President
Breaking: Columbia University ‘will not divest from Israel’
University president continues capitulation to Israeli pressure
The student protest camp for Gaza at Columbia has been assaulted several times by police
Columbia University in New York will not divest its investments in Israeli firms and firms that supply weaponry to Israel, according to the university’s president Minouche Shafik, despite demands from thousands of its students who are protesting in solidarity with the Palestinian people and against Israel’s genocide. Shafik, echoing the narrative of Israel lobbyists, has even claimed that the protests have made the university unsafe for Jewish students, even though Jewish students and faculty members are playing a leading role in the protests, as if the feelings of some students, who don’t like to be confronted with the reality that a country they support is engaged in genocide, are more important than stopping mass murder of women and children.
The announcement continues Shafik’s shame after she failed to challenge a narrative spouted by pro-Israel lawmakers during her questioning by politicians – and claimed a pro-Palestine professor at the university had been sacked and would never teach at Columbia again, a claim denied by Professor Mohamed Abdou.
Columbia is one of a string of universities across the US that have shamed themselves by calling in armed police to arrest and disperse protests against the genocide in Gaza. Some, parroting the pro-Israel lobby, have even accused the students of ‘siding with terrorists’.
Meanwhile, Israel continues to slaughter hundreds of Palestinians daily, mostly women and children – and the US is trying to block a planned warrant by the International Criminal Court for the arrest of Israel’s war criminal prime minister and other ministers for Israel’s war crimes.
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TSSA members in Network Rail London South vote no-confidence in Eslamdoust, Heywood
Motion and letter reveal deep dissatisfaction among members as branch says it will support union staff when they strike and accuses management of inflaming the problems and indulging in delusion
TSSA rail union members in south London have passed a motion of no confidence in the union’s general secretary Maryam Eslamdoust and its president Melissa Heywood over their conduct toward union staff and the GMB union that represents them at work.
The TSSA and Eslamdoust and her team have been in crisis since the Kennedy Report exposed widespread bullying and sexual harassment by senior union figures, leading to the sacking of former general secretary Manuel Cortes and Eslamdoust, who was supposedly going to clean up the union after the scandal. was rocked by fresh allegations of abuse and deep resentment against the new general secretary for the treatment of staff, particularly women.
Eslamdoust, who was recommended to members by the union’s executive despite what appears to be a complete lack of relevant experience, wrote a bizarre article for the Guardian in which she accused the GMB union of attempting to bully her so it could take over the TSSA and distract from its own renewed sexual harassment scandal, and tried to blame others for her failure to take meaningful action to implement the Kennedy Report’s recommendations.
“It’s the fault of everyone but me”. TSSA has a General Secretary that seems unable to accept any responsibility for anything! https://t.co/EW2uQrRJc3
— Steve Coe (@stevecoe1057) April 18, 2024
Former TSSA Assistant General Secretary’s take on Eslamdoust’s actions
She then followed up her attack on the GMB by emailing all TSSA member branches with an astonishing assault branding the union’s workers as greedy and lazy, and treating the GMB union as if it, and not the unhappiness of TSSA staff, was the driver of the impending strike action for which more than 93% of staff voted last week.
Such is the anger among members at the situation that earlier this month the TSSA’s branch for members working in Network Rail in South London passed the following resolution:
That this branch has no confidence in the leadership of the General Secretary and President in the management of internal conflicts that exist in our union and have been created since the election of our General Secretary.
Our branch has more confidence in our TSSA staff who are currently in dispute. Should our TSSA staff who are represented by the GMB decide they have no option but take industrial action, our branch will support them in this action.
The branch then sent a letter to the TSSA executive:
Network Rail London South Branch
Notice of vote of no confidence in TSSA Leadership of our General Secretary and President for circulation to TSSA Executive Committee
At our branch meeting on Thursday 11 April, we invited our General Secretary and President to respond to concerns that our branch has regarding the internal conflicts within our union.
Melissa Heywood did attend this meeting despite her partner being in hospital and joined via phone from her car in the hospital car park. Our branch very much appreciated her attendance, and it would have been entirely justifiable to give apologies, and not attend in these circumstances. Our branch meeting later agreed to specifically thank Melissa for attending this challenging meeting and will make that clear with a separate message to her. Maryam had indicated she would be attending but did not attend, although it was noted that there may have been family commitments for this non-attendance.
