Ecology and Participatory Democracy

Reposting my post from McGill University's discussion blog

2012-02-13T09:26:00.005-06:00

[posted here]

I'm sure people with positions in the McGill University hierarchy will want to protect their gains and the comforts of their elevated positions.

However, we need to abandon the insensitive & rigid traditional hierarchical structure.

We have been disappointed too many times by the collusion of elites in the hierarchy with economic and military actors who have been too destructive and too guilty of the chaos into which our society, economy, and ecology are descending.

We need an adaptive and intelligent institution that receives information from its members, by sensitive and non-hierarchical communication. This means that what have been institutional decisions at the highest level must be made non-hierarchically, collectively.

We need Reason to chart our course and not Capital.

We need an institution that doesn't merely purport to be ethical, but actually IS ethical.

If McGill doesn't become more sensitive and adaptive in this way, it won't have much of a future.

A Comparison of the Effects of Three GM Corn Varieties on Mammalian Health

2012-01-28T20:39:00.004-06:00

de Vendômois, J.S., Roullier, F., Cellier1, D., Séralini, G.-E. 2009. A Comparison of the Effects of Three GM Corn Varieties on Mammalian Health. Int J Biol Sci 5(7):706-726

We present for the first time a comparative analysis of blood and organ system data from trials with rats fed three main commercialized genetically modified (GM) maize (NK 603, MON 810, MON 863), which are present in food and feed in the world. NK 603 has been modified to be tolerant to the broad spectrum herbicide Roundup and thus contains residues of this formulation. MON 810 and MON 863 are engineered to synthesize two different Bt toxins used as insecticides. Approximately 60 different biochemical parameters were classified per organ and measured in serum and urine after 5 and 14 weeks of feeding. GM maize-fed rats were compared first to their respective isogenic or parental non-GM equivalent control groups. This was followed by comparison to six reference groups, which had consumed various other non-GM maize varieties. We applied nonparametric methods, including multiple pairwise comparisons with a False Discovery Rate approach. Principal Component Analysis allowed the investigation of scattering of different factors (sex, weeks of feeding, diet, dose and group). Our analysis clearly reveals for the 3 GMOs new side effects linked with GM maize consumption, which were sex- and often dose-dependent. Effects were mostly associated with the kidney and liver, the dietary detoxifying organs, although different between the 3 GMOs. Other effects were also noticed in the heart, adrenal glands, spleen and haematopoietic system. We conclude that these data highlight signs of hepatorenal toxicity, possibly due to the new pesticides specific to each GM corn. In addition, unintended direct or indirect metabolic consequences of the genetic modification cannot be excluded.

http://www.biolsci.org/v05p0706.htm#headingA11

Mandy Hiscocks

2012-01-14T11:27:00.004-06:00

Amanda Hiscocks has a blog, and you can listen to an interview here:

interview: http://uppingtheanti.org/news/article/uta-interviews-mandy-hiscocks

blog: bored but not broken

anguswd@sen.parl.gc‎; caboisvp@sen.parl.gc‎; cabrazep@sen.parl.gc‎; cacarigc@sen.parl.gc‎; cachampa@sen.parl.gc‎; cadallar@sen.parl.gc‎; cadawsod@sen.

2011-12-17T09:45:00.002-06:00

parl.gc‎; cadebanp@sen.parl.gc‎; catessil@sen.parl.gc‎; cafortis@sen.parl.gc‎; cafrasej@sen.parl.gc‎; cahervic@sen.parl.gc‎; calacomd@sen.parl.gc‎; calacomd@sen.parl.gc‎; calacomd@sen.parl.gc‎; canolinp@sen.parl.gc‎; carivarm@sen.parl.gc‎; cajcrivest@sen.parl.gc‎; caseidmj@sen.parl.gc‎; cavernej@sen.parl.gc‎; cawattc@sen.parl.gc.ca

Dear Senators,

The Canadian Bar Association, representing over 37,000 lawyers across the country, has identified 10 reasons why the passage of Bill C-10 will be a mistake and a setback for Canada:

1. Ignoring reality. Decades of research and experience have shown what actually reduces crime: (a) addressing child poverty, (b) providing services for the mentally ill and those afflicted with fetal alcohol spectrum disorder, (c) diverting young offenders from the adult justice system, and (d) rehabilitating prisoners, and helping them to reintegrate into society. Bill C-10 ignores these proven facts.

