Russian Xenophobia

Anti-immigrant feeling among ethnic Russians, spurred in part by concerns over Islamist militancy in the Caucuses and the Middle East, has put a spotlight on Muslim migrants from across the region. Around 88 percent of Kyrgyzstan's population is Muslim.

1.5 million Kyrgyz – a fifth of the population – working in Russia. Around 33 percent of Kyrgyzstan's GDP is attributed to remittances from migrant workers in Russia, reflecting a regional dependence on Moscow that has only increased since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. The official number of Kyrgyz migrants has remained roughly static despite the ruble’s decline, but remittances fell to $1.367 billion for the first 11 months of 2014, compared to $1.447 billion for the same period in 2013. Russia’s Federal Migration Service (FMS) puts the number of documented Kyrgyz workers at around half a million, but experts believe at least another million work there without proper permits, mostly in the construction or service industries.

Laws regulating migrant workers in Russia have become increasingly restrictive in recent years. In January, new rules made it more difficult to obtain work permits and easier for the authorities to find and deport undocumented workers. New arrivals have 30 days to register their residence, obtain a certification of their skills for their desired industry, translate their passport into Russian, find medical insurance, pass a medical examination, and pass an exam on Russia’s language, history and laws.  It's a daunting process, and even if you get all your paperwork in order, Russian administration is often unable to cope with the backlog. On 7 April, a migrant worker from Tajikistan died at a processing centre in Moscow after spending two days in line with nearly 5,000 other applicants. Violators are added to a blacklist, a database of migrants set up in January 2013 for those found to be breaking administrative rules in Russia and subject to deportation. Around 60,000 Kyrgyzstan nationals are currently on the list.

The migrants have long been targets of labour exploitation and sexual abuse, and now, in a Russia increasingly tense about terrorism, xenophobic attacks are on the rise. Falling oil prices and international sanctions over the war in Ukraine have taken a heavy toll on the Russian economy. The ruble lost 68 percent of its value against the US dollar in 2014, occasionally trading at less than the Kyrgyzstani som.

Next month as Kyrgyzstan formally joins the EEU, forming a unified economic bloc with Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Armenia. In addition to the dropping of trade tariffs, the accession agreements assure the “free movement of labour” within the union. “This means our migrants will not have to pass this very complicated procedure of obtaining a (visa), and will be on the same level of competition as Russian natives,” said Tatiana Zlobina, a researcher at the American University of Central Asia in Bishkek.

Nurbek Umarov, a researcher with the International Organization for Migration in Bishkek, shares such concerns.

“Labour migration depends on the laws of supply and demand,” he explained. “Because employers will have to employ citizens of the EEU under the same terms as a Russian citizen, it may no longer be profitable for them, so those employers who practised illegal employment in the past may switch their attention to migrants from other countries, say Uzbekistan.”

An estimated 2.2 million Uzbeks work in Russia, and Uzbekistan is not slated to join the EEU. Accession into the new bloc is also unlikely to stem hostility to the Kyrgyz among ethnic Russians.

“Even if some legal protection is available (after accession), the situation is complicated by rising xenophobia in Russia,” said Aida Baijumenova, a researcher with the Kyrgyz rights group Bir Duino who regularly interviews migrant workers in Russia.  “We have found that to the police and many Russians, Uzbeks, Kyrgyz, Tajiks all look the same.”

http://www.irinnews.org/report/101398/hope-and-fear-kyrgyz-migrants-in-russia

Enlightenment?

Buddhist monk U Wirathu condemned human rights rapporteur Yanghee Lee at a public rally on Friday held to denounce a recent U.N. General Assembly vote calling for the Myanmar minority Rohingya Muslims to be granted citizenship in the country.

“Just because you hold a position in the United Nations doesn’t make you an honorable woman. In our country, you are just a whore,” Wirathu told a cheering crowd of several hundred people in Yangon on Friday. “Can this bitch really be from a respectable background?”

