Glasgow City Council are poised to bring in new legislation that could effectively ban public processions and demonstrations from the city centre, among other draconian measures which together form an unashamed attack on democratic rights in the city. As we reported earlier this year, this comes as part of their much trumpeted drive  to cut down on the number of the sectarian parades in the city – which is reportedly higher than the annual total in Derry and Belfast combined.

Now the full extent of the council’s plans have been revealed in a consultation document sent this Monday to 29 ‘relevant stakeholders’, including SSY. Among the proposals are:

• to ban marches which would ’cause too much disruption or congestion’
• to develop ’standard procession routes which minimise disruption and congestion’
• to ban marches which  ’place an excessive burden on the police’
• march organisers will be ‘encouraged to consider alternatives to processions’
• no procession will be allowed to ‘become elongated by a formation of fewer than four abreast; a procession will not be allowed to move off until in the correct formation’
• all events with more than 1000 participants will ‘be required to assemble in a public park and progress to a public park’

The target of this is, we’re meant to assume, obviously the Orange Order, as well as their Protestant supremacist pals in the Black Institute and the Apprentice Boys of Derry, who together make up well over 200 of the city’s 370 odd marches each year. Certainly, everything in the consultation document points towards this – there’s even a couple of proposals thrown in there which specifically target these organisations, including a ban on carrying swords without prior permission. However, everything we’ve seen over the past year – since GCC initially announced their plans to slash the number of parades in the city ‘by up to ninety percent’ – indicates that this is far from the reality of the planned legislation.

Since this original announcement, several marches in Glasgow have indeed be rerouted. There was the 3000 strong Unison anti-cuts demonstration, forced to take place at 9.30 in the morning and squeezed out of the city centre. There was the EIS teachers’ union demo against cuts, 10,000 strong, again forced out of the city centre and to the earlier time of 10.30am. Then there was the 9000 strong Wave march calling for immediate action on Climate Change, forced despite protestations to take a route which again completely cut out the centre of the city. You might see a pattern developing here – this demo was pushed back to 10.30am too. These three marches, two called by trade unions and one by a grouping of NGOs, were hardly the most provocative, controversial or dangerous to take place in Glasgow over the year, yet all were denied their desired route and time. The council paper does in fact allude to these marches, as examples of ‘groups which are opting for alternatives to having processions through the city centre’. This is taking serious liberties, no pun intended, with the truth. Meanwhile, the Orange Lodge’s biggest event of the year – the ‘Big Walk’ in early July – was allowed to go ahead entirely unhindered, giving drunk, sectarian bigots ownership of the city centre for the whole day and making it an effective no-go area for anyone else. Nor has it stopped permission being granted to at least two provocative Orange marches directly through the Gallowgate over the past twelve months.

It all bears disturbing similarities to current goings-on in Northern Ireland, where the devolved government is currently attempting to push through a swathing attack on the right to protest, the Public Assembles Bill. Similarly, this is being done under the cloak of cutting down on sectarian parades. But as the coalition which has come together to oppose the Bill makes clear, it’s no coincidence that this has arisen at the same time as the worst attack on the working class since the creation of the welfare state: “The two main parties in the Assembly who have already agreed to make these cuts are also the two parties who sat down together and drafted this proposed legislation. The intention could not be clearer. The purpose of the law is to smash any possible opposition to the destruction of the public sector and the sacking of thousands of workers.”

Under the Bill, all public gatherings of more than fifty people will require permission with 37 days notice. Failure to comply will potentially lead to a prison sentence or hefty fine for all participants. Obviously, Glasgow City Council do not possess nearly the same level powers as the NI Assembly – and their consultation document bluntly makes clear that they’re stretching the boundaries of current Scottish, UK and European legislation to their very limits.