2. Rush job. Instead of receiving a thorough review, Bill C-10 is being rushed through Parliament purely to meet the “100-day passage” promise from the last election. Expert witnesses attempting to comment on more than 150 pages of legislation in committee hearings are cut off mid-sentence after just five minutes.

3. Spin triumphs over substance. The federal government has chosen to take a “marketing” approach to Bill C-10, rather than explaining the facts to Canadians. This campaign misrepresents the bill’s actual content and ensures that its public support is based heavily on inaccuracies.

4. No proper inspection. Contrary to government claims, some parts of Bill C-10 have received no previous study by parliamentary committee. Other sections have been studied before and were changed — but, in Bill C-10, they’re back in their original form.

5. Wasted youth. More young Canadians will spend months in custodial centres before trial, thanks to Bill C-10. Experience has shown that at-risk youth learn or reinforce criminal behaviour in custodial centres; only when diverted to community options are they more likely to be reformed.

6. Punishments eclipse the crime. The slogan for one proposal was Ending House Arrest for Serious and Violent Criminals Act, but Bill C-10 will actually also eliminate conditional sentences for minor and property offenders and instead send those people to jail. Is roughly $100,000 per year to incarcerate someone unnecessarily a good use of taxpayers’ money?

7. Training predators. Bill C-10 would force judges to incarcerate people whose offences and circumstances clearly do not warrant time in custody. Prison officials will have more latitude to disregard prisoners’ human rights, bypassing the least restrictive means to discipline and control inmates. Almost every inmate will re-enter society someday. Do we want them to come out as neighbours, or as predators hardened by their prison experience?

8. Justice system overload. Longer and harsher sentences will increase the strains on a justice system already at the breaking point. Courts and Crown prosecutors’ offices are overwhelmed as is, legal aid plans are at the breaking point, and police forces don’t have the resources to do their jobs properly. Bill C-10 addresses none of these problems and will make them much worse.

9. Victimizing the most vulnerable. With mandatory minimums replacing conditional sentences, people in remote, rural and northern communities will be shipped far from their families to serve time. Canada’s aboriginal people already represent up to 80 per cent of inmates in institutions in the Prairies, a national embarrassment that Bill C-10 will make worse.

10. How much money? With no reliable price tag for its recommendations, there is no way to responsibly decide the bill’s financial implications. What will Canadians sacrifice to pay for these initiatives? Will they be worth the cost?

Please defeat the omnibus Crime Bill. Thank you for your consideration and time,

[etc.]

protestsongs.ca

2011-11-17T16:34:00.004-06:00

My mother is from Cape Breton Island. Our family has 7 generations who can be said to have lived there, or at least really enjoyed many long holidays there, or even years of aimless wandering in the backwoods up on the hill of Boisdale. I enjoy Cape Breton Celtic music rarely, but I have found protestsongs.ca, and I have realized that there's a whole genre of Cape Breton music that I absolutely CAN'T GET ENOUGH OF!

System change at McGill University

2011-11-04T18:07:00.007-05:00

Many of the workers of McGill University are on strike. Secretaries, technicians, cleaning staff, etc., have been walking the picket line for months. McGill University hasn't been accommodating. I suppose it has never been the tradition for McGill to accommodate with magnanimity in such situations.

Winter is coming, the strikers are getting tired, and it seems that their fate will be to return to work, concerns unmet.

McGill University wasn't founded by men who respected the working class. McGill's pretensions and elitism seem preposterous and awful to me, given that it is a colonial Canadian institution, without much in the way of history, relatively speaking, anyway. Its pretensions are where its lack of sympathy comes from, I think.

The Teaching Assistants, including myself, and the Research Associates, may soon be forced to strike. As I understand it, a Research Assistant, who has worked at McGill for 30 years, who holds a PhD, is paid similarly to a newly hired BSc employed in a similar position at any of the other Montreal universities. That's scandalous. However, the truth is I know a few of my colleagues aren't getting paid for their work at all! Do we all at McGill need to be reminded that we all require sufficient pay to make rent & buy food, etc.? It is horribly predictable that our basic needs are often overlooked, here at the home of Canada's most highly paid administrator.

