This article originally appeared in Common Dreams.

“Finally, our fields are made safer for farmworkers and our fruits and vegetables are safer for our children.”

“However, there is no excuse for manufacturing these substances, let alone deliberately releasing them into the environment.” Max Wilbert

By Jessica Corbett

Public health experts and labor rights advocates celebrated Wednesday after the Biden administration announced that it “will stop the use of the pesticide chlorpyrifos on all food to better protect human health, particularly that of children and farmworkers,” following decades of demands for government intervention spurred by safety concerns.

This article originally appeared in Truthout.

Featured image: On September 7, 2021, Water Protectors erected multiple blockades at a major U.S.-Canadian tar sands terminal in Clearbrook, Minnesota, in direct opposition to Enbridge’s Line 3. Courtesy of the  Giniw Collective.

By Kelly Hayes, Truthout

Amid record hurricanes, wildfires and droughts, battles are being waged over the fate of the Earth. Many of those battles are being fought by Indigenous people, and by others whose relationship to life, land and one another compels them to push back against an extractive, death-making economy that renders people and ecosystems disposable. On the front lines of the struggle to halt construction of Enbridge’s new Line 3 pipeline — which would bring nearly a million barrels of tar sands per day from Alberta, Canada, to Superior, Wisconsin — Water Protectors have locked themselves to excavators and drills, and overturned cars and barrels of cement, while also deploying aerial blockades, including elaborate tripods and tree-sits. In scattered encampments that run along a 300-mile stretch of pipeline construction, a culture defined by mutual aid, and a spiritual and physical struggle to defend the Earth, has held strong in the face of brutality and an increasingly entrenched alliance between police and the corporate forces fueling climate catastrophe.

This article is from the blog buildingarevolutionarymovement.

This post lists and challenges, debunks, pulls apart the following myths of capitalism:

• there is no alternative to capitalism
• capitalism is the only system that provides individual and economic freedom
• everything is better under capitalism
• as capitalism increases the size of the economy, everyone benefits
• free-market capitalism is the best way to run the global economy
• capitalist economic theory is the best
• capitalism maintains low taxes, which is good for workers and businesses
• capitalism promotes equality, work hard and you’ll get rich
• capitalism fits well with human nature
• capitalism and democracy work well together
• capitalism gradually balances differences across countries through free markets and free trade.

There is a liberal capitalist myth about progress. A determinist (set path forwards) view that things will continue to get better. I completely disagree with this perspective and it is clearly wrong if you look at history, esp the last 40 years. I will describe and challenge this myth in a future post.

World congress of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) calling for reforms to the International Seabed Authority (ISA). “Deep seabed mining is an avoidable environmental disaster,” said one expert on global ocean policy. Featured image: A pair of fish swim near the ocean floor off the coast of Mauritius. A motion calling for an end to deep sea mining of minerals was adopted at the world congress of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature this week. (Photo: Roman Furrer/Flickr/cc)

Editor’s note: DGR supports local control of the land over settler colonial imperialism. We believe in Free Informed Prior Constent, consultation is not constent. Featured image: Screenshot from the Battle For Berrima Inc. video Hume Coal and Its Plans For A New Coal Mine In Berrima 2015

This article originally appeared in Global Voices.

By Kevin Rennie

Locals celebrate after eleven years of grassroots action

Environmentalists are celebrating a victory over a proposed coal development in the Australian state of New South Wales (NSW) after 11 years of debate and community protests. The Independent Planning Commission (IPC) for the NSW Southern Highlands blocked the plans for the proposed mine, saying the potential impacts of the project were ‘too great to be reasonably managed, and the social risks to the community are high.’

Editor’s note: They hate our freedom, spreading democracy and your with us or you are against us has failed. And all we needed was another five more years of fight them over there, so we don’t have to fight them here. A War on Terrorism can never be won if you are a terrorist.

This article originally appeared in FAIRNESS & ACCURACY IN REPORTING.

By JULIE HOLLAR

Just as US corporate news media “discovered” Afghan women’s rights only when the US was angling for invasion, their since-forgotten interest returned with a vengeance as US troops exited the country.

This article originally appeared in Counterpunch. Featured image: Sámi Parliament of Norway. Photograph Source: Utilisateur:Bel Adone – Public Domain

ByGABRIEL KUHN

On June 23, a coalition of Sámi and environmentalist activists erected a protest camp in Nussir, the projected site of a gigantic copper mine in Sápmi, the traditional homeland of the Sámi people, northern Europe’s indigenous inhabitants. Today, Sápmi is divided by the borders of four nation states: Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia. None of these countries have censuses for the Sámi population, and reliable numbers are hard to come by. The use of the Sámi language, the electoral roll of the Sámi parliaments (there is one in each country), and self-identification are important criteria. Roughly, we can speak of about 70,000 Sámi in Norway, 20,000 in Sweden, 10,000 in Finland, and about 2,000 in Russia. For historical reasons, the Russian community is the most isolated.

This article originally appeared in Common Dreams.

“This is a win for wildlife and communities along the border, where the government has behaved as if the laws don’t apply,” said one environmental lawyer.

By KENNY STANCIL

Social and environmental justice advocates welcomed a federal judge’s ruling Monday that two U.S. agencies broke the law by not conducting an analysis of potential ecological harms associated with increased militarization along the U.S.-Mexico border.

• A subsidiary of the San Miguel Corporation, one of the largest companies in the Philippines, has proposed a $500 million hydroelectric project that will overlap with a national park on Panay Island.
• Northwest Panay Peninsula Natural Park holds some of the central Philippines’ last stands of intact lowland rainforest, is home to endangered species including hornbills and the Visayan warty pig, and is a vital watershed for Panay and neighboring islands.
• The project is still not approved, and a growing coalition of activists and local governments opposes the plan.

Update: On Aug. 10, the village governments of Naboay and Malay publicly released resolutions opposing the hydroelectric project, citing concerns about the project’s potential impacts on the Northwest Panay Peninsula Natural Park, municipal and agricultural water supplies, and the area’s indigenous Ati communities.

This article is from the blog buildingarevolutionarymovement.

In this post I’ll explain why people say they support capitalism and then the actual reasons why people support capitalism. To end capitalism we need to understand why people support it. I’m listing the positives in the post that I don’t agree with. In future posts I’ll describe the myths of capitalism and the reasons why we need an alternative.

It’s easy and common to conflate capitalism, liberalism, neoliberalism and free market economics. Many use them interchangeably and I’m going to go with that for this post.