa and Latin America, but in the advanced capitalist countries. Just last week, a fertiliser plant in Texas exploded, killing 14 people and injuring another 200. In April 2011, 11 workers died in an explosion on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig in Gulf of Mexico that resulted in the largest environmental disaster in US history.

These tragedies are crimes that are ultimately rooted in the profit system itself. Globalised production, which has the potential to provide everyone on the planet with a decent standard of living, is leading under capitalism to enormous profits for the wealthy few and the deepening immiseration of working people around the world.

The only solution lies in a unified struggle of the international working class to abolish this outmoded and reactionary social order and establish a rationally-planned world socialist economy to meet the pressing social needs of humanity as a whole.

Ditto.

Echoes from the Class War (Oct 2) - Occupy Together USA

Theme of the day: again Occupy Wall Street - Occupy Together movement in the USA gaining momentum.

Very large demo at New York on Friday ··> video at PO.

Image of that protest, from Washington's Blog

From 1968 to 2011 (same source)

GW also thinks that the mainstream media and even Internet's big powers like Google or Twitter are censoring the protests, however that does not impede that they gather more and more adherents, like AFL-CIO bosses.

Yves Smith meanwhile ponders today if the 'donation' (another name for bribe) of JP Morgan to NYC Police Department is paying off ··> Naked Capitalism.

This morning (Sunday 2) another large march was 'kettled' by police on Brooklyn Bridge. The cops arrested some 700 people rather arbitrarily. Videos from PO: 1, 2. 

Los Angeles: hundreds protest unemployment ··> video at PO.

San Francisco: Occupy San Francisco takes to the streets ··> video at PO.

Boston: Occupy Boston does as well ··> video at PO.

Denver: Occupy Denver ··> videos from PO: march, meeting.

Chicago: That's a big one ··> video at PO.

Santa Fe: modest but determined ··> video at PO.

Albuquerque  ··> video at PO.

Europe:

Basque Country:

French Nazi hooligans of Paris St. Germain wreak havoc in Bilbao while Spanish-appointed police force do almost nothing. The Nazis attacked taverns and peaceful aficionados around San Mames stadium, injuring severely one person (head fracture, broken jaw...). Only 9 Nazis were arrested and have been already set free, and yet 3 Basques were also arrested ··> SA[es]: link 1, link 2.

Another large demo in solidarity with evicted social center Kukutza gaztetxea ··> Branka[eu], SA[es], Gara[es] (link 1, link 2).

Arrested German internationalists Flo and Rafi finally freed ··> SA[es].

Workers of Panda Security (a major Basque antivirus company) protested against an employment regulation file that will lay out 120 workers at Bilbao and 8 others in Madrid ··> Branka[eu].

French state: Occitania: 500 times more radiation than government admitted in Marcoule mystery accident ··> EneNews.

Greece: 300 faculties under student occupation, exams suspended, 10,000 students took Athens on Sep 22nd ··> communication[en] and videos[gr/es] at Contra Info.

Italy - EU:

ECB's consuls attack the Working Class in Italy. In a sort of ultimatum, they demand: full privatization of public services in Italy, demolition of the collective bargaining system, removing all remaining job guarantees, firing and/or lowering salaries of public workers, automatic deficit-correction clause to budget, tight control of borrowing by all administrations ··> original text in English at Corriere de la Sera.

Impressive: opera director addresses the public against cuts in cultural spending. Actors and public sing together against a beautiful but lost Italy ··> video at Sare Antifaxista.

Czech Republic: Prague playground sealed off after radiation was detected with advanced wristwatch ··> Prague Monitor.

Spain: Murcia: Mortgage Affected People's Platform is blockading foreclosures and marching on banks. Out of 70 evictions paralyzed by popular action in the Spanish state, 35 (50%) are in that region ··> video and text[es] at YouTube.

Catalonia: thousands demonstrate against Neonazi PxC meeting (which only mustered 150 followers) party, crying 'no person is illegal'. Police identified 120 and arrested two ··> SA[es].