What is happening at McGill is like Occupy Wall Street, on a small scale. The smallness of the scale does not negate the significance of this event. On the contrary, this should be instructive.

What is happening here is the long-prophesied System Change. System Change is an important ingredient of Global Change, which has long been thought to be unavoidable, owing to the intersections and collisions of climatic, social, and economic crises.

I hope you can understand, as I have come to understand, that System Change asks of us all to bring into being new systems, in a way similar to what is happening at McGill. Our new arrangement must be designed to meet the concerns of the people who are parts of it.

The old systems don't work. Our environmental & economic crises are evidence of the old systemic inadequacies. There is no avoiding system change, because our systems have to change in order for them to continue. Some of those old systems will not change, and they will not survive. Systems, such as McGill University, will not continue in the manner that they were before, because the people, who are the bones and muscles of such an institutional body, just can't handle the old way (the unsympathetic & elitist way) of organizing things anymore.

Decolonize Montreal

2011-10-18T14:19:00.002-05:00

Hello,

I took the McGill Intercampus Shuttle downtown before dawn this morning.

I walked down to Square Victoria. I asked a couple of policemen - who crossed the street with me - how many tents there were at the park. N.B., there were lots and lots of tents, probably more than one hundred. They said "Oh maybe fifty. No. Maybe thirty." Shameless liars.

I recognized a very nice guy from Musquodoboit, who I see at all the protests and Anarchist Bookfairs. We watched the union conference attendees arrive. There was a very large crowd of them, and they made a few speeches in french before going back to their conference. I wouldn't mind talking to that guy all day, but he escaped for soup.

So I talked with the Global News cameraman. Donny wanted to run Global News out of the tent site, because the Global coverage has been unfair. Donny recommends the Mirror's story instead: http://www.montrealmirror.com/wp/2011/10/13/cover-the-99-are-coming/

So, that's all for now. I plan to go back soon with lots of sidewalk chalk.

Conflict Gypsy

2011-10-01T15:53:00.003-05:00

I may want to read every document on http://www.conflictgypsy.com/

I just thought I would share that.

That is all for now ;)

That Ottawa Action

2011-09-26T19:30:00.008-05:00

I guess it is time for me to write my story about what happened in Ottawa today. This story begins with the fact that I promised my Mom that I wouldn't get arrested while doing my Ph. D.

I am a Ph. D. Candidate and a Teaching Assistant at McGill University's Macdonald Campus in Ste Anne de Bellevue. As you will see, it is necessary for me to communicate with clarity to you that being a Ph. D. Candidate accords me no power whatsoever within this institution. It is definitely not a position of prestige. My position is really humble: endless reading, laboratory experiments at any and all hours of the day or night, the pursuit of the interests of my academic committee. My only possessions of any value are my somewhat more than 25 boxes of books, and my netbook.

I am the TA for a class called Knowledge, Ethics & the Environment. As a product of their readings of environmental philosophy, some of the students spontaneously moved to attend the Ottawa Action against the Tar Sands, organized by Greenpeace, the Council of Canadians, and the Indigenous Environmental Network, et al. This class is an ethics class, and I felt like it was my moral duty to accompany the students.

Some of the undergraduates chose to bike all the way from Ste Anne de Bellevue to Ottawa. Some rode in a van. I heard that Concordia was organizing to go, and I figured they would have put in place a crack legal team, and since I do not currently have a bicycle with me here in Quebec, I opted to try to get a seat on their bus. At various times in the past, I have been bailed out of detention by the Concordia Student's Union and others affiliated with their university. So, if I was to be arrested in Ottawa, I trusted Concordian lawyers to be on my side. However, Concordia did not have its own bus, but shared one with Dawson College. So, I traveled to Ottawa on the Dawson College bus, with some members of Concordia's Sustainability Club, and a small crowd of College young people. We all received names and numbers for legal defense, in case of that eventuality.

