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Oct 18, 15

All the News You Didn’t Even Know Was Going Down

Originally posted to It’s Going Down

On ‘Christopher Columbus Day,’ several statues across the US were vandalized as some state governments bowed to pressure to remove the holiday that celebrates genocide and led to the opening chapter of over 500 years of indigenous resistance to invasion, murder, and displacement. Unfortunately, as with this summer’s trend of writing graffiti on confederate statues, vandalizing symbols doesn’t affect the operation of colonialism nor white supremacy. Nor will the superficial renaming of holidays do anything but attempt to stave off anti-colonial revolt.

Speaking of anti-colonial revolt, in Quebec, a Mohawk police station which was the scene of a standoff in 2004 burned to the ground. As one report stated:

A former police station in Quebec where dozens of Aboriginal officers were held hostage more than a decade ago has burned to the ground. It was the building where Grand Chief James Gabriel’s Aboriginal police force — brought in to fight growing organized crime — was held hostage in 2004. The chief’s family home was famously torched by vandals during that standoff, which ended with the provincial force taking over policing.

In British Columbia, those at the Unist’ot’en Camp has successfully stopped the construction of a pipeline for another year but it appears that the course of the project may change to a new location. As one article stated:

Unist’ot’en Camp has successfully stopped police and pipeline surveyors from entering their indigenous territory in Northern BC for another year. Now we learn that executives with Coastal Gaslink are (quietly) seeking to change the fracked gas pipeline route.

This new proposal won’t get Coastal Gaslink out of trouble with Unist’ot’en, because it would still cross their territory, 5 kilometers north of the current occupation site.

This doesn’t bode well for the consortium of pipeline companies collaborating on a unified route to Kitimat. We wonder if Coastal Gaslink will be the first to break ranks with the tarsands and fracking pipeline cartel.

Another piece of news relates to the likely reason for the logging and police presence last month. We were worried the pipeline companies and RCMP were about to move in permanently.

But that’s not the case. The companies do not have the investment capital to build their pipelines. But their provincial pipeline permit was about to expire, and the managers had to show they are doing “substantial work” by clearing trees here and there on the pipeline route. (They also spent a fair amount of time hanging around Unist’ot’en Camp doing no work at all because they were not allowed in.)

Indigenous militants at Lelu Island fighting against LNG drilling issued this report:

Petronas is currently drilling on Flora and Agnew Banks. Both banks contain high density eelgrass. This work is releasing toxins which have settled on these banks into open ocean, which is an environmental hazard. They have also already cut down several culturally-modified trees, and have clear-cut large areas for borehole drilling on Lax U’u’la. According to their own environmental assessment the coves of Lelu Island slated for a “material offloading facility” and “pioneer dock”–sites they have threatened to attempt destructive work on next–are also filled with eelgrass beds. As well, their assessment clearly shows that their proposed suspension bridge runs right through Flora Bank, contrary to recent advertisements where the bridge is omitted from their map. They have not gained free prior and informed consent to proceed with any of their iwork, which makes them trespassers on Gitwilgyoots land and water. Drill boat operators have made false reports to the Coast Guard and to the Port Authority, and have been escorted by the RCMP while trespassing.

Lakota people have released a new video about decolonization and land defense, check it out.

Unicorn Riot also has a report about murdered indigenous women which had been generating protests across Canada.

In Mexico, people have issued a call for support in the fight against ComCáac in the state of Sonora. From the Earth First! Journal:

During the last few months we have witnessed with worry the dash for resource extraction inside the ComCáac territory within the state of Sonora. This lunge includes mining concessions, some already in prospecting stages, some already extracting minerals, all lacking federal, state, municipal or community permission. This practice has been reported several times; it has been made abundantly clear the impacts that these projects will have on the region. The geographic conditions are very vulnerable here, putting at risk the people and their ways of life.

Do not leave our comrades at ComCáac to fight for their land alone. We denounce the corporation for causing a division between these communities through misinformation, and for their intentions of privatizing Shark island. Likewise, we denounce the mining company “La Peineta SA de CV” for their plans of extraction, and we reiterate our support to the Land Defenders of CoomCáac (sic) in their fight to defend their land, their culture, their way of life.

