John’s Garage Sale

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Selling Out, 


Everything Must Go!





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Walmart – a Life or Death Matter


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In the next few weeks, the Walmart Corporation will help decide if three activists live or die.


A message from the 
 International Labor Rights Forum

See, Walmart relies on cheap subcontractors across the developing world, many of which force workers to toil in unimaginable conditions.

Three Bangladeshis, Kalpona Akter (pictured at right), Babul Akhter, and Aminul Islam, had been fighting to help the workers at some suppliers in their country.

Rather than treat workers fairly, these suppliers have filed false criminal charges against the trio.

The accusations are demonstrably false. For example, the supplier claims that Kalpona and Babul destroyed property on a day when multiple witnesses saw them at a meeting 35 kilometres away.

But so far, that hasn’t mattered. Kalpona, Babul, and Aminul were imprisoned and tortured for their activism. They now await a sham of a trial that can begin as soon as June 1st.  If it doesn’t go well, they could be sentenced to death.  

If Walmart demands that the suppliers drop the charges, the activists will likely go free. But there are only two weeks until the window for intervention closes.

Let’s create a huge uproar that shows Walmart executives that customers around the globe are watching their decision.

Please sign the petition calling on them to demand that false charges be dropped immediately:  


Thanks for taking action,

- Patrick and the Change.org team

VISIT
> International Labor Rights Forum
> Labor is Not a Commodity

Looters Stay Away

‘legal loophole’ would be the single
biggest instance of earthquake-related
looting yet seen
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NO SELLOFF OF CHRISTCHURCH’S PUBLICLY-OWNED ASSETS!


The revelation that all of Christchurch’s publicly-owned trading assets could be in danger of being sold due to a “legal loophole” in the law establishing the new State authority to run the city whilst it is rebuilt after the earthquakes should set alarm bells ringing loudly. If that comes to pass, it would be the single biggest instance of earthquake-related looting yet seen. American writer Naomi Klein coined the phrase “disaster capitalism” in the wake of the Bush Administration’s criminally negligent response to the 2005 Hurricane Katrina catastrophe in New Orleans, where Big Business and its political mouthpieces used the situation as an excuse for an orgy of corporatisation and privatisation. If such disaster capitalism is inflicted on Christchurch, that will be the “third big one” to slam into the city. And it will be the one with the most long term destructive effects.
" flogging off Christchurch’s assets sounds
 like a routine prescription from Dr Brash"
Of course, Government Ministers have said that there is no such intention. The value of a politician’s solemn vow can be gauged from those Act MPs who only days ago publicly declared that Rodney Hide had their undying support as leader. Truth is an elastic concept in politics. And flogging off Christchurch’s assets sounds like a routine prescription from Dr Brash, Act’s new leader and coupmaster. There’s no secret about where he stands on the subject of public assets. And Brash’s ideological soulmate, the Business Roundtable’s Roger Kerr, has already called for the sale of all or some of Christchurch’s assets to pay for the rebuild. CAFCA is sure that it’s purely coincidental that any that were sold would just happen to fall into the hands of the very same transnational corporations that make up a large part of the Business Roundtable. Ever since it branded Christchurch the “People’s Republic of Christchurch” for having the temerity to hang onto its publicly-owned assets (in social housing alone, the Christchurch City Council is the country’s second biggest landlord, after the State) the Business Roundtable and its political mouthpieces has wanted an example made of the city and its assets flogged off.
 
" crack down hard on transnational corporate
 tax dodgers who suck extortionate profits out
 of the country whilst not paying their fair share"
If central or local government is foolish enough to try to go down this path, they will be buying a fight. In 2006 the City Council came a spectacular gutser when public opposition and a shrewd strategic intervention by the Port of Otago thwarted its cunning plan to hock off the Lyttelton Port Company to a Hong Kong transnational corporation.

And if Ministers want ideas on how to finance the massive rebuild, start by implementing the proposal to slap a small earthquake recovery levy on higher income earners. Reverse the tax cuts that were a blatant hand out to the rich. And crack down hard on transnational corporate tax dodgers who suck extortionate profits out of the country whilst not paying their fair share (the likes of the Big Four Australian-owned banks who settled with IRD in December 2009 for $2.2 billion, the biggest tax avoidance case in NZ’s history). There’s no shortage of money in the country – it’s just a question of who has got it, and of ensuring that it stays here to be used for the public benefit.
CAFCA Media Release, Murray Horton. Secretary/Organiser