Greenpeace organizes many actions – every day – all over the world. And it is the law of creative and scientific geniuses, like our friends at Greenpeace, that quantity precludes quality. That is, they must produce a great number of actions in order for a small percent of their work to hit the right note at exactly the right time, to instigate real change. I realize not all actions are perfect. In fact, most actions need not be perfect or even acceptable to anybody, because there are those shining moments when fate and destiny and long hours of organizing produce real, lasting environmental transformation.

We saw a lot of police at the Parliament building, but not an insurmountable force, given our superior numbers. The policemen – and for the most part the women, too - were tall and large. I looked for the usual policemen atop the buildings surrounding the Parliament, and they were there, but I don't suppose they could be snipers. In any case, the police had erected a low fence before the steps approaching the Parliament, and a couple of other fences on the steps and around the Parliament itself. At this point I should be clear about what I believe. I believe that the Parliament is OUR building. I believe it is a public space. I believe it belongs as an edifice to the people of Canada. It is literally ours. I believe sitting on the Parliament lawn is not an offense. I believe that any petty act of vandalism to the Parliament, and even any act of violence that could have occurred there, would necessarily pale in comparison - and pale absolutely in comparison - to the most grave act of vandalism in the world – quite possibly the most grievous act of vandalism and violence in the history of the whole world – which is the clearcutting of the Boreal forest, the open surface extraction of vast quantities of bitumen, and the release of THE CARBON BOMB into our atmosphere, thereby eliminating forever our habitable climate.

In any case, both of those fences could have been scaled by many of the protestors. They could have been dismantled by the crowd. We were so many and so capable that we could have really quite easily penetrated the Parliament's defenses and put our demands directly before the trembling government clerks inside.

I could say the protestors approached the Parliament, but that simply was not the case, owing to the many fences. The best that could be done, under the circumstances of really very peaceful civil disobedience, was for them to cross the first small fence. There, they sat on the lawn, on the other side, uniformly not facing the police. One by one they were “processed.” The protestors were asked to produce ID, they were handcuffed with white plastic ties, which I know to be excruciatingly uncomfortable when worn for many hours, tight. They were taken away. As they were not facing the police, they could not see their self-satisfied and frankly stupid policeman smiles. Those twinkling eyes. Those knowing nods to one another. It was pretty clear that, in the eyes of the Ottawa police, all the protestors were just foolishly idealistic people, merely naughty, but at least fulfilling their quota of necessary arrests for this year. New couples of officers processed each activist, so they each could get a part of the action.

Only one of our chants was provocative. With it, as it occasionally arose, we challenged the police and asked them which side they were on. The police did not get the message. There was no Arab Spring here, no changing of sides on their part, at all.

I started asking the police to not arrest people. Clearly and necessarily loudly I said “Don't arrest this next one! You don't have to! It's not illegal to sit on the Parliament lawn! This space belongs to the people of Canada!” And I was immediately told to be quiet by one of the sitting protestors. She told me I was not being a good ally. This amazed me. She wanted me to let her be arrested, processed, and her life to be reduced to such as ours are in the surveillance state. She wanted me to stand by as “our” police bent the law and arrested her fellow sitters for literally doing nothing.

Furthermore, a Greenpeace crowd control officer intercepted me and also told me to be quiet. They didn't want the situation to escalate. I joked with her that, as a McGill employee, I wasn't used to being told what to do. I really meant that as a little joke. As a Ph. D. student I am always being told what to do. Unfortunately, she took it completely seriously. I let it slide, and that was a mistake because she continued to think I had been serious. I tried to explain to her that nothing could come of this action if we couldn't get the police to stop arresting people. I began to summon my comprehensive academic knowledge on the history of nonviolent direct action, but Tantoo Cardinal also told me to be quiet. They collectively very clearly conveyed to me the message that they didn't want anything to come from this action today. They weren't seriously looking for any change in government policy. As such it was not so much a symbolic action as merely symbolic. It was about people sitting on the lawn getting arrested for no good reason at all. Greenpeace basically hand-delivered more than a hundred arrests to the Ottawa police. God Damn, I hope the gift will be reciprocated!

On the long bus ride home, one of the Dawson College students observed that the only way for environmental change to be effected in Canada would be for the police to decide to take the side of the protestors. “Like they did in Egypt.” He explained. Others tentatively agreed that perhaps an NDP majority would be effective as well.

