The Weekly Round-Up: Monday 19th July
First up this week is the utterly awesome track, Ballad of the Black Gold, by Reflection Eternal aka Talib Kweli and Hi-Tek.
It’s been on repeat on my laptop since I heard it and the video is great too. Share it with as many of your friends, family and work/collective colleagues as possible:
Reflection Eternal “Ballad of the Black Gold” from Sam Ellison on Vimeo.
Music’s a powerful way of telling stories as is drama. So it was nice to see the Culture Not Oil action against BP happen last week that we blogged about here.
Also taking place last week was another action, this time against RBS at the British Banking Association’s Annual International Banking Conference.
Activists from Climate Camp and Tar Sands Network welcomed key players in the Tar Sands destruction, RBS’ CEO Stephen Hester and President and CEO of the Royal Bank of Canada, Gordon Nixon with a piggy pinata.
Amelia has more photos and a write-up over at her site but here are two reasons why this year’s Camp will be targeting RBS:
- RBS is now 83% owned by UK tax-payers – yet it continues to invest in the Alberta tar sands, the most destructive fossil fuel process ever
- RBS also funds UK-based fossil fuel extraction projects such as open cast coal mines which are destroying the landscape and contributing the continued destruction of the environment
More info about to get involved with this year’s Camp can be found here.
Finally, Schnews reports that GM crops are “back in the spotlight” this week after the EU side-stepped applying regulations governing GM use by putting the decision on whether or not to grow GM back into the hands of national governments.
This could be bad news, as although individual EU states now have increased power to ban GM crops within their own territories, authorisation will be easier to achieve at EU level – effectively opening up European agriculture to more GM crops.
As a consequence Schnews predicts these developments will lead to “a resurgence in public opposition to – and direct action movement against – GM crops.”
Well they didn’t have to wait long, as the same day as the EU made its announcement activists in Spain sabotaged two experimental GM Maize trials belonging to Syngenta in the municipality of Torroella de Montgrí (Baix Empordà, Girona, Catalunya).
According to the commique issued by the activists:
“GM agriculture makes it impossible to develop and consolidate social models and models of production, distribution and consumption that differ from the dominant model, based on agro-ecology and the struggle for peoples’ food sovereignty. Because of this, we fundamentally reject both GM crops and the techno-industrial capitalist society that makes them possible and necessary (… necessary to ensure that the powerful few consolidate their domination of the global population, and perfect the business strategies).
We therefore call for people to take the step to action to destroy their genetically modified crops and the social order perpetuated by those that promote them.”
You can read the full statement and get some more images over at Indymedia Barcelona.