Women Born Transsexual

Hooligan minority?  But enough about the police.

From The Guardian UK: http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2011/mar/27/tuc-march-ed-miliband-labour-rally

Business secretary Vince Cable says huge turnout at TUC march will not knock government’s cuts strategy off course

James Meikle
guardian.co.uk, Sunday 27 March 2011

Labour has defended Ed Miliband‘s part in Saturday’s peaceful TUC march and rally in London against government spending cuts, as the cleanup continued of symbols of wealth damaged by a minority of anarchists.

Senior opposition figures condemned the “unrepresentative hooligans” whose behaviour threatened to overshadow the protests of hundreds of thousands of others.

Michael Fallon, the deputy Conservative party chairman, accused Labour of “the laughable fiction” that it had “left the country some sort of golden economic legacy”. The business secretary, Vince Cable, told the BBC that the government was listening to the trade unions but would not change its strategy because of yesterday’s march.

More than 200 people were arrested and 84 people injured, including 31 police officers, as trouble flared in Oxford Street, Regent Street, Piccadily and Trafalgar Square, with banks, the Ritz hotel and the upmarket food store Fortnum and Mason among the targets.

Continue reading at:   http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2011/mar/27/tuc-march-ed-miliband-labour-rally

From Raw Story: http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/03/28/indiana-house-democrats-halt-gop-anti-union-agenda/

By Eric W. Dolan
Monday, March 28th, 2011

Indiana House Democrats who fled to Urbana, Illinois nearly six weeks ago in protest of Republican anti-union legislation will be returning to their state after successfully winning concessions.

“Today we can announce compromises that are great steps forward for working Hoosiers,” Indiana House Democratic Leader B. Patrick Bauer said Monday in a statement. “The principled stand by House Democrats forced concessions by the House Republicans that reflected the concerns expressed by so many people who came to the Statehouse in recent weeks.”

Republicans have agreed to take “right-to-work” legislation that would prohibit union-representation fees from being a condition of employment and a permanent ban on public employee bargaining off the table in the Indiana House. GOP state lawmakers also killed legislation for a private takeover of public schools and an outright ban of Project Labor Agreements.

“The compromise reached by the Party leaders in the House is a significant retreat from the radical right-wing agenda the Republicans sought to advance a month ago,” Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee Executive Director Michael Sargeant said. “House Democrats secured an important victory in their efforts to protect public education and workers’ rights.”

Bauer noted the compromises were not perfect, but were something Democrats could at least work with. “And we are headed back to Indianapolis to do just that,” he said.

Indiana House Democrats left the state on February 22 to protest the Republican legislation. The Indiana constitution requires two-thirds of the members of the House to be present to conduct business.

Continue reading at:  http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/03/28/indiana-house-democrats-halt-gop-anti-union-agenda/

From In These Times: http://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/7126/the_truth_behind_the_public_pensions_funding_gap/

By Jack Rasmus
Monday Mar 28, 2011

It’s not workers’ fault

State governors across the nation, led by newly elected right-wing Republicans (with several Democratic governors in tow), are whipping up anti-union sentiment by declaring that public workers and their unions are the cause of state budget deficits. They argue that various labor costs are driving up their deficits, and that the lead cause of those labor costs is overly generous increases public employee pension benefits.

But increases in public employee pension benefits are not the cause of the states’ budget crises. There are, indeed, serious pension funding gaps in many states’ public pension plans. But a close investigation of these gaps clearly shows that they do not exist because of states’ granting public employees exorbitant pension benefits.

The real reasons behind the pension funding gap are several. First, the current ‘jobless recovery’ since the 2007-09 recession has reduced contributions to pension fund balances. Current estimates are that it will take 84-96 months, or 7 to 8 years, for job creation to recover to 2007 levels. That means a projected larger pension gap.

But there’s an even greater reason why pension funds have ended up short of income today. It’s the practice of ‘contribution holidays’; that is, pension managers refusing to put the necessary contributions into the funds—a practice in the public sector that has been going on since the mid-1990s and even before that in the private sector.

Contribution holidays in turn were made possible by fund managers employing fraudulent actuarial assumptions about rates of return on fund investments and, secondly, by assuming they would hire large numbers of younger workers when, in fact, that hiring never occurred.

Both gimmicks allow a pension fund to appear adequately funded when in fact it isn’t. They permit fund managers to maintain that the pension has more income and fewer liabilities than it in fact actually has.

Continue reading at:  http://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/7126/the_truth_behind_the_public_pensions_funding_gap/

From The Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2011/mar/27/dutch-bankers-bonuses-axed-by-people-power

An online campaign has overturned ING’s executive pay policy, and the mood in Amsterdam is getting increasingly militant about bonuses at bailed-out banks

Richard Wachman in AmsterdamThe Observer,
Sunday 27 March 2011

Britain has a rival when it comes to bashing bankers. After a furious row over pay packages at Amsterdam-based ING in which thousands of customers threatened to make mass withdrawals, the Netherlands is now vying for the title of Europe‘s most bonus-hating country.

A growing Dutch political storm could end with a blanket ban on bonuses to financiers who work for institutions bailed out by the taxpayer.

