A computer screen in Wall Street registers a rise in gold prices - An analyst writes today:

"One of the distressing things about low volume markets is when prices tank for no apparent reason, but when prices go the other way - it sure can be fun. Gold was up $16.09 in early trading to $1,635.19 and silver was up $0.44 to $29.14 dropping the silver/gold ratio all the way to 56.1. The numbers are going up so fast that even my ticker is behind this morning" 

Whilst the 'distressed' gold trader is having so much fun that even his 'ticker' is behind this morning'  Survival international are revealing details of a brutal massacre in the Venezuelan Amazon. 

The global economic crisis of 2008 sent gold prices through the roof and investors have been seeking a safe haven during the 'down-turn'. This has exacerbated a gold rush in the South American Amazon bringing violence, disease and conflict to the mineral-rich rainforests of Brazil, Guyana, Peru, Bolivia, Colombia and Venezuela. 

The Yanomami Indigenous territory covers 96,650 km2 of tropical forest across Venezuela and Brazil representing the largest forested indigenous territory in the world. The Yanomami has a total population estimated at around 32,000. This year is the 20th anniversary of the official creation of this territory which is supposed to be exclusively for use of the tribes. 

Between the 1940s and the 1960s various catholic and evangelical missions, established the first points of contact with the tribes. This led to clusters of serious epidemical outbreaks as unfamiliar pathogens were introduced; mainly measles, influenza and whooping cough.  Contact became significantly more frequent in the 1970s and 1980s bringing roads, colonization projects, and industry in various forms; farmsteads, sawmills, masons and the first mineral prospectors and gold miners (garimpeiros). These contacts provoked an epidemiological shock of great magnitude, causing many deaths; deterioration in health and an upset to the social relations and behaviours established over centuries. 

To this day there remains some uncontacted Yanomami tribes. A large number of miners currently in the area are reported to be very close to the as yet uncontacted Moxateteu , accordingly there are serious concerns about their survival, if not by massacre then by disease.

Indigenous peoples are so often the vanguard in the fight for planetary ecology both focal & global. The Yanomami territory represents an area with some of the greatest biodiversity on the planet, great numbers of species, many as yet undiscovered and of course a huge carbon sink. Cattle ranchers are invading the territory and deforesting from the east and rivers are being polluted with mercury. The Yanomami were officially recognized for their importance in terms of protecting Amazonia's biodiversity by Presidential decree on 25th May 1992.   


The slow motion, patchy genocide of the Yanomami has been underway since the 70s. During the 1980s and 1990s it is estimated that 40,000 lost their lives often with political support of varying degrees of transparency or negligence. Wikipedia defines genocide as "the deliberate and systematic destruction, in whole or in part, of an ethnic, racial, religious, or national group" This definition could perhaps lead us to think the term Genocide is ill matched to the Yanomami. 'Deliberate' implies a more mindful, targeted and coordinated process. Reports of Yanomami killings are patchy over the decades, 1 or 2 here and there, one shot, 2 beaten to death with sticks, 150 of disease, 73 massacred and so on. Certainly 'deliberate' is apt to describe isolated events such as the 73 massacred in 1993 but more generally the Genocide is perhaps best understood as one of collateral damage, or another one of those 'unpaid costs'. This is proportional to the number of miners appropriating the territories (Disease & Murder) and political constraints (or lack-thereof) at the time. Both of these vectors are of course themselves subordinated by the efficient cause. The socio-economic system (capitalism) and fluctuations of Market forces therein. 

Davy Kopenawa, Yanomami, health co-ordinator and spokesperson reports that there could now be over 1000 illegal miners operating inside the Yanomami reserve. He says:

 "I'm worried – my people are suffering - the miners are hiring planes to come into the reserve. Their entry is constant - It is dangerous to go where they are. They are all armed - If we go near them they will kill us. We are getting information that the invaders are getting close to our lands. The Yanomami are asking for support," 


This has been corroborated by unfolding news that an attack by gold miners in the Venezuelan Amazon close to the Brazilian border has left up to 80 people dead. Survival international report that due to the community's remote location, it took those who discovered the bodies several days to walk to the nearest settlement to report what they had found. Details are slowly emerging and three survivors have been found. It appears that a large meeting place or communal house has been torched with the charred remains of the bodies inside. A statement from a network of Yanomami groups called on Venezuelan authorities to investigate the incident and to co-operate with Brazil to "control and watch the movement" of miners in the area. 

