Louisiana’s governor Jeff Landry issued a deadly threat to the people living in the city of New Orleans :
This story – dateline November 13 2023, did not hit international headlines.
By contrast, on January 1 2025, we are in the middle of a breaking story about another mass shooter event in an American city : at least ten people are dead because an assassin opened fire into New Orleans citizens celebrating the new year.
The city of New Orleans uses the Mississippi River as drinking water. Our current governor (Louisiana’s Jeff Landry) begged the state to remove funding from the city of New Orleans to fix the pumps and the decaying sewage and water system UNTIL the District Attorney agrees to prosecute women for abortions.
Must read article by @geauxgabrielle.bsky.social.“IN A HORRIFYING INTERSECTION OF REPRODUCTIVE RIGHTS AND ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE, JEFF LANDRY HAS URGED THE STATE TO WITHHOLD FUNDS BECAUSE OF HIS PERSONAL FEELINGS ABOUT REPRODUCTIVE RIGHTS.”👇🏽
The shadow fleet consists of poorly maintained, often uninsured ships with unclear ownership that export Russian oil and gas via the Baltic Sea, in violation of EU sanctions against Russia.
The proceeds from these exports fund the war in Ukraine. The shadow fleet threatens both the environment and the people of Ukraine.
With today’s resolution, which Hanna Gedin and Jonas Sjöstedt (pictured) skilfully succeeded in pushing through in the European Parliament, hard pressure is now being put on both the European Commission and the Member States to take the decisions needed to stop the shadow fleet. This is a great victory for all of us who want to stop the war in Ukraine.
Carola Rackete, a left-wing German Member of the European Parliament (MEP) with a high profile, supports Ukrainian resistance against Russian Imperialism.
Carola Rackete is a consistent anti-imperialist and is also an ecosocialist activist. Here is Carola’s Wikipedia entry :
Rackete participated in several research expeditions to Antarctica and the Southern Ocean and is co-founder of the Antarctic Rights initiative. She also supported the Extinction Rebellion movement and took part in forest protests in Sweden, as well as the occupations of the Hambach Forest and the Dannenrod Forest in Germany. Between 2016 and 2019, she occasionally volunteered for non-governmental sea rescue organisations in the Mediterranean.[2] In June 2019, she was arrested for docking a migrant rescue vessel without authorization in the port of Lampedusa, Italy. The custodial judge considered Rackete’s actions as justified because she had a duty to save lives at sea and ruled that Rackete should not have been arrested. In 2021, the pending investigation was formally dismissed, since the state prosecutor didn‘t see reason to proceed to court.[3]
A newspaper acting as the mouthpiece of Vladimir Putin’s Russian imperialism (Junge Welt) launched a vicious campaign against Carola Rackete, who, as a leftist member of the EU parliament, agreed to a resolution supporting the Ukrainian resistance.
With the final tallies counted and remaining seats filled, People Before Profits (PBP) Dublin South West and RISE members Diarmuid Flood and Paul Murphy review the deeply polarised Local and European Elections and outline five key takeaways.
For the second election in a row, dramatic political changes took place in the course of the local and European elections. Sinn Féin started the year polling around 30% and yet ended up with less than 12% nationally in the local Elections. Independents and Others started the year with around 15%, but won close to 25% on June 6th. Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael both hit 23%, coming from the high teens and around 20% respectively. In many ways, these appear to be the opposite political trends to what we saw in the General Election of 2020. Back then, Sinn Féin grew dramatically as hope for an end to 100 years of Fianna Fail and Fine Gael rule propelled them to be the biggest party in vote share for the first time ever. Volatility is clearly in the air.
However, what we saw in the five weeks of the election campaign did not come from nowhere. The election catalysed and accelerated existing processes. In the absence of major progressive social struggles, with the exception of the Palestine solidarity movement, the political terrain has undoubtedly shifted rightwards. Ireland has caught up with most of the rest of Europe and the Global North, with the emergence of a reactionary social movement in opposition to asylum seekers and the growth of a racist, climate denialist, anti-LGBTQ, and sexist far-right.
