​At present, Ireland has a constitutional ban on abortion - even in cases of rape, incest and fatal foetal abnormalities. This has forced hundreds of thousands of women to travel to the U.K., since 1983, to access the medical procedure. This ban comes under Article 40.3.3 of Bunreacht na hÉireann, or the Irish Constitution, and is more commonly known as the Eighth Amendment.

The Repeal the Eighth movement has been growing quite rapidly in recent years. It came to my attention after the death of Savita Halappanavar - a young woman who, in 2011, suffered a septic miscarriage, and was denied an abortion that could have saved her life.

Every year since, the Abortion Rights Campaign has held a March for Choice, demanding the government repeal this ban on abortion, and give Irish women and girls the right to make their own choices and control their own bodies. This year's march, on September 24th, gathered over 20,000 supporters to the streets of Dublin.

I'm a big believer in standing up for what you believe in, and expressing the voice we are so privileged to have - and thus I felt it important to discuss my feelings on the Eighth Amendment, here on my blog.

For starters, I'm sick of having other people - namely the middle-aged / elderly white men who take up the majority of seats in Dáil Éireann - having a stronger say in what I do with my body, and the choices I make in life.

I'm sick of living in fear of ever falling pregnant, or being raped, and not being able to afford to travel to another country to access the medical care our country refuses to provide. Or being forced into having a child against my will, because of the Eighth.

I'm sick of not having total control of my body, nor having the final say in what happens in my reproductive system.

Article 40.3.3 is sick, cruel and oppressive. Ireland has always had a difficult and disturbing history with women - and that's putting it lightly. We've seen the horrors of the Magdelene laundries (the last of which was closed in 1996), to legal martial rape (criminalised in 1990), bans on divorce (legalised in 1995, the last country in Europe to do so) and contraception (banned until 1980, after which it was heavily restricted; not legalised until 1985) - and this is all fairly recent history. These things were all happening in my parents' lifetime - some even in mine.

And yet, the Eighth Amendment still remains.

Far too many women have suffered, over decades, at the hands of Irish legislation. Can we really call ourselves a progressive, democratic, developed country when we continue to refuse women bodily autonomy?

Earlier this year, the United Nations Human Rights Committee called the Eighth Amendment "cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment" of women. It called for the Irish government to amend these laws, and to provide "effective, timely and accessible procedures for pregnancy termination in Ireland", as well as the supplement of "full information on safe abortion services without [women] fearing being subjected to criminal sanctions".

Amnesty International has also condemned Ireland's restrictive laws, launching their She Is Not A Criminal campaign last year. As it stands, a woman who undergoes an abortion can face up to fourteen years imprisonment in Ireland. Medical staff can be fined up to €4,000 for providing a patient with information on abortion services.

Approximately 4,000 women leave Ireland every year to access the medical care their country refuses to provide - even in cases where the foetus is suffering a fatal abnormality, or where the woman's life is in danger. That's 77 women a week; 11 women a day.

I'm pro-choice because I believe no woman or girl should be forced to give birth against their will.

I dream of the day where I can have the right to control my own body. But until that day, in the eyes of the Irish Constitution, my body is not mine, and I am just a vessel.

Ciara Pollock @ciarapollock : Presenter on @RaidioRiRa, blogger at http://ciarapocket.blogspot.ie , journalism undergrad at @DITOfficial. 

​Labelling anti-fracking as "extremism" and "terrorism" 
 
The Spinwatch report identifies examples from various parts of the UK including North Yorkshire, Merseyside, Dorset and West Sussex. The unifying theme in all of these examples is that the documents and presentations equating anti-fracking protests with terrorism and extreme-right fanaticism are all linked with the Tory government's Prevent Strategy, which was signed off by Theresa May when she was Home Secretary.

Of course we know that the Tories are totally in hock to the fracking industry, so it serves their purposes to have their opponents labelled as "extremists" and "terrorists", but surely nobody in their right mind thinks that it's acceptable for multiple schools, councils and police forces to equate peaceful anti-fracking protests with savage murderers like ISIS and extreme-right fanatics like the MP killer Thomas Mair.

One of the worst examples of these smears against anti-fracking groups was identified in the Prevent policy of Chesswood School in West Sussex. The executive summary of their prevent policy identifies fracking protests as an "extremist ideology" associated with "terrorist groups" and equates environmental opposition to fracking with Al Qaida and far-right extremism.

British values

The Chesswood School Prevent document then goes on to define "extremist" as "vocal or active opposition to British values".