The state of the global economy, the price of gold and the increasing number of miners indicate the situation is becoming increasingly more desperate. In addition the Brazilian government are currently debating a bill which, if approved, will legalise large-scale mining within the  territories.

The Yanomami have not been properly consulted about these developments.

Davi Kopenawa (Featured in video below) reports:

‘The Yanomami people do not want the national congress to approve the law or the president to sign it. We do not want to accept this law - Our land has to be respected. Our land is our heritage, a heritage which protects us - Mining will only destroy nature. It will only destroy the streams and the rivers and kill the fish and kill the environment – and kill us. And bring in diseases which never existed in our land.’

In 2008, A manga interpretation of Das Kapital  (Manga de Dokuha / Reading Das Kapital through Manga) sold 6000 copies in its first few days and became one of the publishing events of the year. Now it has been published in English by radical publishing house Red Quill Books. 

From the back cover:

"As the gap between rich and poor continues to widen, a new generation is reflecting on the insights of Karl Marx. Marx not only stood against the global economic system but he also helped us understand it. He explained how wealth was created on the backs of workers, how "surplus value" is realized and how accumulation is achieved through unpaid labour-time, the intensification of work and the tyranny of credit.

"Capital - In Manga!" is the English translation of the Japanese bestseller. It's a story of a cheese-maker turned capitalist and how greed, exploitation and its social consequences destroys lives and remakes workers into commodities.

It is hoped that this manga may act as a bridge to Marx's original work"

“Capitalism..has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, that it is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells”. Karl Marx

In the Mel Gibson film Apocalypto the Mayan kingdom is faced with its decline and the rulers insist the key to prosperity is to build more temples and offer up human sacrifices. Academics criticised the film stating that the sacrificial subjects would more likely be royalty and elites as opposed common forest dwellers.

Today the whole of humanity and countless other species are faced with the prospect of their demise. Some agencies are no longer counting in decades or even years before such time that we reach climatic tipping points but rather in the number of months.

The Mayans; to their credit, had a plan. They recognised the elites carry greater weight for sacrifice to their deity than the general population. Our deity is the prevailing socio-economic system and our elites are the <1%, the purveyors of the corporate-political-military complex (CPMC). Our temples are the oil fields, pipelines, chimneys, airports, cars and manifold commodities, often needless that create exchange value but have little or no use value. Last night’s Olympic games opening ceremony was a temple where vested interests of the global elite had converged, and worship to the deity capital was ritualistically performed.

In the huge London arena (the site of the world’s newest corporate tax haven, courtesy of the British tax payer) a potted history of capitalism from feudalism to the industrial revolution to the present day was bought to life - the audience watched on and waved enthusiastically while huge mock coal chimneys were erected, and miners with soot stained faces and their well dressed capitalist masters mimed, gyrated and danced; gesturing like crazed primevil peoples as the chimneys arose from the ground, penetrating the previously commons managed grasslands.

The structures of the polluting fossil fuel economy, the means of production and in this case instruments of ecocatastrophe were there at the centre, at the altar. The sacrificial subjects behaved appropriately in honour of their deity and elites, who occupied a large proportion of available seats.  

A quarter of all tickets – rising to perhaps two-thirds for top events have been given to Olympic bodies and corporate sponsors. These sponsors  represent a veritable feast of exploitation, pollution, and corruption. To name just 2 - Mcdonalds, the London 2012 official Olympic restaurant brings you, obesity, diabetes, deforestation and methane and BP the official sustainability partner – brings you the finest lobbyists, the Deepwater Horizon disaster, huge quantities of carbon emissions and a reliance on profit and access from illegal wars.

This spectre of vested interests and cognitive dissonance did however have some surprise moments. A big nod to the NHS, (which may soon be a service consigned to history as its slow motion privatisation continues) in the music montage, dancers formed a CND sign, the anarchist, anti-monarchists -The Sex Pistols were featured and of great surprise was the inclusion albeit briefly of the song ‘Uprising’ by Muse. In an interview frontman Matt Belamy comments:

 "This song is influenced by glam rock, 80s synths, riots and the more eccentric protesters at the recent G2O protests. It expresses a general mistrust of bankers, global corporations, and politicians."

 And

 “the whole song is about having a massive mistrust for people in power, whether it be government, or bankers. We're living in a society where we're being told to keep quiet, to just accept things as they are."

It was also amusing that the most prominent song in the montage was Dizzy Rascal’s ‘Bonkers’ – Could Danny Boyle who directed the ceremony have been trying to tell us something?

