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Latest Greece travel advises:

You might have heard that Greece is a beautiful country to visit with delicious food and people with great hospitality. Be careful: this is not the whole truth. The reality for hundreds of thousands of visitors is completely different. There is a general threat of human rights’ violations. Expatriates and visitors, who cross the Greek borders, can be departed or transferred in detention centres for 2–4 months or longer. If and when these visitors are released, they are forced to work in agriculture, local industry, organized crime, or as street salesmen, without documents or any civil rights whatsoever. Visitors of Greece are warned about abuse, intolerance, hatred, slander and indiscriminate violence by the Greek State…

Statemant of MASA's local group Zagreb regarding March the 2nd protests.

In these last few days, a series of protests took place in Zagreb, Croatia’s capital city. While the first two were marked by senseless violence and the emergence of Ivan Pernar, a political jester anonymous until recently, on the Croatian political scene, the third protest (held on the 28th of February) was a spontaneous expression of popular discontent. Even though it was organised by Pernar, the protest marginalised the role of its self-proclaimed “leader” and surprised many with its high level of self-organisation.

At the 25th and 26th of february the first federal day of action of the FAU-TAA against the building and gardening supplies store OBI took place. The FAU is participating as the german section of the IWA - international workers association - supporting the polish anarchosyndicalists of ZSP in working-struggle. The ZSP was calling for action against OBI - and asked the FAU specially as the headquarter of OBI is located in germany.

Reason was the conflict caused by some leaders of OBI in several polish cities, who were bullying, threatening and started work-related repression against workers, who started ZSP side groups. One centre for the conflict was Krakow with its two OBI-shops. After first actions against OBI in germany took place allready two weeks ago ( http://de.indymedia.org/2011/02/300565.shtml), the campaign is starting to get dynamics now. (full article in german

see: http://de.indymedia.org/2011/02/301385.shtml)

Actions took place in Freiburg, Bonn, Hamburg, Berlin and Rüsselsheim (for pictures see the indymedia-article)

Thursday, January 27, 2011:

THE GREEK STATE TORTURES HUNGER STRIKERS

On Thursday, the 27th of January, the 237 migrant workers who were staying at an unheated, empty and unused part of the Faculty of Law at the University of Athens, still under restorative construction, were ordered to leave the place. They had started a hunger strike two days before, on Tuesday the 25th, demanding the legalization of all migrants in Greece, and had made the place of the hunger strike known days before beginning their fasting struggle, both to the University rector and the student union.

From 5pm onwards, dozens of special force police units blocked all access to the building of the Law School where the migrants were staying, with three consecutive rows of fully armed guards. Under Greek law, and due to a tradition of struggles, university premises enjoy 'asylum' and are off limits to police unless they are specifically invited by university authorities or when a serious crime is being committed. Here, the serious crime was sleeping in a building site and risking one’s own life for the right everyone deserves – the right to be recognized as an existing person, to live and work like everybody else.

In other words, after an orgy of orchestrated media propaganda the day before, that disclosed the fact that the migrants are on a hunger strike and emphasized their illegal status, on Thursday the university asylum was abolished in order to address the serious crime of dignity. (The university rector obviously chose the side of the reactionary bloc of fascists, the media and the government.) Then the torture of the hunger strikers began. Two Attorney Generals escorted by police who had entered the Law School, told representatives of the hunger strikers that all strikers should leave immediately and be transferred in police vans to another private building designated by the government. While the hunger strikers felt deeply offended, and had not imagined that anyone would dare move them around in the condition they were in, they held firm to their terms for leaving the building: They asked for the riot police to let the gathered demonstrators approach the building, so that the strikers join the solidarity demo and lead it towards the new location.

It looks like the Greek police and politicians’ CIA training and seminars on exhausting the opponent are paying off. For nine hours the strikers were being threatened, they were offered lies, fake deals and promises the authorities kept breaking, a ‘negotiation technique’ that aimed at prolonging the process for as long as possible, so that the solidarity demo would disperse and the strikers become more disheartened. One hunger striker tried to kill himself by jumping off the building and was stopped by his comrades. The pressure was enormous, and most strikers did not know exactly what was going on.

