Tuesday, July 11, 2006

Strike at the BBC?

10,000 BBC staff to be balloted for strike as pay dispute worsens

It is possible. When all TV screens go black in England, maybe the spell breaks. And the Brits wake up to the global massacre their 'managers' are guilty of. The horrible holocaust which the British taxpayer and others in the 'Coalition of the Killing' have to pay billions for. Whether they want to or not.

FPF-intro - July 11, 2006 - The spell by the Tube is disastrous. The brainwashing effect likewise. Take the French newspapers which had the football mass psychosis whipped to the front pages: 'France is Crying!' Which is normal in the circles where heads are similar to footballs: empty on the inside. None of those brain dead sports fundamentalists cried out loud for all the death and destruction globally going on. No tears were shed for the millions of dead, bombed, DU radiated, tortured, jailed, and otherwise abused people, which are the victims of the same economic system that made 1.5 billion people watch football on TV. Lobotomized by a system and a ball.

But there is a ray of hope, a form of wishful thinking. Most of the interested people by now know that the BBC two decades ago openly started servicing the goals of the people managing England, who also put their front man at the top, Michael Grade. - [http://tinyurl.com/l687f] - Within short honest journalism at the BBC was snuffed, like the life of Dr. Kelly who appears to have been suicided by what he called 'the dark forces' - http://tinyurl.com/2p2sb - because he was willing to tell something to a BBC journalist who was trying be honest. The same 'dark forces' had the BBC produce and globally distribute - wrecking their credibility by it - TWO percent dissent concerning the genocides, the illegal wars. The BBC advocated the wars. Nothing else. And they are guilty like the other propagandists.

WALK OUT ON THE KILLERS

What people in the rest of the world now hope for, is that the people working at the British Broadcasting Corporation BBC finally come to their senses. Show that they have a real spine on the place where many now think they have cooked spaghetti. Show how brave they are, and walk out on the killers. The fact that those apparently already emptied the pension funds (like Enron) and want to fire thousands of them could be the trigger to make the BBC journalists and producers finally react against what has happened to the BBC, and them.

So, maybe the fact does it, that the Group's representatives at the treacherous BBC top keep slobbering from the trough, while the curbed cattle get's only 2.6% in a so called 'raise' of their salaries. (Inflation is much higher, so they end up with nothing anyhow). Because it is known that BBC salaries normally are nothing to write home about: before it was the status that did it. Which the BBC looses faster than quick with its omissions and dishonesty. Now the NNC's warmongers and gatekeepers need more money, to ease the shame of their criminal collaboration. But one can't silence a bad conscience with it: the blood sticks.

BRING BLAIR AND HIS WAR CRIMINALS DOWN

Since the Americans in most cases only have woken up when they got problems with the high prices of the gasoline, it may be the clobbering necessary to bring Blair and his war criminals down and even to Court when all TV screens go black. If they have any decency left, the the BBC staff walks out on those warmongers at the top - those malignant and misguided people advocating guided missiles and supporting war against human beings.

The sooner the BBC staff walks out, the more lives they save.

HR

10,000 BBC staff to be balloted for strike as pay dispute worsens

by Alan Jones

The Scotsman - Tuesday 11 July 2006 - THE BBC is facing a series of strikes next month by broadcasting workers and journalists in a bitter pay and pensions dispute after union leaders yesterday decided to ballot on industrial action.

About 10,000 workers will vote later this month, with union officials expecting a big "yes" vote which could lead to walkouts from mid-August.

Leaders of BECTU, the National Union of Journalists and Amicus quickly made the ballot decision yesterday after being inundated with e-mails from staff angry at last Friday's announcement of major pay rises for executives while workers were being offered 2.6 per cent.

Any strikes would be likely to hit radio and television news shows the hardest, BECTU officials said, but live daytime television could also be badly affected.

Gerry Morrissey, assistant general secretary of BECTU, said: "The BBC's planned changes to pensions and its offer to staff on pay in no way compensates for their contribution over the last 12 months. Management have been extremely hypocritical in accepting huge pay rises for themselves."