Then on to a speech by Seb Coe who claimed the olympics celebrates ‘the best of mankind’ followed by the athletes procession -The first 2 nations, countries hit hard by exploitation and imperialism and the inherent deficiencies of the socio-economic order were Greece & Afghanistan. Some time later I had to wonder what the handful of athletes from the little island of Tuvalu made of the occasion. Perhaps of all the teams these athletes have the most acute awareness of climate change; it is a daily concern for them. Their home, a tiny island is slowly disappearing under the Pacific ocean. At the 2009 united nations climate conference in Copenhagen the island’s chief negotiator Ian Fry stated  

"Tuvalu is one of the most vulnerable countries in the world to climate change, and our future rests on the outcome of this meeting."  

When the conference failed to reach a binding, meaningful agreement he said

"It looks like we are being offered 30 pieces of silver to betray our people and our future... Our future is not for sale. I regret to inform you that Tuvalu cannot accept this document” 

He closed by reiterating the point that global warming is currently "the greatest threat to humanity", and ended with an emotional plea "the fate of my country rests in your hands”

My message from the opening ceremony WE ARE ALL TUVALUENS!

Here’s Muse: 

Recent events trace a threatening trajectory, sufficiently so that it maybe worthwhile to look ahead a few generations to the millennium anniversary of one of the great events in the establishment of civil and human rights: the issuance of Magna Carta, the charter of English liberties imposed on King John in 1215.

What we do right now, or fail to do, will determine what kind of world will greet that anniversary. It is not an attractive prospect – not least because the Great Charter is being shredded before our eyes.

The first scholarly edition of the Magna Carta was published in 1759 by the English jurist William Blackstone, whose work was a source for U.S. constitutional law. It was entitled “The Great Charter and the Charter of the Forest,” following earlier practice. Both charters are highly significant today.

The first, the Charter of Liberties, is widely recognized to be the cornerstone of the fundamental rights of the English-speaking peoples – or as Winston Churchill put it more expansively, “the charter of every self-respecting man at any time in any land.”

In 1679 the Charter was enriched by the Habeas Corpus Act, formally titled “an Act for the better securing the liberty of the subject, and for prevention of imprisonment beyond the seas.” The modern harsher version is called “rendition” – imprisonment for the purpose of torture.

Along with much of English law, the Act was incorporated into the U.S. Constitution, which affirms that “the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended” except in case of rebellion or invasion. In 1961, the U.S. Supreme Court held that the rights guaranteed by this Act were “(c)onsidered by the Founders as the highest safeguard of liberty.”

More specifically, the Constitution provides that no “person (shall) be deprived of life, liberty or property, without due process of law (and) a speedy and public trial” by peers.

The Department of Justice has recently explained that these guarantees are satisfied by internal deliberations in the executive branch, as Jo Becker and Scott Shane reported in *The* *New York Times* on May 29. Barack Obama, the constitutional lawyer in the White House, agreed. King John would have nodded with satisfaction.

The underlying principle of “presumption of innocence” has also been given an original interpretation. In the calculus of the  president’s “kill list” of terrorists, “all military-age males in a strike zone” are in effect counted as combatants “unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent,” Becker and Shane summarized. Thus post-assassination determination of innocence now suffices to maintain the sacred principle.

This is the merest sample of the dismantling of “the charter of every self-respecting man.”

The companion Charter of the Forest is perhaps even more pertinent today. It demanded protection of the commons from external power. The commons were the source of sustenance for the general population – their fuel, their food, their construction materials. The Forest was no wilderness. It was carefully nurtured, maintained in common, its riches available to all, and
preserved for future generations.

By the 17th century, the Charter of the Forest had fallen victim to the commodity economy and capitalist practice and morality. No longer protected for cooperative care and use, the commons were restricted to what could not be privatized – a category that continues to shrink before our eyes.

Last month the World Bank ruled that the mining multinational Pacific Rim can proceed with its case against El Salvador for trying to preserve lands and communities from highly destructive gold mining. Environmental protection would deprive the company of future profits, a crime under the rules of the investor rights regime mislabeled as “free trade.”

This is only one example of struggles under way over much of the world, some with extreme violence, as in resource-rich eastern Congo, where millions have been killed in recent years to ensure an ample supply of minerals for cellphones and other uses, and of course ample profits.