What does it mean, to be an anarchist?

2011-09-08T13:23:00.002-05:00

This is a link to a good article about what anarchism is. The author's opinions are similar to my own. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/sep/07/anarchism

link to Ian Mauro's film!

2011-09-03T17:21:00.004-05:00

http://www.isuma.tv/hi/en/inuit-knowledge-and-climate-change/movie

THE DAMAGING EFFECTS OF ELECTROPOLLUTION

2011-07-21T07:07:00.000-05:00

Regulators Ignore Health Impact
as EMF Radiation Invades Canada
by Helke Ferrie
Vitality, April 2011

"The good news is that many of these EMF diseases may be preventable by simple environmental manipulation, if society chooses to pay attention. Unless public outrage intervenes, I am afraid that our ‘diseases of civilization' will get worse. Good science is not enough to force sensible public policy. Only citizens can do that."
Dr. Samuel Milham in Dirty Electricity, 2010

"This device emits electromagnetic radiation, exposure to which may cause brain cancer. Users, especially pregnant women and children, should keep it away from the head and body."
Currently proposed legislation for cell phones: Bill LD 1014, sponsored by Legislator Andrea Boland in Maine, USA.

Ignorance may or may not be bliss, but one thing is certain: it is very profitable. According to Buddhism, all suffering derives from ignorance, and it rarely hurts until it is too late; ignorance keys into the addictive potential in all of us and, thereby, allows somebody to make a huge pile of money on enslavement.
The detrimental health effects of cell phones, WiFi, electromagnetic fields (EMFs), and the microwave-based technology we use daily makes worrying about our kids experimenting with drugs, sexual escapades, alcoholic binges, or a touch of crime insignificant - in comparison to the WiFi-equipped school you send them to, the cell phones you may have bought for them, the hours they spend in front of the TV (forget the content – the TV itself is worse), and the microwave oven from which they often receive their meals. Sex, booze, drugs, and crime are part of the dark side of life's education: one often learns from those mess-ups to go on to make healthy choices. Now consider that this "progressive" and seductive radiation technology has the power to obliterate life, phase out our biological future, and kill the brain.
I am one of those suckers seriously injured by cell phones. Our solar-powered cottage on Manitoulin is far from phone lines; so, for 25 years we used public phones. Last summer, a cell phone tower was erected 1 mile from my study window. Being a social animal, I thought this was fabulous! Over a period of two months I quickly developed indescribable headaches, piercing pains in my right eye, and spontaneous bleeding from my right ear. My ophthalmologist diagnosed two cataracts in my right eye: the hallmark of microwave radiation injury ( age-related cataracts appear in both eyes), as we know from research begun on WW II U.S. Navy personnel injured by radar equipment. In a future Vitality issue I will discuss the successful treatment I am undergoing and how I did not turn into a Luddite.
I am in stellar company: World Health Organization Director General, Gro Harlem Brundtland (1998 – 2003) and convener of the World Commission on Environment and Development in 1987, did not permit any cell phones at WHO's Geneva headquarters because they caused her debilitating headaches. Of course, she had the wrath of the industry descend upon her accordingly. She is currently suffering from cancer.
In 2004, the WHO defined electrohypersensitivity (EHS) as: "… a phenomenon where individuals experience adverse health effects while using or being in the vicinity of devices emanating electric, magnetic, or electromagnetic fields …. a sometimes debilitating problem [occuring] several orders of magnitude under the limits of internationally accepted standards."
In fact, everybody is at risk. Epidemiologist Dr. Sam Milham first studied childhood leukemia clusters in the 1970s that eventually proved beyond any doubt that the risk for this disease is directly related to the presence of powerlines, and subsequently also cell phone towers; those areas of the world that have little or no electricity have almost no incidence of leukemia. In addition to leukemia, evidence now supports that cell phones cause especially brain tumors, cancer of the eye, salivary glands, testicles, non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, and Alzheimer's. This radiation also contributes to the development of autism and ADHD. While several causes are known for all of these conditions, research has confirmed that the use of cell and cordless phones and lap-top computers, speed up their manifestation such that people in their 30's are now beginning to be diagnosed with advanced Alzheimer's. The degranulation process of live brain cells when exposed to cell phone radiation has been experimentally demonstrated. Cancer incidence is also significantly higher within 400 meters of a cell phone tower or transmitter site. Trent University researcher Magda Havas may now have discovered a third type of diabetes caused exclusively by electromagnetic radiation.
The most vulnerable are children, pregnant women, human brains in general, testicles, and ovaries. This was confirmed in 2007 by the World Health Organization and the International Agency for Research on Cancer and in 2010 by a Swedish government study, all showing that cell phone use increases the chances of brain cancer by 40%. Last year, the European Journal of Oncology reported that serious heart and related problems (e.g. arrhythmia, palpitations, heart flutter, racing heart beat, fainting, profuse sweating etc) can occur to pulsed radiation as low as 0.5% of the existing Canadian and US federal guidelines which permit 10 mill micro/Wm2. The truly science-based exposure guidelines demonstrate that nobody should be exposed to more than 1 microW/m2.
When it comes to any type of death industry, the most reliable information comes from the military. On the website www.safeschool.ca you can download a recently declassified US Navy document from1971 which summarizes the more than 2,300 studies on the health effects from microwave radiation known way back then! Of course they knew – microwave technology was already part of the military arsenal intended to inflict bodily harm. It is the Military University in Germany that developed EMF protection standards for civilian building codes. In addition to people, building materials require protection from rapid corrosion caused by radiofrequencies and microwaves. In 2008, the Federation of Canadian Municipalities asked the federal government for an emergency fund of $ 123 billion over 5 years to avoid building collapse.
The financial problems caused by this irresponsible application of radiation-based technology includes agriculture and cows. Plants avoid high EMF levels by not growing as high as they normally would; when the EMF source is removed, they grow normally. As reported by Dr. Milham, when the "dirty electricity" was neutralized by Graham/Stetzer plugs in a U.S. school, "a dairy farmer a quarter of a mile away noticed that his cows each gave an average of ten pounds more milk per day, beginning the day the school received its filters. The cows were responding to dirty electricity being removed from the ground currents." In 2008 the French court ordered a power company to compensate cattle farmers for EMF damage.