TAKE A PAY CUT AND TO WORK LONGER

The BBC is planning changes to its pension scheme, including closing its final-salary scheme to new entrants, which has also angered workers.

BECTU official Luke Crawley added: "BECTU members are angry at the contempt shown to them by the BBC - asking them to take a pay cut and to work longer is insulting. Adding insult to injury is the executive board's greed in swallowing inflated pay rises of between 10 and 30 per cent. BECTU members will vote for industrial action."

NUJ general secretary Jeremy Dear said: "BBC managers cannot be surprised by the immense anger with which their actions have been met by hard-working staff.

"The fact that money can be found to reward managers who have axed jobs, cut programme budgets and presided over a pensions fiasco, but cannot be found to save vital jobs in current affairs, shows where the current BBC management's priorities lie.

"Their shame-faced refusal to negotiate simply adds to the sense that there is one law for fat-cat bosses and another for dedicated BBC staff."

BBC CHAIRMAN MICHAEL GRADE DEFENDED PAY RISES FOR EXECUTIVES YESTERDAY, SAYING THAT SENIOR STAFF SHOULD NOT BE "PUNISHED FOR THEIR LOYALTY" WHEN THEY COULD EARN FAR MORE IN THE PRIVATE SECTOR.

He dismissed the controversy over the latest packages as an "annual ritual" obsession with pay packets.

It was revealed last week that director-general Mark Thompson saw his pay packet rise by £160,000, from £459,000 to £619,000.

Speaking on BBC Radio 4's Today programme, Mr Grade said: "We made it very clear last year that the senior executives at the BBC, each and every single one of them, could earn a lot more money by leaving the BBC and working for the private sector and had fallen well below the BBC's pay policy, which is to pay the market median.

"We said we were going to spend the next two years - last year and this year - correcting them and getting them into line. That's exactly what we've done."

He added: "This is a kind of an annual ritual where people get obsessed with people's pay. It is a lot of money, but it's not as much as they could all be earning elsewhere. Pretty well everybody in the BBC works for less than they could earn in the private sector."

Formal seven-day notice of strike ballots will be sent to the BBC by 13 July, although the unions have not ruled out further discussions with management, or DG Mark Thompson.

Luke Crawley, chief negotiator on behalf of the joint unions at the corporation, said: "If we go out on strike we will be hitting every-day programmes, the Today programme on Radio 4, the Six O'Clock News and the Ten O'Clock News on TV."

A one-day strike last year by the unions, who represent journalists along with producers and researchers, took all the news programmes off the air, with live day-time television also severely affected. Soap operas and other pre-recorded shows are less likely to be hit because they are pre-recorded five or six weeks in advance.

[andend] - Article Url.: http://thescotsman.scotsman.com/index.cfm?id=1007792006


RELATED:
MEDIALENS - ALERT: BLAMING THE VICTIM IN GAZA - Url.: http://www.medialens.org/alerts/index.php

FPF & BBC: BLAIR'S BIASED BROADCASTING CORP. - http://tinyurl.com/naqhd

TEARS FOR THE DEAD? - Iraq Civilians: 50,000 Dead-But Who's Counting? - Url.: http://www.countercurrents.org/iraq-resende110706.htm

* THE BBC SUPPORTS THIS - RELATED LINKS - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/gkgrb

* ROME TRIBUNAL ON WAR CRIMES AND MEDIA: Held Guilty of Deception - The tribunal said mainstream media reportage on Iraq also violated article six of the Nuremberg Tribunal (set up to try Nazi crimes) which states: "Leaders, organisers, instigators and accomplices participating in the formulation or execution of a common plan or conspiracy to commit any of the foregoing crimes (crimes against peace, war crimes and crimes against humanity) are responsible for all acts performed by any persons in execution of such a plan." - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/68jws