However, the document doesn’t shy away from revealing the council’s main agenda in putting forward this new policy on public parades. In fact, a whole section is entitled ‘City Centre Developments: the Changing Face of Glasgow’. Cue a list of major new “improvements” to the city centre over the past few years, among them the £100m extension to the  St Enoch’s shopping centre, the planned expansion of the Buchanan Galleries, the “award-winning” financial district at the Broomielaw, and “many other prestigious office developments”. It concludes that the importance of the city centre to ‘Glasgow’s economic prosperity’ rules it out as somewhere suitable for public processions. It might as well read: anyone expressing dissent to the neo-liberal restructuring and gentrification of Glasgow – can fuck off. It’s also worth noting that the paper bizarrely singles out the May Day demo in 2009 for special attention, claiming it was ‘particularly problematic’, involving a ‘day of protest in the city centre against capitalism and globalisation’. Were they on the same demo as us – all I remember is the usual tame procession from George Square to some equally boring rally at the Old Fruitmarket…

The next few years will bring a virtually unprecedented attack on the social wage of the working class. There’s already been broad speculation that cuts of 25% in state spending will bring what’s possible under a democratic system to its absolute limits. In Northern Ireland, the governing parties are doing the ConDem’s dirty work for them, severely limiting the right to express any kind of dissent.  The same can now be said, perhaps, of Glasgow’s Labour council.

The full consultation document can be viewed here

Berlusconi and Gaddifi bonding over how much they both hate black people.

You may have noticed that the leader of Libya, Colonel Gaddafi, has been on a state visit to Italy over the past few days, where he has been generally making a nuisance of himself by trying to convert Italian women to Islam, and attempting to charge the EU  five billion euros in exchange for preventing Africans from illegally immigrating to Europe.

In Gaddafi’s farewell speech, he told an audience in Rome:

Italy needs to convince her European allies to accept this Libyan proposal – five billion euro to Libya to stop illegal immigration.

Europe runs the risk of turning black from illegal immigration, it could turn into Africa. We need support from the European Union to stop this army trying to get across from Libya, which is their entry point.

At the moment there is a dangerous level of immigration from Africa into Europe and we don’t know what will happen. What will be the reaction of the white Christian Europeans to this mass of hungry, uneducated Africans?

We don’t know if Europe will remain an advanced and cohesive continent or if it will be destroyed by this barbarian invasion. We have to imagine that this could happen but before it does we need to work together.

Wowza. Offensive, right? But, unsurprisingly, Italian MPs are more angry about the fact that Gaddafi wants money in exchange for stopping immigrants, rather than his insanely racist rant – and the insanely racist social policies in Italy that make talking like this in an official capacity totally acceptable.

Colonel Gaddafi and Italian Prime Minister Berlusconi are two sides of the same disgusting racist coin.

As socialists, we believe that the world belongs all people, and we should all be free to travel, live and work wherever we choose. No one is illegal.

Police lines coming between fascists and anti-fascists

We’ve previously covered the run-up to last weekend’s English Defence League march in Bradford. Despite a successful campaign to have the government ban the march, it was always clear that the EDL would come anyway. The “official” anti-fascist movement made no plans to take direct action to try and stop the EDL from being able to take the streets, while a smaller number took action like we’ve done up here with the Scottish Anti-Fascist Alliance.

Daniel Randall is a member of Workers’ Liberty and a supporter of the Stop Racism & Fascism Network who has participated in mobilisations against the EDL in Bradford, Nottingham and London. The following is a guest post giving his impressions of what went on last Saturday in Bradford.

August 28 in Bradford will rightly be remembered by many of the activists involved as the day we defied the police, the local establishment, and, significantly, both poles of mainstream anti-fascism (and their supporters in the left and labour movement) to physically confront the EDL (which, as I’m sure SSYers will be pleased to know, resulted in the EDL getting a good kicking).

The background and build-up to the day is complex and is fundamentally a reflection of the political divisions within the anti-fascist movement in Britain (I understand the situation in Scotland is largely similar to ours in England).

The Hope Not Hate/Searchlight campaign, the anti-fascist formation of choice for large sections of the trade union bureaucracy, focused on collecting signatures for a petition calling on the (Tory) Home Secretary to ban the EDL’s march.

When such a ban was secured, HnH began organising “Be Bradford – Peaceful Together”, a “multicultural festival” (music, face-painting, bouncy castles… precisely the sort of stuff that were key weapons for the anti-fascist militias in Spain in 1936/7) at a location a couple of miles away from where the EDL (now reduced to a static protest) would be gathering. Their event secured the backing of various local religious institutions, the local trade union bureaucracy and indeed local government.

The SWP-run Unite Against Fascism, frequently politically indistinguishable from HnH (same “unite with anyone – and we mean anyone – against fascism” approach, same celebrity fetish, same slavish deference to trade union bureaucrats and religious leaders, same faith in the state to sort things out by banning fascist parties or organisations), called their own “We Are Bradford” event in the city centre, close to where the EDL would be amassed. The list of initial supporters for the event was a chemically-pure mini-popular front, including everyone from trade union leaders to Lib Dem MPs to religious zealots.

