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.
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.).”
Myanmar’s president called Friday for work on a controversial Chinese-backed hydroelectic dam to be halted and the concerns of its critics settled, in a startling turnaround welcomed by democracy activists and environmentalists. President Thein Sein said in a statement read out on his behalf at Parliament that the $3.6 billion Myitsone dam project in the northern state of Kachin should be suspended because “it is against the will of the people.” Thein Sein’s statement said Myanmar would discuss pending contracts regarding the dam with China.
Environmental activists have said the dam would displace countless villagers and upset the ecology of one of the country’s most vital national resources, the Irrawaddy River. It also would submerge a culturally important site in the ethnic Kachin heartland where the Malikha and Maykha rivers meet to form the Irrawaddy. The Myitsone dam was supposed to export about 90 percent of electric power it generated to neighboring China, according to the government. The vast majority of Myanmar’s residents, meanwhile, have no electricity.
“This is the first time in 50 years that the government has given in to the wishes of the people,” said Dr. Than Tut Aung, a prominent publisher who is also one of the leading advocates of the“Save the Irrawaddy” campaign. “The decision to suspend the dam project is not just an environmental issue but a national issue. We welcome the good news.”
Thein Sein came to power in March after the nation’s long-standing junta disbanded, promising to bring democratic reforms to one of Asia’s most repressive nations. But skeptics see his government — dominated by retired military officers — as a proxy for continued army rule, and there has been much debate over whether his reform pledges are merely rhetoric.
The new government has boosted hope for change by unblocking the long-censored Internet, calling on exiles to return, and holding talks with prominent opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi, who was released from seven years of house arrest last year.Yet more than 2,000 political prisoners remain behind bars, while fighting with multiple armed ethnic rebellions has displaced about half a million people within the country and forced at least 200,000 more to flee abroad.
On Friday, Suu Kyi met for a third time with Labor and Social Welfare Minister Aung Kyi, part of an ongoing dialogue between the two sides that some see as proof the that concrete change is imminent.
Afterward, Suu Kyi said she welcomed Thein Sein’s message on suspending the Myitsone dam. “All governments should listen to the voices of the people,” she said.
The hotter seas, provoked by global warming are causing tropical storms to mushroom into giant typhoons. Luzon is to be hit twice in a week, threatening 38 million people
As Philippine was observing commemorations for the nearly 700 people killed during the 2009′s typhoon Ketsana, which dumped a month’s rainfall in just 12 hours, powerful typhoon Nesat smashed the country’s coastline. Nesat has killed some 31 people in the country; with winds gusting to 93 mph (150 kph) and rainfall above 100 mm, the country’s capital Manila was completely brought to standstill on September 26 with at least 111,000 people immediately evacuated from the Albay province. Nesat is the 17th tropical storm and the 8th typhoon of the current year. Nesat was a dangerous category-3 hurricane that is still active (September 28) and moving towards Vietnam and adjoining China now after devastating Philippines.
But now another “expected” monster is forming in the Pacific!There had been a total of 32 tropical depressions in the western Pacific ocean during the current year.
Updates regarding Typhoon Nalgae (also known as Quiel)
It is the 19th tropical storm of the current year, it is the 9th typhoon. Tropical storm Nalgae intensified into a category-1 hurricane and now 1, 195 km ENE of Manila. The storm has continued to move westwards. It is expected to further intensify into a category-2 hurricane due to favorable outflow and warm sea temperatures on late Friday/early Saturday, its affect will mostly start by Friday late or Saturday.
Latest: Nalgae is strengthening phenomenally due to temperatures of 30C in The Phillipine Sea. Some reports estimate it will strike Luzon as a Category 4 Hurricane, with winds to 250kph. Some predict it will then swerve North, sparing Vietnam, but threatening Hong Kong
In an end of the summer compact EF!AU, find news about kicking shell in the teeth in Rossport again and then some more, solidarity with the community at Dale Farm, and anti-GM resistance – Spuds you Don’t Like demo in England, sabotage in Germany, France and Scotland.
On top of the usual contacts and dates, read about solidarity with jailed Swiss nanotech activists, resistance against steel plants, mobile phone masts, mining and energy projects here & across the world – stay angry and don’t carry on as usual!
On September 27th, 2011, we marched on the Financial District’s Luxury Night Out, where couples wore outfits that cost more than
we will ever make in a month and looked at cars that cost more than we will ever make in a year, afterward, they went back to one of their many houses that cost more than we will make in our lifetime.
Occupied Boston doesn’t need a bullhorn to have their voices heard. They have the people’s microphone.
So does Michael Moore, who addressed us tonight.
Occupied San Francisco grows larger every day.
Occupied Chicago was dispersed but not defeated. They will regroup and reoccupy.
Posted Sept. 26, 2011, 6:57 p.m. EST by OccupyWallSt
a few prosper..billions suffer
Anyone with eyes open knows that the gangsterism of Wall Street — financial institutions generally — has caused severe damage to the people of the United States (and the world)
. And should also know that it has been doing so increasingly for over 30 years, as their power in the economy has radically increased, and with it their political power. That has set in motion a vicious cycle that has concentrated immense wealth, and with it political power, in a tiny sector of the population, a fraction of 1%, while the rest increasingly become what is sometimes called “a precariat” — seeking to survive in a precarious existence. They also carry out these ugly activities with almost complete impunity — not only too big to fail, but also “too big to jail.”
The courageous and honorable protests underway in Wall Street should serve to bring this calamity to public attention, and to lead to dedicated efforts to overcome it and set the society on a more healthy course.
Bolivian President Evo Morales has suspended work on a highway being built in the Amazon, amid a national furore over the way opposition to the road has been handled.
On Sunday police fired tear gas and rounded up hundreds of activists staging a march against the road.
A minister quit in protest and Mr Morales condemned the action when he announced the project’s suspension.
He now says he will allow local regions to decide on the future of the road.
“There needs to be a national debate so the two provinces [Cochabamba and Beni] involved in this can decide… In the meantime the project is suspended,” said Mr Morales, according to Reuters news agency.
He did not specify how the two provinces would decide, but on Sunday he said a referendum could be held – though government sources say this could take six months or more to organise.
The issue triggered anti-government protests in Cochabamba, Beni and La Paz – where thousands of protesters, mainly college students, gathered around the Quemado government palace.
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….
Protesters plan to occupy London Stock Exchange
Allegations of police violence towards protesters triggered further protests in Bolivian cities
The Free 