Whatever their opinion on the merits/harms of fracking, I'm pretty sure that most reasonable people would accept that anti-fracking protests consist of vocal or active opposition to fracking, not a vocal or active opposition to British values.

The Chesswood School Prevent strategy then goes on to define "British values" as respect for "democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty, mutual respect for and tolerance of those with different faiths and beliefs, and those without faith".

The right to peaceful protest is an absolutely essential part of individual liberty. It's ludicrous to imagine that it's possible to have a free and liberal society without the right to protest against the actions of the government, major institutions or other individuals.

If anyone is guilty of disregarding "British values" it's clearly people who insist on smearing anti-fracking protesters as extremists and terrorists simply for opposing what they consider to be unacceptable environmental destruction. Anyone who denies the right to protest such issues is obviously denying individual liberty, and clearly opposing the Chesswood School definition of "British values".

If respect for democracy is a "British value" then many would argue that the Tory party are extremists because of their abject disrespect for democracy. Think about the Tory election fraud at the 2015 General Election, Theresa May's Supreme Court appeal to try to scrap the principle of parliamentary sovereignty and the decision by the Tory run North Yorkshire County Council to allow fracking in Ryedale despite the 131:1 scale of public opposition to the plan.

Tory extremism
 
This concerted effort to define opposition to fracking as "extremism" and "terrorism" ties in with another of Theresa May's appalling right-wing authoritarian schemes.

Since 2014 the Tories have been pushing an extremism strategy that would allow them to revoke the human rights of people who have committed no crime whatever.

If Theresa May's extremism policy becomes law, then law-abiding citizens could be banned from attending protests or public events, and have all of their online activities pre-vetted by the police.

All that would need to be shown in order to impose these restrictions on people's human rights is that there is a suspicion that the individual could become involved in "harmful activities".

Theresa May's definition of "harmful activities" includes "a risk of public disorder", "a risk of harassment, alarm or distress" and the extremely vague "threat to the functioning of democracy".

So if Theresa May gets her way people could have their rights to free speech, free assembly, the presumption of innocence and peaceful protest scrapped simply because some police officer says they suspect the individual may at some future point cause "alarm or distress" to specified or unspecified persons.

With such extraordinarily low thresholds it's easy to see how the government could use Theresa May's extremism orders to shut down legitimate peaceful protests. All it would take is for a police officer or fracking company employee to claim "distress" because of an anti-fracking protest, then individual law-abiding anti-fracking protesters could be rounded up and stripped of their human rights, banned from protesting again, and forced into a monitoring regime to censor everything they write on the Internet.

Before he resigned in shame after his EU referendum gamble backfired David Cameron summed up the objectives of this policy when he said that "for too long we have been a passively tolerant society, saying to our citizens 'as long as you obey the law, we will leave you alone'."

It's extraordinary that a serving Prime Minister could get away with expressing such a sinister intention to interfere in the lives of law-abiding citizens, but the mainstream press gave him a free pass on it.

The mainstream media also gave a free pass to Theresa May who is the architect of this policy of stripping law abiding citizens of their human rights, and now this fanatical right-wing authoritarian is the Prime Minister, and still the mainstream media refuse to draw sufficient attention to her autocratic tendencies and her outright contempt for human rights.

Conclusion

It's impossible to not see the connection between this concerted effort to define anti-fracking protesters as "extremists" and "terrorists" and Theresa May's policy of stripping law-abiding citizens of their human rights.

The Tory party are clearly intent on serving the interests of the fracking industry. The widespread effort to brand anti-fracking protesters as "extremists" is clearly useful to the frackers, as will be the Tory policy of stripping people of their right to participate in public or online protests based on nothing more than a suspicion that "alarm" or "distress" may be caused.

You'd have to be staggeringly naive to imagine that the mainstream press would put up a fight to protect our human rights from this next Tory assault, especially given the way Theresa May's appalling Snoopers' Charter drifted into law with barely a whimper of opposition from the media. So it will be down to the public to stop the Tories from achieving their wet dream of labelling law-abiding citizens as "extremists" in order to criminalise peaceful protest.

Thomas G Clark Independent blogger & social activist. @Angry_Voice
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http://anotherangryvoice.blogspot.ie/

I’m often asked why I don’t criticize Donald Trump in my articles. It’s a fair question with an important answer. 

It’s true that apart from his ‘apparent’ desire to impose congressional term limits, and his ‘apparent’ reluctance to participate in endless stupid wars, and his ‘apparent’ opposition to predatory trade deals, Trump stands in opposition to pretty much everything I value.

