blog of the post capitalist transition.. Read or download the novel here + latest relevant posts
More and more food processing plants are going up in flames in the US. Sixteen such incidents have been recorded so far. The background is unclear, but terrorism is being ruled out.
The fact is, however, that the basic needs of the population are massively threatened in some places by these attacks on infrastructure while authorities downplay the incidents.
Continue reading “US food production threatened by mysterious fires in meat plants”
The third rail of American politics is not Social Security, it’s hamburgers.
Over the past decade, the basic facts of how we produce meat and its harms to society — its acceleration of the climate crisis, the torture of tens of billions of animals, hazardous workplace conditions for meatpacking workers — have begun to enter the realm of public consciousness.
That’s led, in part, to a quarter of Americans — perhaps that includes you — telling pollsters they’re eating less meat (even as US consumption rises). But in a world with a population nearing 8 billion, does one person changing how they eat even make a difference for animal welfare or the climate?
Some critics say no, arguing that putting the onus on individual consumer choice is a dangerous distraction from systemic change. “We are not going to fix the climate crisis by shaming…
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– April 21st, 2022 by squat.net from the canary .. shared with thanks
UK anarchist Toby Shone was put on trial for terrorism last year. The charges – which were never proven – related to the 325nostate.net anarchist website. Toby was arrested in November 2020 in the Forest of Dean in Southwest England.
The prosecution against Toby was part of a wider police operation known as ‘Operation Adream’. The original charges were that the 325 website – which published reports of direct action – contained material ‘that would be useful to terrorists’, and that the site fundraised for ‘terrorist activities’.
The case is comparable with the 1997 Green Anarchist/Animal Liberation Front – or GANDALF – trial’, which accused the editors of Green Anarchist magazine and the Animal Liberation Front Supporters Group newsletter of “unlawfully inciting persons unknown to commit criminal damage”. However, Operation Adream went one step further by charging Toby with terrorism.
Toby told The Canary that “the implications of this case do not only concern anarchists”, but should be a warning to anyone who “wants to see actual social, political or environmental change”.
The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) eventually offered no evidence in relation to the terrorism case, and Toby was found not guilty.
However, he was convicted of possession of a small quantity of drugs with intent to supply, and was sentenced to three years and 9 months in prison.
Now, the Counter Terrorism Unit want to use the drugs conviction to apply for a Serious Crime Prevention Order (SCPO). The SCPO will enable the police to control his use of computers, bank accounts and other electronic devices for five years after he is released from prison. They can apply to renew the order indefinitely.
SCPO orders can be imposed by courts on people who have been convicted of ‘serious’ crimes. The orders are designed to severely limit people’s freedom by – in the words of the CPS – imposing “conditions considered appropriate for the stated purpose of protecting the public from serious crime”.
The CPS lists the crimes that qualify for the imposition of a SCPO order on its website. The list includes “drug trafficking”, but the crime has to be deemed by the court to be ‘serious’ in order for a SCPO to be imposed.
The application for the SCPO is due to be heard on 6 May at Bristol Crown Court. A solidarity demonstration is planned at the court at 8.30am.
Support Toby poster – https://www.brightonabc.org.uk/images/toby_may_6_demo.pdf
A poster in support of Toby – by Brighton ABC
Imprisoned since 2020
Toby was originally imprisoned in Wandsworth and had a hearing at the Old Bailey. His trial was eventually moved back to Bristol, to be tried locally, and Toby was moved to HMP Horfield in Bristol.
Recently Toby was moved again, this time to HMP Parc in Bridgend, after supporters spoke out about targeting and threats made against him by a right-wing prison officer.
The Canary interviewed Toby from his prison cell. He said about Operation Adream:
Continue reading “UK: The police want to impose a chilling list of conditions on an anarchist prisoner”
Members of feminist collectives demonstrated at the Glorieta de las Mujeres que Luchan in Mexico City (Mexico). EFE/Sashenka Gutiérrez
Mexico City | 13 Apr 2022
Several dozen women demonstrated this Wednesday in Mexico City to denounce that they were recently attacked by the police in Chimalhuacán, a municipality in the State of Mexico, in the center of the country.
“We do not deserve this fear,” claimed one of the women who, like her companions, told the press about the alleged attacks carried out by people dressed in civilian clothes but who, some of them, were carrying long weapons and who attacked them, according to what she says, with partitions and tubes.
