***EMAIL FLOOD PLANNED FOR THURSDAY, DEC. 15 TO SAVE THE BAUEN!***

[kliljedahl]

To support the Bauen workers cooperative, one of the key workplaces in the Recovered Companies movement in Argentina, we are asking that you email the message below ON THURSDAY to this email address:
[email protected]

Señor Jorge Telerman:

Hoy el destino del Hotel Bauen, recuperado por sus trabajadores, está en sus manos. Miles de personas en el mundo lo están mirando. Vete la ley que consagra la impunidad de los empresarios inescrupulosos y apoye a los 140 hombres y mujeres que todos los días están demostrando cómo construir trabajo digno en ese espacio que es modelo de eficiencia y solidaridad.

**We are looking for a huge, international flood on Thursday, but email after that date will still help!**

And now for some background and translation of the message...

BACKGROUND
At 2 a.m. on Wednesday December 6, the Buenos Aires city Legislature passed a law that will in effect evict the workers' cooperative at the Hotel Bauen.
This law, which was voted on by 29 legislators, ³invents² a boss for a workplace without bosses.

When the workers decided to occupy the hotel to demand their unpaid salaries, the Hotel Bauen was bankrupt and the company had millions of dollars in debt, among them, the cost of the building located at 360 Callao.

As the ownership of the building was in dispute (the person who had bought the building paid only 4 of the 12 million peso price, and the person who sold it promised to return the 4 million and never came through) the hotel was legally without anyone to take care of it. So the workers decided to put it back into operation.

They started to work with nothing but the strength of their conviction.
Now there are 140 men and women who maintain the hotel, 24 hours a day, opening a space for meetings, assemblies and social movement events, all entirely out of solidarity.

Ignoring all of their efforts, the Legisture decided to approve a law that ignores the dictates of justice and attempts to destroy all of the work that the cooperative has put into the hotel. Despite the workers' protest at the time of the vote, the legislators ordered their eviction. They threw them out with batons and tear gas.

Now, the workers demand that the head of the Buenos Aires city government< Jorge Telerman, veto the law. The veto must take place within 15 days of when the law was passed.

If Mr. Telerman does not veto the law, the workers may be evicted.

ACTION
Next Thursday December 15th at 2pm, the workers at the Hotel Bauen are marching to Jorge Telerman's office to demand that this law be annulled.

To support the Bauen workers cooperative, we are asking that you email the message below ON THURSDAY to this email address:

[email protected]

Señor Jorge Telerman:

Hoy el destino del Hotel Bauen, recuperado por sus trabajadores, está en sus manos. Miles de personas en el mundo lo están mirando. Vete la ley que consagra la impunidad de los empresarios inescrupulosos y apoye a los 140 hombres y mujeres que todos los días están demostrando cómo construir trabajo digno en ese espacio que es modelo de eficiencia y solidaridad.


TRANSLATION:
Mister Jorge Telerman:

Today the destiny of the Hotel Bauen, recovered by its workers, is in your hands. Thousands of people all over the world are watching. VETO the law that creates impunity for the unscrupulous impresarios and support the 140 men and women that each day show how to create dignified work in this place that is a model of efficiency and solidarity.

AND IF YOU HAVEN'T ALREADY....

Sign the petition in support of the Hotel Bauen workers!
http://www.petitiononline.com/bauen/petition.html

The petition will be submitted as part of the campaign.



Keith’s Barbeque Central

[Peace Patriot]

1. Thanks for the alert! Recommended!

Maybe you should suggest a subject line for peoples' emails. I just used "el destino del Hotel Bauen."

I had to send mine early because of my schedule this week. Perhaps tell people to do it NOW, if they can't do it Thursday (or might forget, or might lose track of it, or whatever).

This matter is SO IMPORTANT! If we can't do what's right, if we can't do what's best, if we can't act with wisdom and justice, because of the dysfunction and disorder of predatory capitalism, then there is no hope for us as a species and no hope for our planet. In this case and others like it, we MUST force our politicians to represent the PEOPLE WHO MAKE THINGS WORK--the people who create profit with their labor.

As an environmentalist, I have often thought that our planet is going down NOT because human beings don't want to do what is right--they overwhelmingly do--but because of rigid systems of ownership and finance from a past era, when people thought that the earth's resources were unlimited. Although it is clear now that earth's resources are VERY FINITE, those rigid systems of exploitation remain in place, and it is those systems that we come up against time and again, like a brick wall, as barriers to the wisest policy NOW. It is totally insane to have private interests and global corporate predators destroying forests all over the earth, for short term profit. They are literally destroying the planet itself and its ability to absorb the carbon dioxide and other pollutants that we keep pouring into the atmosphere.

I see a parallel in the Hotel Bauen situation. The BEST POLICY is to turn the hotel over to the workers to run as a cooperative. But a brick wall of rigid ownership and financial practices that are dysfunctional in this situation--that are killing the hotel as a business--and the politicians who are attached to those practices and their purveyors--are blockading the best and wisest course.

It is so ironic. The PEOPLE, the workers, want to save a business that the businessmen nearly destroyed with their financial and legal game-playing and profiteering. And in all that game-playing and profiteering, none of them recognized that it is the people, the workers, who make it a business in the first place, who insure its smooth functioning and create profit.

These kinds of predatory capitalists regard forests the same way they regard people: as a disposable resource. They never credit the essential contribution of earth's abundance to their profits, and instead squeeze every last dime they can out the resource--clear-cutting and polluting and destroying the very life that makes their business--and all life on earth--possible. And I don't think most of them do it with evil intent. As individuals, they are trapped in an OLD PARADIGM, with its dysfunctional ownership and financial rules, and can't get out of it. They (the CEOs, anyway, and board members and major investors) think that if they don't take care of "number one" and make themselves into millionaires or billionaires, they will perish; they will be poor; no one will care for them. That is the summary of this outdated and dysfunctional global capitalist system: it turns what might be good people into predators, and a menace to us all.

The earth and its people want to prosper and be abundant, and make things work right, and create a fair and just balance of life systems, livings and trade. The rigid, outdated rules of ownership and finance will not permit it.

Support the Hotel Bauen workers! Their plight is a microcosm of our global problem!

[kliljedahl]

2. Evening kick, Come on People!!!!

Keith’s Barbeque Central