Contents of
Up-Words Vol. 2 No 9
International
Day for the
Eradication of Poverty
Unemployed
Treated Worse Than Criminals!
Take a look at this month's additions to the Sleuth
Click here to access our previous newsletters:
UpWords
1 No. 1:
What is Breaching
UpWords
1 No. 2:
Young Poor under
Attack
UpWords
1 No. 3:
Frog Boiling;
UpWords1
No. 4::
Welfare Reform;
UpWords1
No. 5:
S11;
UpWords1
No. 6:
History of Unemployed Movements,
Homelessness
Up-Words
No. 7:
Launch of UPM/Latest Breaching Statistics
UpWords1
No 8:
Open Letter to Minister
Amanda Vanstone
UpWords2
No 1:
Millionaires' Coup for
Govenrment
Centrelink Officiouisness hurts us all
UpWords2
No 2:
Big Brother is
watching you!
Work for the Dole is
not working
UpWords2
No 3:
Globalisation - the Excessive
Wealth Disease?
UpWords2
No 4:
Is Howard a Communist?
Mal Brough, Minister for Compassionate Employment Figure
Fudging
UpWords2
No 5
Benefits 37% below poverty line
May Day protests worldwide
UpWords2
No 6:
The
Permanently Alienated Underclass Speaks UP!
The Budget for the Unemployed
Views from the Coal Face
UpWords 2 No 7
Criminalisation of Poverty
Job Network is not working - from rorts to
incompetence
UpWords
2 No 8
Work
for the Dole can kill!
National Coalition against Poverty Petition
Post
card campaign
Poet's Corner:
Views on Unemployment
Come
to our Meetings
on the last
Tuesday of the month,
1 – 3 pm
at the Torrens Building,
220 Victoria Square, Adelaide.
Join
UPM against Poverty
as a member!
Copy
the membership form here!
PO Box
485
Brooklyn Park SA 5032
Phone (08) 8352 4950
UPM against Poverty Inc. Joins Ranks for Peace
The Un(der)employed People’s Movement condems the atrocities of New York and mourns with all human beings the enormous loss of lives on September 11, 2001. However, we equally mourn the daily loss of almost threefold the number of children, who die of hunger and starvation in in the world daily. We will also mourn the loss of life of innocent citizens in Afghanistan or Iraq, countries which have already suffered in an unimaginable way.
We would like to highlight excerpts from a letter from an American Afghan citizen, which was printed in a San Francisco paper a few days ago:
“I speak as one who hates the Taliban and Osama Bin Laden. There is no doubt in my mind that these people were responsible for the atrocity in New York. I agree that something must be done about those monsters. But the Taliban and Ben Laden are not Afghanistan. They’re not even the government of Afghanistan.
The Taliban are a cult of ignorant psychotics who took over Afghanistan in 1997. Bin Laden is a political criminal with a plan. When you think Taliban, think Nazis. When you think Bin Laden, think Hitler. And when you think “the people of Afghanistan” think “the Jews in the concentration camps.”
UPM against Poverty believes that this is an interesting statement especially in view of Australia's treatment of Afghan and Iraqi refugees. What year is it, 1942? The letter writer continues:
"It’s not only that the Afghan people had nothing to do with this atrocity. They were the first victims of the perpetrators. They would exult if someone would come in there, take out the Taliban and clear out the rats nest of international thugs holed up in their country.
Some say, why don’t the Afghans rise up and overthrow the Taliban? - The answer is, they’re starved, exhausted, hurt, incapacitated, suffering. A few years ago, the United Nations estimated that there are 500,000 disabled orphans in Afghanistan—a country with no economy, no food. There are millions of widows.
And the Taliban has been burying these widows alive in mass graves. The soil is littered with land mines, the farms were all destroyed by the Soviets. These are a few of the reasons why the Afghan people have not overthrown the Taliban.”
Geoffrey Robertson is a leading British lawyer and author of ‘Crimes Against Humanity — The Struggle for Global Justice’. He wrote:
"We expect hot-blooded “retaliation” rubber-stamped by NATO and legally justified by reference to the primitive “right”of a state unilaterally to use force in self defense. There will be no burden on the US to prove more than suspicion of guilt, and no questioning of the presidential proposition that a state is as “guilty” as the terrorists it harbors. This is incorrect in law (unless those doing the harboring know of their plans) and affords no moral mandate for killing its innocent and oppressed citizens.
Two wrongs, in law as in logic, cannot make a right. There is a better way, although thanks in part to US opposition, the machinery is not yet in place. It involves the international community identifying a class of crime which is “against humanity” precisely because the fact that fellow humans can conceive and commit it diminishes us all. As defined by the Rome treaty for an international criminal court, it includes a systematic attack directed against a civilian population involving acts of multiple murder.
After the NATO bombing of Kosovo, there was general agreement that any lawful use of force against a sovereign state to stop crimes against humanity or to punish their perpetrators must be constrained by a number of safeguards. These include:
— The prior support of the security council, or failing this of a majority of its permanent members;
— the guilt of the targeted state or its agents must be established by clear and objective proof;
— the armed response must comply with international law, be proportionate to the legitimate objectives of the mission and have a reasonable prospect of securing them.These are the minimum requirements for any US response, which should be characterized and prosecuted as an international crime, not as a war. That means the US should first persuade the security council, not NATO, of the justice of counter- attacking any “guilty” state. Long term, the US safety will depend upon its joining the common cause of deterring crimes against humanity through an effective system of international criminal justice.
The Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA) made the following statements on the terrorist attacks in the US. Although not all of their statement can be reproduced here, the important messages can clearly be heard:
“The people of Afghanistan have nothing to do with Osama and his accomplices. On September 11, 2001 the world was stunned with the horrific terrorist attacks on the United States. RAWA stands with the rest of the world in expressing our sorrow and condemnation for this barbaric act of violence and terror.
RAWA had already warned that the United States should not support the most treacherous, most criminal, most anti-democracy and anti-women Islamic fundamentalist parties because after both the Jehadi and the Taliban have committed every possible type of heinous crimes against our people, they would feel no shame in committing such crimes against the American people whom they consider “infidel”. In order to gain and maintain their power. These barbaric criminals are ready to turn easily to any criminal force.
But unfortunately we must say that it was the government of the United States who supported Pakistani dictator Gen. Zia-ul Haq in creating thousands of religious schools from which the germs of Taliban emerged. In the similar way, as is clear to all, Osama Bin Laden has been the blue-eyed boy of CIA.
But what is more painful is that American politicians have not drawn a lesson from their pro-fundamentalist policies in our country and are still supporting this or that fundamentalist band or leader. In our opinion any kind of support to the fundamentalist Taliban and Jehadies is actually trampling democratic, women’s rights and human rights values.
We sincerely hope that the great American people could DIFFERENTIATE between the people of Afghanistan and a handful of fundamentalist terrorists.
Our hearts go out to the people of the US. Down with terrorism!”
We think that we are entering hard times and that it is most important to uphold the fight for human rights globally. We will support the peace movement whenever we can and we encourage all un- and underemployed to participate too.
In
case of attack by USA on another country assemble the same day on the steps
of Parliament House in Adelaide
between
5 and 5:30 pm
International
Day for the
Eradication of Poverty
October 17 is the International Day for the Eradication of Poverty.
Many actions take place around the word. Here in Australia the National Coalition against Poverty is growing daily.
Their web site is at http://www..ncap.org.au.
They have launched a petition which calls for all allowances and pensions to be lifted to 25% of male average weekly earnings and for a Royal Inquiry into Poverty.
Here
in SA the petition will be launched
on October
23
at Old Parliament House, 10 am.
Please
get a copy of the petition and pass it around
and sent a copy of the postcard from the web site to your favorite politicians.
Friday
October 28 at 12 noon is the
Labor Day
March,
contact
the UTLC in SA for more info and/or
come to Victoria
Square
to express your opinion
to the Labor Party politicians.
Unemployed Treated Worse Than Criminals!
UPM against Poverty has released the following media relase in conjunction with the Australian National Organisation of the Unemployed (ANOU):
The Australian National Organisation of the Unemployed and the Un(der)employed People’s Movement against Poverty Inc. in Adelaide are disappointed that the Commonwealth Government program “Australians Working Together” effectively criminalises job seekers who have committed no crime and are doing nothing more than the Government tells them to do.
ANOU Spokesperson, Kevin Brennan said today,
“What we have here is hundreds of millions of dollars of public money being spent on an alleged ‘Self-Help’ program containing requirements that any reasonable person would describe as mandatory sentencing, community service orders and parole-like surveillance.”
Mr Brennan issued a challenge to the whole Australian community to thoroughly examine the Fact Sheet called “Attachment to 11” in the Government’s kit.
“This sheet is a table of requirements, some of which are provisions that are significantly heavier than the penalties applied to people found guilty in a court of law, yet the people they apply to have done nothing but comply with the Government’s already overly enthusiastic requirements.”
“If this new program goes ahead, job seekers of all ages, from 18 to 50+, will be regarded by the public system as worse than offenders”, Mr Brennan said. According to the Government, this is the latest ‘self-help’ thinking. “If you are found guilty by a court and your sentence is a community service order of 240 hours, when you complete those hours, you are regarded as having paid your debt to society. Not so for job seekers: their 240-hour community service order is recurrent. They will have to do it at least once a year, yet they have committed no crime nor have they done anything wrong.”
“And what is perhaps equally offensive, much of the work these conscripts will do is work that, until the Coalition came to office in 1996, was paid community work. They cut the funding to community organisations and then turn the work into work-for-the-dole projects and the new community service orders for non-offenders – and pay people to place job seekers into those positions”, Mr Brennan said.
And Monika Baker, Secretary of UPM against Poverty adds: “The previous mutual obligation of volunteering already created a two class volunteer system, now we have a two class community service (work) system. Only this time the unemployed are the second class community workers behind proven guilty offenders. This is clearly another example of the criminalisation of poverty in Australia, which is build on the American example of welfare reform.”
The ANOU calls on all fair-minded Australians to look beyond the smarmy rhetoric of this program and demand that it be stopped. “If so-called ‘mutual obligation’ is to be this severe, it MUST become the penalty imposed on people found guilty of a crime in a bona fide legal process,” Mr Brennan said.
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