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Open Letter to German foreign minister Annalena Baerbock

Do not use the COP27 Climate Summit to greenwash the el-Sisi dictatorship


01/11/2022

This open letter by Extinction Rebellion, and supported by other organisations, will be handed over at the Green party headquarters at midday on Friday, 4th November. It will be followed by a demonstration to the Egyptian embassy. Please come along and support us.

Dear foreign minister Annalena Baerbock,

We, a broad alliance of climate justice movements and human rights activists, are addressing you today as the most important representative of our country at the coming world climate summit in Sharm El-Sheikh with an urgent appeal.

Highlight the human rights abuses and call for the release of political prisoners!

The main discussion at COP27 will be which measures are necessary to defend the effects of the climate crisis on the countries most seriously affected. And who must pay for this.

The summit is one of the most important of our time, as it will set the decisions which affect whether the world community can keep this crisis at all under control. It is good that it is taking place on the African continent, whose people have contributed the least towards the climate crisis, yet are now dramatically suffering from the consequences. However, the host country Egypt is, to say the least, a questionable partner for this orientation.

Across the world, human rights organisations condemn General Abdel Fatah el Sisi’s abuse of the event for the sake of his own propaganda, to cover up repression, police violence and torture in his country. He holds around 60,000 political opponents under brutal conditions in his jails. There are several shocking reports in the international media (including the Guardian, the Intercept, and the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung) about the suffering of the people, in particular about groups marginalised by persecution, opponents of the regime, and journalists. There are also reports of widespread destruction of the environment.

Frau foreign minister, you came into office with the aspiration towards a “foreign policy guided by values”, and promised to pay particular attention to compliance with the Charter of the United Nations, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Charter of Paris.

At COP27, you should fulfill this aspiration and use your role as the foreign minister of one of the richest and economically strongest countries in the world to highlight the clear abuses in Egypt.

We regret that in July you offered General Sisi a platform in Berlin through the joint organisation of the “Petersburg Climate Dialogue”, at which the ruthless dictator could present himself as a “green leader.”

Use the opportunity in Sharm el-Sheikh to revise this impression!

In solidarity with Egyptian human rights activists, we must show the compelling connections between climate crisis, human rights violations and political calculations!

General el-Sisi issues green propaganda with paper drinking straws and solar panels, to affect the attitude of the international guests and portray himself as the defender of the African continent. He is being advised by a large US-American PR agency Hill&Knowlton. In the past, Hill&Knowlton led a Greenwashing campaign for the tobacco industry. It is currently doing the same for oil and gas corporations. This is beyond satire. An agency, which is painting the public image of climate-damaging industries green, is responsible for organising the PR for the most important climate conferences of our time.

This entanglement of industry and politics cannot pass without comment! Human rights must be valid world wide and cannot be treated as an uncomfortable footnote. Debates about climate protection without public civil society and political freedom are a farce.

Germany is one of the most important financial donors and trade partners of Egypt and could have some influence.

Take responsibility and use the climate conference in Sharm el-Sheikh to call for global climate justice! Demand effective measures to reduce CO2, to defend the ecosystem and vulnerable communities, but also demand the right to freedom and dignity for all people!

In the hope of your support, we remain

Extinction Rebellion

No Climate Justice Without An Open Civic Space

Call to Action: Protest rally in Berlin around the COP27 Climate Summit. Friday 4th November at 12 noon.


31/10/2022

An alliance of Extinction Rebellion, Fridays for Future, theleftberlin, the LINKE Berlin LAG Internationals and Egyptian human rights activists are jointly demanding a clear positioning of German foreign policy towards human rights violations in Egypt.

On 6th November, the 27th World Climate Conference will be taking place in Sharm-el- Sheikh, Egypt. The main discussion at the summit will be which measures are necessary to defend the effects of the climate crisis on the countries most seriously affected. And who must pay for this.

A German delegation is also travelling to this important conference. Human rights movements worldwide are criticising General Abdel Fatah el-Sisi’s abuse of the event for his own propaganda and to cover up repression, police violence and torture in his own country,

As a climate justice movement and in solidarity with Egyptian human rights activists, we want to point out the compelling connections between climate crisis, human rights abuse and political calculation before the summit begins. With the rally and subsequent demonstration, we are addressing the German foreign minister and the Egyptian embassy in Berlin.

