Corporations
The Indian government, under pressure from international campaigners, but primarily Orissa people in their relentless campaign to save their mountains and livelihoods, commissioned a report. The report has now been published.

The report commissioned was one with teeth, it had decision making powers on the bid by Vedanta to open-cast mine incredible amounts of bauxite from the Niyamgiri range in Orissa.

121,000 trees were going to be felled, a seven square kilometre scar would be inflicted on the Niyamgiri wildlife sanctuary and the habitats of Deer, Antelope and a rare lizard, the Golden Gekko, were threatened with complete destruction.... read more

Corporations
Times aren't going too well for Vedanta at present and we couldn't have wished it on a nastier corporation...

UK based corporate villains Vedanta got a kick in the teeth yesterday when a committee set up by India’s Environment Minister delivered a scathing report condemning the companies illegal activity and operating with "total contempt for the Law".

Among a number of blows delivered, the report unequivocally condemned the company for falsifying records documenting their criminality, infringing environmental laws and violating Indigenous Peoples rights by stealing their forest and agricultural lands.

The report concluded: "The committee is of the firm view that allowing mining in the proposed mining lease area by depriving two primitive tribal groups - Kutia and Dongaria Kondh - of their rights over the proposed mining site in order to benefit a private company would shake the faith of tribal people in the laws of the land."

The report has now been delivered to the Environment ministry, who will ultimately make the final decision on Vedanta's future in the area this Friday.... read more

Corporations
After the successful protest at the AGM of Vedanta at the end of July, we're now presented with the dreadful plight of the Ferrexpo Mineworkers
Corporations
The scum always rises to the top, and the business world recognises this as they sit and admire the financial success of this UK registered, Indian owned business that's wrecking lives in pursuit of profit.

The mining corporation, Vedanta, has been aiming to annihilate some of the biggest mountains in the south of Odisha (previously known as Orissa) in its plans for extracting bauxite, the ore for aluminium. There's been a campaign to stop Vedanta for many years, stemming from the grassroots campaign which grew up amongst the Dongria Kond people, the people who have lived amongst the mountains in question for generations and generations.

There's a price tag on these mountains - roughly $2 trillion.... read more

Miscellaneous
Mutiny is a new, vibrant and inclusive event attracting a young crowd discussing political ideas and enjoying performance, multimedia features and interactive art. Try it, we think you'll like...

For it's fourth event, Mutiny is putting the Media on Trial.

Starting with the splendidly innovative 'speed debating', and following with sessions on
* The impact of the media
* Hegemony and the media and
* Activism and blogging

With contributions from Financial Times journalists, through a Big Brother contestant to activists and bloggers the evening will be fast paced, friendly and will close with live music.

The Media on Trial opens at 6pm on Wednesday 21st July at the Resistance Gallery, 265 Poyser Street, London E2.... read more

G8
Despite billions being spent on 'security' the World's leaders do not meet in peace, a short report and pics from Jody Boehnert live from the streets of Toronto.

Don't believe corporate media hype. The streets of Toronto were full of thousands of informed individuals who care about the lack of legitimacy of the G20, their undemocratic backroom deals, their instance on continuing to privatize the commons and socialize risk.... read more

Miscellaneous
What are the prospects for the Red Shirt movement in Thailand? After the ferocious crackdown by government troops recently, we re-publish an article written by Jacques-chai Chomthongdi and Chanida Chanyapate which was first published by Focus on the Global South...

As Bangkok residents came out in full force to help clean up the Silom and Ratchprasong areas so that their lives can get back to normal, the government of Abhisit Vejjajiva is also issuing arrest warrants for the remaining Red Shirt leaders and sympathizers to keep them off the streets.... read more

Climate Change
Humanity confronts a great dilemma: to continue on the path of capitalism, depredation, and death, or to choose the path of harmony with nature and respect for life.

"Today, our Mother Earth is wounded and the future of humanity is in danger. If global warming increases by more than 2 degrees Celsius, a situation that the “Copenhagen Accord” could lead to, there is a 50% probability that the damages caused to our Mother Earth will be completely irreversible.... read more

Thousands Rally in Cochabamba Stadium to Save the Planet

A longer report of the final day and the conclusions from the working groups is coming, but as I have limited time before coming back to the UK here is a set of images from the last day which ended with a rally of around 40,000 people who heard Hugo Chavez warn the choice facing humanity was Socialism or Barbarism, and Evo Morales conclude that we must kill Capitalism before it kills the planet.