ING customers mobilised on Twitter and other social networks to protest at bonuses paid to bosses at the bank, one of the biggest in the country. The threat of direct action raised the spectre of a partial run on ING, terrifying the Dutch establishment. Fred Polhout, union organiser at the bank, says: “People were outraged. We heard about the bloated sums being paid again in the City and in New York; but suddenly the issue exploded on our own front door.”

Compared with the packages awarded to bankers in the US and UK, the Dutch bonuses were small potatoes. Jan Hommen, ING’s chief executive, was due to receive a £1m bonus – a pittance when you consider that Stephen Hester, head of state-controlled RBS in the UK, is in line for up to £7.7m, Bob Diamond of Barclays is to collect as much as £6.5m, and some senior bankers at Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan are looking at windfalls of about £40m each.

“Perhaps we are so upset because we are a small country that prefers to set an example, rather than follow others,” suggests Polhout.

Continue reading at:  http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2011/mar/27/dutch-bankers-bonuses-axed-by-people-power

From BBC: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-12883400

28 March 2011

France’s opposition Socialists are celebrating a decisive local election victory against President Nicolas Sarkozy’s ruling centre-right UMP.

The Socialists took nearly 36% of votes, while the UMP mustered just 20% and the far-right National Front (FN) scored 12%.

The result was interpreted as a key step in the presidential ambitions of Socialist leader Martine Aubry.

Fifty Socialist MPs have now urged the party to back her for the presidency.

Ms Aubry told supporters: “Our determination is total to show that another France is possible.”

Although presidential elections are not due until 2012, Ms Aubry faces strong opposition to lead the Socialist campaign from current International Monetary Fund Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Khan as well as other candidates such as former party leader Francois Hollande.

‘Enormous surges’

In their letter, made public on Monday, the 50 MPs throw their weight behind the Socialist leader, arguing that she has the “legitimacy” and “responsibility” to unite “the Left, ecologists and popular forces” which they believe are necessary for election victory.

Continue reading at:  http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-12883400

This is Reposted with permission

By Helen G.

Originally posted at:  http://www.birdofparadox.net/blog/?p=9547

Crossposted at:  http://www.questioningtransphobia.com/?p=3685

The Trans Murder Monitoring (TMM) project has published its latest update regarding the numbers of recorded murders of trans people worldwide – and it makes depressing reading.

From the Trans Murder Monitoring project website:

In total, the preliminary results show 539 reports of murdered trans people in 42 countries since January 2008.

Although cases have been reported from all six major World Regions (Africa, Asia, Central and South America, Europe, North America, and Oceania), by far the largest number – 424 cases – are from Central and South America. This makes up 80% of the globally reported homicides of trans people since January 2008.

Globally, the number of trans people murdered continues to rise, as it has year-on-year since the TMM project began its work.

[Click image to enlarge]

For further information, see the Trans Murder Monitoring project website.

—————

Previous related posts:

• November 2010: Trans Murder Monitoring Project update (November 19th, 2010)
• Trans Murder Monitoring Project update: every second day the murder of a trans person is reported (September 14th, 2010)
• A selection of published statistics of violence against trans people (August 27th, 2010)
• Trans Murder Monitoring Project: 333 cases of reported murders of trans people in the last 2 years (March 17th, 2010)
• TGEU press release: More than 160 murders of trans people in the last 12 months (November 19th, 2009)
• Every third day the murder of a trans person is reported (July 21st, 2009)

Denis Diderot was right.  Mankind will only be free when the last royal is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.  The French revolutionaries were right with their guillotine.  The Russian Revolutionaries were right when they executed the Tsar and family.

The American Revolution was right when it kicked the King out and became an independent nation rather than part of the Commonwealth.

The proper place for any Royal head is on the end of a pike.

I didn’t give a shit about the wedding of Charles and Diana and I don’t give a shit about the wedding of the royal spawn and who ever.

I have an alternative to Great Britain’s current austerity plan for the poor and working people. Get rid of the royals and confiscate all their wealth and property.  There isn’t any “Divine Right of Kings”.

Royalty is an anachronism that has no place in an egalitarian world.  It needs to be given its proper place on the dung heap of history.

I care more about the half million people who marched over the weekend than I care about the spectacle of the overly privileged and under deserving royals.

Of course Huffington Post, which is rapidly losing its edge under the ownership of AOL, is in a tizzy about anarchists possibly disrupting the royal wedding.  Wonder when they will actually start paying their contributors?

From The Huffington Post: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/03/28/royal-wedding-threat_n_841374.html

U.K. Royal Wedding Threatened By Anarchists (Go Anarchists)

By PAISLEY DODDS
03/28/11

LONDON — Scotland Yard is bracing to fend off possible security threats to the royal wedding from groups that range from terrorists to anti-monarchists.

The announcement Monday came only days after a peaceful demonstration Saturday against government spending cuts was disrupted by violence. Police made more than 200 arrests as the march drew 500,000 people to London, the largest protest in Britain since the Iraq war.

A small group separated from the main protest, hurling ammonia-filled light bulbs, paint and wooden planks at officers and smashing windows near London’s Trafalgar Square.

Police commander Bob Broadhurst said the April 29 wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton carries even more of a security threat than the anti-austerity protests, and that means police officers will be able to tap into special stop-and-search powers that fall under Britain’s counterterrorism laws.

Continue reading at:  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/03/28/royal-wedding-threat_n_841374.html

Class war.  Not just for the rich anymore…