Resistance to tar sands is savaging the industry

A new report shows that production revenues from the ecologically devastating tar sands resources in Canada are down by over $30 billion between 2010 and 2013, with 55% of this fall being due to the massive campaigns which have delayed Keystone XL and delayed or defeated other projects (3 were cancelled in 2014 alone). There's a Common Dreams article on the subject here.

In Ireland too, popular resistance has massively slowed the Corrib Gas project and escalated costs astronomically while resistance to fracking is just gearing up. Who knows - maybe our grandchildren will still have an island to live on after all?

Radical Routes housing co-ops network tour of Ireland

Radical Routes Ireland presents

'HOMES WITHOUT LANDLORDS': CO-OPS AS A SOLUTION TO THE HOUSING CRISIS
How to set up a housing co-operative

All-Island speaking tour 2014:
Cork Oct 25th, Dublin Oct 26th, Galway Nov 1st, Derry Nov 2nd.

Today in Ireland we find ourselves with an acute housing crisis, but the general discourse implies that all the power to affect change lies with private business and government.
We want to promote and encourage the ideas of a grassroots-led approach to solving the housing crisis.

People can empower themselves by working together in their communities to make housing a collectively-owned resource rather than an asset to be speculated on by developers.
Co-operative housing could offer a way out of the precarious rental market and the trap of long-term mortgage debt.

Established in the 1980's, the Radical Routes network has over 35 member co-ops throughout the UK which are residential projects of all shapes and sizes as well as a number of workers co-operatives. Member co-ops work together in legal, financial and planning working groups, providing advice and support to eachother as well as new members. The idea is based on mutual aid and solidarity, and a determination that access to housing is a right and not a privilege.

Radical Routes begin an all-island speaking tour on Saturday October 25th in Cork, and continue to Dublin (October 26th), Galway (November 1st) and Derry (November 2nd). The Events are free and open to the public to attend. Please contact 086-3614554 or radicalroutesireland@gmail.com for more details or find us online at radicalroutes.org.uk or on our facebook event pages.

Frankfurt Blockupy festival, November

• Resistance in the Heart of the European Crisis Regime

• Frankfurt Blockupy Festival

• We will not wait for the appointments of the rulers – we will set our own agenda. Even if it will be 2015 before the ECB holds its hors d’oeurve event of prominent faces to inaugurate its new tower, Blockupy will be in Frankfurt this fall. 
  
  
  Now, after the “May of Solidarity” across Europe and before the blockade of the ECB inauguration next year, is the right time: we will discuss, we will bring together our struggles and make plans. We will meet to music, with a beer, at a film. And, of course, we will be present in those places where we disrupt normal activities: on the streets, over the fence.
  
  
  Blockupy – we refuse to adapt! “Austerity kills!” still applies. The rulers are intensifying their structural measures, even if they are more “softly” packed. They are transforming the crisis politics of the Troika into “business as usual” – mini-jobs, Hartz-IV, authoritarian policies and social cuts, racist deportations, militarized borders, and privatization of public goods, ruined healthcare systems, appear to be the answer to unemployment, precarity and nationalist reflexes. The crisis should become a form of life…
  
  
  Democracy comes from our many struggles. Blockupy attempts, together with others, to create a platform in Europe at a slow moment – against austerity and exploitation, for solidarity beyond borders. Europe is not a question of passport or origins for Blockupy – Europe is the region in which we are starting to struggle together. We are expressing a collective refusal of all nationalist, sexist and racist “crisis solutions”.
  
  
  #talk – and listen/what to do. Together in workshops, podium discussions and assemblies we want to ask questions that we can answer in collective action: how do we find the cracks in the capitalist cement? How do we guarantee an unconditional welcome to all refugees and migrations? How do we take back our cities, which are selling themselves? How can we find each other so as to live and work with dignity? We will talk about what we must do, what we want to do, to develop alternatives, to bring our struggles together and become stronger.
  
  
  #dance – grooves and resonances. The festival will bring a different light to many places in the city – spaces of self-managed culture, projects of other ways of living and taking residence, pubs and cafes, theatre, cinema or bookshops. We will met, listen, confuse and explain. We will dance, eavesdrop and be in the squares. A sustainable politics of protest cannot abstain from bringing disorder and confusion to the ruling order.
  
  
  #act – beyond borders. Factually and symbolically, collectively and publicly we will go beyond borders. We will find places that stand for policies of impoverishment. We are convinced that mass disobedience is a very appropriate answer to the scandal of the becoming-normal of the ‘crisis policies’ and ‘reform’ of European capitalism. Even as a dress rehearsal: so that we can more clearly imagine the days and nights of the ECB blockade in 2015 and break through the ‘expected’.
  
  
  From networks, Blockupy platforms, groups, organizations and NGOs in Europe we will come together at the Blockupy festival. “The blue will remain gray until it has been reinvented.”
  
  
  We should all meet in November!
  Blockupy coordination blockupy.org/en/

Two fascinating exhibitions

In Dublin,

"Women to Blame: 40 years of struggle in Ireland for abortion and contraception. A multimedia exhibition which opens Friday November 7 in Film Base in Dublin’s Temple Bar, will visually represent the events before, during and after 1983 when article 40.3.3 was inserted into the Irish Constitution via referendum."

In London,

"Disobedient Objects is an exhibition about the art and design produced by grassroots social movements. It will show exhibits loaned from activist groups from all over the world, bringing together for the first time many objects rarely before seen in a museum." There are downloadable PDF guides for making some fascinating activist tools on the V&A's site(!)

Both links from the always-well informed Cedar Lounge Revolution blog.

The HSE goes to war on independent midwives (again...)

Philomena Canning, voted Ireland's midwife of the year in 2012, has had her indemnity cover revoked by the HSE without investigation or explanation. As anyone involved in the campaign to enable women who wish to to have home births in Ireland knows, she has been a thorn in the side of the HSE for many years - not as a campaigner but as a caring and professional midwife who has continually provided home births for women despite every obstacle the HSE have come up with. There's a petition on Change.org in support of Philomena.

"We Make Our Own History" at 40% off this week

Apologies for sounding like Dunnes Stores but we want people to be able to get hold of this book while it's cheap...

Laurence Cox and Alf Nilsen's new book We Make Our Own History: Marxism and Social Movements in the Twilight of Neoliberalism is now available at 40% off through the Pluto Press website this week (Weds 1st Oct - Tues 7th) as part of their annual sale, bringing the price down to £10.20. To get this offer, click on http://bit.ly/plutob2u and then the discount gets applied to all Pluto books on the site.

Short essays related to the book / excerpts are available on various activist and academic sites, as follows:

The centrality of popular agency (OpenDemocracy)
Resisting activist despair (Reflections On A Revolution)
Recovering theory for activist purposes (Pluto Press newsletter)
How social movements shape societies (Discover Society)
Understanding neoliberalism and its crisis (E-International Relations)
Are we in a revolutionary wave? (First of a series of three in Ceasefire)