Against fascism in Barcelona

America:

Canada: Ontario: Communist Party protests censorship by public TV before upcoming elections ··> video at PO.

USA:

Superweed explosion threatens Monsanto's heartlands (GMO are a dangerous failure and fraud) ··> France24.

BP not tracing source of new crude spill ··> Florida Oil Spill Law.

According to Arnie Gundersen, everyone in Seattle is breathing five radioactive particles from Fukushima, including plutonium, every day ··> Fukushima Diary.

Honduras: emotive homage to the victims of the dictatorship in the meeting on militarization. Must watch video because the list of names (and photos) of those murdered by the Lobo regime seems to never end ··> LINYM[es].

Asia:

Bahrain: medical staff that attended injured protesters sentenced to 15 years in prison ··> Al Jazeera.

Nepal: the left-wing faction challenges the ruling right-wing (central) faction within the Maoist Party on demobilization, on returning occupied lands, on becoming a mere social-democratic pro-establishment party:

• Maoist Radicals take to the Streets ··> Revolution in South Asia.
  
• Badal denounces 'Great Capitalist Leap' by Maoist central faction ··> Revolution In South Asia.

Torch march against pro-Capitalist turn of Maoists in Nepal

Bangladesh: many young workers affected by silicosis for wearing off jeans with sand (and without protection) ··> BBC.

Sandblasting jeans without protection

Japan:

Parliament President suffers cancer

Some of the worst radioactive hotspots in Tokyo before Parliament, Imperial Palace, TEPCO central offices... ··> Fukushima Diary.

Chernobyl expert: Fukushima is largest delivery of radiation to the Ocean ever seen ··> EneNews.

Fukushima sea contamination by plutonium remains high ··> New Scientist.

Plutonium found in a wide area 45 km around Fukushima Dai Ichi ··> Fukushima Diary.

Kyoto: radiation 10 times higher than Government admits 500km away from Dai Ichi ··> EneNews.

Fukushima city: schoolchildren abused by teachers for rejecting to drink contaminated milk ··> Fukushima Diary. 

Myanmar/Burma: controversial dam suspended in spite of China (probably because of threat of reigniting the Kachin rebellion and the breakup of the fragile multiethnic state) ··> BBC.

Philippines: secret cables reveal that US military exercises and even humanitarian missions were in fact military interventions ··> Revolution in South Asia.

Worker uprise in Bangla-Desh ends up with four dead, hundreds injured

The date for this news is December 13 but I did not know until today (thanks "free media" for keeping us so ill informed). 

The conflict seems to have begun as a protest of workers of Korean textile company Youngone Ltd, demanding the restoration of a food allowance of 250 taka (c. $3.5) withheld by the management when it began paying the minimal salary (they "raised salaries" by 500 taka (per law) but then deducted 250. 

This caused the Korean multinational to close their whole complex, the Korean Export Processing Zone (KEPZ) at the Chittagong harbor, causing factories through the country to stop production. When some 10,000 workers arrived to work and found the industries closed, the riots began. 

Workers clashed with the police in the cities of Chittagong, Dhaka and Narayanganj. Police used live ammunition, killing four people, a textile worker (Ruhi Das, 45), a rickshaw-puller (Ariful Islam) and other two not specified people at the KEPZ. More than 200 people were injured, including 56 police agents, one also shot (not cler by whom). 30 people were arrested.

The most affected city was Chittagong, where workers scattered their fights through the city, bringing it to a halt. They set fire to some vehicles and ransacked 30 factories.

Source: The Daily Star, via Revolution in South Asia.


Update (from Random Pottins):

Union leader, Moshrefa Mishu, was arrested at night and without any warrant by plain clothes policemen, in spite of being not directly related to the riot. He is now being accused, falsely, of connection with a banned islamist group. Relatives have not been able to visit her in jail.

She is now at hospital and still under arrest (and no visits), under humiliating conditions as her guards are policemen (with emphasis in men).

You can sign a petition for her liberation HERE.

That same weekend 25 workers were killed and more than a hundred injured in a factory fire because the emergency doors were locked by the patrons.