cCClick here for larger image

Home | Weds 2nd August 2006 | Issue 553/554

WAKE UP! WAKE UP! IT'S YER BIG GREEN...

SchNEWS

Story Links: Wing & A Prayer | Crap Arrest Of The Week | High Fives All Round | Profits Of Doom | Carots And Stick | SchNEWS in Brief | Starlight Express | Debt Of Ingratitude | ...and finally...

Download this PDF to view full issue with SPOOF FESTIVAL GUIDE which was published in the inside pages of this edition, and was not emailed to subscribers. NB - this PDF is laid out onto A3 pages, and is large - 2 meg - because of the graphics in it.

WING & A PRAYER

AIR TODAY GONE TOMORROW FOR JET SET SOCIETY

Cheap short-hop flights to the continent could seem a tempting option given that it’s sometimes cheaper to fly from London to Rome than catch a train to Manchester. Due to insanely low taxes on jet fuel, air travel is seeing massive expansion, and is now the fastest-growing contributor to climate change.

cCClick here for larger image

Greenhouse gas emissions caused by UK air travel have doubled in the past 13 years. The world’s 16,000 commercial jet airlines generate more than 700 million tonnes of carbon dioxide - more than the total output of Africa. A return flight from the London to New York will use 1.3 tonnes of carbon per person, nearly a quarter of the average annual UK person’s carbon footprint. Heathrow Airport alone handles more than 67 million passengers a year. Between 1979 and 1999 numbers from UK airports increased three-fold and international passenger numbers are up 7% compared to this time last year. According to Airport Watch, if this trend continues it will “take up the entire sustainable emissions budget for all sectors of the UK economy by the 2030s, and all sectors of the EU economy by the 2040s. That means that schools, hospitals, homes, commerce, and industry will not be able to release any emissions if the UK and the EU are to stay within environmental limits.”

Although Neo Labour couldn’t be bothered to consider emissions from aircraft in the Government’s stated target to cut CO2 by 20% from its 1990 levels, there’s been a little more action on the continent, with MEPs recently voting (439 to 74) to tax airline fuel. But that same parliament is also approving the ridiculous emissions trading scheme, which will enable less polluting airlines to trade their surplus allowances of greenhouse gases on the carbon market. Hey presto the big polluters buy these up and the expansion continues!

But it’s not just people who are travelling more. Pressure group Sustain surveyed supermarket shelves to find that only 4% of the grub on sale had been sourced locally. Sustain reckon that to fly in one calorie of lettuce from Los Angeles uses 127 calories in aviation fuel. Not so good for the eco-diet. Food transport counted for some 19 billion vehicle miles and is up 25% since 1992. Our appetite for out of season fare has meant that aircraft food miles have doubled in ten years. Tescopoly imports nearly three quarters of its organic produce.

In 2003, the UK Govt set out its programme for airport expansion which would treble air traffic by 2030, and lead to major expansions at Shoreham, Stansted, Luton, Heathrow, Birmingham and Edinburgh Airports. The same corporations that are professing to be concerned about climate change are pushing this agenda hard, but local campaigns are springing up to oppose development at each airport – see box for details.

Crap Arrest Of The Week

For dressing like a Zombie...

Six mates from Minneapolis who were out and about on a ‘Zombie dance party night’ were, according to a police spokesman, “arrested for behaviour that was suspicious and disturbing.” Cops appear to have mistakenly thought that their rucksacks, which contained portable radios, were in fact bombs and the group were potentially toting ‘simulated weapons of mass destruction’. Having been let off with the minor charge of ‘disorderly conduct’ this was “not a case of police overreacting,” said Inspector Janee Harteau, “why would you have those bags if not to intimidate people?”

HIGH FIVES ALL ROUND

In Ireland, The Pitstop Ploughshares Five, who took a stand against the use of their country as a staging post for the ‘War on Terror’ and damaged military aircraft, found themselves unanimously acquitted by a jury last Tuesday (25th July). They were found not guilty of committing £1.2 million worth of damage to US military aircraft, by a jury in The Four Courts, Dublin, after a thirteen day trial. The five, from the Catholic Worker movement, were arrested during an anti-war action at Shannon Airport in western Ireland, in the build-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. At the time, the airport was being used as a supply base and hub for U.S servicemen commuting from the US to the Middle East.