Most of Myanmar’s 1.1 million Rohingya Muslims are stateless and live in apartheid-like conditions in Rakhine state in the predominantly Buddhist country. Almost 140,000 Rohingya remain displaced after deadly clashes with ethnic Rakhine Buddhists in 2012.

Guilty of discrimination against the Roma

A high court has ruled that the communities secretary, Eric Pickles, has “unlawfully discriminated” against Romany Gypsies. A judge said both human rights and equality laws were breached by Pickles and his department “calling in” cases which would normally be considered by his planning inspectors.

The judge said Pickles was operating a legally flawed policy of “recovering” for his own consideration appeals by Travellers who claim there are exceptional circumstances for allowing them green belt sites. Mr Justice Gilbart, sitting in London, said an inspectors’ decision was normally received within eight weeks of the end of an inquiry – but it could take six months or more for a decision letter for a called-in case. No attempt had been made by Pickles and his ministers to follow steps required by the 2010 Equality Act to avoid indirect discrimination, and “substantial delays” had occurred in dealing with the appeals in violation of article 6 of the European convention on human rights, said the judge. The judge said Pickles’ department had “coined and developed” a practice in 2013 and 2014 of calling in all, and then a majority, of green belt Traveller cases – most involving Romany Gypsies or Irish Travellers – “which discriminated unlawfully against a racial group”.

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/jan/21/eric-pickles-unlawfu-discrimination-against-romany-gypsies-green-belt-judge-rules

the dream is over

Cuba was once a Spanish-ruled sugar plantation economy, with a largely black workforce, until the Spanish-American War of 1898. Slavery had only been abolished a decade earlier by means of a royal decree issued by the Spanish King in 1886. After independence in 1902 little changed. The population of African descent remained at the bottom of the economic and political ladder and whites at the top, with Mulattoes (of mixed European and African lineage) in between. Cuba's history of racism originated with the colonial Spanish settlers and their subordinated African slaves.
In1891 Cuban author and independence fighter José Martí stated that there is no racism in Cuba because there are no races. He argued that Cuban unity and identity depended on all Cubans identifying as Cubans, instead of racially. White Cubans have often cited Martí's position subsuming race to national unity as an argument that racism is not an issue in Cuba because "we are all Cubans." But the legacy of slavery lingered, and was exacerbated by Cuba's semi-colonial status under U.S. hegemony. Interactions with wealthy, white, prejudiced visitors from the U.S. contributed to social and economic divisions along racial lines. Afro-Cubans endured segregated facilities, discrimination under the guise of eugenics, and  blatant racism at the hands of groups as extreme as the Ku Klux Klan Kubano.
The Castro government achieved more for blacks in fifty years than previous administrations had in the last 400 years. He passed policies to desegregate beaches, parks, work sites and social clubs. He outlawed all forms of legal and overt discrimination, including discrimination in employment and education. Three years into his rule, Fidel Castro declared that the Revolution had eliminated racism, making any further discussion of racial inequalities a taboo subject.

"Racism in Cuba has been concealed and reinforced in part because it isn't talked about. The government hasn't allowed racial prejudice to be debated or confronted politically or culturally, often pretending instead as though it didn't exist" explained Roberto Zurbano

Castro’s policies only addressed issues of unequal access without changing structural biases underlying society. With a new wave of economic changes affecting the country, race and racism are once again becoming important issues in Cuba.

Cuba has now in many ways reverted to what it was prior to the revolution. The country now allows for self-employment and the buying and selling of homes and cars. Small businesses have sprung up everywhere. The much praised health and education systems have suffered declines. Commitment to social justice has lost ground to the need for economic development. The country has moved backward in terms of race relations as well.