A thoroughly depressing fact is that the main reason gorillas in Africa were reduced in numbers by 90% over the past two decades is because their habitat was destroyed by miners for a rare mineral called coltan. This mineral is apparently indispensable to the production of cell phones. The international efforts to save the gorillas is appearing to have some success, but nothing has happened so far, it seems to rescue the miners themselves – they are primarily children even as young as 6 years.
Living creatures are electrical beings able to function only within specific frequencies. Devra Davis observes: "The difference between being alive and being dead is just one thing – the presence of electrical activity in the brain." Thoracic surgeon Dr. William Rae, the co- founder of the American Academy for Environmental Medicine with Linus Pauling and Dr. Thoren Randolph, became originally interested in environmental influences on health when he himself became seriously EMF-sensitive in the 1970's from operating room equipment. His research led him to recognize the deleterious influence of pesticides and many other environmental toxins, all of which cause multi-system damage. The immune system is the primary target which does its job through electrically charged biological substances such as neurotransmitters, hormones, and peptides which transmit faster than the speed of light. It has been known since the 1990's that environmental illness from biological toxins and electrohypersensitivity share the process of a disastrous reduction in the nervous system enzyme cholinesterase. It's sudden depletion cause depression and also suicidal behavior.
All these biological processes have their inherent timing, repair and defensive responses, especially during pregnancy and brain development. Hence, the industry "safety" standards, with which government regulators collaborate, are totally absurd. Devra Davis explains: They are based on the imaginary SAM, the Standard Anthropomorphic Man based on military recruits of 1989: six foot two tall, about 200 lbs, and never exposed to a cell phone. The subsequently constructed safety standards date to 1962 when nobody knew the difference between heat-producing radiation and microwave radiation, and cell phones did not exist.
The Safe School Committee in Collingwood ( www.safeschool.ca) is fighting the WiFi craze that has hit Canadian schools. Even though WiFi is slower than landline-transmitted connections, and even though there is a documented 40% increase in cardiac arrest in children under 13 years directly related to this type of radiation, the Toronto School Board is hell-bent on WiFi for all schools – presumably until no brains are left to zap. So eager are our guardians of education to implement what they call "Vision of Hope" (abysmally black humor unintended), they even exceed the totally inappropriate safety standards set by Health Canada – standards that date from a time when wireless phones were Dick Tracey-type sci-fi watches.
Ken Dryden expressed outrage on March 12 (Globe & Mail) about the lack of mandatory protection from head injuries in hockey, stating: "How could we be so stupid!" Such outrage applies to WiFi in schools even more because even more children – all of them in fact – will be affected. In a 2009 review of the usually irreversible harm EMFs cause, neuroscientists O. Johansson of the Karalinska Institute in Sweden, wrote: "Today no-one would consider having a radio-active wrist watch with glowing digits (as you could in the 1950s), having your children's shoes fitted in a strong X-ray machine (as you could in the 1940s), keeping radium in open trays on your desk (as scientists could in the 1930s), or X-raying each other at your garden party (as physicians did in the 1920s). In retrospect that was just plain madness. However, the persons doing so were not …less intelligent. … knowledge was deficient, as was a competent risk analysis coupled to a parallel analysis of public needs."
What is happening in other jurisdictions? In 2007, Germany initiate a policy of reducing the use of CAT scans because of their demonstrated cancer-causing properties, and because their use increased health care costs (directly and through additional cancer incidence) by 80% in 40 years. It followed logically that last year Germany banned the energy efficient CFLS light bulbs because their carcinogenic radiation exceeds European exposure limits. (I tossed all ours and put old-fashioned incandescent bulbs back; I found that the crushing fatigue I thought was aging mysteriously disappeared!) Many jurisdictions in the US are now framing legislation to deal both with the bulb's unacceptable levels of radiation and the difficulty of their disposal because of the high mercury content threatening the ground water.
The European Union's September 2009 report on EMFs stressed the "serious and irreversible damage to health and environments" from EMF radiation and called on all member states to take precautionary action. Shortly afterwards the possibility of outlawing the use of cell phones for children under 18 was discussed in the EU parliament.
The UK, whose national Department of Health is as industry-friendly and science-challenged as our Health Canada, started to surrender to reality and on March 11 advised its citizens that they should text, rather than put their cell phones to their ears.
Switzerland, Finland, Luxemburg, and Austria supply their schools with the totally radiation-safe fiber-optic technology for their internet and communication needs. Israel has similar legislation in the works. Those countries also set the maximum level of exposure between 5 to 10 microW/cm2. Recall: In Canada we are told 1,000 microW/cm2 is "safe". Guess on which part of the Earth human brains will survive!
Meanwhile, we are also being threatened with "smart meters" which tend to increase electricity costs for people and expose them to massive amounts of radiation. As of February of this year, California allows people to refuse their installation, because a formal investigation showed that these US-made devices never passed all the mandatory regulatory hurdles, are hazardous to health, and can cause fire.
Devra Davis in her superb book "Disconnect" explains how the most serous practical challenge to this industry comes from the world's large insurance companies, such as the Sterling Group of Lloyd's of London. Having nearly been nearly wiped out when the asbestos-related claims became undeniable in the early 1990s, the cell-phone industry was informed they would not be backed when radiation hits the fan, as it must. The trigger for this decision was the UK's 2005 Stewart Commission whose chair, citing worldwide research demonstrating harm to children's brains from cell phones, told the mobile phone industry to "refrain from promoting the use of mobile phones by children". In Canada, liability is certainly worth testing in court, because the 2007 Human Rights Commission report on Environmental Illness specifically included harm from EMF radiation as being real and requiring accommodation.
Hear Magda Havas, Devra Davis and many others at the Total Health Show (April 8,9,10) and learn that, amazingly, it may be possible to be safe and have your toys.