We presented an outline of our concerns which included the following:
TSSA had been through the massive challenge of removing the previous senior management team, including our General Secretary following an investigation and report by QC Helena Kennedy. There was a remarkable and positive consensus across the union to achieve these goals.
We have gone through the election process for a new General Secretary with Maryam being successful in that election, being endorsed by the Executive Committee. At that point Maryam had the overwhelming support of our union employees and members, with the hope that we had every prospect of a positive leadership that would have learnt from our previous conflicts.
Within weeks internal conflicts started to emerge, including one EC member leaving as he found the environment to be intolerable. The derecognition of Women in Focus was illegitimate and unnecessary.
Disputes between TSSA staff and the senior management team soon emerged, with complaints about non-compliance with agreements, accusations and counter accusations of bullying, with TSSA staff now moving to a ballot for industrial action, referencing “a culture of bullying, harassment and victimisation.”
The communications from our General Secretary to the employees appear to have inflamed rather than attempted to resolve this conflict. The article in the Guardian, in which the dispute is claimed by Maryam to be a takeover attempt by the GMB, can have done nothing but harm to our union and the GMB, and appears to have no basis in reality.
Subsequently there was evidence that our President liked a social media post that called for the derecognition of the GMB, which represents our employees in TSSA. There now appears to an extension of this conflict with the Executive Committee apparently agreeing this week to the suspension of three TSSA members who have been critical of the leadership.
Whilst it is not for our branch to consider the detail of the staff complaints, we should however be able to expect that our leadership acts in the best interest of our union and does not bring our union into disrepute. Currently, there appears to be no path to resolve this.
Our President responded to some of these challenges and to many others made in the meeting. There was however no indication that the leadership recognised that they have a responsibility to resolve the many conflicts which appear to have been caused by the action of the General Secretary and the President.
Our branch therefore proceeded to debate and vote for the following:
That this branch has no confidence in the leadership of the General Secretary and President in the management of internal conflicts that exist in our union and have been created since the election of our General Secretary.
Our branch has more confidence in our TSSA staff who are currently in dispute. Should our TSSA staff who are represented by the GMB decide they have no option but take industrial action, our branch will support them in this action.
Invited to comment, a TSSA spokesperson said:
“The TSSA is committed to working with our staff to ensure that we have a union that is fit for purpose and fully focused on delivering for members. We have arranged talks with Acas on 24th April. However, so far, the GMB is refusing to take part. We hope the GMB leadership will reconsider its approach and join the talks.”
GMB reps among TSSA staff have accused Eslamdoust and her team of not informing them that they had approached ACAS, and of bypassing them to try to negotiate the dispute with GMB general secretary Gary Smith instead of engaging with workers and their representatives.
Other branches are expected to follow suit in the coming weeks. The workers’ first strikes will take place on 30 April and 4 June, including pickets of TSSA offices.
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Exclusive: Eslamdoust continues to lash out as TSSA staff pass unanimous no-confidence vote
Union general secretary keeps blaming GMB as union employees say she keeps exposing lack of understanding of union mechanics
A union in flames? TSSA staff appear to think so
Maryam Eslamdoust and the TSSA rail union she is running – into the ground in the eyes of many – continues to lash out at the GMB union for TSSA staff’s complete dissatisfaction with her management and her team – despite a unanimous motion of no-confidence passed at an ‘all-staff meeting’ last week.
Ms Eslamdoust was recommended to members, despite what appears to be a complete lack of relevant experience, by the TSSA executive after former general secretary Manuel Cortes was sacked over sexual harassment and bullying exposed in the Kennedy Report, and was supposedly going to clean up the union after the scandal. However, the union has been rocked by fresh allegations of abuse and deep resentment against the new general secretary for the treatment of staff, particularly women.
The staff, who are members of the GMB union – union employees are usually represented by a different union in case they need to enter a dispute with their employer – and recently voted overwhelmingly for strike action in response to the abuse they say they are experiencing, held the ‘all-staff meeting’ a week ago. The following motion was passed unanimously:
TSSA Staff Motion of No Confidence in the GS, AGS, and President
Following the recent all-staff meeting on Thursday 11 April, where the AGS announced that the Trainee Organiser’s contracts would not be extended without any prior notice to the Trainee Organisers themselves, the TSSA staff unreservedly condemn this as a further example of an unacceptable and grotesque management style that has no place in a respectful and civilised
workplace.The further revelation by the AGS [assistant general secretary] that a significant sum of HS2 compensation monies has not yet been invested, losing us around £25,000 per month in interest at a conservative estimate, gives the TSSA staff considerable concern that the union is not being managed effectively to ensure its long-term survival as an independent trade union.