However, they were at great pains to ensure everyone that the event WASN’T a counter protest. Oh no. Nothing as radical or confrontational as that; just a “peaceful multicultural celebration of Bradford”. Undoubtedly the EDL were quaking in their boots.

Local supporters of the Stop Racism & Fascism Network called for a genuine counter-mobilisation to confront the EDL from the start.. SRFN doesn’t have a fraction of the resources that either HnH or UAF have so we were sanguine about our prospects. Nevertheless, SRFN supporters spent the build-up to the event leafleting local working-class estates, particularly in Asian areas, calling on people to mobilise on the day to confront the EDL rather than spending the day at HnH’s limp “festival” or at UAF’s non-protest.  SRFN called on people to meet at separate location, Centenary Square, near to the EDL’s rally point.

The other key element in the picture, which would ultimately prove decisive, was local Muslim youth. Unfortunately the left has no real implantation amongst those communities and before the event it was unclear to us whether they would mobilise independently in any significant numbers or follow the advice of community “leaders” to either stay at home or attend the HnH or UAF events.

The experience of previous anti-EDL mobilisations told us that policing would be pretty tight, and we weren’t disappointed. On the day, the cops were out in force. SRFN supporters who attempted to remain outside of police cordons and leaflet members of the public were told to move on and disperse, under threat of arrest. However, in spite of almost every organised element in the equation militating against it, a crowd of several hundred of us managed to gather across the street from the EDL’s rally point, almost literally within spitting distance of the enormous pen the police had constructed to contain the racists. The crowd was made up of SRFN supporters and other independent anti-fascists along with hundreds of Muslim youth, and police soon mobilised to make sure we didn’t get any closer to the EDL.

I think a lot of us were preparing to dig in for a day of fairly typical anti-fascist activism; shouting at a group of nearby racists plus a bit of low-level scuffling with the cops as they try and push us back and we try and get a bit closer. Even if that had been the end-result, it would have represented a significant improvement on UAF or HnH’s strategy; at least the EDL would’ve encountered some visible, vocal opposition (even if it was from the other side of a fenced-off pen and a few lines of cops) rather than having every anti-fascist in town neatly swept off into either the UAF or HnH distractions where they were visible only to other anti-fascists and maybe a few passers-by who took the time to find out what was going on.

As it turned out, we were able to do rather more than just shout at the EDL. They were obviously just as agitated as we were about being held in one place and made several attempts to break out of their pen. At one point, a small group made it onto the pavement and lobbed a few bottles and rocks in our direction. Then, a few hours later, around a 100 EDLers managed to escape and headed off; we could only assume their intention was to cause a bit of (probably-violent) havoc in town. We figured that trying to head off and confront that group was a more useful thing for us to do than spending the rest of the day shouting ourselves hoarse and shoving the cops, so a group of maybe three hundred of us turned back up the street we were on and ran to find them.

We tracked the EDLers down to a roundabout by a retail park and managed to bloody a few noses before police stepped in to break us up and quickly herded the EDLers into Forster Square train station and out of town.

We shouldn’t overstate what we achieved; the EDLers we confronted represented maybe 1/8th of their entire forces on the day. We should also take care not to fall into a crude idealisation of physical-confrontation anti-fascism; it’s a form of activism that excludes those less-able to take part in it and is only one aspect of the anti-fascist strategy we need to develop.

But we did prove that with a bit of tactical dexterity, the EDL can be confronted. We challenged their right to bring their racist bile onto the streets of our cities without encountering any visible opposition. We challenged the pro-state, popular-frontist perspective of mainstream anti-fascism that asserts that calls for state bans or polite rallies are sufficient responses. A lot of us didn’t know whether to laugh or cry when we received reports that leading SWPers had led chants of “whose streets? Our streets!” from the platform of the UAF rally while we were actually doing the work of defending the streets from the EDL hundreds of yards away.

Darth Vader and pals move in

Beneath the practical unity built on the day between Muslim youth and independent anti-fascists, there are some politics that need unpicking; during the lulls between scraps with the cops, we chanted “unemployment and inflation are not caused by immigration; bullshit, come off the enemy is profit” while many of them chanted “Allahu akhbar!” Some of them also chanted “the EDL are faggots!” and hurled sexist abuse at women police officers.