Without Soviet sugar subsidies, Cuba's economic development shifted to the growing tourist trade.Tourism once again has become a mainstay of the economy, and foreign capital, from Canada, Spain, and elsewhere has flowed in. The US dollar is again king, fuelling an underground economy. While the tourist industry is currently the most profitable sector because of the availability of US Dollars, it is also the industry with the greatest racial disparity in employment opportunities. Afro-Cubans are often excluded from positions in tourism related jobs, where they could earn tips in hard currencies. They are relegated to poor housing. Afro-Cubans hold only five percent of jobs in the tourist sector.The tourist resorts hire primarily whites, drawing on the structural legacy of racism and the pervasive cultural belief that white is superior. Whites tend to live in more up-market houses, which can easily be converted into paladares (small restaurants run from the home) or bed-and-breakfasts — the most common kind of private business in Cuba. Jobs in the tourist sector require less education and skills, meaning that Afro-Cuban advances in education in the early years of the Revolution no longer translate to economic success.
Most remittances from abroad go to white Cubans. 83.5 percent of Cuban immigrants living in the US identify themselves as whites. Assuming that dollar remittances are evenly distributed among white and non-white exiles and that they stay, roughly, within the same racial group of the sender, then about 680 out of the 800 million dollars that enter the island every year would end up in white hands. Black Cubans have less property and money, and also have to contend with pervasive racism.
In 2000, the Havana Survey found that 77 percent of the self-employed were white, and that these white entrepreneurs were more economically successful in comparison to their Afro-Cuban counterparts. Once again, blacks face disadvantages because they lack the capital in USD from tourism and remittances: it often takes an initial investment.
Zurban writes "It’s true that Cubans still have a strong safety net: most do not pay rent, and education and health care are free. But the economic divergence created two contrasting realities that persist today. The first is that of white Cubans, who have leveraged their resources to enter the new market-driven economy and reap the benefits of a supposedly more open socialism. The other reality is that of the black plurality, which witnessed the demise of the socialist utopia from the island’s least comfortable quarters.”


Taken from
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/24/opinion/sunday/for-blacks-in-cuba-the-revolution-hasnt-begun.html?_r=0
http://cuba.blogspot.com/2011/06/revolutionary-racism-in-cuba.html

immigration

Britons are more fearful about immigration than many other nations.

Almost one in four (23%) said immigration was the most important issue facing the country. The other countries, including the US (9%), Canada (5%), France (8%), Germany (9%), Italy (10%), Holland (4%) and Spain (3%), appeared far less concerned. The survey also found 59% of Britons agreed there were "too many" people living in the country who were not born here, also a much higher figure than the other nations. 47% believed legal immigrants were a burden on social services like schools and hospitals, and 33% said legal immigrants increase crime. About one in four (22%) said only British citizens should have access to UK schools and 25% said only British citizens should have access to healthcare.

However, the survey also showed that 77% of people agreed legal immigrants were hard workers, and 43% said they were integrating well or very well into society - a higher figure than several of the other nations.

Whether Polish plumbers or Chinese cockle-pickers, migrant labour in the UK is undoubtedly higher profile now than it has been for many decades. Should we be surprised by such findings when politicians ever ready to seek the votes of Little-Englanders often speak about the problem of immigrants from abroad coming to this country and causing problems such as housing, medical care and education. The problems facing working people and their families are not caused by immigration or immigrants and will not be solved by the Fortress Britain or a policy of "British Jobs for British Workers". They are caused by capitalism. We face manipulations, lies and exaggerations from the media accounts of immigration and asylum seekers, e.g. in the Thatcher era, with immigrants making up 4 percent of the population, she gave her vision of what made Britain 'Great' – 9 percent felt there were too many immigrants before she expounded compared with 21 percent who admitted to being worried afterwards. The actual state of monetary and housing benefits to immigrants are wildly different from the stories abounding in the media. The estimate of a £200m expense for so-called “health tourism” turned out to be unsupportable, and the real cost is probably far less. Most desperately poor and sick people capable of scraping together the cost of reaching Britain would spend this trying to get well close to home. And with a NHS budget of almost £70bn, the true cost of transnational healthcare pay-avoidance must be comparatively trivial.