In the early hours of February 3rd 2003, the five cut their way into the airport, poured human blood on the runway used for US military flights and constructed a shrine to Iraqi children. They then began to attack and damage the runway itself and when they got to a hanger housing a US Navy plane, they painted “‘Pit stop of death”’ on the main door. After beginning to dismantle the building, they charged inside and to disarm the warplane with some hammers. On arrest they all were remanded for between four and eleven weeks, facing possible jail sentences of ten years.

This trial turned out to be third time unlucky for the prosecution. The first case ended in a mistrial after five days, and the second collapsed when it emerged that the appointed judge had a personal relationship with Dubya Bush. After this third failure a spokesperson for the US Embassy in Dublin was said that US Inc. was ‘very disappointed’ with the result.

This is, yet again, a vindication that members of the public - a jury - have agreed with the protesters and their claims that they were preventing the greater crimes of war and genocide, as opposed to simply taking the criminal damage charges at face value. This comes virtually on the tenth anniversary of the four Ploughshares women being found not guilty by a jury in Liverpool Court after having done £23million damage to Hawk Jets. They represented themselves and also won with the prevention-of-genocide argument (See SchNEWS 84).

But despite this victory Shannon Airport is still being used by the US military, and the Shannon Planespotters continue to report sightings of CIA Rendition and other covert aircraft. Just last month cleaning staff at the airport claimed to have seen a man in shackles on board a US aircraft.

* For more see www.indymedia.ie and www.warontrial.com

cCClick here for larger image

Profits Of Doom

Despite facing climate chaos, politicians - and the corporations they serve - continue as if nothing is happening to our ecosystem. Busily building more airports, selling plasma TVs and generally rampantly exploiting everything, the multinationals are telling us that, actually, they’re a nice environmentally-concerned bunch - as green as a field full of hippies.

So are the most powerful institutions on our planet slamming on the economic brakes before we get to the cliff edge? Er no, they’re plotting ‘profit-driven’ solutions to the oncoming tumble into the abyss. OK, those eco-nuts might have had some valid points about the whole global warming thing, but don’t think of a changing climate as disaster - look on it as a window to new markets! Judging by the current tsunami of ‘greenwash’, it looks there’s real cash to be made with global warming, and investors are being told to look greenwards to make some serious loot. General Electric, the world’s 11th biggest corporation with £9 billion annual profits, has just launched ‘Ecomagination’, a subsidiary which seeks to make as much cash as possible from all things solar- or wind-powered. And seeking of course, as one former US govt official put it, “to make money in a carbon constrained world”. Investment heavyweights Goldmann Sachs’s ‘Environmental Policy Framework’ tells us they aim to “find effective market-based solutions to address climate change, ecosystem degradation and other critical environmental issues.”

The clear message is that we should ignore the fact that our consumerist culture is one of the root causes of all this, ‘cos our newly greened corporations are gonna tweak a few things, stick up a couple of wind turbines and everything’ll be fine. Shell and BP-Amoco, for example, have been busy transforming their image. They’re no longer oil barons with dodgy environmental and human rights records but ‘energy companies’ seriously committed to combating climate change. BP might have gone from British Petroleum to Beyond Petroleum but it just can’t seem to go Beyond Profit. If you believed the propaganda, you’d think Shell et al were getting out of oil and into making fair trade hemp dungarees. But Big Oil spends less than 1% of its budget on renewable energy, peanuts compared to the damaging search for oil going on all over the planet.

Look at BP, who spent £20 million buying the Solarex Corporation to boost its solar power credentials – but will of course be joining in with plans to spend £3billion over the next five years on oil exploration in Alaska. Meanwhile this week Exxon is expected to report the biggest ever quarterly profit for a corporation, with £5billion made in only three months.

