Canada: The Best Damned Democracy That Money Can Buy!

And if you ain't got no money nobody gives a shit what you think anyway!

Disturbing, disturbing, highly disturbing stuff from Alison at Creekside and the passionately anti-NDP Eugene Forsey. It seems that the House of Commons Standing Committee on Environment has decided to shred all the evidence from its past six meetings and all the research evidence that was to go into their report.

The last seven committee sessions on the tar sands have been locked to the public.

At the last public session back in March, the committee heard testimony from a scientist who had conducted the first independent research done since 1983 on airborne tar sands contaminants found in the snow pack along the Athabasca River.
Dr. David Schindler from the University of Alberta told the committee that at the 31 locations he had tested :

"Mercury emitted from these plants has increased three-fold in seven years, lead has increased four-fold in six years, and arsenic three-fold in six years as well."

Further, he said that although Environment Canada tests at only one location on the Athabasca, it has come up with the same numbers, as have the oil companies in their own research.
Schindler contends the oil companies' reports on contaminants are duly submitted to Environment Canada but he believes EC is being muzzled and prevented from making the findings public, and the oil companies of course are not obliged to do so on their own.

And that, my friends, was the last public session of the Environment Committee before it went in camera for the next six sessions and decided against making a report to the House, and to us.

This is serious stuff. It goes like this people: If you're a convinced proponent of the Tar Sands project (but an honest one) you'd say "I think all this global warming stuff is so much hooey," or "I don't think these pollutants are so excessive or that they'll be all that harmful," and then you'd allow to be published whatever the studies say.

The fact that the harpercons are doing the same-old strategies of obstruction (based on their play book for the destruction of democracy) shows that they're actually revolting pieces of shit who KNOW that bad stuff is happening, which they don't want the people to know about.

It ought to be front-page news, a major scandal, in this country, but I'm now convinced that we have a bullshit democracy where "the rule of law" is a sick joke. After the overthrow of the Aristide government, after mike harris's contribution to the death of Dudley George, after two prorogations, after the torture of innocent Canadians and Afghans, after the constitutional crisis provoked by harper's refusal to inform Parliament had degenerated into some boring committee sideshow where nobody is going to be embarrassed, and after the non-reaction to the total reaming of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms at the Toronto G20, ... after all those things and more (APEC-Suharto-Pepper-Spray, Caledonia, etc.,) I have no faith in this country's political system or its people.

Tomorrow, check this space for extended commentary on Miley Cyrus's career aspirations.

G20 Reflections

Thinking about the police riot at the Toronto G20 Summit made me think about the processes I wrote about when I blogged about having watched the film "Jarhead."

A lot of people took "Jarhead" the wrong way. They got the impression that the
movie is asking us to feel sorry for US-American soldiers who don't get to kill
anybody. That wasn't the point of the film. The point of the film was that the
US military (the Marines in the case of "Jarhead") trains young men (and now
women!) to become killers. It teaches them to dehumanize their enemies and it
pumps them up to want to kill them. The main character becomes obsessed with the
desire to see "the pink mist" a pseudo-erotic description of the explosion of
somebody's head when a sniper's bullet blasts their skull apart.

I'm sure something much the same was done to the police at the Summit. They were no doubt pumped by "training" sessions wherein demonstrators were referred to as dangerous, lawless, violent anarchists. I'm sure the term "terrorist" was tossed around even more sloppily than it usually is. After the enemy was dehumanized, the police were then all pumped-up with nowhere to go for a couple of days. Like the soldiers in "Jarhead" sweating their balls off in the desert boredom, the cops in Toronto sweltered in their riot gear waiting, waiting, waiting for something to happen. When the rocks were allowed to fly for half-an-hour and the police cars were sent out to be left to the vandals, the boys and girls in the battle-suits were ready to go ape-shit and the rest is a stain on Canada's history.

Secondly, I'd like to address the buffoonery of some of the members of Toronto City Council who saw fit to hoot and holler in blind, total support of the violations of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the rape threats, the physical assaults, the inhumane conditions that aresstees were kept in, and the overall billion dollar incompetence of the Toronto Police Service and the rest of the ISU.

Leading the pack was the loutish public drunk, Rob Ford, who yammered something about how he would have started attacking people at random on the very same day that the fucking security forces ALLOWED the vandals to smash windows and burn police cars, as opposed to the wholesale mass arrests a day later of people unconnected to the violence. That's because he has shit for brains.

Here's a link to one councillor's letter explaining why they abstained from the ridiculous vote:

http://www.torontosun.com/comment/2010/07/08/14651096.html

Mass Starvation and Mass Extinctions

That's the forecast. stephen harper thinks it's a better idea to spend $1.1 billion on a two-day summit than to seriously address global warming.

A Depressingly Accurate Description of the State of US-American Politics

"Living the Regressive Dream"

If the product of this slow and silent coup wasn’t so bloody and so ruinous to so many lives, you’d really have to hand it to these guys for their political acumen and patience. It took a while, and it required the building of a broad and robust infrastructure, spanning from mainstream media to talk radio and TV to think-tanks to Congress, the presidency and the judiciary, to the GOP and now to the Democratic Party as well, but they have pretty much completely succeeded in grabbing all the levers of power in our society. They dominate its discourse entirely, and they have been almost completely successful to date in securing all the elements of their legislative, regulatory and jurisprudential agenda, at least to this point (how far they ultimately intend to go isn’t clear – the US as Honduras, perhaps? – but it’s unlikely to be pretty).

Read the whole thing.

The Rot Starts From the Top

Y'know, all the needle-dicked pigs expressing their rape fantasies and living out their sadistic masturbation fantasies were only playing around with the situation their superiors gave them.

And the G20 ISU took its orders from stephen harper.

And stephen harper takes his orders from BP, Monsanto, Goldman Sachs, and etc.

Canada Day 2010

It was a beautiful day. I was at the park in Hamilton with my little boy when I saw a young woman I recognized from the local activist community. She told me that she'd been arrested in Toronto at the G20 Summit. She wasn't there to protest though. She was visiting friends and they went out for something to eat. They were all surrounded and handcuffed and arrested with the police not even offering a pretence of having any justification. She was shaken to tell me about the terrible conditions of her 30 hour detention. How the police were abusive, calling them all by the c-word, threatening them with lengthy stays in prison. She was traumatized, afraid of being out by herself, afraid that at any moment the police might come back and take her away again.

That's the fear that people feel living in a lawless police state!

That is not what our leaders tell us that Canada is all about.

The Miami Model

Today, why don't we all google "miami model protests" (or "miami model - [anything else]") and see what we find. Because I just know that we'll find great stuff to read.

Because, you know, I think our protests as they stand, are useless. We stand around and chant, the elites ignore us with impunity, and then, either some genuine direct-action types, provocateurs, or vandals of some persuasion or other, break something somewhere and the media creams its jeans obsessing about the breakage.

But apparently, even the IDEA of protest fills our elites with a violent nausea. (Shit! The very idea of parliamentary democracy fills harper with disgust!) And they're doing everything they can to discourage protests. And so, while the ignorant, authoritarian-minded, apathetic, complacent fools go about whatever it is they do, the decent, principled people become more and more afraid to protest the policies that are killing us all.

I want to go to today's Queen's Park rally for a public inquiry into this monstrosity.