blog of the post capitalist transition.. Read or download the novel here + latest relevant posts
Author: thefreeonline
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New Zealand said it was preparing for an environmental disaster Friday as a container ship stranded off the North Island threatened to break up and spill oil into the pristine Bay of Plenty.
Source: Supplied by John Mathieson Rena, the ship stranded off the coast of Tauranga after striking the Astrolabe Reef
The 47,000 tonne container vessel “Rena”, which hit a reef off the coast of Tauranga earlier this week, has already created an oil slick more than five-kilometres (three miles) long that has killed a number of seabirds. Continue reading “New Zealand: Oil disaster on Tauranga reef”
As Occupy Wall Street protests intensify around America, it’s important to examine possible solutions
Eric Blair Activist Post ( shortened and slightly adapted, with thanks)
Barack Obama and his 2008 presidential challenger John McCain both received more money from Wall Street donors than their combined lifetime government salaries. It was a billion-dollar-plus campaign. In fact, all of Congress makes more from Wall Street and corporate campaign contributions than their public salaries.
So what could be done if a huge movement could really force change??
Complete Debt Forgiveness:
I have been one of the advocates for a complete write-off of all fraudulent debt, essentially hitting the economic reset button. This act would zap all of the power that the banking cartel has over governments and individuals. Although I truly believe this to be the only way out of this mess, it may require an entirely new free and fair financial structure in place when the button is pushed, or the same group of thugs will likely maintain their control over the system. (blogger’s comment: Seems to me impossible, if most US debt is ‘owned’ by the Chinese, they’re hardly likely to forfeit their savings .)
End the Wars:
Yes, yes, and yes. End the foreign wars. End the phony war on “terror”. And end the war on drugs. They only benefit those funding the wars (with interest) and the pirates who the government gives the spoils to. Because no average citizen ever wants war, it leads some to believe that all wars have been baited by these beneficiaries — and they wouldn’t be wrong. Unfortunately, for too long we have taken the bait and they have gotten their spoils. It is time to stop this insanity. Significantly, this is one of the only practical solutions that will have minimal blowback. It will save trillions in public spending and immediately bring more harmony to the planet. However, America will face the very real challenge of creating new employment for returning soldiers, contractors, and laid-off weapons manufacturers, as well as DEA agents, prison guards and others who participate in perpetuating the war on drugs. So, even though ending all wars is the only sane policy, by itself it is not a silver bullet for economic woes………
” New York Times, finance columnist Andrew Sorkin revealed some of the fear now churning the guts of the ruling class:
“Is this Occupy Wall Street thing a big deal?” the C.E.O. asked me. I didn’t have an answer. “We’re trying to figure out how much we should be worried about all of this,” he continued, clearly concerned. “Is this going to turn into a personal safety problem?”
The ‘Occupy’ movement is exciting, but it must reach out to the wider working class if it is to have any lasting effect on the political landscape. Beyond the occupations of town centres and squares, working people must fight for control of their own workplaces, neighbourhoods, and communities. Only then can “the 99%” dictate terms to those who have run roughshod over their basic needs for so long.
. As sections of the union bureaucracy, plus fellow reactionaries such as former World Bank Vice President Joseph Stiglitz and multi-billionaire financier George Soros voice their ‘support’ for the demonstrations, they do so with the intention of making them safe for capitalism.”
But they wont find it so easy.. In Europe every splinter party under the sun tried to hijack the movement without much success so far, partly due to the direct democracy ‘Assemblies’,and because the young demonstrators are not at all stupid.
Here’s my ‘Wish List’ for the 15th October World Movement
Destroying the Banks in favour of a phased in Money-Free system. Banning Hierarchical, sexist and homophobic organizations. A minimum world wage, or free rations of basic goods. Abolishing armies and war. Community Co-operatives instead of companies. Phasing out of the Oil Economy in favour of renewables and NH3 fuel. Banning GMO’s. Collectivising excess private property. Abolition of the Prisons and police system….
El 15 de Octubre del 2011 va a ser una fecha inolvidable para la raza humana. Este sera el primer encuentro UNIVERSAL de ciudadanos por un mundo mejor.
NO es un tema de ideas políticas, religión o filosofía.