You could not make it up. The Irish Green Party Leader Éamon Ryan is a Minister for Climate Change in the FFFGGG (Fianna Fáil Fine Gael Greens and Gombeens) Dublin Coalition Government. In a display of pure gombeen politics, the Green Irish TD fought the “Swiss Grannies” (“Aînées pour le climat”) in the European Court of Human Rights (EHCR) – and lost.
The “Aînées pour le climat” won a historic victory.
Heat-related deaths were at the heart of a recent landmark legal case taken by the so-called ‘Swiss Grannies’ in the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR). The group, representing 2,400 older women, had argued that senior citizens were more likely to die in heatwaves. Earlier this month the court found that weak Swiss government climate policies had violated their human rights.
On 9 April, the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights handed down a historic verdict, ruling that Switzerland is violating the human rights of older women because the country is not taking the necessary measures to combat global warming. [Aînées pour le climat – Older Women for Climate]
Across the globe left-wing forces over-influenced by conspiracy analysis methods have created propaganda smokescreens about the sabotage of the Nordstream Russian Gas pipelines in the Baltic Sea. The left-wing 21st century conspiracists use research methods which are not based on painstaking hard-grind work. Journalists such as Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein brought the world’s attention to the 1972 Watergate with evidence based research. Today’s conspiracists begin with their own fantasy theories – and never mind the facts which get in the way. They create a circus 🤡 – it is the method of the bumbling Irish police who attempted to frame Joanne Hayes in the infamous “Kerry Babies” case.
Christian Zeller is an activist in the European Network for Solidarity with Ukraine (ENSU). https://ukraine-solidarity.eu/
Germany’s Sozialistische Zeitung gets it wrong on energy and geopolitics
Angela Klein’s commentary “Blowing up NordStream 2. An act of Ukrainian warfare” is bizarre. A long-time SoZ editor, Klein takes the revelation story as a confirmed finding and inserts it in her own account of the war in such a way that she even insinuates that the Ukrainian defence is waging an economic war against the German population.
On 6 June, the Washington Post again triggered all kinds of speculation with the publication of an exposé story on the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines. The journalists “revealed” without providing substantial evidence that a Ukrainian commando destroyed the pipelines on 26 September 2022. Since then, this speculation has been doing the rounds. A few months ago, Seymour Hersh “revealed” that the US had blown up the pipelines. Significantly, the same circles that followed Hersh’s US hypothesis are now following the Ukraine hypothesis….
The movie of the book: ‘How To Blow Up A Pipeline’
Guest post by Des Derwin
The movie ‘How To Blow Up A Pipeline’ (Dir. Daniel Goldhaber, 2023) is the perfect application of the theory of the book to practice. For once, in a triumph of the filmmakers art, exactly what the strategy would mean is demonstrated both with realism and as an experiment, but not in grim reality. Is this the first time a political strategy can be applied and tested imaginatively, virtually, without the painful, tragic human loss of actual idealistic trial and error?
Sociologically (just such a band of desperadoes, masterfully acted, would do it), militarily (an isolated guerrilla group), politically (a fringe alliance of almost apolitical diversely-motivated people), technically (brilliantly produced weaponry and spectacle and the resultant once-off effect), Andreas Malm’s book meets its end in front of our cinema-going eyes.
As there is no instruction in the book* (How To Blow Up a Pipeline, Verso, 2021) on how to blow up a pipeline, and as the film is a video class in how to blow up an oil pipeline, a fairly audacious defiance of the national security censors, there is nothing of Andreas Malm’s text in the movie, no analysis, history, political comparison or strategic discussion. Yet there is everything about the book in the film, that title which was not delivered on in the book, but is now, the deliverance of the message of the book, the manifesto manifested.