There are now an estimated 60,000 political prison in Egypt. Torture and murder are on the agenda. Press and scholarship are drastically censored. An independent report of environmental and health dangers from industry or transport in Egypt is impossible. But the host of COP27, General el-Sisi, practices green propaganda with paper straws and solar panels to affect the mood of the international guests and present himself as the defender of the African continent.

El-Sisi is being advised by a large US-American PR agency: Hill&Knowlton. In the past, Hill&Knowlton led a Greenwashing campaign for the tobacco industry. It is currently doing the same for oil and gas corporations. This is beyond satire. An agency, which is painting the public image of climate-damaging industries green, is responsible for organising the PR for the most important climate conference of our time. We denounce this!

This entanglement of industry and politics cannot remain without comment! Human rights must be valid worldwide and we will not allow them to be treated as an uncomfortable footnote. Debates about climate protection without an open civil society and political freedom are a farce.

Germany is one of the most important financial sponsors and trade partners of Egypt, and could be able to exert influence. But instead of demanding that el-Sisi adhere to human rights, foreign minister Annalena Baerbock has offered el-Sisi another stage through the joint organisation of the “Petersberg Climate Dialogue” in July in Berlin, at which the ruthless dictator could be presented as a “green leader”.

With our rally and demonstration on Friday, 4th November 2022 in Berlin, we want to provide a voice and a face for those people who the Egyptian dictator el-Sisi is trying to silence: activists in the country’s prisons and representatives of the resistance in exile. And we want to honour those who have been killed in the fight for freedom and dignity.

We demand that our foreign minister Annalena Baerbock raises the catastrophic situation of human rights in Egypt at COP27.

We demand that German foreign policy connects all financial or political joint work with the dictator Abdel Fatah el-Sisi with clear conditions.

NGOs, journalists and civil society must be granted access to the debate about climate protection methods, political prisoners must be released and the repression of critics must be immediately stopped.

We will start at the Green party headquarters where we will hand over a letter to Frau Baerbock. From there we will march to the Egyptian embassy, where we will hold up photos of political prisoners and read out personal letters and histories of people affected by el-Sisi’s politics.

Rally and Demo on 4th November 2022

Start: 12 noon
Green Party headquarters
Platz vor dem Neuen Tor 1

End: 3pm
Egyptian Embassy
Stauffenbergstraße 6-7

This call to action was issued by Extinction Rebellion Berlin with the support of Free Alaa, Fridays for Future, die LINKE Berlin LAG Internationals, theleftberlin, Occupy Cop 27 and others. The open letter to Annalena Baerbock will be published on theleftberlin.com on Tuesday, 1st November

 

Suggested Further Reading:

Lettuce Liz and Kami-Kwasi

WTF UK? An attempt to explain what has just happened


27/10/2022

I’ve been asked to explain what is going on in British politics at the moment. Right, well there was this lettuce and the lettuce beat the Prime Minister in a tabloid newspaper competition and the Prime Minister resigned. Now the guy who lost in the competition to be the Prime Minister last time round has been crowned Prime Minister. He is yet to face the lettuce. I know, I know. It doesn’t make much sense. Lettuce go back a few days and look at what has happened.

Odious Prime Minister Boris Johnson was finally given the boot in July this year. Excellent. But then he was replaced by someone almost as awful. This awful person was Liz Truss, former Lib Dem and reportedly a brief member of Socialist Worker Student Society (sorry comrades). Liz Truss was voted in by 57% of the 170,000 or so “mad swivel-eyed loons” that make up the Conservative Party membership.

On becoming Prime Minister, Truss met the Queen, who promptly died. She then set about causing chaos both within and external to the Tory party. Together with her new Chancellor and fellow radical free market libertarian Kwasi Kwarteng, her government presented a ‘mini-budget’ to the House of Commons. Policies in this ‘mini budget’ included abolishing the 45% higher rate of income tax, reversing plans to increase corporation tax and removing limits on bankers bonuses. It contained billions in unfunded tax cuts. The country, already on its knees in a so-called ‘cost of living crisis’ was not particularly impressed. Approval ratings for Truss, Kwarteng and the Tories nosedived. No thanks to the official opposition who are still busy with their internal purges and promising to be tougher on protesters and “failed asylum seekers” than the Tories.

The pound crashed. The financial markets didn’t like all this increased borrowing. There was talk of the pound reaching parity with the dollar before the end of the year. People suddenly started talking about ‘gilts’ (UK government bonds) because the Bank of England started buying them in an effort to calm the markets and prevent the collapse of some large pension funds.

