Ruth Andrade

eco punk geek

[Prem Sikka @premnsikka]

Keir Starmer to drive through welfare cuts for UK’s severely disabled people, 600,000 claimants could lose out on an average of £675 a month.

Awful, inhumane.

No cuts to corporate welfare, won't tax the rich.

People sacrificed to gods of neoliberalism.
https://t.co/TJleSg3QYE

[Led By Donkeys @ByDonkeys]

Thousands of people are ditching Tesla. Here’s one of them with a message you can see from space.

Location: Black Rock Sands, Wales, UK

Led By Donkeys is 100% funded by small donations.

[Ruth Andrade @ruthbellatrix]

Peeps I know launched a ski coin. If there is one thing that can stop skiing from being so much fun it is climate change.
Hopefully the coin can support some interesting projects to keep the best mountains snowy!
Tokens for snow!

@UnitNetwork

https://t.co/9WU1eh46Mb

[PETA UK @PETAUK]

Experimenters tore him away from his mother, sewed his eyelids shut, forced him to wear a sonar device on his head, and kept him completely isolated 💔

RT if you know that animals are not test tubes with tails.

[Ruth Andrade @ruthbellatrix]

@TiceRichard hmmmm double standards.

[Supertanskiii @supertanskiii]

Shout it louder.

[Greenpeace UK @GreenpeaceUK]

🚨SHOCKING FACT: UK police arrest environmental and climate protesters at nearly THREE TIMES the average global rate.

Britain is a WORLD LEADER on cracking down on climate activism.

The right to PEACEFUL protest is under ATTACK.

[Ruth Andrade @ruthbellatrix]

@burr223373 @ablasalma @LushLtd working with IMET, they are Palestinian-led and have been in Gaze for a long time. It's important work, and done by Palestinians for Palestinians.

[Ruth Andrade @ruthbellatrix]

@baldo_se @ablasalma @LushLtd @GazaGreatMinds can you send this to [email protected] FAO of Hilary Jones please?

[Cat Hobbs @CatHobbs]

Here are YOUR PUBLIC SERVICES that 5 Prime Ministers have stolen in the past 14 years

Don't let them get away with it #bbcqt

[Jason Hickel @jasonhickel]

What the present moment reveals, once again, is that Western aggression during the "Cold War" was never about destroying socialism, as such. It was about destroying movements and governments in the periphery that sought economic sovereignty. Why? Because economic sovereignty in the periphery threatens capital accumulation in the core.

This remains the primary objective of Western aggression today. And it is the single greatest source of violence, war and instability in the world system.

The reason Western powers went after socialist movements across the global South during the "Cold War" (Cuba, China, the incineration of Vietnam and North Korea, etc) was because they knew socialism would enable the South to regain control over their own productive capacities - their labour and resources and factories - and organize them around local needs and national development.

When this happens - when people in the global South start producing and consuming for themselves - it means that those resources are no longer cheaply available to service consumption and accumulation in the core, thus disrupting the imperial arrangement on which Western capitalism has always relied (cheap labour, cheap resources, control over productive capacities, markets on tap). Remember, roughly 50% of all material consumption in the core is net-appropriated from the global South. This is what they are trying to defend.

But it wasn't only socialist governments that pursued economic sovereignty. After political decolonization, a wide range of movements and states across the South also sought economic liberation and sovereign industrial development. And Western powers attacked them with equal brutality (Indonesia, Brazil, Guatemala, the DRC...).

This is the key reason that Western powers supported the apartheid regime in South Africa, and it is why they support the Israeli regime today... as Western settler-colonial outposts that can be used to attack and destabilize regional movements seeking socialism or any form of real economic sovereignty, whether in Angola or Mozambique or Zimbabwe or any of the Arab nationalist or socialist movements in North Africa and the Middle East.

Iran has always been central to this story. Western states orchestrated a coup against the extremely popular prime minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953. He was a left-leaning nationalist, not a socialist. But he wanted Iran to have control over its own resources (notably, oil), and for the US and Britain this was unacceptable. Mossadegh was replaced by a brutal Western-backed dictatorship. The revolution that finally overthrew the dictatorship in 1979 - and constituted the current government - wasn't even left-leaning, much less socialist. But they want national economic self-determination and that is sin enough. They are a target for the exact same reasons that Iraq and Libya were targets.

The same goes for China. China's path toward sovereign industrialization - whether socialist or not - means that it is no longer an easy source of cheap labour for Western capital. And as the supply price increases so too does the sabre-rattling from Western states and media.

So this is the situation we are in. The Western ruling classes are backing obscene violence and plausible genocide in Gaza, against overwhelming international condemnation, because they must shore up their regional outpost at virtually any cost. The vast majority of the world supports Palestinian liberation, but Palestinian liberation would constrain Israeli power and open the way to regional liberation movements, and this is strongly antithetical to the interests of Western capital. And now they are provoking war with Iran, risking regional conflagration, while at the same time encircling China with military bases, ramping up sanctions on Cuba, trying to contain progressive governments in Latin America, threatening invasion of the Sahel states...

It is intolerable and it cannot continue. The violence they perpetrate, the instability, the constant wars against a long historical procession of peoples and movements in the global South who yearn for freedom and self-determination... the whole world is dragged into this horrifying nightmare. They are willing to inflict enormous suffering and misery on hundreds of millions of people in order to preserve existing dynamics of capital accumulation. We will not have peace until this arrangement is overcome and post-capitalist transformations are achieved.