The point is that practical unity in confronting fascist organisation is the best framework from within which to challenge the religious, homophobic and sexist politics that some Muslim youth hold. The left must break from the essentially racist assumption that working-class Muslims can only be related to on the basis of religious communalism and can only be engaged with through the religious establishment and community “leadership”. At one point the self-same community “leaders” who had backed the HnH and UAF events turned up on the frontlines of our confrontation with the police to plead with local kids to go home. Fortunately, their pleas were ignored.

The English Defence League promised us a summer of mass mobilisations intended to cause havoc in some of England’s key centres of Asian, and specifically Muslim, population. They crowed about mobilising up to 5,000 to come to Bradford. Those claims have come to nothing; they were not strong enough to meaningfully impose themselves on the streets of Bradford on August 28, and when a few of them did manage to defy the police they were sent packing by our hastily-convened anti-fascist rapid response unit.

Hopefully, the dismal and disgraceful role of HnH and UAF on the day will help break the stranglehold that these groups hold on anti-fascist politics in the organised workers’ movement. One battering isn’t going to make the EDL go away and the social problems leading many white working-class people into the arms of the EDL and, beyond them, the BNP haven’t gone away either.

We still need to build a national anti-fascist movement that combines a direct-action approach with ongoing campaigning on issues like jobs, homes and services so we can provide anti-capitalist, anti-racist answers to the legitimate grievances which the far-right attempts to exploit. Young working-class people from every community will be at the centre of that; the ruling-class figures and popular-frontist ideas that existing mainstream anti-fascism looks to will be no part of it at all.

we can haz no paycut plz

The placards, headlines and banners have been screaming about cuts, austerity measures and swingeing job cuts for what seems like ages now. We’ve all known that there’s a pending apocalypse coming our way – insert comparison about it being the worst attack on the working class since Thatcher/WWII/THE BEGINNING OF TIME  here – for ages, but when it actually comes to visualising it, it can be pretty difficult. There’s so many different facts, figures and quotes being thrown around all over the place, that it can be hard to know what’s mere speculation, what could be a government red herring, and what’s actually going on – so much so, that ‘the cuts’ can actually seem pretty remote and distant at the moment, something we can all hope surely wont be as bad as everyone’s saying it will be, or at least wont affect me personally, right?

Not so any longer for Scotland’s 150,000 council workers, who’ve just been hit with a non-negotiable “deal” by COSLA (consortium of stupid stupid stupid local authorities), the organisation that represents all of Scotland’s councils together, which effectively amounts to three years of pay cuts.

Initially, trade unions had approached COSLA asking for a 3% rise this year.  In real terms, this isn’t a pay rise at all – it’s just keeping up with inflation, currently hovering at just over 3%. But full of rhetoric about “tightening their belts” and the need for “public sector pay restraint”, the local authorities got back and offered  a 1% rise this year, a pay freeze in 2011, and an 0.5% rise in 2012. The unions put this to their members and it was quite rightly rejected, and with this mandate, they returned to the negotiating table hoping for a better offer.

Alas, COSLA had a better idea, so on Friday they tore up their old offer, and came up with a new one that’s even crappier. And what’s worse is that for the first time ever they’ve made imposed the offer and refused any further negotiations. Local authority workers across Scotland – encompassing cleansing workers, social services, roads, libraries and everyone else except teachers – can now expect an 0.65% increase this year, and a pay freeze in 2011 and 2012. With inflation well above this and liable to rise, this offer effectively amounts to a significant cut in wages, which the ConDems’ VAT rise, coming into effect in February, will only add to.

Wage cuts don’t have to be inevitable though, despite the propaganda of the capitalist press and the government who insist that we’ve “all got to share” the burden of the er, massive bank bail-outs and global recession that we er, didn’t cause. It remains to be seen how much will there is within the local authority trade unions – the main three being Unison, Unite and the GMB – to take action against the cuts. Sources have told Leftfield that in the current climate with huge fears over job security in the public sector, there persists a reluctance among large sections of the workforce to take industrial action. This reluctance only plays into the hands of the bosses though, who can then impose any pay offer they want, as they just have, assured that they wont have to suffer any consequences through industrial action.