* FPF-COPYRIGHT NOTICE - In accordance with Title 17 U. S. C. Section 107 - any copyrighted work in this message is distributed by the Foreign Press Foundation under fair use, without profit or payment, to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the information. Url.: http://liimirror.warwick.ac.uk/uscode/17/107.html

FOREIGN PRESS FOUNDATION
http://forpressfound.blogspot.com/
Editor: Henk Ruyssenaars
http://tinyurl.com/amn3q
The Netherlands
fpf@chello.nl

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Imperial Racism & Apartheid in the Holy Land

Race is, indeed, a construction – a very convenient one when you want to take someone else’s property, or kill them, or enslave them. It is this construct that animates the American debate about foreign policy – or even domestic policy when it comes to "aliens" of one kind or another.

END DIPLOMATIC RELATIONS WITH ISRAEL - BOYCOTTS AND SANCTIONS

Intro by Henk Ruyssenaars

FPF - July 11, 2006 - In the in Johannesburg in South Africa published Mail & Guardian, an article is published stating that: "The 'apartheid Israel state' is worse than the apartheid that was conducted in South Africa, Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) president Willie Madisha said on Monday. He said Palestinians were being attacked with heavy machinery and tanks used in war, which had never happened in South Africa.

Cosatu and other organisations supporting Palestine have called on government to end diplomatic relations with Israel and establish boycotts and sanctions such as those against apartheid South Africa. Israel has launched several attacks on Gaza, bombing its main university and firing missiles that have killed Palestinian bystanders.*

Desmond Tutu is the former Archbishop of Cape Town and Chairman of 'South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission.' - [Images - http://tinyurl.com/f3dec ] - In an address given at a conference on 'Ending the Occupation' held in Boston in 2002, bishop Tutu condemned what he had seen in Israel during his visit as: "Apartheid''.

It may be a good thing to read bishop Tutu's article with his own observations in the Guardian first, to more fully understand how bad the situation really is. International observers and local people call the ethnic cleansing - which for such a long time has been going on - for the 'Holocaust of the Palestinians'.

THE PALESTINIANS ARE - LIKE THEIR ISRAELI HENCHMEN - SEMITES TOO

What the cruel Israeli defense force IDF - with mostly American $billions - has been doing for decades is absolutely inhuman. I's like the Apartheid regime in South Africa was, and the prolonging in other forms of slavery and segregation, like now again in the US 'Project for a New American Century'. Serfdom and slavery is profitable for the rulers: turning blood into gold, and thus power. The group (not so kosher) bleeding and wrecking our globe has no moral qualms nor decency: to them even blood money doesn't smell.

The murderous Apartheid and segregation of human beings the group managers behind the PNAC for decades have been trying to do in Palestine and to the world, and which will not succeed, can be defined as follows: "A segregated society is one in which members of different races or social groups rarely, if ever, come into contact with one another as equals. All aspects of daily life are separated, and contact between the races is regulated so that one race is always in a superior position to the other."

EFFECTS OF APARTHEID POLICY ON HUMAN BEINGS AND SOCIETY

Being Dutch by birth, and knowing the language, in 1976, and at the request of the at that time critical and in 'Apartheid South Africa' forbidden German weekly STERN, I started gathering facts and information for a book concerning the effects of Apartheid policy on human beings and society in general in South Africa. It was horrible. Later on I was arrested in the black township of Soweto and - after a short detention - kicked out of the country, declared 'persona non grata' by the Apartheid government. I've seen and reported on the misery ever since.

And let me assure you: those people can quote William Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice too: “Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions . . . ? If you prick us do we not bleed? If you tickle us do we not laugh? If you poison us do we not die?” - Shylock who exclaimed this, apparently never wanted to understand nor meant what he was saying...

And during four decades abroad, I've seen what Jewish 2005 Nobel Literature Prize winner Harold Pinter* explained: "People do not forget. They do not forget the death of their fellows, they do not forget torture and mutilation, they do not forget injustice, they do not forget oppression, they do not forget the terrorism of mighty powers. THEY NOT ONLY DON'T FORGET: THEY ALSO STRIKE BACK." - Pinter.