[Nahel Belgherze @WxNB_]

We just observed the warmest March day on record in four European countries.

Some of the previous monthly records were broken by large margins, up to 4°C in Belarus.

This is mind-blowing.

[Jeremy Corbyn @jeremycorbyn]

The UK government knows it is complicit in the slaughter of innocent Palestinians.

That is why it refuses to publish legal advice. That is why it evades our questions in Parliament. And that is why it maligns our mass movement for peace.

End arms sales to Israel, now.

[Caroline Lucas @CarolineLucas]

Oh come on Labour - surely you can say that the foreign worker salary threshold should NOT be increased to £38K? Families risk being torn apart - why should only the wealthy be allowed to keep their families together? #bbclaurak

[Ruth Andrade @ruthbellatrix]

I just endorsed the campaign for a #FossilFuelTreaty — calling for a new international mechanism to manage a global just transition.

Join me and thousands of others here: https://t.co/kydMotxKdN

[Ahsan Yaseen @itx_AhSiii]

@jacksonhinkle @jacksonhinkle share this as well please.

[Caitlin Johnstone @caitoz]

Sometimes Israel’s crimes are so horrific that at first you don’t even understand what you’re looking at. You just stare at it trying to make sense of what you’re seeing for a bit, like you would if you suddenly saw a space alien or a leprechaun or something.

It happened to me yesterday when I was watching a Sky News report about a teenage boy who was shot by Israeli forces in Jerusalem for celebrating the release of Palestinian prisoners in the hostage negotiations with Hamas. I was watching it thinking to myself, I must be misunderstanding what I’m looking at. I know that Israel does gross things, but surely the story here isn’t that they shot a kid for being happy about something.

Then, as has happened so many times over the last two months, I kept watching and learned that yes, that is indeed what happened. The deputy mayor of Jerusalem Fleur Hassan-Nahoum is seen defending the shooting by saying “part of the deal is that there would be no celebrations for the release of attempted murderers” (this was actually not a part of the deal, it was just a decree issued by Israel’s national security minister) and claiming dishonestly that “we’re talking about the release of attempted murderers” (the vast majority have not been convicted of any crime and have been denied any due process for the accusations against them).

The band Eve6 nicely summed up what it felt like watching the clip of the deputy mayor’s comments, tweeting, “The remarkable thing about this clip is her self assurance. Like she’s supremely confident that ‘we shot the teenager because he was celebrating’ is a thing that people will find reasonable.”

I had the same experience reading about the five premature babies who were left to die after the IDF raided al-Nasr Pediatric Hospital in Gaza earlier this month, their decomposing bodies only discovered when the temporary ceasefire allowed access to the hospital. It’s just too insane to believe — they attacked a pediatric hospital? And then they left the babies there to die? What??

The only reason we’re learning about this now is because the pause in fighting allowed journalists to get cameras into the building and show the dead infants to the world. This calls to mind the Politico report immediately prior to the ceasefire which said that the White House was worried “an unintended consequence of the pause” would be “that it would allow journalists broader access to Gaza and the opportunity to further illuminate the devastation there and turn public opinion on Israel.”

Indeed, since the pause in fighting began the world has been receiving drone footage from mainstream platforms like Reuters and The Washington Post revealing vast expanses of urban terrain completely destroyed by a blanket of Israeli military explosives spanning from city block to city block. Looking at the blatantly indiscriminate devastation that’s been caused by Israel’s assault on Gaza since October 7 makes it clear that the IDF are not targeting Hamas but Gaza itself.

I’ve been amazed at how much I’ve been sleeping since the ceasefire started; that’s why I haven’t been writing as much. I guess spending weeks staring at unbelievable horrors unfolding on your screen can be pretty hard on your system if you’re sensitive to that sort of thing, so my body’s been resting up as much as it can while there’s an opportunity.

And I’m just here watching this all unfold safely from my home in Melbourne. I cannot imagine what it’s like to be living in the midst of this horror for the last two months, trying to figure out the best way to survive while also grieving the family, friends and neighbors you’re losing along the way. These people have all been deeply traumatized in ways that will haunt them for the rest of their lives, if they survive the violence, disease and deprivation that’s to come.

This thing is so astonishingly ugly, and it could get a whole lot uglier after the ceasefire ends. If there’s anything positive to be found in this living nightmare, it’s that it’s so earth-shakingly ugly that it just might shake the world awake.

[Ruth Andrade @ruthbellatrix]

@CarolineLucas @LushLtd @ChrisGPackham @natalieben It is crazy that so much science is still relying on outdated methods.
"90% of new drugs fail during human (clinical) trials having passed earlier (preclinical) tests which are largely based on animals."
https://t.co/6eW40PKFJX

[Ruth Andrade @ruthbellatrix]

@LushLtd hosted an event at parliament to help educate and raise awareness with our MPs on why we need better science and bring an end to animal testing.
We need government, universities and the private sector to help accelerate human-relevant science!
#FightAnimalTesting

[Caroline Lucas @CarolineLucas]

Thanks ⁦@LushLtd⁩ & ⁦@ChrisGPackham⁩ for all you do to #FightAnimalTesting. Great to catch up with ⁦@natalieben⁩ & hear such a powerful case for shifting away from cruel & outdated animal tests, & promoting human relevant science instead. Govt needs to do more