The TSSA staff reconfirms our commitment to the policy of remaining an independent union, and believes that with the right management, sufficient resources, meaningful progress on culture change, and an environment in which staff feel valued and respected, this remains a realistic prospect.
However, the many contradictions between stated objectives and the decisions being taken, whether in respect of resourcing priorities, progressing culture change, or managing the union’s finances, only leads us to conclude this is far from being the case.
The TSSA staff therefore instructs the GMB staff reps to convey the decision of this meeting that the staff have no confidence in the GS [general secretary], AGS, and President of the union.
The TSSA executive member for Scotland also resigned last week, saying he could no longer work with Eslamdoust or the executive supporting her.
Ms Eslamdoust attacked Skwawkbox during the general secretary election for scrutinising her and her supporters’ campaign claims that she had ‘high level trade union experience’. She also recently wrote a bizarre article for the Guardian in which she accused the GMB union of attempting to bully her so it could take over the TSSA and distract from its own renewed sexual harassment scandal, and tried to blame others for her failure to take meaningful action to implement the Kennedy Report’s recommendations, outraging staff members who have pointed out that their dispute pre-dates the new GMB revelations.
However, when asked for comment the union doubled down on its blaming of the GMB, compounding the impression of a lack of understanding or recognition that the issues are with the unhappiness of people working for the union and not with the management of the union they are instructing to coordinate the strike on their behalf. A spokesperson told Skwawkbox:
We would encourage GMB to start talking with TSSA to focus on resolving the workplace issues they say they have. It is genuinely extraordinary that GMB are so blatantly seeking to interfere in (and misrepresent) the internal administration of a sister union. TSSA EC took the decision that the last tranche of HS2 compensation would be reserved for strategic objectives to grow and strengthen our union. That is what is happening.
TSSA staff have said that their approaches to the union’s management have been ignored or rebuffed and that Eslamdoust and her team even opened talks with ACAS without bothering to inform them. The union’s latest comment will do little or nothing to change the publicly-expressed view of staff, reps and members, including a former TSSA assistant general secretary, that Ms Eslamdoust has ‘lost the plot’.
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Breaking: TSSA union staff vote overwhelmingly for strike action against bullying
Rail union general secretary’s troubles escalate as staff react to alleged smears and abuse
GMB members working for the Transport Salaried Staffs’ Association (TSSA) have voted overwhelmingly in favour of industrial action, including full strike action, in a dispute with their trade union employer.
The staff were balloted last week and, from a turnout of 86 per cent, 93% voted in favour of strike action. They will meet tonight to agree strike action and dates in a dispute over workplace bullying and harassment and failures to follow agreed policies and procedures designed to create a better workplace culture.
The TSSA, already reeling after its former general secretary Manuel Cortes was sacked over sexual harassment and bullying exposed in the Kennedy Report, has seen fresh allegations of abuse and deep resentment against new general secretary Maryam Eslamdoust, who was recommended to members by the union’s executive despite what appears to be a complete lack of relevant experience.
Ms Eslamdoust attacked Skwawkbox during the general secretary election for scrutinising her and her supporters’ campaign claims that she had ‘high level trade union experience’, an article that led to accusations of ‘losing the plot’. She also recently wrote a bizarre article for the Guardian in which she accused the GMB union of attempting to bully her so it could take over the TSSA and tried to blame others for her failure to take meaningful action to implement the Kennedy Report’s recommendations.
GMB London Region Organiser Andrew Harden said:
The ballot result is an obvious indication that our members at TSSA are united in their dispute. They want changes to how they are treated at work and are worried about how the union they work for is managed.
Repeated requests for TSSA’s leadership to agree to ACAS talks have been refused and recent media comments by the TSSA’s General Secretary have made it harder for staff to believe that the General Secretary or TSSA’s leadership want to resolve this dispute.
We now expect this employer to accept the result of the ballot, understand what it means and engage in good faith to achieve a satisfactory outcome for our members.
Eslamdoust has also been accused of ‘summarily de-recognising’ TSSA’s self-organised women’s group. The union’s executive member for Scotland resigned last week saying that Eslamdoust and union president Melissa Heywood had “pulled apart all the good work that the interim President and interim Assistant General Secretary” and were suspending staff for challenging their decisions, voicing opinions or raising issues about fresh allegations of bullying and harassment.