There’s an urgent need for a movement to grow to resist the cuts. Above and beyond this latest measure  to slash pay for thousands of low paid council workers across Scotland, the Westminster government spending review – revealed in October – will paint a fuller picture of the cuts to come. In an ideal situation, there’d be unofficial walkouts at council offices and depots across the country next week, and official action over the next few months. Whether we can summon more than a demo at the end of October will depend on the ability of activists within the union movement to convince the workforce that they can fight and win on this issue – and whatever they come after next, be it pensions, holiday entitlement or jobs!

Glenn Beck is someone we’ve written about here before. For those that haven’t been lucky enough to check him out on youtube, he is one of the most prominent figures of the American right media, with 3 hours of radio and 1 hour of telly EVERY DAY to push his extreme agenda on to the public in the US. Some of his views make the Daily Mail look like a left wing propaganda sheet.

He’s also a relentlessly self promoting narcissist, who has raked in millions of dollars from his shows and books. He frequently fakes crying on air to try and give some fake sincerity to his constant verbal diarrhea of incoherent threats and garbage. He’s a convert to Mormonism (dum dum dum dum dum), mainly, by his own admission, so he could have sex with the woman who is now his wife (who btw he constantly insults, mocks and belittles in his show.)

Beck’s latest money making scheme is another book, ‘The Plan’, which apparently will detail his “100 year plan to restore our great country,” along with the upcoming paperback edition of his previous hit ‘Arguing with Idiots’ (takes one to know one.)

To promote these books, he’d planned a massive launch in Washington DC. That was, until he came up with an even better idea -- get a charity to pay for it so it doesn’t cost him anything! Although the event this weekend was originally billed straight up as what it was, a book launch designed to generate more cash for the Beck empire, it’s now being described as the “Restoring Honour” rally. Quite what the message of this event will be is pretty hard to work out, apart from a vague focus on the American military being great.

The event is supposed to be raising money for the charity Special Operations Warrior Foundation. This group provides counselling and support to the families of those killed on US military Special Ops missions around the world, including college education scholarships for their children. Let’s leave aside for a minute that a lot of these dead soldiers weren’t “heroes” but in fact scumbags sent to other people’s countries to kill, kidnap and terrorise in the name of American imperialism; that’s not the fault of their families and so some support for them is probably OK.

But all the money raised for the charity will first have to go for paying for the rally, featuring keynote speakers Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin. So, these two self-promoting far right lunatics are getting a gigantic national platform provided to them FOR FREE. The estimated $1 million cost of organising the event will be met entirely by SOWF, allowing Beck to get in all the news and sell a whole lot more books.

Because it’s organised by a charity, the event can’t be “political” according to tax rules. But what that specifically means is that the speakers can’t endorse a particular political party or candidate; apart from that, they can rant away about their far out views as much as they like. The fact that the rally is also being sponsored by groups like the National Rifle Association and FreedomWorks, a right wing organisation behind many of the Tea Party protests, shows how much of a joke the idea of the rally as “non political” is.

However, the promotional stuff that Beck has put out for the event is a bit toned down, which in fact makes it even harder to watch. At least when this guy is ranting like a crazy person he can be entertaining to watch, like a car crash. But I challenge you to watch either of these two ads and not feel your last meal start inexorably rising towards your mouth.

“You see, I learned something today.”

But it gets worse! It turns out the date that Beck has picked for a gigantic celebration of himself is in fact the 47th anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington at which Dr Martin Luther King Jnr made his ‘I have a dream’ speech.

Given that the event is inextricably linked with the racist Tea Party movement, dedicated to a far right politics of attacking the working class and motivated by a hatred of the first black president, understandably the surviving members of the 60s civil rights movement are a bit pissed off about this. Glenn Beck’s reaction? To claim that he and his supporters are “the inheritors of the civil rights movement”!! You couldn’t make this shit up. Check out what he says in the clips below on the subject, along with the Rev. Al Sharpton, who was a close collaborator of King’s in the civil rights movement, slamming comeback.

Beck’s insulting claim to have any right to the legacy of the civil rights movement is based on pissing on the legacy of what he actually stood for. Beck claims that the left has lied about what King. He tries to claim that King was in fact an individualist or even a conservative. In hijacking the memory of the 1963 march on Washington he wants us to forget it was actually called the March for Jobs and Freedom, and was organised by Socialist and trade unionist A Phillip Randolph to demand federal investment in new jobs.

