Saturday, June 16, 2018

Preparing for the Global Network conference in Oxford, England

To  Global Network  

Preparing for the GN conference in Oxford....


 
During the past few weeks I've been preparing for our Global Network annual conference that this year (our 26th) will be held in Oxford, England on June 22-24.  There are always a million small details that need to be checked off my list.  Thankfully our hosts the Oxfordshire Peace Campaign, GN board member Lindis Percy, and our organization's board convener Dave Webb (who also serves as the chair of the UK's Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament) are doing most of the heavy lifting.

Mary Beth, GN board member Will Griffin and I will arrive in London on June 16.  We'll take a train north to Yorkshire where Dave will take us to his home in Leeds.  Then over the ensuing days he's arranged four talks for us including one in Edinburgh, Scotland.  Then on June 22 we'll head back south to Oxford for the conference.  You can see the event program here

Most of our board members have been with the organization a long time.  In various countries around the world the Pentagon has established downlink receiving stations and radars that work with military satellites which guide and direct all of their war making operations.  The pirates of old have graduated to space technology and are sitting on the buried taxpayers treasure chest that will pay for all this expensive Star Wars in the making.

Groups from England, Sweden, Australia, Japan, South Korea, Norway, Diego Garcia, Hawaii, New Zealand, and throughout the US have long been engaged in educating the public about the role a particular Pentagon (US Space Command) high-tech facility in their community plays in the overall design for 'Full Spectrum Dominance'.

It's a bit of a specialized field but in a way its clear as a bell and easy to understand.  The aerospace industry sees space as a lucrative new market.  Have the taxpayers cover the many years of research, development, and testing costs and then once 'ready to use' the process is privatized.  So now that the industry sees it can make huge profits by militarizing and colonizing space they are ready to 'take the risks'.  In the end the taxpayers get Tang, Velcro, tin foil and a big slice out of their weekly pay check to pay for it.  And the industry is coming for Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare next.

The spirit of our folks that will meet in Oxford is exciting to experience.  They all have a steady eye on the Star Wars project - they see the dangers and the costs - but they are realistic about our immediate chance to impact Washington decision making.  The GN's basic strategy from the start has been to help translate this space issue to the public in a meaningful way.  We need an expanded consciousness and bigger constituency around the space issue before we can make much headway in the colonial capitals.  
  • J. Narayana Rao from India is one of our best leaders.  He works hard at spreading the space issue message all over his country and to Nepal, Mauritius, France, Japan, and Vietnam among others.  All these nations are sending representatives to Oxford except Nepal.  There in Kathmandu our newest affiliate has been denied two years in a row the right to attend a GN annual conference.  Last year when we met in Huntsville, Alabama (Redstone Arsenal) our friends in Nepal were all denied entry Visas by the US and this year England is doing the same.  Nepal has gone commie and must be isolated.
  • Sung-Hee Choi from South Korea is part of the international team in Gangjeong village on Jeju Island, South Korea.  She brought the issue of Jeju to the GN long ago and helped lead us into greater understanding and action around the Asia-Pacific region.  She will be in Oxford as well.
  • Lindis Percy from North Yorkshire is a dedicated resister of American military bases in England. She's been arrested many times at the US NSA spy base and downlink station called Menwith Hill and at other American bases across her colonized country. She often holds American flags with anti-base messages painted on them.  Lindis came out of the Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp days in the early 1980's when the UK women came on fire in opposition to US nuclear weapons deployments at an Army base.  The women set up full-time occupation and eventually due to persistent protests all across Europe the US had to pull their nukes out of England, Italy and Germany. 

  • Retired economics professor Atsushi Fujioka from Kyoto, Japan is a long-time board member.  He is very active with protests opposing the recent deployment of a Pentagon 'missile defense' radar in his prefecture.  The radar is aimed at China and Russia and would guide a US launch of a 'missile defense shield' to its target after a first-strike attack.
  • Dave Webb takes care of the GN's web site and runs our meetings with patience and gentleness.  He makes excellent presentations with images to illustrate how the entire US-NATO space warfare technology system all fits together - with Washington at the tip of the spear.  
  • Agneta Norberg in Stockholm, Sweden is a tireless worker educating the world about how the Scandinavian region is being taken over by US-NATO military operations and new bases.  The bases and the constant military exercises aimed at Russia have become a US-NATO staging platform for war.  Agneta gets arrested and talks to people everywhere she goes.  She is a leader with fierce determination.  See a recent documentary about her life here
  • Iraq and Afghanistan war veteran Will Griffin will do some filming during the conference and make short videos afterwards sharing the spirit and story of the event.