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Doctors’ fury at RCP ‘contempt’ and financial conflict of interest in non-doctor ‘associates’
Royal College of Physicians’ extraordinary general meeting turns to farce as doctors accuse panel of filibustering and lecturing them after concerns raised about dangers of untrained ‘physician associates’ carrying out doctor roles
The Royal College of Physicians (RCP) has provoked fury among doctors for its handling of an extraordinary general meeting (EGM) called by members to discuss motions against the College’s support for the government’s moves to both expand the use and roles of ‘physician associates’ (PAs) and to have them regulated by the General Medical Council (GMC).
PAs, who do not have medical degrees and receive only two years’ training compared to the seven years and more required to be a doctor, are increasingly being presented in healthcare settings as medical professionals and are even performing unsupervised heart surgery in some hospitals, as well as diagnosing, prescribing and seeing more patients in many general practices than GPs. Privately-owned GP companies are even making GPs redundant in order to replace them with cheaper PAs. Several patients have died, including at least two confirmed by coroner’s inquests, after misdiagnosis and inappropriate treatment by PAs.
The meeting, called to debate several motions around patient safety by enough members to trigger an EGM under the RCP’s rules, quickly descended into anger and farce. Doctor and professor Trisha Greenhalgh summed up in a series of her own and reposted Twitter/X posts indicating that the RCP panel was attacking those who raised concerns as irresponsible and damaging and were shutting down debate, even to the extent of ‘filibustering’, or talking at length to run out time:
More “headlines” without any actual RESULTS from the six questions. pic.twitter.com/SB5H6uAnW2
— Trisha Greenhalgh (@trishgreenhalgh) March 14, 2024
Here’s more. The category “neutral or positive” allows them to over-egg what they are spinning as a positive finding. Assumes that lack of experience with PAs *causes* a negative view. This would be a FAIL in any undergraduate essay on survey analysis. Correlation ≠ causation. pic.twitter.com/ZNPniLRLNM
— Trisha Greenhalgh (@trishgreenhalgh) March 14, 2024
Members attending online reported being unable to connect or losing their connection partway through:
This is fun pic.twitter.com/B4DKbbXgw7
— Trisha Greenhalgh (@trishgreenhalgh) March 13, 2024
Although opportunity to ask about financial conflicts of interest were not addressed, according to attendees, information emerging subsequently seems to indicate that the RCP does indeed have a financial interest extending to ‘millions of pounds’ in at least one aspect of the continuation and expanded use of PAs, as one disgusted doctor and NHS campaigner, Dr Rachel Clarke, pointed out:
Greenhalgh commented on the financial conflict of interest – and pointed out that the RCP’s president had just written an article about there being a role for PAs in healthcare for the British Medical Journal (BMJ) in which she did not point out the conflict, despite each BMJ article ending with a statement of potential conflicts of interest:
Even as of the time of writing, the end of the BMJ article still states that RCP president Sarah Clarke has not declared any competing interests:
So disgusted was Dr Rachel Clarke with the ‘lack of respect’ she witnessed at the meeting that, having originally been thrilled to be scheduled to appear as a keynote speaker at the RCP’s annual conference later this year, she has now withdrawn and has published an open letter about her reasons:
The use of PAs, which is considered by nine out of ten doctors to be dangerous to patients and confuses many patients, who do not realise that they have not been seen and treated by a fully-qualified medic, is being pushed by the government as a way of ‘downskilling’ the NHS, reducing costs and allowing increased profits for private providers, under the guise of the so-called ‘NHS Workforce Plan’ as part of the ‘Integrated Care Systems’ (ICS) project.
ICS, formerly called ‘Accountable Care Organisations’ (ACOs) after the US system it copied, were renamed after awareness began to spread that ACOs were a system for withholding care from patients and that care providers were incentivised to cut care because they receive a share of the ‘savings’. The system remained the same, but the rebranding disguised the reality.
Labour and Tories combine in Lords to defeat attempt to protect your right to see a doctor
The government used a ‘statutory instrument’ (SI) to pass these changes, avoiding proper parliamentary scrutiny, but both the Tories and Keir Starmer’s Labour support these and other measures to cheapen the NHS for private involvement and only independent MP Claudia Webbe spoke against them during the brief SI debate. Green peer Natalie Bennett’s motion in the House of Lords to attempt to kill the instrument was defeated by the Tories with the help of Labour peers.
