Jury: University of Colorado Wrongly Fired Prof Ivan Moreno DENVER (AP) - A jury ruled Thursday that the University of Colorado wrongly fired the professor who compared some Sept. 11 victims to a Nazi, a verdict that gives the professor $1 and a chance to get his job back. Then-Gov. Bill Owens was among the officials who called on the university to fire Ward Churchill after his essay touched off a national firestorm, but the tenured professor of ethnic studies was ultimately terminated on charges of research misconduct. Churchill said claims including plagiarism were just a cover and that he never would have been fired if it weren't for the essay in which he called World Trade Center victims "little Eichmanns," a reference to Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi leader who orchestrated the Holocaust. Jurors agreed. When the verdict was read, Churchill hugged his attorney, David Lane, and his wife, Natsu Saito. The jury awarded Churchill only $1 in damages, but he has maintained that money was never his goal. A judge will decide later whether Churchill should get his job back.

Support Visteon Factory Occupation in London, Enfield Short Report, 2nd of April 2009 After car parts manufacturer Visteon announced job cuts workers occupied plants in Belfast, basildon and Enfiled. In Enfield about 70 workers - men and women from all kinds of backgrounds - are still inside the plant and on the roof. Last Tuesday the management called for a general assembly and told people that they would have to leave their workplace immediately. They were told to fetch their personal belongings the next day at 10 am. When people turned up the factory was already closed. Workers entered through an unlocked side entrance and occupied the plant. The security guards won't let people go inside, they also blocked the fire exists with padlocks - which is clearly illegal. Last night, Thursday 1st of April, two bailiffs entered the plant. They issued an eviction order, supported by five cops. The eviction order was flawed, e.g. it was not signed and it had the wrong address on it. Workers expect a proper eviction order for tomorrow, Friday, 3rd of April. In case of eviction workers plan to picket the plant. they also plan to go to Ford Dagenham for a solidarity picket.

Homeless New Yorkers Take Over Vacant Building in East Harlem/El Barrio Claim Property for Low-Income Neighbors, Demand Action From City Government El Barrio/East Harlem, NYC. —Homeless people have taken over an empty building in East Harlem, as part of a coordinated push-back against city policies that let buildings stay empty. The building, which is owned by the city, has been completely vacant for decades.

Anarchist Movement Conference 2009 London June 6-7, 2009 As the world economy heads deeper into an unprecedented recession, the spectre of social unrest is again spreading across Europe and the World. In the UK we have experienced an extended holiday from wide-spread class struggle as social democracy and capitalism worked hand in hand to maintain social peace. But as the guarantees of the banks have gone, so too have the guarantees that the state can manage the emerging social conflict, which could potentially turn into social rebellion unseen in the UK for decades. So, where does that leave the Anarchist Movement? Are we relevant? Do we exist in a form coherent enough to actually be called a movement? Are we progressing? The Anarchist Movement Conference is a chance to put our ideas on the table and rebuild ourselves. The barriers that exist need to be broken down, the experiences and ideas of those involved in anarchist politics need to be shared, discussed, critiqued and debated. The task is urgent, practical and necessary - are we as a movement mature enough to face the challenge? How and where should we organise? Who are we are speaking to? How do we relate to the wider world as anarchists? These are some of the discussions that might happen during the course of the weekend. We want this conference to be a historical turning point, a point where we manage collectively to come together to look at the problems and work towards the solutions. Anarchists from every federation, network and local group, those involved in diverse struggles from environmental direct-action to community work, trade unionism to DIY projects - we invite you and encourage you: Claim your place at the table and help make a movement!

From Precarity to Unemployment: the Great Recession and EuroMayDay Alex Foti Neoliberalism and monetarism have ended up ruining the world, like the antiglobalization movement always said they would: like two mad scientists, they proved socially, environmentally, and economically unsustainable. And so they fucked up majorly and have produced the worst economic crisis since the times of Roosevelt, Stalin, Hitler. Problem is that it's hard to cheer because the vast majority of those laissez-faire bankers and deregulating economists are still in charge, still dictating the terms of the game. Those who precipitated the crisis with their foolish policies of banking deregulation, welfare privatization, trade liberalization, labor deunionization are still at their desks! They tell us we should be quiet, accept layoffs and wage cuts, take some fiscal stimulus if we are lucky, and after 2010 we will again live happily under capitalism ever after. BULLSHIT! And they are throwing trillions at the banks who have made the riskiest of bets on real estate, paid off millions in bonuses to assehole CEOs and let the economy hang dry when the debts were called in. Trillions for bankers, cuts for people. This is the European equation. Not only this is scandalously immoral, it's economically counterproductive. Banks are hoarding liquidity for fear of going bust and don't supply new credit. As Keynes and Kalecki first showed, during great depressions monetary policy doesn't work, since it falls into a liquidity trap. Only social spending, public investment and redistribution away from profits and rents toward wages and transfers is gonna do the trick. For three decades, as they were happily pocketing the quantum leap in social productivity afforded by the information revolution, the élites said there was no public money for services, schools and the precarious many, while hedge funds and private equity funds were siphoning off zillions for the super-ritzy few. They said wages had to stay low, because global competitiveness demanded it, until income distribution became as absurdly unequal as it had gotten on the eve of the Great Depression. No wonder another major depression has ensued. This crisis is no random phenomenon, it was caused by the venality and stupidity of the financial and political elites.

Workers Without Borders Jenifer Gordon New York Times Americans are hardly in the mood to welcome new immigrants. The last thing we need, the reasoning goes, is more competition for increasingly scarce jobs. But the need for immigration reform is more urgent than ever. The current system hurts wages and working conditions — for everyone. Today, millions of undocumented immigrants accept whatever wage is offered. They don’t protest out of fear of being fired or deported. A few hundred thousand guest workers, brought in for seasonal and agricultural jobs, know that asserting their rights could result in a swift flight home. This system traps migrants in bad jobs and ends up lowering wages all around. The solution lies in greater mobility for migrants and a new emphasis on workers’ rights. If migrants could move between jobs, they would be free to expose abusive employers. They would flow to regions with a shortage of workers, and would also be able to return to their home countries when the outlook there brightened, or if jobs dried up here.

Guy Debord, A Natonal Treasure? Frederique Rousell France has decided to classify the archives of the situationist philosopher coveted by an American university. Guy Debord erected as a national monument. . . . The French state has refused to allow the personal archives of the founder of the Situationist International to leave France. The injunction of 29 January [2009], signed by the Minister of Culture, Christine Albane, and published on Thursday in The Official Journal, stipulates that the archives assume "a great importance for the history of the ideas of the second half of the 20th century and for the knowledge of the still-controversial work of one of the last great French intellectuals of the period." A major and symbolic decision. "This classification as a national treasure reveals a recognition by the State that what Debord represents in the intellectual and artistic life of the just-ended century," emphasized Bruno Racine, President of the National Library of France, who has worked to keep the archives in France.