The group of women activists were on April 2 in front of the Chimalhuacán Justice Center -a unit belonging to the Attorney General’s Office of the State of Mexico (FGJEM)- accompanying Irene Cervantes, a woman who two years ago denounced that her underage daughter was kidnapped, tortured and raped by police officers of the State of Mexico.
Since she denounced the case, Cervantes, her companions denounced her, she suffers harassment, harassment and even she was allegedly assaulted by police officers.
According to what they reported, on April 1, traffic police arrested the woman alleging that the motorcycle on which she was traveling was stolen. Three hours later she was found battered and missing two teeth.
On April 2, several police officers were detained inside the center, and the activists gathered outside the building to demand that all other people linked to Irene’s case and her daughter’s case be arrested.
According to what they reported, since the afternoon of that day, when around 20 women gathered, they were besieged by several men who said they were not policemen.
Members of feminist collectives demonstrated yesterday at the Glorieta de las Mujeres que Luchan in Mexico City (Mexico). EFE/Sashenka Gutiérrez
The end of QE “is very likely to happen in the course of the third quarter with a high probability that it will be early in the quarter if numbers continue to be the way we have seen them,” President Christine Lagarde told CNBC in an interview today.
“But we have to be data dependent and we will be sequential,” she said.
This moves the end of QE to the early part of the third quarter, so July, and maybe August. In the ECB policy statement last week, the ECB only said that QE “should be concluded in the third quarter,” and that had moved the end of QE to September.
With “data dependent” she means the ECB will watch with stunned open mouth how inflation is now raging further and deeper and more insidiously into the economy, tearing up the ECB’s philosophy that NIRP and QE don’t destroy the monetary system.
And with “data dependent” she also means that the tightening schedule will keep getting sped up – as they have been doing it all year – because the inflation data keeps getting worse.
With “sequential” she means that QE will end first before rates are being hiked. So if QE ends early in Q3, rates could be raised starting in Q3, rather than Q4.
And now it’s not just once before year-end. “How much, how many times, remains to be seen,” she said, leaving the number and size of the rate hikes up to our imagination.
This has now been the crescendo all year: Every time someone at the ECB says something, it’s a little more hawkish – if that’s the right term – than before, and everything is getting moved forward. The taper has already been sped up. Now the end of the taper is being further sped up. And the rate hikes are being sped up.
The ECB’s deposit rate is still negative (-0.5%), and some banks are charging their customers, even retail customers, for their deposits, thereby turning interest rates into ECB-inflicted punishment rates.
Now the bets are lining up that the ECB will abandon NIRP this year, and raise its policy rate above 0% before the end of the year, something that ECB Governing Council member Pierre Wunsch suggested this week.
While the raging inflation in the US is terrible, with CPI inflation at 8.5% in March, in numerous EU countries, it is much worse.
In seven of the 29 EU countries, the “harmonized” (calculated the same way for all countries) inflation rate is in the double digits topping out in Lithuania at 15.6%. In four more EU countries, including Spain, the inflation rate is above 9%. Germany’s inflation rate of 7.6% is sending shockwaves through the country.
In many of the non-euro countries in Europe, central banks have for nearly a year jacked up interest rates to slow down the surge of inflation, including some shock-and-awe surprise rate hikes by the Czech National Bank, the National Bank of Poland, and the Central Bank of Iceland (here’s my February update on this). The ECB gas been the laggard.
But this inflation shock is not kidding around:
| EU countries by inflation rates, for March | |
| Lithuania | 15.6% |
| Estonia | 14.8% |
| Czechia | 11.9% |
| Netherlands | 11.7% |
| Latvia | 11.5% |
| Bulgaria | 10.5% |
| Poland | 10.2% |
| Spain | 9.8% |
| Romania | 9.6% |
| Slovakia | 9.6% |
| Belgium | 9.3% |
| Hungary | 8.6% |
| Greece | 8.0% |
| Luxembourg | 7.9% |
| Germany | 7.6% |
| Croatia | 7.3% |
| Ireland | 6.9% |
| Italy | 6.8% |
| Austria | 6.7% |
| Sweden | 6.3% |
| Cyprus | 6.2% |
| Denmark | 6.0% |
| Slovenia | 6.0% |
| Finland | 5.8% |
| Portugal | 5.5% |
| France | 5.1% |
| Malta | 4.5% |
The ECB’s NIRP policy, and its policy of buying not only government bonds and housing bonds, but large amounts of corporate bonds — echoed by other central banks in Europe that had similar programs — has created the greatest corporate bond bubble of all times, with even the average euro junk bond yield falling to a ridiculously low 2.1% in November 2017. And still in September 2021, it was back at 2.25%, for an average junk bond!