Also in Mexico, an anti-mining campaign located in Zanatepec and parts of San Miguel Chimalapa declared victory and indigenous Yaquis continue to fight against an aqueduct project.

In Oaxaca:

https://twitter.com/MexicAnarchist/status/653717776561889280

In Mexico City:

In ecological news that continues to only get worse as industrial civilization hurdles forward, according to The Guardian: 

The food chains of the world’s oceans are at risk of collapse due to the release of greenhouse gases, overfishing and localised pollution, a stark new analysis shows.

A study of 632 published experiments of the world’s oceans, from tropical to arctic waters, spanning coral reefs and the open seas, found that climate change is whittling away the diversity and abundance of marine species.

Problems in the ocean’s food chains will be a direct concern for hundreds of millions of people who rely upon seafood for sustenance, medicines and income. The loss of coral reefs could also worsen coastal erosion due to their role in protecting shorelines from storms and cyclones.

Noam Chomsky writing for In These Times offers a similar grim assessment:

The likely end of the era of civilization is foreshadowed in a new draft report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the generally conservative monitor of what is happening to the physical world.

The report concludes that increasing greenhouse gas emissions risk “severe, pervasive and irreversible impacts for people and ecosystems” over the coming decades. The world is nearing the temperature when loss of the vast ice sheet over Greenland will be unstoppable. Along with melting Antarctic ice, that could raise sea levels to inundate major cities as well as coastal plains.

The era of civilization coincides closely with the geological epoch of the Holocene, beginning over 11,000 years ago. The previous Pleistocene epoch lasted 2.5 million years. Scientists now suggest that a new epoch began about 250 years ago, the Anthropocene, the period when human activity has had a dramatic impact on the physical world. The rate of change of geological epochs is hard to ignore.

One index of human impact is the extinction of species, now estimated to be at about the same rate as it was 65 million years ago when an asteroid hit the Earth. That is the presumed cause for the ending of the age of the dinosaurs, which opened the way for small mammals to proliferate, and ultimately modern humans. Today, it is humans who are the asteroid, condemning much of life to extinction.

The IPCC report reaffirms that the “vast majority” of known fuel reserves must be left in the ground to avert intolerable risks to future generations. Meanwhile the major energy corporations make no secret of their goal of exploiting these reserves and discovering new ones.

Group

In anti-fascist news, One People’s Project was kind enough to create a list of upcoming white nationalist and far-Right conferences in the United States coming up in the near future. If one is near you, please start organizing and shut this shit down.

9/18 – 9/20: Aryan World Congress || Converse, LA (http://www.donotlink.com/gna1)
9/25 – 9/27: Value Voters Summit || Washington, DC (http://www.donotlink.com/gn9y)
9/26: American Freedom Party Conference || Los Angeles, CA (http://www.donotlink.com/gn9i)
9/27: Virginia Flaggers 4th Anniversary || Mechanicsville, VA (http://tinyurl.com/peagggg)
10/10: American Freedom Party Conference || Los Angeles, CA (http://www.donotlink.com/gn9j)
10/23-10/25: John Randolph Club || Cleveland, OH (http://www.donotlink.com/gn87)
10/29 – 10/31: Int’l Conference for Men’s Issues || Houston, TX (http://www.donotlink.com/dhb3)
10/31: National Policy Institute || Washington, DC (http://www.donotlink.com/f6w0)
11/6 – 11/7: HL Mencken Club || Baltimore, MD (http://www.donotlink.com/gn8a)

In NYC, a man was arrested for blocking a truck displaying propoganda in support of Turkey’s ruling party AKP. This occurred during a demonstration against the bombing of a peace rally in Ankara. The man arrested allegedly fought for the YPG in Rojava.

In the United States, the number of people killed by police this year reached 946.

In Baltimore, several protesters refused to leave City Hall chambers until they could present their demands to officials. Much has been written over the nature of demands in struggle, but it’s worth re-stating that there are no demands they could possibly grant us that would truly do away with white supremacy, or any other structure of domination.

In NYC, people also remained on the streets.

In prison news, Victoria Law reports that a recent move by feds to bring home thousands of prisoners is the result of years of prison organizing. Also, be sure to check out Mask Magazine for their ‘Prisons for for Burning‘ column.