El asunto es sobre cuanto nos importa nuestro futuro y el futuro de la Tierra
Oct 15th will be 6 months since the ‘Take The Streets’ movement took off in Spain and is still spreading like wildfire around the world. For the first time we can start talking about a worldwide movement without controlling Parties, leaders and authoritarian manipulation. We’re all equally important and deserving to not be mistreated and exploited. The movement is inspired by the obvious lunacy of the Capitalist system, the catastrophic destruction of the biosphere and runaway Climate change, and maybe also by the rise of the Internet, which by its nature pushes horizontal not hierarchical society….
IMAGINE there’s no money.. It isn’t hard to do..
We need a new system. This one measures ‘Progress’ by how fast we can destroy the planet!
October 15th 2011 is a key date in the collective search for a new system. For the first time really on a global level. And may be the precursor to greater actions.
When the Capitalist money system collapses all kinds of unthinkable options may become possible.
Oct 15th 500 demos worldwide
It’s about time people began preparing for the inevitable, instead of desperately trying to keep the Juggle Balls of Capital in the air.
Imagine there’s no Prison.. and no policemen too..
Here’s one ‘thing to do’ list..Destroying the Banks in favour of a phased in Money-Free system. Banning Hierarchical, sexist and homophobic organizations. A minimum world wage, or free rations of basic goods. Abolishing armies and war. Community Co-operatives instead of companies. Phasing out of the Oil Economy in favour of renewables and NH3 fuel. Banning GMO’s. Collectivising excess private property. Abolition of the Prisons and police system….
El 15 de Octubre del 2011 va a ser una fecha inolvidable para la raza humana. Este sera el primer encuentro UNIVERSAL de ciudadanos por un mundo mejor.
NO es un tema de ideas políticas, religión o filosofía.
El asunto es sobre cuanto nos importa nuestro futuro y el futuro de la Tierra
Protesters plan to occupy London Stock Exchange
A group of protesters are organising an occupation of the London Stock Exchange to bring attention to what they see as unethical behaviour on the part of banks, following a similar demonstration on Wall Street.
In a Facebook group called Occupy the London Stock Exchange organisers call on crowds to march on the exchange’s headquarters at Paternoster Square and fortify it with tents and barricades “for a few months”.
“Beginning on October 15, we want to see at least over 20,000 people flood in, set up tents, kitchens, peaceful barricades and occupy the London Stock Exchange for a few months. Once there, we shall incessantly repeat one simple demand in a plurality of voices,” reads the description of the protest on Facebook.
According to the group the protest will begin on Saturday October 15 and run until 11am on December 12.
La primera marcha indignada a Bruselas cruza la frontera belga.
La Ruta 1, la marcha procedente de Madrid, cruzará mañana martes 4 de octubre la frontera entre Francia y Bélgica.
Unos setenta caminantes saldrán el martes a primera hora de la mañana de Lille con destino final del dia en Warengem, la primera ciudad belga donde pernoctarán tras más de mil quinientos kilómetros de caminata.
Tras instalar el campamento realizarán la primera Asamblea General en territorio belga.
El recorrido hasta Bruselas dentro del país será el siguiente:
The front of his white and blueT-shirt had the Watershed Management Group (WMG) logo on it and in a font that looked like it had been stamped diagonally across read the words “CO-OP”. When he turned around to grab a pick axe, other wise known as an Arizona Shovel, the back of the shirt said “I Do My Labor with My Neighbor!”.
-This catchy little phrase does more than just rhyme. It tells of an opportunity for community, a way to reach an otherwise high costing goal. A chance to not only change your own personal landscape, but eventually heal a neighborhood and enjoy a little bit more of a responsible feeling as you look out at your land.
-The WMG has created, and successfully run, this CO-OP program down in Tucson and I have been lucky enough to not only participate in some of the workshops, but I have also been able to meet some amazing and interesting people who share like views on how we should be friendly to the desert……….
……….. -While the clock neared the end of the workshop…who am I kidding, it was actually an hour past end time, the clouds could no longer hold back their hydro-soaked insides and it began to RAIN!! Like I said, the workshop was officially over, but there was still almost every single volunteer still there. This was a passion and a need to see this through. A belief that this was important and an opportunity to grow a property AND grow the knowledge inside. So we hit another gear, put the final pieces into place, and actually started catching that SkyGold into one of the pur-tiest metal tanks in the neighborhood.