Posted by Internationalist 360° on Rainer Shea
The atomic bomb isn’t the most powerful weapon that the U.S. imperialists have ever used. There’s an even stronger tool that it constantly uses to inflict violence, and that tool is propaganda. It doesn’t merely cause harm to the people it targets, it turns them into monsters. Monsters who are willing to kill their fellow human beings for the benefit of American capital, and believe they’re doing so for a righteous cause.
In Ukraine, the imperialists have done this by indoctrinating their favored ethnic group to hate Russians.
Which is an absurd project on its face, because “Ukrainians” aren’t truly a distinct ethnic group from Russians, and “Ukraine” isn’t truly a separate nation from Russia.
Ukraine is inextricably tied to Russia, with their connection going back centuries. Ukraine is where the concept of Russia began, with the three identities of Ukrainians, Belarusians, and Russians having originated in the Kievan Rus a millennium ago.
Continue reading “Ukraine: How the U.S. Empire Uses Propaganda to Turn People into Monsters”from Yale Environment 360 By Jonathan Mingle • April 21, 2022 shared with thanks
Jonathan Mingle is a reformist US journalist who here gives a good resumé of the LNG export industry. However the article fails to mention this is over 90% fracking gas transported by a maze of leaking pipelines from over a million short term unregulated, methane spewing fracking wells, drilled and abandoned by disappearing capitalists, after pumping billions of liters of highly toxic chemicals into the fractured earth and US aquifers.
The U.S. plans to boost liquefied natural gas exports to Europe to help the EU reduce its dependence on Russian gas. This could spur an expansion of LNG terminals, which analysts say would lead to long-term increases in gas production and greenhouse gas emissions.
By Jonathan Mingle • April 21, 2022
In the span of weeks, Russia’s war on Ukraine has created millions of refugees, transformed the geopolitical landscape, upended global energy markets and food supply chains, and hastened Europe’s efforts to transition away from fossil fuels. The war also threatens to alter the trajectory of energy and climate policy in the United States.
On March 25, a month after Russia launched its invasion, President Biden met with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen in Brussels and jointly announced a new initiative to help Europe reduce its reliance on Russian fossil fuels. Their plan calls for boosting exports of liquefied natural gas (LNG) from the U.S. to the European Union by 15 billion cubic meters this year and as much as 50 billion cubic meters — a third of what Europe currently buys from Russia — by 2030.
Biden administration officials have characterized the LNG surge as a stopgap measure to help Europe bridge these next few years until it can build more renewable energy and make its buildings and industries more energy efficient.
But energy analysts say the announcement could signal a pivot toward greater support for expanding gas infrastructure, potentially locking in significant new sources of greenhouse gas emissions.
New LNG terminals — whether for export on the U.S. Gulf Coast or for import on Germany’s North Sea coast — would take several years and several billion dollars to build. Analysts say that by the time they are up and running, the geopolitical environment may look different, but climate change will be all the more urgent, and there will be powerful business incentives to keep the terminals operating.
editorial insert: It’s also worth noting that Russia also supplies LNG, over 40 million tons a year to the world market, mainly to China, and has a new export terminal, Artic LNG 2, due to come on stream already this year. So we will have Europe refusing to buy cheaper, nearer and non-fracking Russian LNG which will go instead to Asia..
Even with new infrastructure, the U.S. won’t be able to replace the volume of gas that Europe imports from Russia, says an expert.
“Europe needs more U.S. LNG to get through the next two winters, not incentivization to use gas for the next 20 years,” said Claire Healy, of the energy think tank E3G, in a statement. “It has turned a short-term energy crunch into a long-term crutch for American oil and gas producers.”
Some energy experts caution that expanding LNG infrastructure would be a distraction from more durable solutions to promote energy security in both the U.S. and the EU. Rather than boosting supply by building LNG projects that could become stranded assets, they say, countries should focus on energy efficiency and other ways to reduce demand for gas.
Continue reading “How U.S. Fracking-Gas Exports to Europe Could Lock in Future Emissions”
The Free 