Comic Book Review: Liberator #1

from Earth First! Newswire

The first issue of the Animal Liberation Front-inspired comic book, Liberator, hits shelves today. Check it out for pages of awesome animal fury against cruel anthropocentrists.

Liberator #1 [Black Mask Studios, 2013] is about two activists – one who puts her freedom on the line by committing civil disobedience, and one who works underground, running an autonomous campaign of liberation and sabotage against dog fighting rings and fur farmers. Security culture, tactical diversity, shitty coworkers, asshole cops, explosions – Liberator seems to have it all. It’s refreshing to see a comic hero fighting for something I care about, rather than protecting the financial security of the rich and middle class. The comic world hasn’t had anything approaching this since Grant Morrison’s Animal Man chickened out during a laboratory arson.

The art, with illustrations by Javier Sanchez Aranda and coloring by Joaquin Pereyra, is lively and engaging, if a little more technophilic than I would have expected from such a niche publication. But where Liberator really sets itself apart is with its writing. In a medium dense with mutations and magic, Matt Miner presents us with a new kind of hero. Damon, the protagonist, is a barista by day and an almost Travis Bickle-like ski mask-donning animal rescuer by night.

NGOs Kickoff Civil Disobedience Campaign at Chicago Anti-KXL Rally

Even if it annoys you, can you try not to be a prick about it? 

by Panagioti / Earth First! Newswire

With twenty-two people arrested yesterday morning after a sit-in at the State Department’s Chicago office, it seems environmental civil disobedience may have officially moved from fringe to center. If what Credo says is legit, this action is the first of an effort to mobilize 60,000 people who signed a commitment to risk arrest in escalating protests against tar sands infrastructure.

I’ll admit it can be pretty frustrating to watch big NGO’s build glossy, shallow campaigns off the grassroots momentum created by the efforts of our radical countercultures. It’s tempting to talk shit about how they’ll probably use these pictures in their next mass email fundraising plea while our friends and allies living full time on the front lines are scraping by on stale bagels…  But, in my opinion, it really ain’t worth wasting time on.

Controversial Primate Dealer Flees Miami

Activists claim victory as Primate Products closes facility

from Smash HLS

Doors close at Primate Products in Miami

The workers are gone, the lab specimen boxes have been removed, and the cages that held as many as 500 monkeys are empty. Animal activists with the group Smash HLS are celebrating what has become obvious: Primate Products has closed the doors to its monkey quarantine/holding facility in Doral (7780 NW 53rd Street). For the first time in more than 25 years, the building is empty.

Primate Products, Inc. imports, breeds and sells monkeys for use in experiments to universities, the U.S. military and to pharmaceutical and contract testing companies. The company operates a monkey breeding facility in Immokalee.

Primate Products facility in Immokalee gets a visit in 2011

Smash HLS held its first protest targeting the company in May 2010 and since then has held dozens of loud protests outside the Doral facility and employee homes. Primate Products has lost customers and employees as a result of the campaign.

Updates on Mapuche Resistance and Repression in Chile

from Earth First! Newswire

On January 4, 2013, the mansion of the major latifundista and usurper of Mapuche lands Werner Luchsinger was set ablaze at Vilcún, near Temuco (pictured above). Werner was the cousin of fellow businessman and latifundista Jorge Luchsinger. On January 3, 2008, Mapuche weichafe Matias Catrileo was shot in the back and killed by police guarding Jorge Luchsinger’s estate against an action to pressure the latifundista with the longterm goal of recovering stolen lands. Police opened fire on the crowd with automatic weapons. Catrileo was killed while running away.

In September and October, 2010, a group of anarchists from North America traveled to Chile, Wallmapu (the Mapuche territories, occupied by the Chilean and Argentinean states), and Bolivia to learn the histories and current situations of their struggles, and, in their words “make the connections necessary to strengthen real and long-term solidarity…”

They arrived at an important time, less than a month after a major wave of raids and arrests in Santiago, during a crucial and highly supported hungerstrike by Mapuche political prisoners against the antiterrorism law and the repression of their struggle. And they have continued to tell this story of Mapuche resistance as it unfolds today.

Just this week, an author from the trip posted the following incredible update from Wallmapu in a recent series entitled  “The Intensification of Independence”. (See the former posts for a glossary of terms in Spanish and Mapudungun.)

Ongoing Repression in Wallmapu

by John Severino / Solidarity Trip to Chile, Bolivia and Walmapu

Awareness of repression should never be turned into a list of cases and prisoners. Those who struggle must understand repression strategically. If the essence of repression is isolation, this means intentionally formulating our responses to overcome that isolation, both by connecting them to the lines of our ongoing struggle, and analyzing and thwarting the particular mechanisms through which the State seeks to isolate us.

In Wallmapu, that ongoing struggle is a struggle for the land, not as an alienated possession, but as a whole relationship outside of and against capitalism. Mapuche in struggle take over their traditional land, fighting with cops and landlords to do it, and sometimes burning them out; they block highways and sabotage the industries that would exploit their lands; and they farm, graze, and common in those lands, build their houses there, hold their rituals there, raise their children, marry, and bury their dead there, making their relationship with that land a solid fact.