Sources and Resources:
S. Milham MD, Dirty Electricity, iUniverse, 2010, any bookstore or www.sammilham.com
D. L. Davis, Disconnect: The Truth About Cell Phone Radiation, Dutton, 2010
M. Havas & C. Rees, Public Health SOS: The Shadow Side of the Wireless Revolution, 2009
L. Blake, Electromagnetic Fields: A Consumer's Guide to the Issues and How to Protect Ourselves, iUniverse (updated 2007 edition)
Best source for relevant information www.magdahavas.com and www.microwavenews.com
To fight cell phone towers being placed near schools, playgrounds, hospitals, etc. research www.whyfry.org and google "cell phone towers + opposition"
NOTE: The products sources listed below I myself have tried and found helpful.
Planetary Association for Clean Energy Inc. Ottawa. Andrew Michrowski provides excellent scientific sources and practical help: paceincnet@gmail.com
Environmental Working Group at www.ewg.org tests cell phones etc for hazards, safety, alternatives, etc where regulatory information is lacking, outdated, or wrong. Check out their recommendations on safer cell phones.
Dr. Stephen Sinatra, a cardiologist of Co-Q10 fame, has excellent information on radiation on his excellent website www.heartmdinstitute.com
To take action against the WiFi plans for all of Toronto's schools go to www.safeschool.ca and meet its organizers at the Total Health Show April 8, 9, 10 at the Metro Convention Center.
To have your home/apartment assessed and made safe, or to build an EMF-safe house, contact www.breathing-easy.net
For Graham/Stetzer filters www.stetzerelectric.com & www.DirtyElectricity.ca and EMFSolutions 1-877-987-5185 or visit their booth at Total Health.