-My brain, my clothes and my passion left soaked that early evening as I drove off…back to the Valley of the Sun. -Hopefully in the very near future, I too can wear a white shirt with a blue logo that PROUDLY states:
Here’s what I’m excited about these days: we just held a volunteer workshop to totally makeover a Tucson family’s front yard. 15 volunteers transformed it from a sterile, black-plastic and rock-laden heat island into a runoff-capturing garden of native plants, organic mulch, and (soon) living soil. This workshop, which was followed by blessed afternoon monsoon rain showers, was just the second in some 24 public workshops that WMG is co-hosting with six different Tucson neighborhoods over the next year. Through these projects we will de-pave a closed alley to turn it into a pocket park, install rainwater-fed trees along the entrance of a school, and create rain gardens in the middle of a parking lot, among other things. We will do all of this alongside volunteers from each neighborhood. 20 of these volunteers recently completed a 5-month training with WMG to assess, design, build, and advocate for these kinds of green infrastructure in their communities.
WASHINGTON, Oct 1, 2011 (IPS) – Home to a fast-growing network of farmers’ markets, cooperatives and organic farms, but also the breeding ground for mammoth for-profit corporations that now hold patents to over 50 percent of the world’s seeds, the United States is weathering a battle between Big Agro and a ripening movement for food justice and security.
Conflicting ideologies about agriculture have become ground zero for this war over the production, distribution and consumption of the world’s food. One camp – led by agro giants like Monsanto, DuPont and Syngenta – define successful agriculture and hunger alleviation as the use of advanced technologies to stimulate yields of mono-crops.
The other side argues that industrial agriculture pollutes, destroys and disrupts nature by dismissing the importance of relationships necessary for any ecosystem to thrive. At the heart of this struggle is the debate about genetically modified organisms (GMOs), which were given the green light in 1990 when the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) stated, “(We) are not aware of any information showing that GMO foods differ from other foods in any meaningful or uniform way.”
The Pitfalls of Terminator TechnologyAccording to Frees, one of the worst manifestations of GE/M is the use of Terminator technology, used to cause seed sterility and forcibly eliminate seed saving.
“Terminator is a biological means to enforce intellectual property rights, and its introduction into developing countries that rely on saved seeds for 80 to 90 percent of planting could mean elimination of farmers’ right to save seeds; dramatically higher seed costs; and poor farmers’ inability to survive,” he said.
“Terminator is morally reprehensible and must be banned,” Frees told IPS. Lovera added that between 2001 and 2007, annual U.S. glyphosate use on GE crops doubled to 185 million pounds.
“Ubiquitous Roundup application has spawned glyphosate-resistant weeds, driving farmers to apply even more toxic herbicides, according to a 2010 National Research Council report,” Lovera told IPS.
“Farmers may resort to other herbicides to combat superweeds, including 2,4- D (an Agent Orange component) and atrazine, which have been associated with health risks including endocrine disruption and developmental abnormalities.”
“In the United States, irrigated corn acreage increased 23 percent and irrigated soybean acreage increased 32 percent between 2003 and 2008,” she added. “The rising U.S. cultivation of GE corn and soybeans further threatens the strained High Plains Aquifer, which runs beneath eight western states and provides nearly a third of all groundwater used for U.S. irrigation,” Lovera said.
“Ninety-seven percent of High Plains water withdrawals go to agriculture, and these withdrawals now far exceed the recharge rate across much of the aquifer.”
“The worldwide expansion of industrial-scale cultivation of water- intensive GE commodity crops on marginal land could magnify the pressure on already overstretched water resources,” Lovera warned. “But these are the crops the biotech industry has to offer.”
In addition to wreaking havoc on land, GE/M has also filtered into the oceans, with the attempted introduction by Aqua Bounty of GE salmon engineered with a growth hormone gene to grow faster.
“Studies suggest that the salmon could be more susceptible to disease; and if it’s grown in pens in the ocean and [inevitably] escapes, it could mate with wild salmon and make them less fit, potentially devastating wild salmon populations,” Frees told IPS.
But a report released Wednesday by the Washington- based Food and Water Watch (FWW) on the destructive impacts of GMOs added fuel to a two-decades-long fight by farmers, economists and experts against the FDA’s conclusions.
“Genetically Engineered Food: An Overview” details how the genetic engineering of seeds, crops and animals for human consumption is not the foolproof answer long championed by agribusiness and biotechnology industries to feeding the world.
To the contrary, the study found that genetically engineered/modified (GE/M) organisms do not out-perform their natural counterparts, and their proliferation into vast tracts of cropland have caused a slew of environmental and health crises, and actually increased poverty by forcing millions of farmers to “buy” patented seeds at exorbitant prices.