... read more

Climate Change
Double the numbers expected see Summit struggling to cope with demand for change

In yesterdays inauguration rally Evo Morales called for communitarian socialism to replace the failing and destructive Capitalist system, today we found out that despite thousands of activists from Northern Europe and elsewhere not being able to attend the summit because of the Volcano eruption in Iceland, a huge 31,000 people from more than 135 countries have began the enormous task of making such a vision possible.

Even the optimistic predictions for the summit thought attendance would be around 15,000 so it's a sign of how the social movements are picking up momentum again, after a lull at the end of the 00's, that so many have made the effort to be here.... read more

Climate Change
"Planet or Die, We shall Overcome" Evo Morales opens the World People's Summit on Climate Change

Leaving Britain to the dull echoes of the live television election 'debate' between the main political party leaders, where each boring man in a suit and coloured tie tried to out do each other in avoiding talking about any of the pressing issues that confront humanity couldn't be a sharper contrast to the experience of this mornings inauguration rally in the Esteban Ramirez Ecological Stadium, Tiquipaya.... read more


Climate Change
"“The debate about climate change is a debate between two ways of life and of culture: the Culture of Life and the Culture of Death.” Evo Morales

Here in Cochabamba, activists from across the globe are gathering as the Climate Conference starts Tuesday morning with a rally led by Bolivian President and host Evo Morales.

The Conference is being held at a University just outside the city in a town called Tiquipaya, which from the visit I made to it today to get registered has certainly never seen or had to deal with a gathering of this scale before!

The Programme for the conference is available here, reposted below is the introduction to the programme which outlines the philosophy behind the event.... read more

Climate Change
This week we'll be reporting from World People's Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth, in Cochabamba, Bolivia.

Here in a sunny Cochabamba, the week leading up to the climate conference called by Evo Morales after the disaster that was the UN climate summit has been preceeded by the 10th anniversary celebrations of what the Bolivians call 'The Water War', the immense, successful mass struggle against water privatisation that came between the WTO protests in Seattle in 1999 and the G8 in Genoa 2001 and showed how it is possible to resist Corporate Globalisation through militant mass movements, it was a beacon of hope to all of us around the World struggling against the same Neo-Liberal policies and Cochabamba was it's heart.

Ten Years Later

Fast forward ten years and the political result of that struggle and many others means Bolivia has it's first indigenous president, a new constitution and is leading the charge alongside other South American countries to make 'Another World' Possible.
Over the week we'll be posting reports, pics and video from the conference so check back regularly to get the GR view on the events–it's going to be an interesting week!


... read more

Other Actions
14–22 November, Shop 14, Truman Brewery, London E1 6QL Opening 13 November 6pm then open weekdays: 12–10pm weekends: 10–10pm

10 years ago, in November 1999 an alliance of direct action activists, environmentalists and trade unionists shut down the meeting of the World Trade Organisation in Seattle, stopping the next trade round of Capitalist Globalisation. In the process they sparked a Movement of Movements right across the globe its slogan became ‘Another World is Possible’.

This November exactly 10 years from that momentous demonstration, and with most of the predictions of the movements rapidly coming true what with the crisis of the economy, a permanent state of war and the collapse of our eco-system wrecking lives across the planet, the rich and powerful meet again in Copenhagen to discuss the next Climate treaty after Kyoto, yet again activists are preparing to challenge the idea that the Market can solve the problems of the world, and take another step toward that possible world after Capitalism.

Signs of Revolt is an exhibition that weaves together the story of the past decades social movements, drawing out the influences and connections between and across the movements against Capitalism, War and Climate Change.... read more


Corporations
GR's first action for some time manages to hit the headlines.

Around 250 activists held a noisy and angry demo on Wednesday 28 July, outside the AGM of murderous U.K registered mining corporation Vendanta.

The protest, organised by 'Foil Vendanta' , was part of a global day of action in support of The Dongria Kondh activists in Odisha India to hold the multinational to account for the environmental destruction, murder and human rights violations it perpetrates in the region.... read more

Social Forums
The European Social Forum has now closed in Istanbul, smaller than previously, but recognising that the current crisis is experiencing a growing resistance. Here is the Call of the Social Movements agreed at Istanbul
Oil
It was always unbelievable, an oil company that posed as a forward thinking responsible corporation. Now the unprecedented oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is showing; any talk in the past about caring for this increasingly frail planet was just that: talk.
Anti-War
A report from the NATO protests Strasbourg April 2-5 2009

Thursday April 2 evening

We left London with the sound of Police helicopters in humming in our ears, we arrived in Strasbourg to find the the same sound coming from scores of French Police helicopters swopping over the city as it got locked down by thousands of CRS riot police and huge metal barriers cutting the City into impassable zones.