In Hawaii, the governor declared an emergency in regards to the high amount of homeless people. But we all know there’s nothing the government can do that will actually solve the problen, only the collective action of housing ourselves in complete antagonism to capitalism.

In labor news, in Vacaville and Farfield, California, over a thousand public workers went on strike which was then declared illegal. One report read:

Hundreds of Solano County government workers on a one-day strike marched Wednesday to the government center where they heard from speakers praising their “purple power” and a vow “to bring the glass house down.”

In San Francisco, Uber drivers tried to pull off a three-day action and strike, although were met with small success.

In the United States, there has been a large buzz around the spectacle of the Democratic Party debates. As one report wrote:

On the eve of Tuesday’s first televised debate among the candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination, the two poll leaders, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, have gone out of their way to express support for the Obama administration’s military interventions in the Middle East.

They are solidarizing themselves with US imperialist aggression in the region under conditions where American policy in Iraq and Syria has produced an unmitigated debacle, with the growing threat of a wider war involving major powers, including Russia, whose nuclear arsenal is second only to Washington’s.

Moreover, the main pretext for the Obama administration’s escalation in Iraq and Syria, the so-called war on terror, has been completely exploded by the open alliance of Washington with the al-Nusra Front, the Al Qaeda affiliate in Syria, which the US government itself declares a terrorist organization, against the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

Clinton has called for a more aggressive military posture in Syria, including the imposition of a no-fly zone, potentially bringing US military forces into direct conflict with Russian warplanes now flying missions in support of the Assad regime.

This is consistent with the policies that Clinton advocated as secretary of state, when she pushed for direct US intervention to overthrow the Assad government in 2011-2012, only to be overruled by Obama, who opted for a more cautious and indirect policy using the CIA and US allies such as Saudi Arabia and Qatar.

Of course, it’s not news that those who strive to dominate are complicit in domination. Nevertheless, the candidates still offered empty gestures towards social justice issues with occasionally a nod to Occupy style language. Throughout the Democratic debate, all the politicians attempted to give credence to concern over a growing wealth gap and class and racial divides within American society, which have only grown larger in the past 8 years of Obama’s reign. On article read:

As Tuesday’s debate underscored, the Democrats are endlessly repackaging themselves in a non-stop marketing effort, hoping to rekindle support from a disillusioned and alienated public by adopting a new brand, slogan, etc. Virtually no effort is made to align today’s positions with yesterday’s or reconcile their words with their deeds.

But besides a set of few reforms such as raising the minimum wage and making higher education less expensive, even the “socialist” candidate Bernie Sanders offers nothing which will get us out of the continuing economic, ecological, and social crisis that is modern capitalist civilization.

One commentator wrote:

The economic crisis at once intensifies and is compounded by mounting geopolitical crises and international conflicts, driven above all by the relentless pursuit of global hegemony by American imperialism. For a quarter century, the American ruling class has been engaged in endless wars of ever-expanding geographical scope. For the past fifteen years, the military interventions have been waged under the banner of the “war on terror,” the ideological framework used by the American financial aristocracy to reorganize the Middle East and Central Asia through bloodletting and violence.

One country after another has been targeted for regime change or subversion by the US and its allies: Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen. The carnage produced by these wars has led to a virtual collapse of state structures throughout the Middle East, producing a flood of desperate refugees to which the ruling classes of Europe have responded with violence and repression.

Here too, the crisis is reaching a tipping point. The local wars in the Middle East are leading increasingly to direct conflict between the major powers. This week, French President Francois Hollande declared that the conflict in Syria risked devolving into “a total war, a war that will also affect our territories,” i.e., Europe.

Over the past week, the Russian ruling class has sought to defend its interests in Syria by more openly backing the government of President Bashar al-Assad, which is targeted for overthrow by US-backed Islamist militias. The US and NATO powers have responded with extreme belligerence.

In response to looming disaster, the Left continues to offer no solutions but strikes which work with management, protests which wait for politicians to listen, and marches which run in circles and pray for the public to take notice. What is needed now are tactics and strategies which build the capacity, confidence, and power of everyday people to destroy, attack, gain territory, and create autonomy.

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In search of new forms of life. It's Going Down is a digital community center and media platform featuring news, opinion, podcasts, and reporting on autonomous social movements and revolt across so-called North America from an anarchist perspective.

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