Pro-mining Forces Pushing EPA to Approve Dangerous Pebble Mine

by Kate Sheppard / Mother Jones

photo: Ritu Manoj Jethani / Shutterstock.com

Last month, I reported on the potential environmental threats posed by the massive proposed gold and copper mine in Alaska. The EPA conducted a watershed analysis, released in April, that showed that the mine would endanger rivers and the Bristol Bay, as well as the region’s salmon fishery. The EPA extended the comment period through the end of June, allowing more time for the public to weigh in.

A number of organizations, both pro- and anti-Pebble, had circulated mass mailings asking supporters to comment. You’ve seen the type; they’re form letters that people can sign onto via email. As of Friday, pro-mining groups had generated 118,294 comments from those mass mailings. But 117,401 of those comments—or 99.25 percent—came from a single group called Resourceful Earth. Here’s a sample of one of its letters:

Gagged by Big Ag: How Exposing Abuse Became a Crime

Illustration by Tim O’Brien

Horrific abuse. Rampant contamination. And the crime is…exposing it?

by Ted Genoways / Mother Jones

Shawn Lyons was dead to rights—and he knew it. More than a month had passed since People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals had released a video of savage mistreatment at the MowMar Farms hog confinement facility where he worked as an entry-level herdsman in the breeding room. The three enormous sow barns in rural Greene County, Iowa, were less than five years old and, until recently, had raised few concerns. They seemed well ventilated and well supplied with water from giant holding tanks. Their tightly tacked steel siding always gleamed white in the sun. But the PETA hidden-camera footage shot by two undercover activists over a period of months in the summer of 2008, following up on a tip from a former employee, showed a harsh reality concealed inside.

The Green Scare, PRISM, and the Rise of the Surveillance of Women

from Badass Marxist Feminist

Thanks to radicalrationale.wordpress.com for designing the logo

For most of the history of US domestic surveillance, efforts have been focused on those who seek to undermine hegemonic power, particularly communists, socialists, black nationalists, civil rights activists, union organizers, peace activists, political opponents of the reigning administration, and, to a predictably lesser extent, white hate groups. Of 92 total confirmed targets of COINTELPRO, 31 were organizations, 44 were men, and 17 were women. Of the 31 organizations, only one was explicitly dedicated to advancing women’s rights. Considering that sexism is alive and well in the left even today, it was certainly exponentially more pervasive before Roe v. Wade and Title IX.Women who belonged to the 31 organizations monitored by COINTELPRO were relegated to subordinate roles; the leaders, officers, and most influential contributors were men. Consequently, men were the primary targets of COINTELPRO and its predecessors, and, I posit, its antecendents until roughly 2001, which ushered in the rise of the surveillance of women. 

Antarctic Could House World’s Biggest Marine Sanctuary

Penguin on Antarctic sea ice. Photograph: John B. Weller

by Graham Readfeam / The Guardian

An extraordinarily big thing might happen in the world of marine conservation next month at a meeting in Germany of a little known international commission.

And while you probably haven’t read much about it, the outcome could see the creation of the two largest areas of protected ocean on the planet that would lock out fishing from more than 1.5 million square kilometres of ocean around the Antarctic.

The Houses Built on China’s ‘Poisoned’ Land

Homes are being built on contaminated land in Chinese cities – and the residents of these developments have no idea

by Gao Shengke and Wang Kai / The Guardian

Photograph: Caijing

Gao Shengke and Wang Kai have won the prize for Best Investigation at ChinaDialogue’s and The Guardian’s China Environmental Press Awards – 2013 for their investigation into contaminated earth in Chinese cities. Here is the first of their three-part series of reports.

The excavators are rumbling and dust swirls all about at the second phase of the Kangquan New City construction project in Guanzhuang village, Chaoyang District, outside Beijing’s east fifth ring road.

A 20-metre deep pit has been dug on the site. A foul stench rises from the pile of earth that has been removed. Until now, few people knew about the secret that was buried here.

Pentagon Bracing for Public Dissent Over Climate and Energy Shocks

NSA PRISM is motivated in part by fears that environmentally-linked disasters could spur anti-government activism

by Nafeez Ahmed / The Guardian

US domestic surveillance has targeted anti-fracking activists across the country. Photo from tarsandsblockade.org

Top secret US National Security Agency (NSA) documents disclosed by the Guardian have shocked the world with revelations of a comprehensive US-based surveillance system with direct access to Facebook, Apple, Google, Microsoft and other tech giants. New Zealand court records suggest that data harvested by the NSA’s Prism system has been fed into the Five Eyes intelligence alliance whose members also include the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

But why have Western security agencies developed such an unprecedented capacity to spy on their own domestic populations? Since the 2008 economic crash, security agencies have increasingly spied on political activists, especially environmental groups, on behalf of corporate interests. This activity is linked to the last decade of US defence planning, which has been increasingly concerned by the risk of civil unrest at home triggered by catastrophic events linked to climate change, energy shocks or economic crisis – or all three.