Martin Luther King might not have gone as far left in his politics as we in SSY do, but at root he was a left wing figure. Around him in the civil rights movement were a host of socialists and communists who saw the fight for racial equality and desegregation as inextricably linked from the fight against capitalism. King himself recognised that the battle against racism was in fact a battle against the socio-economic foundations of American society, saying:

“We must rapidly begin the shift from a ‘thing’-oriented society to a “person”-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism and militarism are incapable of being conquered.”

As the 60s went on, King became more and more radicalised by events. Whereas before he had seen the way forward as appealing to the Democratic Party and the “moral conscience” of white liberals, after riots in Watts and seeing the horrors of the war in Vietnam, he increasingly saw the importance of appealing to the working class. In the last weeks before he was assassinated, he was in Memphis showing solidarity with striking black bin workers, some of the lowest paid in the US.

He also developed an uncompromising opposition to the war in Vietnam and US imperialism, denouncing the war as clearly linked with poverty and oppression at home. This drew the condemnation of many of his former liberal supporters, who found that messing with US geopolitical interests was a step too far.

Dr Martin Luther King wasn’t a full on socialist as we would understand it, but he was a social democrat who wanted to see an end to racism and imperialism, massive redistribution of wealth and huge government investment programme to provide decent, well paid jobs for the poor. He’d recognised the need to organise outside of the two-party system, and was preparing for the possibility of an independent run for President on a ticket of Peace and Justice.

For Glenn Beck to try and deny the legacy of King’s left wing ideas, and to claim that his racist mob of pro-capitalist crazies has any continuity with the civil rights movement would be hilarious if it wasn’t so insulting. His far right movement wants to undo everything achieved for the oppressed in the US during the revolutionary moment of the 60s, and he must be fought every step of the way.

“The dispossessed of this country — the poor, the white and Negro — live in a cruelly unjust society. they must organize a revolution against that injustice, not against the lives of the persons who are their fellow citizens, but against the structures through which society is refusing to take means which have been called for, and which are at hand, to lift the load of poverty.” Martin Luther King.

Dangerous Minds is a blog I have a lot of time for, which generally features stuff about music, funny videos, and general not-that-political fun. They do have a political agenda though, particularly chiming with SSY’s views about drug prohibition.

Each week they do an interview with an interesting person, usually someone who has a new book out or something. This week they’ve spoken to Prof. Michael Lebowitz, who has just published ‘The Socialist Alternative: Real Human Development.’ I’ve not had the chance to get hold of a copy yet, but his previous one ‘Build it Now: Socialism in the 21st Century,’ was absolutely brilliant.

Prof. Lebowitz has done a lot of work as part of the ongoing revolution in Venezuela, and a major focus of his work is recapturing the idea of socialism as a society that would allow everyone to develop their maximum potential. He sees socialism as a direct democratic system that allows people to take control of their own lives and gives them the freedom to determine their own future, much like we do. He writes about the need in workplaces to have real worker control by breaking down the division between those who think and those who do, so that everyone is deciding together about the way forward, and then making it happen together. His work is really worth a look, and to give you a flavour I’ve embedded the interview with him above. Some of the questions are a bit North America-centric, but it’s still worth a watch.

American Apparel was founded in 1989 as a wholesale tshirt supplier. They opened their first retail store in 2003, and started selling to the public. It was instantly a huge success. Melanie Rickey, fashion editor of Grazia magazine, said “”It became very big, very quickly. Everybody was wearing it, and I mean everyone: high-fashion kids, clubbers, geeks and gay kids across the world. It crossed all genres and tribes.”

Marketed as the ethical alternative to sweatshop manufactured clothing, American Apparel pride themselves on the fact that all of their product is made in the USA . Nearly all of the company’s manufacturing, distribution and retail is done in LA, by employees – the majority of whom are immigrants – who are paid more than twice the minimum wage, offered low-cost, full-family healthcare, and allowed free international phone calls during work hours.

So far, so awesome. And American Apparel’s success reflected this – in 2008, shares of the company reached $14 (£9) and they were named Label of the Year by everyone’s favourite “ethical” newspaper.  In 2009, their CEO and founder, Dov Charney, was a finalist for Time’s 100 most influential people in the world. They expanded by nearly 150 stores in their first three years, and nearly twice that in the next three.

Last week though, American Apparel shares were trading at an all-time low of 75 cents, and the company had to admit that it now has debts of $120m and is losing money at a rate of nearly $30m a year.