The capitalist system is marketed on its promises of equality and freedoms through purchasing power. Prospective immigrants are given rhetoric about how capitalism makes anything possible – if one has money. It is taught in school that capitalist countries are mosaic countries, small units of various cultures co-existing alongside. This view is marketed so that potential immigrants will not have to leave their customs behind and still be able to reap the so-called rewards of capitalist society. In reality, what exists is a melting pot where these cultures are eventually assimilated. The opposite of a mosaic, melting pot, a term with a negative connotation, is often used to describe societies experiencing large-scale immigration from many different countries that seem to “melt” into the existing society. For example, Muslims are being assimilated into Western culture by way of developed capitalism. Only those who assimilate into the capitalist system are able to experience the "freedoms" it promises, but at often cost to their culture. It follows that people who come to developed capitalist countries work to serve the needs of the majority, who are of a different culture, often by forgoing their own so that they might fit in the prevailing market-driven norms. The immigrants who now try to settle in Britain come at the bottom of the social scale, taking the worst houses, accepting the worst conditions. Yet many publicists cannot contain their indignation that they should try to come here at all.

Capitalism needs a reserve army of unemployed, to exert a downward pressure on wages as well as a source of readily-available extra labour-power that can be called upon during the expansion phase of the capitalist economic cycle. The problem for the capitalist class is a potential labour shortage threatens the growth of the economy. However, a labour shortage puts the working class in a strong position and clearly the employers wish to counteract this. All things being equal, a labour shortage causes wages to rise and thus puts workers in a comparatively stronger bargaining position vis à vis overall working conditions. Naturally, our masters will always seek to counteract such a situation by importing (often cheaper, more compliant) workers, which in turn intensifies competition among workers, potentially fermenting xenophobia and racism. This can lead to the government actively recruiting labour from overseas to bridge the gap. Some economists have pointed out that such a policy is likely to put intolerable pressure on public and private housing in terms of provision and surging house prices . In some parts of the UK the influx may well have resulted in increased unemployment for existing workers and appears to be putting a downward pressure on wages in some sectors. For workers fighting over crumbs in lower wage unskilled jobs, the temptation to blame your unemployment or wage level on foreign labour may be strong. But nevertheless such views are false. The blame lies elsewhere. In order to stay profitable, UK employers are demanding cheap labour. In the nineteenth century, capitalists in Britain welcomed many thousands of Irish immigrants, in the belief that they would keep wages down. So some English or Scottish workers may have felt that their pay was less than it might have been, without the competition from these Irish newcomers. From this point of view, then, immigration might be a minus for British workers.

Now the capitalist economy is going through yet another of its inevitable cyclical crises and such economic crises make migrants unwanted. They put politicians under maximum pressure to keep them out to minimise state expenditure

We must not blame another worker for our poverty, whether migrant or not, whether illegal or legal.Those travelling long distances through fear or desperation are people no different to ourselves. Instead of falling for the divide and rule tactics which weaken us all, workers should recognise who their real enemy is and work together to defeat the system that enslaves us all.

Unequal

A report from the Center for American Progress emphasized that minorities have had a harder struggle through the recession than the white population.

UNEMPLOYMENT: Unemployment stands at nearly 16 percent among blacks, about 9 percent for whites and 13 percent for Latinos.

PAY GAP: As of the third quarter of 2010, African Americans’ usual median weekly earnings were $623 in 2009 dollars; Latinos earned $532. In comparison, whites made $774 each week, while Asians earned $871.

POVERTY: In 2009, 25.3 percent of Latino families and 25. 8 percent of African-American families lived below the poverty line. Poverty rates were 9.4 percent among white Americans and 12.5 percent among Asian Americans.

HOMEOWNERSHIP: Nearly 75 percent of whites own homes, compared with 45 percent of blacks and 47 percent of Latinos.

HEALTH CARE: In 2009, 12.0 percent of white Americans lacked health insurance, compared with 21 percent of African Americans; 32.4 percent of Latinos, and 17.2 percent of Asian Americans.

Black American Poverty

We read that the wealth gap between whites and African Americans has expanded dramatically. A new study by Brandeis University in Massachusetts Institute on Assets and Social Policy reveals that income equality does not always lead to wealth equality when it comes to race. The wealth gap between black and white families and individuals being tracked in the study more than quadrupled over the course of a generation, and that the middle-income white families in the study accumulated a higher net worth than high-income African-Americans.

