Announce protest actions, general chit chat or give your opinion on issues we haven’t covered for the day.
The Editor doesn’t moderate this blog, 3 volunteers do, they are very lenient to provide you a free speech space but if it’s just deranged abuse or putting words in bloggers mouths to have a pointless argument, we don’t bother publishing.
All in all, TDB gives punters a very, very, very wide space to comment in but we won’t bother with out right lies or gleeful malice. We leave that to the Herald comment section.
EDITORS NOTE: – By the way, here’s a list of shit that will get your comment dumped. Sexist abuse, homophobic abuse, racist abuse, anti-muslim abuse, transphobic abuse, Chemtrails, 9/11 truthers, Qanon lunacy, climate deniers, anti-fluoride fanatics, anti-vaxxer lunatics, 5G conspiracy theories, the virus is a bioweapon, some weird bullshit about the UN taking over the world and ANYONE that links to fucking infowar.
Migrants being paid more than New Zealanders
More than 30,000 companies in New Zealand have become accredited to employ migrants since 2021, and most migrants at those businesses must receive at least the median wage – about $30 an hour.
With the minimum wage set at $23, some local staff have realised they are not getting the same salary as their overseas workmates.
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/business/515679/workplace-tensions-simmer-over-local-and-migrant-pay-rates
I refer to Danilo Dolci in the post on workers in government administration. This is relevant – it is about his work in Italy and the prevailing political and moral conditions there and how they impacted on the lower paid and unemployed. This is about a country that had been undermined by corruption and uninterested leaders for a long time. We are feeling the same foul winds and will follow the same path if we just allow our leaders to continue to follow the money and disdain their proper work of regard for all citizens whether wealthy or in the upper class coterie or not.
http://www.bestofsicily.com/mag/art120.htm – Danilo Dolci by Vincenzo Salerno
…In a society plagued by a general lack of trust and honesty, Danilo Dolci’s greatest gift was the hope he brought to those whose lives he touched. He organized unions, promoted education and, most importantly, taught people to believe in themselves.
Dolci actively fought to assist victims of the 1968 earthquake which destroyed much of the Belice Valley; the funds for relief and reconstruction were siphoned off by greedy administrators, and “Belice” has since become an Italian by-word for political corruption.
Some of Dolci’s later initiatives were less successful than others, often bordering on the intangible. His center sought to produce evidence against a secret NATO submarine base off the Sicilian coast on the basis that such an installation required Italian approval and control which in this case was apparently granted covertly to the United States Navy.
And from Dorothy Day Catholic Workers Movement 1967 –
https://catholicworker.org/859-html/
…He [Dolci] wants man to be “master of his own conscience, yet at one with his neighbor, shaping his life in groups, within groups, which will spread in all the most varied forms of community, sometimes overlapping, sometimes separate, from districts to regions, to nations and continents,
,…To me, this is the significance of Dolci – not just the three dams envisioned for Sicily, one completed, one under construction and the new Jato Dam, which will mean twenty-five thousand acres reclaimed, one thousand and six hundred acres reforested, the working days and gross yield trebled. Not just the big wine cooperative at Memfi, where men receive honest reckoning of the weight of their grapes and so double the price they receive, where they also receive a knowledge of what they themselves can do. It is not just the things envisioned and already accomplished, but the fact that Dolci carries to all he meets on his extensive trips, these ideas of love and brotherhood, this “little way” of nonviolence….
On Dolci’s family:- I was happy to meet Dolci’s wife Vincenzina, a dark-haired, strong and quiet woman, who, one felt, had done much of the hard work of their early years at Trappeto, the village by the sea where the work had started among the fishermen and where there had been a school – settlement – house – hospice and refuge during the first years of Dolci’s work.
Vincenzina’s first husband had been a farm laborer. He was so badly beaten by the Mafia for his refusal to blackmail his employer that he died of his injuries within a few months . (I obtained this information not by direct questioning, but from a book by James McNeish, Fire Under the Ashes, which was published last year.) When Dolci arrived in Trappeto, she was a widow with five small children. Those first children have now become young adults, working in the north of Italy, and there are five more children by the second marriage…
The sort of tribulations that improvers may go through:- this one an Italian University Professor –
Fabbrini, [Fabrizio Fabbrini] a professor at the university in Rome, had lost his position and had been imprisoned for six months in a damp cold cell beneath the level of the street. He was in the same cell with nine others, not conscientious objectors but sentenced on various charges. There was neither work nor exercise nor recreation for him, and one wonders how he stood it…
Julian Assange. 3 May 2024
https://diem25.org/world-press-freedom-day-we-continue-to-demand-julian-assanges-immediate-release/
…It has provided some momentary relief but we must be under no illusions that this fight is over. Assange is still being kept in torturous conditions for almost five years now in one of Britain’s harshest prisons, adding to the seven years he was kept inside the Ecuadorian Embassy.
Assange faces a 175-year sentence in a maximum-security prison if he were to be moved to the US for the crime of for revealing governments’ lies and exposing their very crimes against humanity. Powerful players are still desperate to lock Assange away for the rest of his life, so we cannot let up in our opposing struggle which is to see him walk free.