As ‘peak oil’ kicks in (see SchNEWS 499), and governments are forced to swing in the direction of renewable energy, these companies - and their PR machines - will morph into whatever shape is needed to be first in the queue for ‘green energy’ subsidies, while raking it in as prices rise on the remaining supply.

* For more on corporate greenwash see www.corporatewatch.org.uk

CAROTS AND STICK

Imagine a load of strangers turned up, did some digging and discovered large deposits of gold and silver buried beneath your neighbourhood. Bad news: you’re stuffed. As any glance back at history will confirm - you can either accept that a bunch of serious heavies are gonna rush in to rip it all up and cart it off, or, be prepared to take serious action. And this is exactly what has happened in the Kardjali District of Bulgaria.

Back in the 1980s, prospectors visited and decided that the only profitable way to extracting the local gold is to use, er cyanide (around eleven tons of it). Although the proposals would gradually contaminate the local groundwater with toxic poison, this has only been viewed as a slight nuisance, and plans were quickly made to forcibly evict surrounding villages. Only after a prolonged battle with local communities, and the realisation that it really would mean poisoning the water supply for whole Thracian valley area, were plans finally abandoned. 18 years on and a number of corporations are have now re-evaluated the situation and have decided that the size of potential profits are worth a taking the additional ‘strategic and operational risks’.

Profit-hungry Canadian firm (extra ludicrously-named) ‘Euromax’ are one such company. They’ve told investors and potential customers that “while mineral wealth in this region formed the foundation of some of the most powerful dynasties in the ancient world, exploration in modern times has been at best sporadic.” With this Roman Empire spirit, Euromax bought up the mining rights to the area back in 2004. Since then they’ve been beavering away trying to make sure any trifling legal or democratic objections were overturned or bypassed, eventually succeeding in getting the supreme court to rule that no environmental impact concerns need addressing at all. Sorted! Locals, for some strange reason, are less enthusiastic about getting the prospective trashing of their ecosystem, despite the fantastic deal that allows Euromax to hoard 99% of the profits, while bunging the local municipality a measly 1%. After a failed ‘promotional’ campaign in the villages, and when heavy mining equipment started showing up at night, 500 people quickly mobilised and blocked off access to the site.

Since the end of June the people from Popinci, together with their neighbours, have set up a permanent barricade at the hill of Petelovo, shutting the road to the proposed mine. Elderly grannies, mothers with small children, teenagers, middle-aged men and women have all joined the camp to try and save their village. 7 days into the camp, one of the protesters was found with a knife in his chest, following a disagreement with the company’s bodyguards the previous day. No information about the case has so far been made public. Nearly a month later, protesters are still there, declaring that “We will not elect people who are betraying us, instead of supporting us. We will not vote. These people must understand that this state is OURS. We have to redefine our definition for a state.”

See more at www.aseed.net Other interesting stuff about Bulgarian mining and pollution at www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=13235 If you’re up for going email info@zazemiata.org

SchNEWS In Brief

• Last weekend was the NoBorder Camp in Italy’s north west Gorizia on the Slovenian border. At an action at the Deportation Centre in Postojna, Slovenia, around 150 Noborder activists arrived to try to blockade the gates, but were met with heavy handed police, who heavily truncheoned protesters and arrested seven.
• Are you in the north of England and looking for a ton of organic, nutritious compost? The compost waste from two large events next month - the Camp for Climate Action and the Northern Green Gathering, will be looking for a home. If you can help email tomasremiarz@cooptel.net

STARLIGHT EXPRESS

For the first time ever, details of the 1,000 nuclear rail transports that take place in the UK each year have been made publicly available. You can now know for certain that potentially lethal loads of incredibly dangerous materials are definitely thundering through your neighbourhood, with minimal protection on a rickety old infrastructure, although it may be best to avoid any direct derailment action protest in this instance! Talking of accidents, you’ll be reassured to learn that trains on the Dungeness to Willesden Junction route have twice collided with vehicles on an unstaffed level crossing and, in Bridgewater, a cargo of unprotected nuclear waste sat for several hours less than 100 metres from a school in October 2005.