Bishop Tutu's Apartheid story is here - Url.: http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/comment/0,10551,706911,00.html

IMPERIAL RACISM

by BC Publishers Glen Ford and Peter Gamble

Racism, the ideology that came into full flower as a justification for European conquest of most of the planet, is now headquartered in the United States – with an annex in Israel. Tel Aviv is a very active annex.

There could be no justification for George Bush’s aggressions, without the underlying assumptions of racial superiority. Bush has committed multiple crimes against peace – a capital Nuremberg offense for which a number of Nazis were hanged. He is a war criminal, many times over. However, he will never be prosecuted in the United States, because of the pervasive ideology of imperialism, which is racist at its very core: it dehumanizes the victims.

Race is, indeed, a construction – a very convenient one when you want to take someone else’s property, or kill them, or enslave them. It is this construct that animates the American debate about foreign policy – or even domestic policy when it comes to "aliens" of one kind or another.

BUT IT IS DEADLY. IT SWARMS COUNTRIES, AND CONSUMES CITIES.

Fallujah was flattened, with its main hospital the first target. Three hundred thousand people are now refugees in their own country, because of US actions, and an unknown number are dead. That is a war crime – but is not seen as such by most of the US public, who are under the sway of the ideology of imperial racism. The death of an entire city does not matter to them, because there were no real people there. Racism does more than color the situation – it defines it. How do you kill a city and call it victory? Why is this celebrated as a benchmark of "progress"? Is the assumption that the white man’s triumph is, inherently, progress?

Of course it is. That’s what imperial racism is all about. There are "enemies" and "others" who are not "Western" – a euphemism for "non-white" – the construct they keep making up every time they want to steal something.

THE HARD-RIGHT ISRAELIS ARE VERY GOOD AT THIS GAME.

They are on totally racial mission, and have made their construct. Jewishness is a race, in Israel, with rights that only accrue to Jews. We are supposed to believe that Jews have a right to shape Palestine in such a way that they always have a majority. How does that conform with any democratic principle?

Now the hard-right regime in Jerusalem is making war against the entire Palestinian society, destroying its infrastructure – its bridges, roads and energy facilities – to make all 1.2 million inhabitants of Gaza pay some kind of price. However, it is a price that can not be paid. The extremist Israelis are racial imperialists who are not looking for anything other than the mass elimination of a people from the land. They have invested the firing of tens of thousands of rounds of artillery into one of the most crowded corners of the world to achieve this purpose: but their motives are well understood by everyone who is not a racial imperialist.

Everyone, that is, except the (white) Americans, who eat this crap up. The uniform reaction of the American corporate media to the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision that something resembling the rule of law must prevail at Guantanamo Bay and other U.S. installations, has been to frame the issue in domestic political terms. The Bush administration had been politically tarnished, was the conclusion: not that it had violated international law, and was in fact an outlaw among nations. The situation has been framed as one of domestic political peril for Republicans – maybe in November – but not how the U.S. gets along with the rest of the world.

SUBSIDIZED BY A SUPERPOWER

In the same way, the Israeli "incursions" into Gaza and the West bank have been framed as defensive measures, even as the world’s forth-strongest military power relentlessly pounded a people who have virtually no military with thousands of rounds of artillery a day. As the entire world knows, Israel could not possibly have amassed such an amazing war machine, unless they had been subsidized by a superpower. And, of course, they were.

In the Arab world, and the larger Muslim world, the "incursions" are seen as alien invasions, and as a threat to their own societies. The Israeli Zionist project is never discussed in the U.S, and now it has become forbidden to speak of it. Meanwhile, a reign of terror exists in Gaza and the West Bank. The terrorists are the Israeli government and armed forces, but instead our own media keeps showing us pictures of a goofy-looking Israeli soldier, while a whole people are being strangled and bombed.

