Category: Archive

From the Earth Liberation Front

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In the early hours of February, 9 the Earth Liberation Front paid a visit to Green Hall at the University of Minnesota in St. Paul, MN. The target was transgenetic oat research crops. The research was being done by University professors David Sommers and Howard Rines. All the oats found in the greenhouse were destroyed, messages were spray painted, and the locks were glued on the way out. Oat research is simply one of the projects that the University is taking part in, in partnership with gross corporations that are adding to the destruction of the Earth. Let this action be a warning to the University of Minnesota and the entire biotech industry, that if you continue to destroy the biodiversity on the Earth your profits will continue to fall.

The elves are always watching. Stop genetic engineering or we will.

For Freedom and Wilderness,

Earth Liberation Front

From the Earth Liberation Front

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Greetings from the Earth Liberation Front.

We are claiming responsibility for the second attack upon C S McRossan’s machinery. In the early morning hours of Sun. Oct 3 (’99), the ELF entered the construction site on highway 55 in Minneapolis where the company is working. Machines that were found with accessible holes had sand poured into the oil, the draining of them. Three machines had hoses and wires cut before the elves escaped into the night. This follows an attack earlier in the week on Mon Sept 27 when a visit was paid to CS McRossan’s offices in Maple Grove, where we slashed conveyor belts and damaged machinery. We see highway 55 as symbolic of the larger system that is strangling us of our air and water. The NAFTA superhighway and the roads into the forests are all a symptom of the sick capitalist system that puts profits before people or ecosysytems. As long as the trees continue to fall, so will the profits made of this project. This is just the beginning of a new level of battling against highway 55 and car culture. We urge the elves of MN and the world to unite against the profit hauling infrastructures around the globe. Target machines, offices, and equipment used to build roads. We are everywhere and we are watching. We will be back.

From the Bioengineering Action Network

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The direct action campaign against genetic engineering and corporate agriculture in Minnesota is underway. Following up on the attack on Novartis/Northrup-King’s Seed research facility on September 1, “Bolt Weevils” trampled 50 rows of research corn adjacent to Pioneer Hi-Bred’s seed research facility in Mankato, Minnesota (Hwy. 22) on Sunday, Sept 12. Company vehicles parked at the facility were also damaged, and “free the seed” and “stop agribusiness” were spray-painted on a shed at the site. The Pioneer sign in front of the facility was appropriately amended to read “Pioneering Farmageddon”.

Pioneer Hi-Bred is the largest seed company in the world and was acquired by Dupont Chemical Co. earlier this year for $9.4 billion. As farmers in the US, France, India and elsewhere struggle to maintain a place in the expanding global economy, corporate mergers and acquisitions increase, giving more control over the world’s food systems to a handful of huge seed-chemical-pharmaceutical conglomerates. The technology of genetic engineering has been developed and marketed to the world by these companies with no regard for the social, ecological or economic consequences of releasing millions of acres of mutated plants into the environment, or the consolidation of seed ownership that has resulted from such a profit-driven science.

Our strike against pioneer is a call to the Weevils and Borers of the world to join the growing resistance to the quickly approaching “Farmageddon”. Crops, research facilities and corporate offices are all sources of this technological threat and should be targeted. Genetic modification of plants is a dangerous experiment on nature and people, and should be stopped.

From the Bioengineering Action Network

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Harvest came early this year at the Novartis Corporation’s Seed Research facility on Hwy 19 in Goodhue County, Minnesota. Several thousand stalks of corn from research plots ajoining the Northrup-King (Novartis’ Seed Division) facility were trampled and crushed in the pre-dawn hours of Wed. September 1 by the Bolt Weevils. Simultaneously in a northern Twin Cities suburb, another strain of Weevils glued and jammed the locks at Novartis/NK Seeds’ Corporate offices at 7500 Olson Memorial Hwy, to prevent another day of profiting off the dirty business of genetic engineering.