I am lucky to work with such fine and dedicated people.  As always it will be good to see them all again.

We hope each of you will find some way to help take the money away from the aerospace industry.  Growing global poverty and the coming reality of climate change require that we dump the Star Wars plans in the dust bin of history.

Bruce K. Gagnon
Coordinator
Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space
PO Box 652
Brunswick, ME 04011
(207) 443-9502
http://www.space4peace.org 
http://space4peace.blogspot.com  (blog)

Thank God men cannot fly, and lay waste the sky as well as the earth. - Henry David Thoreau

PLEASE OPPOSE the creation of a Factory Farm Fish project in Belfast, Maine .

To  Occupy Maine  
 

Organic Consumers Association
View This Email On the Web

The World’s Largest Land-Based Salmon Factory Farm? In Maine?

Dear Ann,
A Norway-based company wants to build a 40-acre land-based salmon factory farm, in Belfast, Maine. And Belfast city officials are keen to green light the $450 - $550-million project.

But a group of local citizens—Local Citizens for SMART Growth—have a lot of questions about whether the project is good for the environment, good for their city, or good for the state of Maine.

Organic Consumers Association supports the local Belfast citizens' effort to put the brakes on this project. We encourage local officials to explore alternative businesses that are ecologically, economically and socially better for Belfast and the surrounding region.

Want to help keep Nordic Aquafarms (NAF) factory farm out of Maine? Sign up here! We need help with community and media outreach, fundraising, event-planning and more. You don't have to live in Belfast to help organize against this project.

Want to learn more? Attend the next meeting on Thursday, June 14, 6:30 p.m. at the Ecovillage Common House (reddish building), 25 Village Rd., Belfast. Local Citizens for Smart Growth will host an organizing meeting.

Are we getting the whole truth about the NAF factory farm?

Nordic Aquafarms CEO Erik Heim has been making the rounds, trying to win over public sentiment. But many opponents don’t think Heim is giving them straight answers. As Belfast columnist Lawrence Reichard wrote, in the Republican Journal:
In promotional material, Nordic says the facility will have no "adverse environmental impacts." False. Fish produce feces, and Nordic would produce 66,000,000 pounds of fish per year - that's a lot of feces. Nordic says most of that might become fertilizer - might. But the rest will go into Belfast Bay, and that is an adverse environmental impact. Fish feces produces nitrogen and phosphorus, which cause algae blooms and oxygen deprivation for all marine life.
In a follow-up column, Reichard wrote:
Nordic's U.S. operations—which are so far only in Belfast—are incorporated in Delaware. Why would a corporation doing U.S. business only in Maine incorporate in Delaware? Corporations register in Delaware because Delaware shields corporations from liability more than other states. Is Nordic expecting liability problems? At the Feb. 21 public meeting, Erik Heim said Nordic wanted to be a good neighbor. Wouldn't a good neighbor incorporate here in Maine and follow Maine law, as local businesses do?
Those are just two of the many concerns Maine citizens have about the NAF project. Others include:
• There has been no public discussion about selling off Belfast Woods, a treasured public recreation area.

• Belfast city zoning laws have been changed to allow up to 70 percent of the over 40 acres of natural landscape, which would become the site for the factory farm, to become impermeable (hard paving and building footprint). The proposed new zoning will allow up to a 45-ft.high structure. Vent stacks, antennas and solar panels would make it even taller. The minimum boundary setback is only 50 feet. The site adjoins established woodlands and prime recreational and wildlife habitat.

• The proposed facility is 16 times larger than NAF's initial project in Norway, which is not yet even at full capacity. There are no precedent studies to show that it is safe. Plus NAF has no experience with atlantic salmon.
You can read about other questions and concerns here.

In her book, “The President’s Salmon: Restoring the King of Fish and Its Home Waters,” Catherine Schmitt writes:
Hundreds of thousands of salmon used to ascend the rivers of New England. By 1992, no adult salmon returned to the Kennebec River.Seventeen came back to the Androscoggin, and only eight to the Saco. Their banks were empty of salmon anglers.
We can’t help but think, what if Maine invested in restoring the Atlantic salmon’s habitat, instead of allowing a foreign company to come in and destroy 40 acres of biodiverse, natural habitat? Only to produce an unhealthy consumer product?

Sign up to get involved.

Like and follow the Local Citizens for SMART Growth: Salmon Farm on Facebook to keep up with news and events


Call Nordic Aquafarms CEO Erik Heim to express your concerns: 
erik.heim@nordicaquafarms.com

More on fish farms and factory farm salmon here and here.

Hope to see you soon in Belfast!