With sales down by 16% in its 279 shops globally the company whose clothes were worn by the coolest kids across the world is now at risk of breaching the terms of an $80m loan it received in March 2009 – a loan advanced to rescue it from another financial crisis.

American Apparel is in crisis, facing bankruptcy and closure – and SSY will be celebrating its downfall. Here’s why…

Founder and CEO Dov Charney is a pervert and abuser. He has been subject to FIVE sexual harrassment lawsuits. He regularly conducts meetings with employees wearing nothing but a thong or a cocksock. He had oral sex with a female employee and masturbated several times in front of a female journalist he was supposed to be giving an interview to. Most of the resulting interview consisted of him referring to various women as ’sluts’ and ‘cunts’, denying that these are derogatory terms, and insisting that “women initiate most domestic violence”.

One industry insider calls Charney an “odious character about whom I have heard nothing but bad things, particularly concerning his recruitment techniques and the way he treats female employees”. There is, he adds, a “certain over-reliance on oral sex during interviews over assessing their retail experience”.

American Apparel adverts do not feature models who are paid for their work. They feature young employees from the shopfloor who are whisked away from their normal duties to pose for provocative photos, and then sent back to work. And their adverts seem to feature very little actual clothes, instead focusing on exoticised teen girls in sexually compromising positions. Not to mention this infamous ad…

Instead of hiring models to fit their clothes on, Charney just heads to the local strip club: “Big companies tend to hire fitting models at a hundred bucks an hour. But they only give you one look. At a strip bar, you get a cross-section of chicks. You’ve got big chicks, little chicks, big-assed chicks, little-assed chicks, chicks with big tits, and chicks with little tits. You couldn’t ask for a better place to fit a shirt.”

American Apparel fans praise them for their commitment to workers’ rights – who cares about women workers, right? It’s not like the employees in clothing manufacture or fashion retail are going to be nearly all female, after all…

Besides which, for all their rhetoric on workers’ rights, American Apparel are vehemently anti-union, and were reported to the National Labor Relations Board for their attempts to sabotage and interfere with union organisers.

So much for workers’ rights… American Apparel is nothing but a disgusting sham who exploit and oppress those they claim to care about, all the while trying to sell our protest back to us.

Rumours persist that protesters also had tent pegs, bicycles AND EVEN SILLY STRING

DOZENS of misinformed media outlets yesterday went on a hysterical rampage – going head-to-head with FACTS and SCIENCE – and causing chaos across the country as they poured an oily slick of lies across the nation’s front pages.

At the same time, hundreds of idiots wreaked havoc across the internet, using websites as diverse as Twitter and newspaper comments sections to vent their reactionary opinions and stupid world view.

The occasion was, of course, the weekend’s Climate Camp, and the hyped-up ‘day of action’ which took place on Monday. Inevitably, there wasn’t nearly enough ‘action’ to satisfy a media which had been building up this invasion of anarchists intent on violence and disruption for months, but hey, let’s not let the small matter of FACTS get in the way of some good RIOT coverage!!1!211

Faced with this lack of COP15 style scenes of thousands of riot cops and activists facing it down, they had to make do with total lies and some made-up nonsense about ‘weapons’ – all of which the police obligingly did their best to go along with.

Most of the press coverage of Monday has focused on a supposed ‘oil slick’ which was created by activists pouring ‘oil and vegetable oil’ onto two busy roads. This is a blatant lie which has been spread by Lothian and Borders Police in a bid to discredit the protests and any political points they were trying to make. Two roads were indeed shut by the police for several hours on Monday morning, but there’s no evidence to prove that protesters had poured oil anywhere, let alone over busy roads. In a couple of actions on the day, molasses was used, specifically because it has the appearance of oil, but is sticky and doesn’t present any present any great safety risk, as oil would. Somewhere, wires have obviously got crossed, and news about molasses being poured over the offices of Cairn Energy in the city centre has lead to the Climate Camp being blamed for presumably an accidental leak of oil on two Edinburgh roads – hardly a rare occurrence.

Lethal weapons recovered by the police

In another bout of sensationalism, police were able to provide the media with pictures of supposed ‘weapons’ that they’d retrieved from around the campsite. The key word here being campsite, particularly when it’s revealed that these dangerous weapons were in fact a chisel and a mallot. Leftfield can also exclusively reveal that the site had saws, spades and even pick axes. In fact, a whole marquee was dedicated to storing tools which we’d presumed were for site maintenance and construction – how terribly naive of us.