The report also says that three U.S. federal agencies – the FDA, the Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) – are complicit in these crises due to shoddy oversight, weak enforcement of regulations and a complete absence of coordination.
It found that Big Agro spent half a billion dollars between 1999 and 2009 on lobbying to ease GE regulatory oversight, push GE approvals and prevent GE labeling.
This, after attorney Steven Druker in 1999 obtained 40,000 pages of FDA files containing “memorandum after memorandum warning about the hazards of (GE) food,” including the likelihood that they contained, “toxins, carcinogens or allergens” and testified that GE foods violated “sound science and U.S. law”.
Ceci King, a member of the Black Farmers and Agriculturalists Association, told IPS that in 2011, an estimated “60 to 70 percent of all processed foods in the U.S. contain at least one GE element.”
“Eighty-four percent of GM crops in the world today are herbicide- resistant soybeans, corn, cotton or canola, predominantly Monsanto’s ‘Roundup Ready’ varieties that withstand dousing with herbicide,” Bill Frees, science policy analyst at the Center for Food Safety (CFS) and author of ‘Why GM Crops Will Not Feed the World’, told IPS.
“Pesticide and chemical companies like Monsanto, DuPont, Syngenta, Dow and Bayer have bought up many of the world’s largest seed companies, and now call themselves biotech companies – this represents a historic merger of the pesticide and seed industries, which allows them to profit twice by developing expensive GM seeds that increase use of the company’s herbicide products,” he added.
Seed patents, an off-shoot of the “agro-biotech revolution” that also spawned GE/M, have had two negative consequences since their original issuance by the U.S. Patent Office in the mid-1990s, Frees told IPS: “They enticed pesticide companies to buy up seed firms; and they led to criminalisation of seed-saving.” “Farmers have saved seeds from their harvest to replant the next year for millennia,” he added. “Monsanto is changing that. The company has already sued thousands of farmers in the U.S. for saving and replanting its patented seeds and won an estimated 85 to 160 million dollars from farmers, in lawsuits that have ruined farmers’ lives, and (partially explains) why we have ever fewer farmers in America.”
The fightback
Ray Tricomo, a mentor at the Kalpulli Turtle Island Multiversity in Minnesota, told IPS, “People of colour must re-radicalise themselves and go on the offensive including the return to land bases, from Turtle Island to Africa and Asia.” “Ancient knowledge systems are to be painstakingly recovered, even if it takes centuries,” he added. And this is exactly what is happening.
Despite the deep pockets and aggressive efforts of Big Agro, a major pushback from a broad coalition of forces has limited 80 percent of GE/M planting to just three export-oriented countries: the U.S., Brazil and Argentina. Nearly two dozen other countries, including the European Union and China, have passed mandatory GE/M labeling, and millions around the world are refusing seed patenting and developing seed banks to protect, share and preserve their seeds.
In Florida, the 4,000-strong Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) is organising to resist farm wage-slavery and “seed-servitude”. The Landless Workers Movement (MST) in Brazil has organised 400,000 peasants to join forces with the nearly half-billion farms around the world that are responsible for producing 70 percent of the world’s food. Navdanya, an organisation in the Indian State of Andhra Pradesh, has united 500,000 farmers in their struggle to fight chemical dependency and save indigenous seeds, including preserving over 3,000 varieties of rice. “For five years, the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (CSD) had indigenous farmers from all over the globe come to speak against destructive farm practices and GMOs,” King told IPS.
“During the Indigenous People’s Permanent Forum, there were complaints about the harm caused by industrial agriculture and the acts in the name of agribusinesses. Farm workers like the (CIW) are protesting their fate,” she added. “They are picketing companies like Trader Joes and Whole Foods, letting the public know that their tomatoes were picked from workers who are basically slave labour.” “Third World Network is fighting back by exploring the problem of GMOs and publishing findings that scientists working on GMOs are capitalists using humans as guinea pigs in a global lab experiment,” she added.
“[Numerous] deaths and disabilities have been traced back to a GM product emulating tryptophan. It took nearly 20 years to find the source of the problem,” King told IPS. “GM technology i antithetical to an agroecological approach to agriculture, our only hope for truly sustainable food production,” Frees told IPS. “Without radical change we will continue to have famines,” he added. “Haiti is a good example of what happens when a country’s farmers are put out of business by cheap, subsidised imports from a rich producer nation (here the U.S.).”
Protesters plan to occupy London Stock Exchange
The Free 