The dismantling of the Charter of the Forest brought with it a radical revision of how the commons are conceived, captured by Garrett Hardin’s influential thesis in 1968 that “Freedom in a commons brings ruin to us all,” the famous “tragedy of the commons”: What is not privately owned will be destroyed by individual avarice.

The doctrine is not without challenge. Elinor Olstrom won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2009 for her work showing the superiority of user-managed commons. But the doctrine has force if we accept its unstated premise: that humans
are blindly driven by what American workers, at the dawn of the industrial revolution, called “the New Spirit of the Age, Gain Wealth forgetting all but Self” – a doctrine they bitterly condemned as demeaning and destructive, an assault on the very nature of free people.

Huge efforts have been devoted since to inculcating the New Spirit of the Age. Major industries are dedicated to what political economist Thorstein Veblen called “fabricating wants” – directing people to “the superficial things” of life, like “fashionable consumption,” in the words of Columbia University marketing professor Paul Nystrom.

That way people can be atomized, seeking personal gain alone and diverted from dangerous efforts to think for themselves, act in concert and challenge authority.

It’s unnecessary to dwell on the extreme dangers posed by one central element of the destruction of the commons: the reliance on fossil fuels, which courts global disaster. Details may be debated, but there is little serious doubt that the problems are all too real and that the longer we delay in addressing them, the more awful will be the legacy left to generations to come. The recent Rio+20 Conference is the latest effort. Its aspirations were meager, its outcome derisory.

In the lead in confronting the crisis, throughout the world, are indigenous communities. The strongest stand has been taken by the one country they govern, Bolivia, the poorest country in South America and for centuries a victim of Western destruction of its rich resources.

After the ignominious collapse of the Copenhagen global climate change summit in 2009, Bolivia organized a People’s Summit with 35,000 participants from 140 countries. The summit called for very sharp reduction in emissions, and a Universal Declaration on the Rights of Mother Earth. That is a key demand of indigenous communities all over the world.

The demand is ridiculed by sophisticated Westerners, but unless we can acquire some of the sensibility of the indigenous communities, they are likely to have the last laugh – a laugh of grim despair.

Revisiting the Magna Carta.
BY Noam Chomsky <http://inthesetimes.com/community/profile/10246>

*Editor’s note: This column is adapted from an address by Noam Chomsky on
June 19 at the University of St. Andrews in Fife, Scotland, as part of its
600th anniversary celebration.* 

Populationism leads to dark places.....
Populationism is a distraction...............
Populationism will not prevent catastrophic climate change.......
Populationism sustains the 1%....

New eco village starting in Windsor, Saturday, 9 June 2012.

There will be a new eco village starting in Windsor in June. We plan to grow our own food, build shelters and live sustainably to show an alternative to the current system of crisis. We will be taking over a piece of disused land on the Crown Estate. If you share our vision then you are welcome to join us.

Meet up at 11am on the 9th of June at Syon Lane Community Allotment, adjacent to Platform 1, Syon Lane Station, Rothbury Gardens, Isleworth, Middlesex.

On Saturday 9th June, we will be walking from Syon Lane Community Allotment in West London to Windsor. We will be camping for one night on the route. Our aim is to start a community on a piece of disused land on the Crown Estate. Bring camping equipment:

Full details here:  http://diggers2012.wordpress.com/2012/05/21/stand-up-ye-diggers-all/

Murray Bookchin - The movie - BOOKCHIN ON BOOKCHIN - I have some ideas about things that could be included in this film and am going to try and get involved with promoting it.  Here is the trailer, some background info and a bit about the campaign for funds.

(If you have access to the Red Pepper archive you can click here for Derek Wall's obituary: http://www.exacteditions.com/read/red-pepper/september-2006-1521/3/3.)

You may also be interested in Bookchin's take on the 'population myth'



BOOKCHIN ON BOOKCHIN is an independent feature-length documentary about the life and times of American political thinker Murray Bookchin, who made history as the founder of the social ecology movement. Our aim is to make a film that deeply explores the influences and experiences that have helped shape one of the most unique and distinctive voices in modern political thinking. The documentary will explore the development of Murray's politics through his personal experiences, drawing off hours and hours of filming. We have been granted unparalleled access to Bookchin, including exclusive interview footage at his home in Vermont and his final public appearance in Montreal. Murray was reticent to engage in anything that smacked of the personality cult but his biography covers key points in the development of radical politics and sets in context the "Social Ecology" of his later life. We are in the process of making the film, but need your help in order to complete it. Thanks for visiting our page and we hope you enjoy what you find!