As well as the police, the media were able to rely on a bunch of populist politicians from the mainstream political parties to come out and call on the police to start beating up peaceful activists who were engaged in a “disturbing” protest according to Labour and an “absolutely unacceptable” one according to the Lib Dems, while the Tories added that “it is time that the police sort this out”. The chair of Lothian & Borders Police Board also came out yesterday and called for protesters to foot the bill for the policing of the entire camp, in a startling display of utter contempt for the democratic right to protest.

As it happens, Monday’s actions were highly successful, closing down the offices of two energy companies in the city centre, as well as various RBS buildings and branches. As we’ve already reported, the camp also managed to close down the entire RBS headquarters for the day, with staff being told to stay at home or work elsewhere. Most of the condemnation of the protests – from the media and equally misinformed idiots on the internet – is coming from people with little understanding of the camp, its aims, or what really went down on the day. From what I saw, the only lives that were endangered during the whole camp were those that risked travelling in a shaky siege tower as it took its lengthy journey down to the front lines…

Your riot cops are no match for our RHINO SIEGE ENGINE

I’ve just returned from 5 days of occupying the land of the Royal Bank of Scotland, a piece of direct action that yesterday successfully achieved its objective of shutting down RBS’ headquarters. On Monday when we looked across at the building we could see there was nobody working there apart from cops and security guards.

Context

A quick recap: for the past few days hundreds of activists affiliated with Climate Camp have targetted the Royal Bank of Scotland. Having previously taken direct action against projects like Kingsnorth coal fired power station and the (now cancelled) third runway at Heathrow, they’ve moved on to a target that’s slightly less obvious.

But for people concerned about climate change, RBS is in fact at the heart of the problem. As a financial institution, they are the biggest UK investors in fossil fuels, styling themselves “the oil and gas bank.” In an economy that is now kept firmly in the stranglehold of financial capitalism, banks and other investors must be held responsible for their leadership role in a socio-economic system that is destroying the ecological basis for civilisation.

This system is now in the early stages of falling apart at the seams, due to the interrelated crises of the environment, the economy and social collapse. In the UK, RBS is at the heart of this process.

The current economic crisis was caused by the fact that the dominant financial institutions, like RBS, had used debt and self-delusion to try and keep the economy going. This bubble lasted for a while, until the myths that underpinned it began to unravel. The UK government then gave RBS and other massive banks huge injections of our money. RBS is now 84% owned by the British state. However, they refused to take any control over the banks in return for this money, leaving RBS under the command of its previous owners.

The people that run RBS have one priority: finding ways to invest their money (which you and I gave them) that will generate them more profits and then more money to invest. That’s what they exist to do as an institution. One of the main ways they can do that is to put our money into energy projects. As the world’s supplies of fossil fuels dwindle, the ones that remain will become more profitable to extract, at least for a while.

So RBS has poured our money into projects and companies like the Alberta Tar Sands, ConocoPhilips who are destroying the Amazon rainforest, and E.ON, the energy corporation looking to cover Europe with new coal fired power stations. They do this not because they’re evil, but because they are designed as an institution to do a specific job, and they’re doing that job.

As it is currently structured, it would be impossible to make RBS act otherwise, which is why we should demand that instead of being controlled by private capitalists the wealth of RBS is used collectively and socially to solve problems in the world, instead of being used to create huge problems that will make the world a less habitable place for humanity in the coming decades.

This is all the more appalling when you remember that the working class is about to face one of the greatest austerity blitzkriegs of all time, after the government chose to facilitate RBS and its chums taking the money that should have been spent on public services, jobs and wages for the people who actually keep our society running – public sector workers. In this context, it’s clearly time for radical action against an institution which is poisoning our society.

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Some of SSY’s roving reporters are back to civilisation to give YOU all the latest news from climate camp…

After an epic amount of pushing, we stormed RBS headquarters this afternoon. Delicious molasses bombs were thrown, windows were smashed and there was a lot of scuffling with the police. Bear in mind that today was Sunday, and the bank wasn’t even open…! Who knows what’s on the agenda for the rest of the working week…

Most of the SSY delegation are still pitched up in the RBS back garden and will be until the end of the camp – stay tuned for a full climate camp analysis and review in a few days…