Vestas campaign updates from Save Vestas and The Guardian

Tim Wise - Red-Baiting and Racism

An urgent communication from the Save Vestas campaign [Please Forward]:

Dear friend,

an eviction notice has been served on the occupation at Vestas IoW. The eviction is due to take place tomorrow, Friday 7 August, at 12 noon.

Please get to the Island if you can. The workers want support tomorrow. There is a minibus leaving London tonight. Email us if you want to be on it and we will forward your number to the driver. If anyone else can drive or offer transport, please let us know. We can post details on the blog or put you in touch with people seeking transport.

If you can't go, please organise a protest in your town or join one of those already planned. Protests we know about are
- tonight, 6pm outside Department of Energy and Climate Change, 3 Whitehall Place, London
- tonight Bristol: demonstrate 5.30pm Bristol fountain
- tonight Manchester/ tomorrow Warrington: demonstrate 5pm in Piccadilly Gardens and protest at 8am tomorrow morning at Vestas HQ in Warrington, tel Hugh 07769 611320

Let us know if you are organising something and we can advertise it.

Please contact Climate Change and Energy Secretary Ed Miliband now. ps.ed.miliband@decc.gsi.gov.uk and tell him to step in to save wind turbine blade production at Vestas, IoW, for the sake of renewable energy, green jobs and his credibility as a politician. His phone number in his Doncaster constituency is 01302 875 462, and at Westminster, 020 7219 4778. And on Twitter http://twitter.com/edmilibandMP

Please forward this email to contacts or post up on your blogs/website.

Thank you,
Save Vestas

England: Vestas occupiers fired, occupation continued

Just a bit of glib but telling ludicrousness from The Guardian.



This dude wants you to know:

"Advance co-operation between police and protesters is the only way to ensure safe and effective demonstrations."

"The Christian right is making a fresh push to force religion onto the school curriculum in Texas with the state's education board about to consider recommendations that children be taught that there would be no United States if it had not been for God." (link)

Internet users paid to spread Israeli propaganda

The passionate support for Israel expressed on talkback and comment sections of websites, internet chat forums, blogs, Twitter and Facebook may not be all that it seems.

Israel's foreign ministry is reported to be establishing a special undercover team of paid workers whose job it will be to surf the internet 24 hours a day spreading positive news about Israel.

Internet-savvy Israeli youngsters, mainly recent graduates and demobilized soldiers with language skills, are being recruited to pose as ordinary surfers while they provide the government's line on the Middle East conflict.

"To all intents and purposes the internet is a theater in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and we must be active in that theatre, otherwise we will lose," said Ilan Shturman, who is responsible for the project.

The existence of an "internet warfare team" came to light when it was included in this year's foreign ministry budget. About $150,000 has been set aside for the first stage of development, with increased funding expected next year.

[Read more...]

Vestas workers commence sit-in of Britain's only wind turbine plant, which had been scheduled for closure

For more, see http://savevestas.wordpress.com/.

This is a crucial struggle, a demonstration of the shallowness of "green capitalism" and of the necessity - and possibility - of direct, collective action which strikes the root of the ecological crisis: the nihilistic growth impulse that sustains the capitalist world system.

Send messages of solidarity to: savevestas[at]googlemail.com

There will be a demonstration on Wednesday in London:

DEMONSTRATION to save Vestas called by Campaign Against Climate Change

Wednesday 22nd July , 6.00 pm
Outside the Department of Energy and Climate Change, No 3 Whitehall Place, London
(off Whitehall, Charing Cross tube)
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=99987963950