The escalating gap, according to the study researchers, was largely caused the fact that white families have historically had more wealth to pass down. Although many black families have moved up to better-paying jobs, they begin with fewer assets, such as inheritance, on which to build wealth. They are also more likely to have gone into debt to pay for university loans.

"About one in every four white families inherit money, and their average inheritance is $10,000" said Thomas Shapiro, director of the IASP and author of "The Hidden Cost of Being African American: How Wealth Perpetuates Inequality." "That provides a huge head start. Less than 8 percent of African-American families inherit wealth, and when they do, the average inheritance is $900. Even when African Americans do everything right - get an education and work hard at well-paying jobs - they cannot achieve the wealth of their white peers in the workforce, and that translates into very different life chances”

White families typically have assets worth $100,000 (£69,000), up from $22,000 in the mid-1980s. African-American families' assets stand at just $5,000, up from around $2,000. A quarter of black families have no assets at all.Only one in 10 African-Americans owns any shares. A third do not have a pension plan, and among those who do the value is on average a fifth of plans held by whites.In 1984, high-income black Americans had more assets than middle-income whites. That is no longer true. "African-Americans' wealth essentially flatlined."

The report attributes part of the cause to the "powerful role of persistent discrimination in housing, credit and labour markets. African-Americans and Hispanics were at least twice as likely to receive high-cost home mortgages as whites with similar incomes. African-Americans, before the 1960s, first by law and then by custom, were not really allowed to own businesses. They had very little access to credit. There was a very low artificial ceiling on the wealth that could be accumulated. Hence there was very little, if anything, that could be passed along to help their children get to college, to help their children buy their first homes, or as an inheritance when they die" said Shapiro. "In African-American families there is a much larger extended network of kin as well as other obligations. From other work we've done we know that there's more call on the resources of relatively well-off African-American families; that they lend money that's not given back; they help cousins go to school. They help brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, with all kinds of legal and family problems".

Class is determined, not by the size of income or colour of skin but by their ownership or non-ownership of the means of production and distribution. Today, the richest 1% of the US population owns close to 40% of its wealth. The top 25% of US households own 87%.

The fact that these are examples of the lower strata of working class existence should not obscure the fact that poverty, in some measure, is a problem for the entire class. The worst poverty is usually suffered by those who for some reason - unemployment, old age, sickness are unable to get a job and a decent wage. Or as this report explains , an unwelcomed legacy of discrimination and racism from the past. History will affect peoples chances in life. Chronic poverty can be passed on from generation to generation

Another immigration myth debunked

There is no evidence that new migrants are jumping the queue for council and housing association homes to the detriment of any other group, including white families, according to new research.

The study shows that out of the 10.1 million council and housing association tenants in Britain, 9 million are UK-born and just over 1 million were born outside the country. It adds that only 183,300 - less than 2% - of tenants arrived in Britain in the last five years and most of the 1 million are long-settled migrants who have been here for years and may have become British citizens.
The analysis of housing for new migrants to the UK who have arrived over the last five years, including those from Poland and other east European countries, shows 60% living in private rented accommodation, 18% owner-occupiers and only 11% allocated to social housing.

Most new migrants in the past five years, particularly those from the eight east European countries which joined the EU in 2004, are not eligible for social housing unless they have been resident in the UK and in work for at least 12 months. Any application they make must meet the same criteria of need as UK-born applicants. According to the latest figures for 170,263 lettings in the social housing sector in 2006-07 in England, where the nationality of the named tenant was collected, less than 5% went to foreign nationals and less than 1% went to new migrants from eastern Europe.

A poll of 66 housing managers across Britain, of whom 74% said they believed that migrants had "not very much" or "no" impact on increased demand for housing in the social rented sector, while 66% said they had increased pressure on private rented accommodation.