"Perhaps the most compelling real fact that radicals in our era have not adequately faced is the fact that capitalism today has become a society, not only an economy" Bookchin 1991.

Murray Bookchin (1921-2006) was a pioneer of the ecology movement, and was a significant social theorist on the Left throughout his life. He was an anti-capitalist and an advocate for the decentralization of society along ecological and democratic lines. He called for alternative energies and wrote prophetically about pesticides, cancer and obesity. His writing on anarchism, specially his 1971 book Post-Scarcity Anarchism, lifted and sustained the movement from the 19th century into the 21st century. His life paralleled major American and international events, such as the Great Depression, World War II, the Vietnam War and the counterculture movement. We'll ask how a large part of the 20th century, with all that's come and gone, has helped shape his thoughts a nd theories. In 2006 Bookchin died after a long and active life as a revolutionary, being deeply involved in the labor movement, in the civil rights movement, in urban activism, and in Green politics. In 1974 he co-founded the Institute for Social Ecology. In 1992 the british newspaper The Independent, referred to him as ''the foremost Green philosopher of the age.'' It called his 1982 book The Ecology of Freedom one of the ''classic statements of contemporary anarchism.''

His books include Our Synthetic Environment, The Spanish Anarchists, Towards an  Ecological Society, The Ecology of Freedom and The Limits of the City.


The director of BOOKCHIN ON BOOKCHIN is Mark Saunders, an award-winning independent film-maker, media activist and writer. His expertise in the field spans over two decades. He is currently running Spectacle Productions, an independent London-based production company which he founded in 1990. Clients include Amnesty International, Channel 4, the Rowntree Foundation, the Howard League for Penal Reform and many others. Previous film credits include: The Truth Lies in Rostock, The Battle of Trafalgar, Exodus from Babylon and Despite the City. His films have been broadcast internationally and exhibited at galleries, including Tate Britain, the National Film Theatre, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Musee des Beaux-Arts,  the National Media Museum and the Photographers Gallery. 


Why should you help us make this movie?

We think it's important that Murray Bookchin is preserved on film; sharing his thoughts, telling us his stories and showing us a side of himself very few people have had the opportunity to see. You are supporting a truly independent documentary about a remarkable man who believed political movement at a local level was necessary, anticipating the global protests that have since swept our screens. This past year alone, the Arab Spring, the Occupy Movement, environmental and student protests worldwide have demanded change. In a climate of pervading political and social dissatisfaction, Murray's thoughts and theories have as much resonance today as they did back then.

Murray Bookchin was a  theorist of the anti-globalisation movement before its time, an ecological visionary, an advocate for direct action and a polemicist. He believed in the unconventional, the non-traditional, hence us looking for a funding platform that allows us the independence and freedom to make a documentary faithful to ours and Murray's vision. Indiegogo provided just this; it made it possible to reach out to Murray Bookchin followers all over the world. On the right you'll see the pledge levels with corresponding rewards. You can donate to our documentary and in return receive some fantastic rewards. We have a project we believe in and now need your help to make it a reality!

How your contribution will help

We are an independent non-profit group and all funding and support will be used to cover production costs for our film. We've had no commissioning money and no access to conventional funding. Every dollar we raise will go towards:

- Post-production Editing and Mastering - We have hours and hours of exclusive footage and the only way to finish this film (and give it that award-winning touch) is to hire an editor to work on it full time. This will include Color Correction and Sound Mixing.
- Music rights.
- Archive material - we need to cover the huge costs of acquiring licensing rights to what we consider key historical moments, significant elements to his story.
- Marketing, promotion and awareness - to organize and host local screenings and to submit the work to world-class festivals.

Our fundraising goal has been set at the minimum level at which we can make this documentary. We would like to raise a lot more than that because all the money will go to making the film that much better. Should we exceed our goal, rest assured that the money will go straight into the film. Please lend you support. Every extra penny helps!

Other ways you can help

Spread the word, tell your friends and colleagues, share our video on Facebook, blog about the project and Tweet. Anything you can do to help spread the word will be of tremendous service and is enourmously appreciated.  If you can't spare any money, then share your thoughts. All feedback and comments are more than welcome.
You can reach us at BookchinBiog@spectacle.co.uk. Feel free to email us with any questions or comments you have. We know how important it is to have all your questions answered, so just get in touch and ask away! We'll answer all emails promptly.