The tense times obviously made the warmongers feel they had to put on another impressive show for Capitalist 'democracy', and so just like the G20 protest, denial of the right to protest, intimidation, and blatant whipping up of tensions by Police and the Corporate Media made it as difficult as possible for people to express their opposition to NATO.

Friday April 3

We started out in the morning checking out the convergence centre near the Station, this had a few, mainly autonomist and anarchist activists at it, and heavy police presence outside, so much so that as we came out what we thought might be a raid, because it looked like riot police making there way to the centre was in fact about 50 activists who'd just come off transport at the station getting escorted to the centre by a ring of CRS, totally heavy handed and unneccessary policing.... read more

Climate Change
The build up by the media promised violence - the police provided it.

A few of us spent the day in the City of London with about 10,000 others. As the four marches converged at the Bank of England in Threadneedle Street there was a celebratory atmosphere, the hilariously 'dressed down' bankers in their moccasins and expensive, ironed jeans stood out like sore thumbs, but rather than receiving the media imagined kicking they might have expected, they talked with the protesters, some even admitting the system was screwed.... read more



A few of us spent the day in the City of London with about 10,000 others. As the four marches converged at the Bank of England in Threadneedle Street there was a celebratory atmosphere, the hilariously 'dressed down' bankers in their moccasins and expensive, ironed jeans stood out like sore thumbs, but rather than receiving the media imagined kicking they might have expected, they talked with the protesters, some even admitting the system was screwed.... read more


Anti-War
The Stop the War Coalition, CND and the British Muslim Initiative held a march as a curtain raiser to the G20 summit, starting in London the next day.


Thousands of Stop the War Coalition activists and supporters marched on the 1st of April from the American embassy in London to Trafalgar Square. As world leaders of the G20 gathered in London to discuss their failing attempts to save capitalism, the people had expressed their solutions to the crisis and their contempt at flooding the banking system with our – the tax paying majority of ordinary people – money.... read more


Social Forums
An interview with Éric Toussaint by Pauline Imbach Via:International Viewpoint

The Belém declaration is different. It includes a fundamental diagnosis of the crisis of the capitalist system and a clear position as to how to move out of it. Its title and subtitle sum up this new approach: We won’t pay for the crisis!... read more

Analysis
David Harvey outlines the problems for the Neo-Liberals as the economy crashes

Via:David Harvey

Much is to be gained by viewing the contemporary crisis as a surface eruption generated out of deep tectonic shifts in the spatio-temporal disposition of capitalist development. The tectonic plates are now accelerating their motion and the likelihood of more frequent and more violent crises of the sort that have been occurring since 1980 or so will almost certainly increase.... read more

Corporations
The dramatic emergence of the sweatshop story could be described as a “global political economy” train-wreck. Just as the big-name brands and department stores began outsourcing all of their production to contractors, the industry was moving to the most corrupt and repressive places in the world. At about the same time, changes in information-sharing technologies made it possible for activists to link up with nascent unions and groups of protesting workers. While business school case studies were heaping praise on corporations for shedding responsibility for manufacturing, the seeds were being sown for a tremendous upheaval that would come to fruition once the contractors' brutal practices were exposed.

When executives at transnational corporations (TNCs) awakened to this tacit alliance forming between Third World workers and rich country consumers, it became a top priority to change the media frame. During a period in the late-1990s, for example, Nike, Inc.... read more

MOViE ARCHiVE
Alfonso Cuarón, director of "Children of Men", and Naomi Klein, author of "No Logo", present a short film from Klein's book "The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism".



THE SHOCK DOCTRINE explodes the myth that the global free market triumphed democratically. Exposing the thinking, the money trail and the puppet strings behind the world-changing crises and wars of the last four decades, The Shock Doctrine is the gripping story of how America's "free market" policies have come to dominate the world -- through the exploitation of disaster-shocked people and countries.

DIRECTED BY JONÁS CUARÓN.


... read more


Rostock 2007
Stunning success in Baltic German fields and lanes.

On Wednesday protestors successfully blocked the main roads in the G8 summit in Heiligendamm in Germany. This was one of the most exciting and successful actions I have ever been on. The BLOCK G8 CAMPAIGN has been planning this action for over a year and was set up by a range of organisations including church groups and veterans of the anti-nuclear movement as well as autonomist and anarchist groups.... read more

Police
A surreal challenge to the SOCPA law - the one that limits the right of protest near to Parliament - happened on Saturday 21 April 2007. here's what happened...

In the previous 18 months, there were over 2000 occassions that the police had to grant permission for protests to happen in the "SOCPA ZONE". This law is meant to make anyone holding a protest in area around Parliament write to the police for permission to do so.... read more