The strikers were finally left to exit the Law School building with a solidarity group in the small hours of the night. Even after all this suffering, they carried their bags and blankets with their heads held high, and marched briskly the empty streets of Athens shouting slogans of victory. The sleepless migrants were taken to some mansion, owned by a businessman who is a friend of the minister of education and other MPs. All eight rooms of the mansion were locked. The heating was off and the building was freezing. The toilets were inoperative and filled with luxury furniture that had been removed from the corridors. There was no water. Around half of the hunger strikers were allowed to lie on the floor of the corridors and the rest were left outside on the lawn in front of the building. At 6 o’clock in the morning of a particularly cold day, it started raining. 80 hunger strikers that had been left outside to rest under the winter sky, were transferred, by a small solidarity group that was staying with them for protection, to a social centre nearby.

on Thursday, the 27th of January

-237 hunger strikers were terrorized by special police forces with bullet-proof vests and heavy weapons

-237 hunger strikers had to endure 9 hours of meaningless negotiations

-80 hunger strikers were left sleepless in a yard for a whole night in cold and rainy weather, 157 were amassed in the corridors of the first floor of a businessman’s mansion with no toilets or water

The actions of the Greek government and the police, with the help of the media, transgressed every moral law. They showed no respect to the university asylum, but, most importantly, they showed no respect to the sacred figure of the hunger striker, who, in claiming life and dignity, only has his own life and dignity to offer.

Open Initiative of Solidarity to the 300 Migrant Hunger Strikers - Thessaloniki

An immigrant who was spending the night together with 20 more under a bridge on the highway to Igoumenitsa was shot and injured. The weapon used was an air-gun and the immigrant suffered light injuries in his face.

On November 10, 2010, near a gas station on the national road connecting Ioannina and Igoumenitsa, a racist opened fire against a group of 5 immigrants. A 23-years-old Kurd from Iraq was injured in his genitals.

http://clandestinenglish.wordpress.com/2011/01/12/greece-immigrant-shot-...

At the beginning of 1995, one part of USI (which was based in the city of Rome) tried to lead USI into an organization called ARCA-USAE (linked to a coordination of European unions) together with other Italian unions, both alternative as well as corporate. The ARCA project lasted a few years and in the end failed due to internal power struggles.

The majority of USI at that time objected to joining ARCA, conscious that this would mean ending the identity of USI and its participation in the IWA.

This is the first general strike in Portugal for the last 22 years and that alone should shed some light over the social situation in this country. In fact, social conflictuality in Portugal is quite low and the number of strikes has actually been falling for the past thirty years, despite the continuously worsening situation of the Portuguese working class. Unionization rates tend to fall as well, as the two large Portuguese party-run Trade Unions serve more to appease and stall conflicts than to fight exploitation and that hasn't gone unnoticed.
Portuguese society has gone trough considerable changes for the past half-century, going from a rapid industrialization starting in the 1960's, fueled mostly by the influx of foreign capital, from which a more combative and organized working-class would emerge, to an equally rapid de-industrialization, as cheaper sources of labor-force would be found in Eastern Europe and Asia. Portuguese economy nowadays is dominated by small, inefficient services companies, where workers have become more isolated from one another, have less traditions of struggle, are generally on precarious terms, and are paid those miserable wages that make possible for such companies to survive. The whole system has been in an acute state of crisis for the past 10 years and workers have been its first victims.

Workers Solidarity Alliance Statement in Support of

the Recent and Ongoing Prisoners Strike in Georgia

December 13, 2010

We express our utmost support and solidarity to all of the prisoners in Georgia who have been on strike for the past three days, refusing to leave their cells to work or perform any prisoner-related duties assigned them by the prison. The strike is astounding in more than one way, perhaps the most important of which is that it has broken the racial boundaries that structure prisons. Black, white, and hispanic prisoners are uniting together to demand the following:

Report by John Beauchamp

The boycott, which is promoted by demos called “Food not Votes”, is a weekly event in the city’s southern Podgorze district aimed at getting through to residents.