Prime Minister Truss had succeeded in upsetting everyone. Working people saw this rightly as a ‘mini-budget’ of the rich, prioritising tax cuts for high earners and unlimited banker’s bonuses. Homeowners saw their mortgage interest rates skyrocket. Many on the right watched the market turbulence in horror. Tory party colleagues were aghast at the mess she was making. The swivel-eyed loons wanted to bring back Boris. Everyone was pissed off.

Truss dealt with this by sacking her Chancellor after 38 days in the job. This was a bit unfair as she was fully supportive of the economic policies he had tried to deliver. But Tories hate fairness anyhow. The Tory party was in disarray, letters of no-confidence in the Prime Minister were reportedly piling up. A new Chancellor, the poisonous Jeremy Hunt, was appointed to calm the markets.

A vote on fracking was held in the House of Commons. This was briefed to Tory MPs as a vote of confidence in the PM, then it was ‘un-briefed’ when it looked like they might vote against it. The actual vote ended in farce, with reports of Tory MPs being dragged into the voting lobby and the Chief and Deputy Whip resigning during the proceedings, then un-resigning later. It was an embarrassing and shameful spectacle, and in that way representative of the Truss government and the Johnson one before it.

On Friday 21st October, Truss resigned as Prime Minister. At 45 days in office, that makes her the shortest-serving UK Prime Minister. The Daily Star tabloid newspaper celebrated as its ‘wet lettuce’ outlasted the Prime Minister. The runner-up in the last Prime Minister selection was crowned Prime Minister without a hint of democracy. Ultra-millionaire Rishi Sunak, caught boasting to Tory supporters that he’d changed the rules to redistribute money from deprived areas to richer ones, is seen as a safer pair of hands by the financial sector. The Tory Party is divided over his appointment, maybe there is potential for the lettuce to claim another head.

The important lesson to learn is, you can fuck the poor but don’t fuck the markets. Lettuce (sorry) hope that the wave of industrial action currently sweeping the country is strong enough to sweep away this self-serving Tory government. Whether it will Romaine’s to be seen.

Remembering Marxist historian Mike Davis

Ingar Solty from the rosa luxemburg stiftung looks back on the US American historian who died yesterday


26/10/2022

I just learned that the U.S. American historian Mike Davis died at the age of 76 last night. This is such sad news.

I remember vividly my first encounter with Davis’s work when reading “Prisoners of the American Dream” for the first time. I will never forget the way it blew my mind: how a book could ooze out Marxism from every page (and a page-turner it was…), a Marxism of flesh and blood without the stale academic jargon of yet another repetitive Poulantzasian finger exercise in “the internationalization of the state,” a Marxism that reached your head because it sprang from the real world of social injustices and the brutality of the real instead of ahistorical intellectual endeavors in high places, a Marxism you could feel in your bones weary from routinized, alienating, hard manual labor, a Marxism you could feel in your heart with a mixture of the anxiety of job loss and hazardous workplaces on the one hand but also, on the other hand, the hidden memories of childhood aspirations and the raw and yearning dreams of a better life.

It is this kind of humanist Marxism – rich in history and detail – which, unlike French structuralist abstractionism, could never be said to be in crisis, could never devolve into quite the epistemological opposite it set out to be (a new state-theoretical idealism for instance…), because it has sunk its roots deep into the very fabrique of the world we live in. It is this kind of humanist Marxism which could and will never end up being just a short-lived fashion among self-indulgent thinkers in the academy brought to you by short-lived fashion-oriented publishing houses selling the newest radical chic. Or blindly following the zeitgeist of neoliberal counter-revolution and a neoliberalized higher education system. And in that sense Mike Davis’ writings were also furthest away from the current tradition of selling the author’s biographical story instead of the intellectual rigor and enlightening nature of his or her book.

Davis was not about form but about content. His books didn’t need a sales pitch. Just as carrier pigeons deliver the messages to the farthest reader, they would necessarily find their way to an attentive audience. They could do this because of their truffle nosing abilities concerning yet unwritten and hidden histories (“Late Victorian Holocausts”), concerning the greater world-historical trends resulting, for example, from free trade-induced mass proletarianization around the globe (“Planet of Slums”), and concerning the ways in which capitalism structures, organizes and disorganizes spaces – urban, suburban and rural – and impacts not just how we work but how we live – and where (Davis’ urban social historiography of his hometown Los Angeles).