Reviving the namesake of the MN farmers who toppled NSP power lines in the 1970s, todays Weevils targetted one of the largest “life sciences” conglomerates in the world. Created in Switzerland in 1997 by the merger of two major pharmaceutical and agriculture firms (Ciba-Geigy and Sandoz/NK Seeds), Novartis is one of many companies seeking to commercialize and expolit the most basic biological process- genetic evolution.

Much of the corn attacked by the Bolt Weevils was labelled as genetically modified with Bt (Bacillus thuregensis), a bacterial insecticide sprayed topically by organic and small scale farmers as a last resort to control problem insects, but now increasingly genetically engineered directly into the DNA of corn, cotton and potatoes, to make plants express the pesticide throughout. Ecologists, farmers and corporate executives alike agree that such widespread exposure to the toxin will eventually create Bt-resistant “super pests”, rendering small scale use of the bacteria in spray form obsolete. Novartis and other companies producing Bt seeds respond to this prediction by suggesting “refuges” of non-Bt crop be grown amidst transgenics to slow adaptation by insects. This rationale ignores the reality of cross-pollination, and could unleash irreversible genetic pollution on plants and insects.

Additionally, recent research has revealed that Bt pollen has a similar fatal effect on the intestines of the Monarch butterfly as on the corn borer, and scientists have shown that engineered Bt accumulates in the soil and could disrupt soil ecology irreversably.

Decades of farm policies designed to boost profits for agricultural chemical companies like Monsanto, Dow and Dupont has left the rural farm economy in shambles, with suicide rates among desperate farmers on the rise. Intensive industrial agribusiness has severely degraded, eroded and poisoned the American heartland. Now these very same companies are creating new ways to profit off industrial agriculture, promising farmers “improved” genetically altered seeds that will boost production and help them compete on the world market.

Rapid industry consolidation has centralized control over the research and development of powerful genetic technologies, allowing the industry to control market forces. This trend spells disaster for the global food supply, from agrarian third world communities to rural America. Family farms won’t survive without a new approach to farm economics and a turn to ecological farming practices. There is abundant knowledge of such agricultural methods, as evidenced by the growing organics and permaculture movements, and more importantly, by the ancient breeding and seed saving traditions still used in indigenous cultures. Why have these practices taken a back seat to agribusiness?

The Bolt Weevils’ harvest is meant as a WARNING to the entire “life-sciences” industry that opposition to its sinister plan is far more widespread than they think, and growing exponentially. Though the true natures of this industry are hidden behind slick PR campaigns, people all over the world are exposing and attacking it on many levels, most dramatically in the fields and greenhouses where research and breeding occurs.

Our fellow weevils in Europe, Asia, New Zealand, Maine, Vermont, and California, have set the stage for a full scale underground attack on the roots of this threat to the future of life on earth. Unsurprisingly, government agencies like the USDA, FDA, EPA, and state departments of agriculture have acted as collaborators with the biotech industry, and should also be targeted. This action should be seen as an incitement to join the biotech resistance by taking direct action against this menace in all its forms.

From The Blast 3

For the second year in a row, hundreds of dykes took to the streets of Minneapolis in an unpermited display of frisky and militant less energy on Saturday, July 9, the night before the official and comparatively milktoasty LGBT Pride Parade.

Sounds of drumming and the rev of motorcycle engines rallied the women who collected in Loring Park in front of Amazon Bookstore. As the march stepped off, somewhere between 400 and 700 dykes, lesbians, gay women, bi women, queer women and a smatter of queer guys chanted, hooted, toted signs and caught street chalk being tossed out to them to use for civic beautification along the way. The march streamed onto Hennepin, then over to 12th and up Nicollet as Dyke March marshals—wearing armbands sporting such monikers as Carpet Muncher, Muff Diver, Ball-Busting Dyke and Sodom & Gomorrah Tour Guide—stopped two lanes of traffic, held intersections, and stalls the cops along the way. About a dozen gay men kept appearing and reappearing along the march route sidelines, yelling and carrying signs reading “Cocksuckers for Muffdivers,” “Dykes Rule,” and the like, much to the entertainment of the women marching.