Members of the Anarchist Federation believe that the democracy we see in local towns across Poland is a sham, and want a more direct form of government. Piotr Malinowski from the Krakow branch of the Anarchist Federation talks to Polish Radio about the demos.

http://www.thenews.pl/radio/newsfrompoland/artykul144466.html

The invitation which called out by Animal Liberation Initiative, one month before "massacre days", produced a pervasive effect. The activists who took the road with this slogan: "We throwed a stone to the sea, it created five circular ripples, now, it's time to create a storm", staged tens of protests against the massacre and cruelty in many districts of Istanbul and Izmir. They said these with their writings: in fact, the sacrificial ritual is not an Eid -the feast-, it's a massacre and cruelty. They damaged and destroyed hundreds of pancartes, banners and bill posters about the Feast of the Sacrifice. Those destroyed stuffs had placarded by offical corporations, religious and militarist NGO's. The activists stuck thousands of stickers to the streets. While the action was influencing, a few dissident media published action news.

The current popularity of the movement exceeds strict pension reform: everyone knows that it is one more attack more against our lives and, all combined with glaring inequality (the rich, bankers and bosses never so well protected by the State), it is the straw that broke the camel's back.

The pension problem is a small part of the whole and we must reject the politics of austerity completely because those in power may well drop a few crumbs on pensions but replicate these politics elsewhere.

Life expectancy has increased, boosting the percentage of pensioners from 20% in 1960 to 50% in 2050. But the number of people paying into the pension system has grown steadily right up to the year 2010. Median productivity grew by a whooping 500% from 1960 to 2010. If that productivity is harnessed one worker in 2010 can pay the pension of one retiree just as easily as s/he could pay 20% of someone’s pension in 1960. One problem is that, even according to official figures, 23% of the young people have no jobs and can contribute nothing to anyone’s pension.

A group of orderlies from a hospital in Starachowice have been protesting for a week over plans to outsource their work to a private firm. About 30 people have been taking part in the protest which has included wearing black shirts to work, blocking the offices of the director of the hospital, taking off work to protest and holding a hunger strike.

The orderlies have gathered about 3000 signatures on a petition supporting them and have demanded the dismisal of the director of the hospital. All the unions functioning in the hospital support the protest and postulates of the workers.

An outside firm is to take on 70 workers who have been hospital employees starting Nov. 1. The new contracts only offer a two-year employment guarantee and the firm will be hiring people also on a temporary basis. The workers would like to stay in permanent employment and warn that the outsourcing of workers means more temps who may not be properly trained, overwork and a probable decline in the quality of services correspondent to the declining work conditions.

We are squatters from the Netherlands. We are asking you to join us in our struggle against the squatting prohibition. We will have two demonstrations this week, on 1st October in Amsterdam and 2nd October in Nijmegen. This week mayor of Amsterdam said that in coming months 200 squats will be evicted in the city!!! If you can not come to the Netherlands please organize a protests or action in your place against the squatting prohibition that starts on 1st October 2010.

Demo in Amsterdam on 1st October:
http://indymedia.nl/nl/2010/09/69650.shtml

Demo in Nijmegen on 2nd October (english text in the second comment):
http://indymedia.nl/nl/2010/09/69622.shtml

// Joint Communiqué MLC-GALSIC (Cuban Libertarian Movement – Support Group for Libertarians and Independent Sindicalists of Cuba)

On September 13, the newspaper Granma, official voice of the Cuban Communist Party published a communiqué (1) by the Central de Trabajadores de Cuba (CTC - Cuba’s only union) in which the official labor union announces, justifies and defends the labor adjustment measures the Cuban government has implemented, “following the process of modernizing the economic model and the projections for the economy for the 2011-2015 period” which foresees for the coming year “a reduction of over 500,000 workers from the state sector and their transfer to the private sector”.

The reply (not by chance) of Fidel Castro to an American journalist’s question, admitting that “the Cuban model doesn’t work, even in Cuba” and the shameful and cynical pronouncement by the CTC announcing, justifying and defending the firing of half a million Cuban workers – a measure decided unilaterally by the government of President-General Raúl Castro – clearly show that the Castro brothers are saying goodbye to socialism but not to power, and that in order to continue in power they are ready to implement an economic policy of naked capitalism.