None of this could happen, if there were not racial imperialism, in which the Jews of Israel were considered "white" – and, therefore, had inherent rights. White Americans also think they have rights that not nobody else possesses. There is a connection between the extremist Zionist scheme and the umbilical cord of imperialism. Here is the result, that places the Zionist perspective and the "American" worldview in proper place.

Just as the Americans obliterated Fallujah, Zionists in Israel want to wipe out whole cities. Gaza City has to go.
Up in flames. Member of the Knesset, Moshe Sharoni, taunted his Arab colleagues in the Israeli parliament. He said: "We need to obliterate Gaza and call it the City of Murderers, the City of Terrorists."

THIS IS THE MENTALITY OF MASS MURDERERS.

But then, you can only murder real people. Imperialism kills non-people. That’s the nature of the beast. It can only act that way. Who is wagging this dog? Many of these people are from Brooklyn. American racism and imperialism are the same thing.

IT APPEARS TO HAVE BEEN EFFICIENTLY EXPORTED.

Written by BC Publishers, Glen Ford and Peter Gamble

[and end] - Url.: http://www.blackcommentator.com/190/190_cover_imperial_racism.html

FPF - CONNECTING THE DOTS:

MAIL & GUARDIAN - SOUTH AFRICA - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/modak

MERCENARIES FIGHTING FOR APARTHEID: THE GROUP IN LONDON - UNDER COVER OF THE 'WORLD WILDLIFE FUND' ETC. - IN 'OPERATION LOCK' FOUGHT AGAINST NELSON MANDELA c.s. Quote: "The funds for Operation Lock were actually WWF funds."- Url.: http://www.ogiek.org/indepth/whit-man-game-wwf.htm

URI AVNERY: MANUFACTURING ANTI-SEMITES - ''Many good people, who feel no hatred at all towards the Jews, but who detest the persecution of the Palestinians, are now called anti-Semites.'' - Url.: http://www.counterpunch.org/avnery1002.html

WHAT ONE IS NOT SUPPOSED TO KNOW NOR DEBATE: ''The NN-phant in the Room'' - Url.: http://boston.indymedia.org/newswire/display/186337/index.php

THE LORDS OF APARTHEID & their 'Economy Vatican' - Money is the root of all evil. - Url.: http://disc.server.com/discussion.cgi?disc=234999;article=304;title=APFN%20MESSAGE%20BOARD

APARTHEID IN SPAIN? - THE PROJECT FOR A NEW AMERICA STARTED IN 1492 - 'The Jewish Virtual Library' has the following 'underreported' information on this medieval 'Project for a New America': 'Judaic Treasures of the Library of Congress - Columbus Sets Sail - The Exodus August 3, 1492' - Url.: http://antwerpen.indymedia.org/print.php?id=3751

APARTHEID SPREADING - COMPULSORY 'PASSES' IN THE NETHERLANDS - ''ID cards: a story I thought I'd never write'' - Url.: http://www.no2id-handf.org.uk/dutchfpf.htm

2005 NOBEL LITERATURE PRIZE WINNER HAROLD PINTER - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/9cyeq - US - ZNet - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/hyv52

The Dutch author this far has lived and worked abroad for more than 4 decades for international media - when they still knew what honest journalism was - as an independent foreign correspondent. Of which 10 years - also during Gulf War I - in the 'Arab World' and the Middle East. Seeing worldwide that every bullet and every bomb breeds more terrorism !

WITH 'APARTHEID' AND FASCISM STRONGLY RELATED LINKS - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/gkgrb

FPF-COPYRIGHT NOTICE - In accordance with Title 17 U. S. C. Section 107 - any copyrighted work in this message is distributed by the Foreign Press Foundation under fair use, without profit or payment, to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the information. Url.: http://liimirror.warwick.ac.uk/uscode/17/107.html

FOREIGN PRESS FOUNDATION
http://forpressfound.blogspot.com/
Editor: Henk Ruyssenaars
http://tinyurl.com/amn3q
The Netherlands
fpf@chello.nl

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