Racism in Immigration Detention Centres

Widespread racism was exposed inside Britain's immigration removal centres last night in an official report.
The Borders and Immigration Agency (BIA) said its detainees had been called "black bastards", "donkeys" and "animals" and described the atmosphere as "distressing and turbulent" at one centre and "tense" at another.

It launched its official audit of racism - published yesterday - after a TV documentary broadcast in 2005 uncovered racist abuse at the Oakington removal centre in Cambridgeshire.

The agency found the worst racism at Harmondsworth, a large centre near Heathrow .
"Regular taunting of detainees by some officers goes unchallenged," the BIA report found. Repeated patterns of alleged racist incidents were missed by the in-house investigation process, it added. There were even "staff on staff" racial problems at Harmondsworth between colleagues

At Scotland's only centre, Dungavel in Strathaven, South Lanarkshire some residents felt they were denied access to the kitchen "as a result of bias or the racist attitude of staff".

Ex-prisoners awaiting deportation are filling many of the UK's other nine removal centres. At one, Colnbrook, which, like Harmondsworth, is near Heathrow, they told auditors they would rather be in jail than in immigration detention.

Health Racism

Emergency room doctors are prescribing strong narcotics more often to patients who complain of pain, but minorities are less likely to get them than whites, a new study finds.

Even for the severe pain of kidney stones, minorities were prescribed narcotics such as oxycodone and morphine less frequently than whites. Minorities were slightly more likely than whites to get aspirin, ibuprofen and similar drugs for pain. The analysis of more than 150,000 emergency room visits over 13 years found differences in prescribing by race in both urban and rural hospitals, in all U.S. regions and for every type of pain.

Linda Simoni-Wastila of the University of Maryland, Baltimore, School of Pharmacy said the race gap finding may reveal some doctors' suspicions that minority patients could be drug abusers lying about pain to get narcotics. The irony, she said, is that blacks are the least likely group to abuse prescription drugs.

"If anybody argues they have no social biases that sway clinical practice, they have not been thoughtful about the issue or they're not being honest with themselves," said Dr. Thomas L. Fisher, an emergency room doctor at the University of Chicago Medical Center

The Roma - Europe's poor of the poor

Further to an earlier blog here , Europe's roughly 10 million Roma remain the poorest of the poor, often migrating abroad in search of work .

The Czech Republic guilty of discriminating against Roma children by placing them in special schools for the mentally handicapped. In Slovakia at least 90% of Roma children attend special schools for the mentally retarded. In Hungary, several local courts have ruled in favour of Roma children who sued the state for discrimination, for placing them in special schools. In Romania and Bulgaria up to one-third of Roma children were not in school, a proportion which reaches 80% in Bosnia-Hercegovina. A report from Amnesty International criticised shortcomings in primary education in Slovenia, Bosnia-Hercegovina and Croatia which it said "deprive Romani children of the chance of fulfilling their true potential".

"Although a lot of improvements have been made in the education system, the level of illiteracy in the Roma community is still high and 35-40% of Roma children don't have access to school," Magda Matache, executive director for Romani Criss, a Roma human rights group says

About one million Roma children "remain invisible" in South-East Europe, without documents or adequate healthcare, a Unicef report says. 50,000 Roma children live as refugees in Germany.

The Roma suffer three fold-prejudice in the UK. Firstly because they are Gypsies, secondly because they are often asylum seekers or refugees and thirdly because many are Romanian.

The Romanian author Mircea Cartarescu points out that it was the Romanians who forced the Roma into a life of misery and delinquency - by enslaving them.

"For centuries they could be bought and sold, families were torn apart, children taken from their mothers, women separated from their men. The young women were generally raped by their owners and the 'flock of crows', as they were called, was the target of general contempt and discrimination. One of the voivodes, or provincial governors, used to have them climb trees and then shot them down with arrows. He called it crow-hunting. Tied to one place and kept like animals, the gypsies multiplied more quickly in the Romanian principalities than anywhere else in Europe. Therefore we only have ourselves to blame for creating the gypsy problem. It is our historical guilt. ... We are appalled when other countries perceive us as a nation of criminals, but we see the gypsies in exactly the same way." he said

The American Dream - Whites Only

Black Americans are failing to climb the social ladder, while a worrying number born into the middle classes are now actually poorer than their parents, according to a study .