Mike Davis had the magnificent talent and gift of being able to show how even the smallest unit and microcosm contained the greater totality of the universe. No one could study urban riots in London or Southern Californian wildfires like he did pointing to the economic, social and ecological destructions of capitalism allowing us to see and feel that what appears natural and as natural disasters to be accepted like fate are in fact very un-natural, human-made disasters and the opposite of fate, the result of a specific economic and social system in which very specific rules and logics apply from which very concrete people benefit who also tend to be the ones calling the shots.

Obviously, whenever Davis would write another one of his lucid and poignant new pieces for the Los Angeles Review of Books, New Left Review or other outlets, we would translate it for “Das Argument” or “LuXemburg” and the images he created in his texts stick with me. There is hardly a curriculum, talk or a paper where I don’t reference one of his works. Mike Davis was in the major league of a 21st century Marxism capable of making, to quote Marx himself, “the petrified conditions dance by playing them their own tune” and creating, in a nutshell, a new tune of how things can, should, even must be completely turned around for us to have a future on this planet.

Mike Davis will be sorely missed.

Mike Davis (author and activist): born 10th March 1946, died: 25th October 2022

All Trussed up and Nowhere Good to Go

Seize the Suez, oops I mean sewers. A Hypothesis for Marxists


23/10/2022

How stupid do the British ruling class think we are? The hidden masters of the Tory party knew perfectly well what they were doing by enabling Truss to become Prime Minister. No attempt was made to disguise her vicious policies. Even a very placid working class would find it difficult to swallow the astonishing tax-relief for the upper-crusters that she and her Treasurer inaugurated. Now a newly militant working class led by the rail workers are facing a bitter “restraint” on real wages – after inflation, that is. Truss’ rival in the leadership campaign – the slimy Sunak – made clear she was destined to alarm the financial elites. They would worry about underwriting upper-crust bonanza while falsely promising relief to the working class for the coming winter of discontent. Something did not add up, nor does it now! Can we really believe this was all a mishap?

We know Marx’s famous words on “personages in history”: “once is a tragedy, the second time is farce“. But five times in six years! Cameron, May, Johnson, Truss and now…

Opportunist ex-Home Secretary Suela Braverman smeared Guardian readers as “tofu-eating wokerati”. But as the writer Polly(-Anna) Toynbee blithely boosts Starmer and Labour, Braverman seems ‘woke’ – if this is read as a falsely aware person. The ruling class want disemboweled, sanitized ‘leftists’ and those exorcised out of Marxists’ party – i.e., Labour in power.

Three years ago on the Berlin Left  platform, I suggested that “the UK ruling class was sorely divided about which direction to go. The Conservative Party was hijacked by the section of the ruling class whose mandate is to tie the apron strings of the UK back onto the (Trump-ite) USA. A significant part of the Labour Party hierarchy seems to have bought into this.” But the best laid plans of these mice have been fouled….

After their “success” of Brexit, the lies and machinations have fallen apart. The major matter for them is that Biden’s USA and his pushing of Germany to ‘spine up’ against Russia, finds the UK far less relevant than Trump’s USA did. And things are dire for workers in the UK.

As Toynbee rightly says, inequality has grown. The “Living Standards Audit 2022” states: ” the UK’s Gini coefficient for disposable income was 0.37, lower than that in the US’s (0.39) but higher than all other G7 countries, and higher than every country in Europe other than Bulgaria.”

At the same time, the former Bank of England Governor Mark Carney says: “Put it this way: In 2016, the British economy was 90% the size of Germany’s. Now it is less than 70%.” The Economic and Social Research Institute data shows “reductions in UK to EU goods trade by 16% and trade from the EU to UK by 20% relative to the scenario in which Brexit had not occurred.” So much for Singapore-on-Thames.

The ruling class wants to trim sail, as the working class got uppity. But their right wing was rather noisy. What better way to disillusion them of their pretences that the UK could still rule the world than by allowing Truss and Kwarteng show how dependent the UK actually is? This is a Suez moment for the most right-wing upper class ideologues who seized the UK by the neck. I believe a smoother operator – Starmer – will be relied upon to straitjacket the working class.

Truss was no mistake. The working class needs its own party and not a social-democratic facade for the ruling class.