The result is a thrilling, action-packed success, a ‘they-got-away-with-it’ caper. Which in real life we know would be subject to months of painstaking FBI evidence gathering and eventual arrests. Which we can see, even sticking to the film’s spectacular and catastrophic blasting of the pipeline, and triumph of the rebels, could not be repeated, and certainly could not be repeated like that again. It’s all so slickly presented and paced: including the TV in the bar beginning the overdrive on ‘terrorism’ and the manic might of the US state mobilising.
Bombing will not go softly. We still have to go into the city, not the desert,and build a mass movement against the ecological emergency.
Jill Stein has form. Mary Scully, an Irish-American activist and blogger, explains below.
The Green Party (USA) is split down the middle on this issue.
This party’s 2020 Presidential candidate, Howie Hawkins, endorses the policy of the European Network for Solidarity with Ukraine (ENSU) and its Irish supporter Irish Left With Ukraine (ILWU).
Here is an extract from a Howie Hawkins post dated March 2022 :
People are not going to respond to a call for no US war with Russia when they plainly can see that the shooting war is Russia’s assault on Ukraine. If we are not clear that we oppose Russia’s aggressive war in Ukraine, we won’t be able to get a public hearing about opposing the expansion of NATO to Russia’s doorstep as a precipitating factor in this war, as well as opposing the many “low-intensity” and economic wars that the US and NATO are fighting around the world.
I would like to suggest some more particular demands we should make and actions we should take under these two slogans of Russian Troops Out and No NATO expansion.
The following article was submitted to the USA journal Counterpunch replying to the article mentioned in the paragraph below. Counterpunch refused to publish it.
We wish to thank the New York based Irish-American activist Joan McKiernan who brought the article below to our attention. This vital discussion is occurring in many parts of the world, including Ireland. If you wish to actively participate in principled left-wing solidarity with the Ukrainian masses we recommend the European Network for Solidarity With Ukraine (ENSU). The ENSU’s Irish supporters work with Irish Left With Ukraine (ILWU), which has organised a public meeting in Dublin taking place on November 21 2022. The main speaker is ENSU activist Yuliya Yurchenko.
“Victory against Russia,” is the wrong goal in Ukraine, writes Binoy Kampmark (“Vicarious Zeal: Fighting to the Last Ukrainian,”Counterpunch, Jul. 15, 2022). Kampmark, a frequent contributor to Counterpunch, worries that Ukraine and the West are demanding what amounts to Russia’s “unconditional surrender.” Instead of demanding Russia’s surrender, Kampmark recommends peace talks. A negotiated peace, he writes, will shorten the war and save lives. Unfortunately, “Hard-headed peace talks, let alone anything approximating to negotiations have … become taboo.”
I respect Binoy Kampmark. I believe this is the first time I have disagreed with something he has written, but I do disagree. Strongly. Here’s why.
Russian-Ukrainian Peace Talks Since the Russian Invasion Kampmark appears to have bought into the myth propagated by the “anti-imperialist left” that Ukraine refuses to negotiate. That puts the onus on Ukraine for rejecting peace. The truth is that negotiations between Russia and Ukraine began even before Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24. Russia and Ukraine, together with France and Germany, met in January and February to attempt to defuse the growing crisis.
Russia’s imperialist invasion of Ukraine is re-shaping the left across Europe and other parts of the globe. In Germany, the die Linke party (the Left) seems on the verge of a damaging split.
Leftwing party’s future in balance after series of resignations, as former co-leader calls coalition ‘stupidest government in Europe’
Germany’s Die Linke could split into two parties over the Ukraine war, as the ailing leftwing party’s indecisive stance over economic sanctions against Russia triggered a series of high-profile resignations this week.
The German Left party’s future has hung in a precarious balance since it snuck into the national parliament last autumn under a special provision for parties that win three or more constituency seats. Should three of its 39 delegates resign from the party, Die Linke would lose its status as a parliamentary group and attached privileges over speaking times and committee memberships.
Tomás Ó Flatharta 