The report found blacks were missing out on a cherished American dream that their children will be economically better off.

"Children from middle- and upper middle-class black families experience a generational drop in income that is in sharp contrast to the traditional American expectation that each generation will do better than the one that came before it,"

Two out of three Americans who were children in 1968 grow up to have higher income than their parentsbut less than a third of black children born in the middle classes do better financially than their parents.
Being born into a financially secure home is no guarantee of dying in one, with blacks enjoying significantly less economic protection than white peers .

"A startling 45 percent of black children whose parents were solidly middle income end up falling to the bottom income quintile, while only 16 percent of white children born to parents in the middle make this descent,"

Median black family incomes in 2004 were $35,000, compared with $60,000 for whites of similar age, and almost one-quarter of blacks live below federally defined poverty lines, three times more than whites. There has been the decline in the relative economic well-being of black men , which got worse between 1974 and 2004. In fact, black men now in their 30s earn roughly 12 percent less than their fathers' generation.

"In terms of absolute, relative and integrated mobility measures, white children have substantially more upward mobility than black children of comparable incomes,"

When will it ever end ?

I have previously drawn attention to the plight of the Australian Aborigines here and celebrated one of their rare victories here . The recent racist plans from Howard left such a bad taste in my mouth that i refrained from commenting . A socialist view on them can be found at the Official SPGB Blog .

But I now read that the Australian government are now deploying troops to be stationed in the Northern Territories outback to enforce Howard's crack-down . The first soldiers will start arriving in remote desert settlements in the sparsely populated Northern Territory starting Wednesday, backed up by police, social workers, and government officials. One of the 60 communities to which troops and police reinforcements will be deployed is Mutitjulu, located in the shadow of Uluru, also called Ayers Rock.

"I fear there will be another case of Stolen Generation children because they will be taken away from their mothers and fathers and aunties and uncles," said Aborigine Barbara Swan from the Tangangera Council in Alice Springs . The Stolen Generation refers to the forced removal of Aboriginal children from remote communities so they could be brought up in white homes. The failed assimilation policy ran for decades until the late 1960s. The movie Rabbit-Proof Fence depicts true events of those legally kidnapped youngsters .

"We believe that this government is using child sexual abuse as the Trojan horse to resume total control of our lands," said Pat Turner, who represents 13 central Australian community groups

Howard said he sent soldiers to Afghanistan to save Afghans from Afghans , troops to Iraq to save Iraqis from Iraqis , now he sends the army to save Austrialian Aborigines from Australian Aborigines . It is no wonder we all question the sincerity of his motives .

The Blood and The Cross

From Reuters report :-

Outraged Indian leaders in Brazil said on Monday they were offended by Pope Benedict's "arrogant and disrespectful" comments that the Roman Catholic Church had purified them and they had welcomed the arrival of European priests at the time of the conquest as they were "silently longing" for Christianity.

Millions of tribal Indians are believed to have died as a result of European colonization backed by the Church since Columbus landed in the Americas in 1492, through slaughter, disease or enslavement. Priests blessed conquistadors as they waged war on the indigenous peoples.
Many Indians today struggle for survival, stripped of their traditional ways of life and excluded from society.

"The state used the Church to do the dirty work in colonizing the Indians..." said Dionito Jose de Souza a leader of the Makuxi tribe in northern Roraima state.


"It's arrogant and disrespectful to consider our cultural heritage secondary to theirs," said Jecinaldo Satere Mawe, chief coordinator of the Amazon Indian group Coiab.

"We repudiate the Pope's comments," said SandroTuxa who heads the movement of northeastern tribes. . "To say the cultural decimation of our people represents a purification is offensive, and frankly, frightening."