At least two people have already died avoidably because of misdiagnosis by PAs. Emily Chesterton, 30, who didn’t realise she wasn’t seeing a doctor, was treated for a calf strain when she had a deep vein thrombosis that led to a lethal embolism. Ben Peters, 25, was sent home from A&E with a ‘panic attack’ that was really a serious heart condition. A doctor’s Twitter/X thread includes details of others said to have died because of issues around PAs.
The RCP was contacted for comment.
Update: the RCP has now said:
In organising the EGM, we wanted to ensure that a broad spectrum of views could be heard and addressed. There was a high volume of questions and we made clear it would be unlikely that all could be answered. However, every effort was made to facilitate an inclusive and constructive discussion where fellows, whether they were in the room, watching remotely, or contributing through randomly selected pre-submitted questions and comments, had the opportunity to express their view.
While as host to the Faculty of PAs (FPA) there will be a range of issues for the RCP to consider once the EGM ballot results are known, our core mission is excellent patient care. We agreed to host the FPA exactly because we wanted doctors to have oversight of the development of the profession. There is a workforce crisis in the NHS and when employed appropriately we believe PAs can be useful supplementary members of the multidisciplinary team. As a valued member of the RCP community we are saddened that Dr Clarke has made the decision to withdraw from the upcoming conference. However, we understand and recognise her strength of feeling on this issue and will be writing to her directly to respond to the concerns raised in her open letter.
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Nobody With Real Power Cares If You Refuse To Vote For Biden
Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
https://medium.com/media/a263aed72563c5d2180777e188237c37/href
There’s been a lot of talk in pro-Palestine circles about withholding votes for Biden in protest of his genocide in Gaza, which is of course fine, but the discourse around doing so often misses an important point. A lot of US voters erroneously think they’d be punishing the Democrats for Gaza by costing them the election, mistakenly assuming Democrats care about winning. They don’t.
Losing an election costs Democratic party leaders nothing; all the career politicians and political operatives at the top keep their careers either way. From their point of view this is just a cushy job with sweet benefits, and they keep those win or lose. And obviously Biden himself doesn’t care; he’ll have a comfortable retirement regardless of the outcome in November, and on some level he’s surely aware that it’s nuts for a dementia patient to be in the White House anyway.
If the Democrats cared about getting your vote they’d be trying hard to earn it. They’re not trying because they don’t care.
The unelected empire managers who actually run the US power structure also don’t care who wins the election. They know they’ll still get their murder and militarism and capitalism and imperialism no matter who gets sworn in next year, whether it’s Biden or Trump or Harris or someone else. Nobody with any real power cares about your vote.
And that’s the real issue. That’s the real point that keeps getting missed here. The problem is not that the wrong people keep getting elected, it’s that the elections don’t matter and voters don’t have a say. It’s that humanity is dominated by a murderous globe-spanning power structure loosely centralized around Washington whose actual movements and behavior have effectively zero responsiveness to the will of the electorate.
You’re never going to be able to vote your way out of this mess, and you’re never going to be able to not-vote your way out of this mess, because the power of your vote has been undermined to a value of zero. That doesn’t mean there’s no way out of this mess, it just means there’s no way to get out of this mess using the fake plastic diversion toy they handed you to shut you up and trick you into thinking you have a say.
There are still plenty of other tools in the toolbox for forcing an evil power structure to stop doing evil things, but they require a whole lot of hands to bring about, and right now we don’t have them. Too many people have been successfully propagandized into believing the status quo works and their government is basically good, or successfully manipulated into giving up on politics altogether and throwing their attention into other things.
Before the people can begin using the power of their numbers to force real change, they’re going to have to be awakened to the reality that everything they’ve been told about their government, their society and their world is a lie. They’ve got to come to the understanding that the mainstream news media are nothing but propaganda and they live under the most murderous and tyrannical regime on this planet. They’ve got to realize that this power structure does not ultimately serve their interests, or the interests of their fellow human beings around the world. Only when enough eyes open to this reality can revolutionary change via direct action become possible.
The good news is it’s entirely possible to help get those eyes open. Everything you do to help share the truth with your fellow citizens and spread awareness of what’s really going on pushes this possibility toward reality. The more people open their eyes, the more people there are to help open others, so this could snowball from impossible to probable to inevitable quite quickly.
An entire globe-spanning empire rests on a closed pair of eyelids. Once they snap open, the whole thing will crumble. And from there we can begin building a healthy world together.
_____________
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