The march, organized by the Lesbian Avengers, was to be a spontaneous expression of whatever women showed up. Two possible march routes were suggested, to be decided upon depending on the numbers of women present, the collective energy, and the rapidity with which the cops figured out and attempted to quash what the marchers were up to. Dykes on bikes led the way and circled around the throng, picking up info from marshals about which route women wanted to take next.

Officers attempted to shoo the women off the streets and onto the sidewalks, but fortunately most marchers totally ignored the police and continued along Hennepin avenue until the finished what they set out to do. Avenger marshals distracted a cop who wanted to know who organized the march, where it was going, and who he should collar for a report. The interchange went something like this: Cop: “What is this?” Dyke: “A dyke march.” Cop: “Don’t you have a march tomorrow?” Dyke: “Yep.” Cop: “Then what is this?” Dyke: “A bunch of women who wanted to march tonight.”

At the end of the march four dykes ate fire in memory of the Oregon Martyrs, a Black dyke and a white gay man who were killed when their apartment was firebombed by neo-nazi skinheads during the Oregon Measure 9 anti-gay referendum fight in 1992.

Twin Cities dykes appreciated the significance of an unpermited and militant display such as this, and organizers plan to continue the march as an annual event. Minneapolis Avengers hope to work in coalition with other groups over the next year in order to schedule the march at the best possible time and to help the Dyke march represent a genuine coming together of not only enthusiastic individual dykes, but a strong collectivity of organized activist Queer women.

From The Blast 3

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A series of fights between African-American and white prisoners lead to a lockdown in a Minnesota state penitentiary on June 26th and charges that authorities instigated or manipulated the conflict. Officials appeared to single out for discipline one prisoner, framed in the 1992 shooting death of a police officer, and may have encouraged white supremacist prisoners to attack him.

Shannon Bowles, one of the Minnesota Eight, eight African-American men wrongly convicted for the unsolved killing of a white cop, told supporters he was only slightly hurt in what he described as a race riot at Oak Park Heights, a maximum-security prison 25 miles east of the Twin Cities.

Shannon also reported being put in a recreation yard with a white prisoner who had the word “Hitler” tattooed on his chest. Shannon said the nazi attacked him, and he fought back.

Shannon appears to be the single most heavily-charged prisoner in the first fight, and only one of two to be charged in the second. He faces 270 days in segregation, under the charge of “inciting a riot.” The lesser charge of fighting carries only 15-45 days. 

Several Black prisoners reported that white skinhead prisoners were not disciplined for fighting.

Further, one of Shannon’s most consistent visitors, Connie, a member of the Committee Seeking Equal Justice for the Minnesota 8, was refused her weekly visit three days after the first fight, and barred from the prison for 3 months.

The lockdown ended July 6th.

Shannon had been released from segregation, or the “hole,” only nineteen days before the fight, after 120 days in isolation following a January disturbance. That time, the prison’s riot squad thumped Shannon, fellow Minnesota 8 prisoner A.C. Ford, and 11 others for refusing to take their recreation outdoors, in sub-freezing weather.

A third Minnesota 8 prisoner, Larry Flournoy, is also at Oak Park Heights.

Outside Support

In response to the lockdown, the Committee Seeking Equal Justice for the Minnesota 8 issued a flyer and secured accurate coverage in two local alternative weeklies. Minneapolis Anarchist Black Cross mailed copies of the Committee’s leaflet to prisoner support groups in the U.S.

Committee members and activists in the group’s periphery also pressured Oak Park administrators by telephone to end the lockdown and rein in white supremacist prisoners.

The crisis was the first test of the Equal Justice Committee’s ability to react swiftly since it’s June strategy-planning retreat. While on retreat, members decided to spend the summer assisting prisoners with their appeals, organizing an “extravaganza” forum about the frame-ups, and launching a campaign against random police stops of motorists. While the decision was unanimous, some members worried the group might be too busy with these ambitions to respond to a sudden threat to the prisoner’s safety.

Indeed, Shannon remains in the hole and nazis continue to strut openly. But the Committee, a small group working on hostile terrain, was nevertheless able to act fast, even with several members out of town in June and July.