I think the cataclysmic threat of climate change and the inevitable job losses that will be caused by increasing automation in both the lower and the middle classes are going to necessitate both a substantial tax increase for the one percent and a substantial decrease in the political influence of wealthy elites in order to resolve.

We’re going to need a massive, nationwide push of human energy, collaboration and innovation to prevent disastrous climate change, and we’re going to need major social programs and probably a basic income for all citizens if automation is going to reach the levels Stephen Hawking says it will.

Those are just necessary changes that we will have to make if we don’t want to collapse as a civilization, and we’re going to have to purge corporatism from our governmental systems in order to implement those changes in a way that doesn’t end up oppressing and exploiting people. Some non-idiotic financial, legal, foreign and healthcare policy would be great, too. 

That said, I’m happy to leave the Trump-bashing to the much bigger voices of the much more widely-viewed corporate media giants at CNN, NBC, ABC, CBS, Comedy Central, HBO, the New York Times, the Washington Post, etc., because Donald Trump and his supporters are not the major obstacles to those changes I’d like to see made. The elites of the Democratic party are.

The only thing we need to get the Republicans out of the way is votes. The only thing we need to get votes are candidates who aren’t slobbering sycophantic minions of Wall Street running as Democrats against Republicans. As we saw clearly in the Democratic presidential primaries, the people will joyfully rally around a good person with good ideas, but the Democratic establishment will fight tooth and claw to silence, sabotage and subvert them.

As we saw clearly in the presidential general election, that kills voter turnout, putting the Republicans in power. So that is plainly the real problem here. If we can get good candidates running as Democrats, we can make the Republicans our bitch every time, but the Democratic establishment, since it is pervasively immersed in corruption and cronyism, stops that from happening. This has been the case for a long, long time, and will continue to be the case until we force it to change. 

So if we can fix the Democratic party, the Republican problem solves itself. If we can’t fix the Democratic party, we’ll have to rally behind a party that better represents our interests, in which case we’ll still be fighting the Democrats first and foremost, since they’ll be competing for the votes on the political left. Either way, joining with the Democratic elites and their media pawns in opposing Donald Trump is a waste of progressives’ time and energy right now. 

And of course, that is the idea. If they can keep us focused on Donald Trump, the ruling elites of the Democratic Party will successfully avoid having to stop their rampant cronyism and corruption by distracting everyone with a message of opposition and enmity. They’ll be able to keep their corporate donations rolling in and keep the party under the control of the Nancy Pelosis, the Chuck Schumers, the Barack Obamas and the Debbie Wasserman Schultzes. 

The thing is, this tactic is actually far less effective against the Republicans than consistent campaigns based on anti-corporatist populism would be. The opposition strategy can only work if the Republicans perform badly; if the economy improves and Trump’s popularity doesn’t take too much of a plunge due to implementing moronic domestic policies, they’ll keep winning in 2018 and 2020, because nobody will buy into the “vote for us because we’re not them” narrative.

If the Democrats can actually put together a sales package that the American people want to buy, something they’ll get excited about and rally behind, there’ll be no stopping them. But it’s going to have to come from impressive policy changes since Hillary’s loss proved that the novelty of wedge issues and “first ______ president” has officially worn off. And those impressive policy changes will not happen as long as the Democratic party is being controlled by neoliberal corporatist plutocrats and their cronies.

As it is, it’s hard to even tell which party is supposed to be on the left or the right anymore. It’s the Democrats trying to sell us on exploitative corporatist trade deals now, and they’ve certainly become the bigger warmongers. Their candidates predominantly embrace the Walmart economy and are only interested in tiny, incremental changes when it comes to climate policy and income and wealth inequality.

Their official party narrative is that they can keep soliciting financial favors from Wall Street and the military industrial complex while still serving the interests of the poor and marginalized, and the facts simply don’t bear that out.

So I focus on where the real problem is. Trump gonna Trump, and that’s just going to play itself out however it plays itself out. Unless he actually starts doing what the alarmists say he’ll do and starts putting Muslims in internment camps or whatever, I find opposing him ultimately uninteresting if the Democrats aren’t going to put forward something much saner.

If we’re going to turn this country around, I can promise you it’s not going to come from the people in the Democratic party who got us here in the first place.
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Article by Caitlin Johnstone first featured on Newslogue.com (@caitoz)

Caitlin Johnstone is a journalist, author, feminist thinker, cage rattler, giant woman, and mother of two. Thank you for joining her on her adventure.
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