Defend Havasupai Sacred Land from Uranium Mining at Grand Canyon June 2013

Red Butte photo Dawn Dyer/Censored News

from Censored News

Grassroots protesters will take action at 7 am near the junction of Forest Road 305 and AZ Highway 64, independently from but in conjunction with Idle No More’s International Indigenous Solidarity Day, the presence of Havasupai elders, and the Sierra Club’s national executive director at the Canyon Uranium Mine. Grassroots protesters will also be available for interviews.

Surprise, Surprise: Mexico Resurrecting La Parota Plans

by Root Force

Well, that didn’t take long. Less than a year after the government of the Mexican state of Guerrero made it clear that it would not approve any plans for La Parota dam, the Federal Electricity Commission (CFE) has included the dam in its most recent report on its upcoming plans. The commission hopes to begin construction within the current six-year presidential term.

Maybe that’s why the government has started trying to introduce paramilitaries into the resisting communities.

Of course, the communities that would be flooded out by this dam (designed to provide electricity to the port of Acapulco and, eventually, hundreds of miles north into the southwest United States) have maintained a solid, no-compromise resistance and remain organized. And all the government’s attempts to expropriate their land have, thus far, been declared illegal and invalid.

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.