Even the Catholic Church's own Indian advocacy group in Brazil, known as Cimi, distanced itself from the Pope. "The Pope doesn't understand the reality of the Indians here, his statement was wrong and indefensible." Cimi advisor Father Paulo Suess told Reuters.

From the BBC :-

Indigenous leaders in Brazil have reacted angrily to Pope Benedict's comments that their predecessors had willingly converted to Christianity 500 years ago . The BBC's Emilio San Pedro said the Pope had said the Christianisation of the region had not involved an alienation of the pre-Colombian cultures. The BBC correspondent said Pope Benedict also made no mention of the violent history that followed or the documented decimation of native cultures in favour of the Christian model Conquistadores and other Europeans colonisers.

One law for one , another law for another

Although all Black, Hispanic and white drivers are equally likely to be pulled over by police in America , it was the blacks and Hispanics who were much more likely to be searched and arrested, a federal study found . And that the police were much more likely to threaten or use force against blacks and Hispanics than against whites in any encounter, whether at a traffic stop or elsewhere, according to the Justice Department. The conclusion is consistent with those found in a similar study of police-public contacts in 2002 .

Traffic stops are the most frequent way police interact with the public, accounting for 41 percent of all contacts. An estimated 17.8 million drivers were stopped in 2005.

Blacks (9.5 percent) and Hispanics (8.8 percent) were much more likely to be searched than whites (3.6 percent).

Blacks (4.5 percent) were more than twice as likely as whites (2.1 percent) to be arrested. Hispanic drivers were arrested 3.1 percent of the time.

Blacks (4.4 percent) and Hispanics (2.3 percent) were more likely than whites (1.2 percent) to be subjected to force or the threat of force by police officers. People interviewed described police hitting, kicking, pushing, grabbing, pointing a gun or spraying pepper spray at them or threatening to do so. More than four out of five felt the force used was excessive

The times they are a-changing ...

Students of Turner County High School started what they hope will become a new tradition: Black and white students attended the prom together for the first time on Saturday.
In previous years, parents had organized private, segregated dances for students of the school in rural Ashburn, Georgia, 160 miles south of Atlanta.

But this year's upperclassmen -- 213 students total --voted to have just one official prom. Another tradition that ended this year -- having two separate homecoming queens. In the past, two queens were chosen -- one white, one black.

"Whites always come to this one and blacks always go to this one," said Lacey Adkinson, a 14-year-old freshman at the school of 455 students -- 55 percent black, 43 percent white "It's always been a tradition since my daddy was in school to have the segregated ones, and this year we're finally getting to try something new"

"It's been a dream of all of ours," Senior Class President James Hall said. "It was fitting already because we are breaking away from the past traditions here in Turner County School"

But needless to say there were those who still hanker for the good ol' days

"If they're not coming tonight it's because either they had to work and they couldn't get out of it or because their parents are still having an issue because they grew up in south Georgia," said Cheryl Nichols, 18, who attended the dance . "I've asked, 'Why can't you come?' and they're like, 'My mommy and daddy -- they don't agree with being with the colored people,' which I think is crazy," .

"There is a time and season for all things, and right now it's time for Turner County to make a change." said Valerie McKellar .

Organise and resist

In our companion blog Socialist Courier we have referred to Standard Life's proposals to downgrade the pension rights of its existing workers . Today , the Herald has an update on how it is now being resisted .

Six hundred employees of the non-unionised Standard Life attended packed meetings in Edinburgh yesterday organised by trade union Amicus which pledged to fight plans to cut pension rights.

It displays the need for workers to organise independently in real trade unions and not to rely on those phony docile staff associations that Standard Life management prefer to represent its employees and manipulate .

And here is example of the standard of Standard Life's bosses . Trevor Matthews , its chief executive , has been forced to apologise for racist language .

When asked why those proposals for pension cuts were buried in a one sentenced reference on Page 126 of the De-Mutualisation prospectus , Mr Matthews said: "That's the n****r in the woodpile." A formal complaint was made to the company, understood to be from a white member of staff who has a black spouse.