* View the whole terrifying timetable at www.greenpeace.org/international/news/nuclear-waste-trains-260706

DEBT OF INGRATITUDE

As Israel calls up thousands more troops in preparation for a ground invasion of Lebanon, guess who’s likely to have to pay for the all the destruction that’s been caused? You’ve got it – Lebanon! Three Israeli lawyers are about to file a lawsuit in the US against the Lebanese government for compensation which would have to be paid to Israeli businesses for war damages. Nice little earner! The idea is that, despite only being elected last June, the Lebanese government should have prevented Hezbullah from launching its attacks. You see, what’s at stake is Lebanon’s breaching of the International Convention for the Suppression of Terrorism. Not a bad argument coming from a country engaged in a bloody illegal invasion of a neighbouring country that has seen 500 Lebanese killed, including 34 kids in one strike against the southern village of Qana, together with more than 50 of its own civilian population in just over two weeks.

If the Lebanese refuse to cough-up, a tough approach to debt collection is promised. The threat of economic sanctions will ensure that the cash is “collected from Lebanon without its consent.” According to one of the well paid litigators pursuing the case, “we intend to sue other bodies as well in the case that the Lebanese government evades payment. No group associated in any way, shape, or form to Hizbullah is immune to these claims.” And just what are the Lebanese people to make of this? Said lawyer went on, “in my opinion, the Lebanese need to sue their own government”. The perfect answer for profit hungry parasitic lawyers a that like to make money from misery.

...and finally...

Foreign secretary, Margaret Beckett, is ‘not happy’ and will be taking a really tough stance with her pals in the White House over revelations that Glasgow’s Prestwick Airport was used to ship bombs over to Israel. The complaint is to be issued because the US er, failed to ‘follow procedure’. Presumably, in order to use a UK airport to aid and abet an illegal invasion of another country, you need to fill in form AF237 - and the military commanders must have forgotten to do this – bloody paperwork! The 5,000 pound laser-guided bombs in question are supposed to be used to ‘bust’ the ‘sophisticated cave networks’ where bearded terrorists like to hide out, but are being utilised against civilian populations with devastating results. Not to worry though, a Foreign Office spokesman has promised to “look at our approach to these flights”, indicating, perhaps a move towards more convenient ticketless online booking.

Disclaimer

SchNEWS warns all readers to keep you carbon footprint down, or a yeti hunter will come after you. Honest!

SchMOVIES

Download free short films produced by SchNEWS, or order a copy of the new SchMOVIES 2005 DVD only £6 incl. p&p. Click Here for more info

SchNEWS Annuals

OUT NOW!!! 'SCHNEWS AT TEN' - A Decade of Party & Protest - £9 inc p&p

• Peace de Resistance - issues 351-401. £7 inc p&p
• SchNEWS of the World - isues 300 - 250. £4 inc p&p.
• SchNEWS and SQUALL’s YEARBOOK 2001. £4 inc p&p.
• The SchQUALL book Sold out - Sorry
• SchNEWS Survival Guide Sold out - Sorry
• SchNEWS Annual issues 101 - 150 and a whole lot more £2.00 inc. p&p

(US Postage £6.00 for individual books, £13 for above offer).

In addition to 50 issues of SchNEWS, each book contains articles, photos, cartoons, subverts, a “yellow pages” list of contacts, comedy etc.

Subscribe to SchNEWS: Send 1st Class stamps (e.g. 10 for next 9 issues) or donations (payable to Justice?). Or £15 for a year's subscription, or the SchNEWS supporter's rate, £1 a week. Ask for "originals" if you plan to copy and distribute. SchNEWS is post-free to prisoners.

SchNEWS, PO Box 2600, Brighton, BN2 0EF, England
Phone/Fax: +44 (0)1273 685913
email: schnews@brighton.co.uk

@nti copyright - information for action - copy and distribute!