Katherine, for the OCA team
P.S. OCA is committed to fighting factory farms, including the salmon farm in Belfast. We are committing resources to this fight, including toward potential legal action. If you would like to support this campaign, please make a generous donation today, either online, by phone or by mail, details here.
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No free passes: Wendy’s return to US doesn’t obviate duty to respect workers’ rights…

To  
Despite repatriation of tomato purchases from Mexico, the imperative remains the same: Farmworkers in Wendy’s supply chains must be protected by the Fair Food Program, the only effective human rights program in the agricultural industry!

Following Wendy’s announcement last week that that the company would be repatriating the vast majority of its tomato purchases from Mexico to greenhouses in the US and Canada by the end of the year, many in the media turned to the CIW for an idea of how the news might affect the farmworkers’ demand that Wendy’s join the award-winning Fair Food Program. Because the Campaign for Fair Food had been casting an unrelenting spotlight on Mexico’s horrific human rights record and, in particular, the country’s exceptionally high rate of sexual violence, the questions seemed to suggest that Wendy’s move might somehow satisfy the demands of the farmworkers and their allies. 

Nothing could be further from the truth. The ticker-tape parade will have to wait.

Let us be very clear. Wendy’s move to leave Mexico’s produce industry and its culture of violence and corruption was the right one, but it merely remedied its earlier indefensible decision to go to Mexico in the first place. The CIW’s position today is the same as it always has been: Wendy’s must join the Fair Food Program. The farmworkers in Wendy’s tomato supply chain deserve to enjoy the same, best-in-class human rights protections as workers in the supply chains of Wendy’s competitors Taco Bell, McDonald’s, Burger King, and Subway. Nothing about Wendy’s return to purchasing from US producers changes that. 

Coalition of Immokalee Workers
Connect with us

6/29 Pastors for Peace Event July 26th Coalition via Act-MA

*/You are invited!/*

​The July 26th Coalition of Boston is hosting an event for IFCO-Pastors
for Peace on *Friday, June 29,  7 PM. *
**​**

The gathering is held in honor of Pastors for Peace​, based in New York
City, that has long worked throughout the country and the world to end
the U.S. economic blockade of Cuba. Every ​summer​since 1992, the
Pastors for Peace Friendshipment caravans have gone to Cuba. When they
go, they are making a statement in purposeful defiance of U.S. laws as a
matter of civil disobedience.

The speaker ​on this route ​will be​ Cheryl LaBash, a journalist who
writes about Cuba and who is one of the chairpersons of the National
Network on Cuba. Her first trip to Cuba was in 1985 as a member of the
executive board of her AFSCME Local in the city of Detroit.

She will​introduce​​thenew and exciting film, */Dare to Dream: Cuba's
Latin American Medical School./*//That training facility known as ELAM,
provides medical education at no charge and graduates over 1000 new
doctors every year, including from the United States.  Cheryl works in
Michigan with Doctors 4 Detroit supporting the ELAM scholarship program,
Detroit area students and graduates. A recent graduate of ELAM, now
doing her residency in Boston, has been invited.

First Baptist Church,​ located at ​633 Centre Street in Jamaica Plain. ​**

*Itwill begin at *7 PM**​***with free ice cream generously​ donated
by JP Licks.
*

With questions, call Jim at 781-235-2804

To learn ​moreabout IFCO/Pastors for Peace, go to www.ifconews.org
<http://www.ifconews.org/>

​For more info about the film, go tohttps://daretodreamfilm.org/

Facebook <https://www.facebook.com/events/1649905008455709/>
https://www.facebook.com/events/1649905008455709/

<https://daretodreamfilm.org/>

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Organizing Against Mass Incarceration | Sunday, June 17, 3:00 PM

Sunday, June 17| 3:00 – 4:30 PM

Organizing Against Mass Incarceration

Edward Carson, CPUSA Boston

All too often people are taught to see racism as individual acts and not as
components of institutional racism or a system of dominance—the enslavement of
Black and Brown people under the guise of capitalism, which has propagated
the current predicament of mass-incarceration. With a system designed to target
marginalized groups, imprisonment without rehabilitation does more harm
than good. Private and government prisons profit from prisoners—hence the
more people incarcerated means more profit. Mandatory minimums and three
strike policies make for strict sentencing and contribute to the increase
in prison populations nationwide. This engaging session explores current
scholarship, while inviting the audience into a discussion of resistance
and action, not talk. Join us for this thought provoking meeting.

Center for Marxist Education
550 Massachusetts Avenue, 2nd Floor Cambridge, MA, 02139

https://www.centerformarxisteducation.org/eventschedule.html
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