Full Source List for Vitality Website:
This list is in order of the information's appearance in the article itself.
1. The legislation proposed in Maryland could be used in its identical wording in Canada and proposed to Health Canada via our MPs. See www.mainlegislature.org go to "Summary of LD 1014".
2. On cell phone towers the most comprehensive information is in Dr. Sam Milham's book "Dirty Electricity". For success in having proposed cell towers moved to locations away from children, hospitals etc. see Waterloo Chronicle February 15, 2011 article entitled "Transmission interrupted?" and March 9, 2011 "WIND Mobile looking at other tower sites".
3. The EarthCalm website has a good summary article on the research involving EMF harm and possible protection entitled "EarthCalm develops unprecedented EMF protection against phone and WiFi radiation".
4. Google the name Arthur Firstenberg and read his article in The Ecologist volume 34, number 5, June 1, 2004, on the harm cell phone towers do to people and animals.
5. On the dangers to food quality done by using microwave ovens google "microwave ovens + safety".
5. The Wikipedia entry on former WHO Director Gro Harlem Brundtland is pretty informative and useful for the links it provides to her statements and interviews involving harm, from cell phones.
6. Contact Andrew Michrowski of Planetary Association for Clean Energy at paceincnet@gmail.com for his powerpoint presentations and scientific papers. Most useful is his summary of all the literature, world-wide, up to the end of 2010, entitled "Electro-Magnetic Fields: High Level Microtechnology Concerns". It is the source of many items in this article including the degranulation of brain cells, the damage to blood cells, the corrosive effect of microwaves on building materials, etc.
7. On February 23, 2011, the Journal of the American Medical Association published an article "Cell Phone Radiofrequency Radiation Exposure and Brain Glucose Metabolism" which is exceedingly tame, until you get into the details which support the worst findings published internationally.
8. The information on microwaves and EMFs affecting the heart is in the European Journal for Oncology, Library Volume 5, October 2010. The lead author of Trent University's Magda Havas. For medical professionals this article is a must and for people with existing heart issues it is perhaps a life saver.
9. On building codes and EMF protection in architectural design, the Military University in Germany etc., go to Robert Steller's website www.breathing-easy.net
10. How EMFs adversely affect animals and plants is discussed and sources ion both the work of Andrew Michrowski (PACE) and in the book by Dr. Sam Milham. There are also a website specific to EMFs involving the issue of damage to trees, other plants and animals: www.popsci.com or con tact nukenet@energyjustice.net
11. The unbelievable nonsense on which the Toronto School Board bases its decision to WiFi all schools, go to www.safeschool.ca from where you can download all of this material.
12. The declassified summary of all adverse health effects of microwave radiation known by 1971 also go to www.safeschool.ca
13. The biological pathways shared by MCS (Multiple Chemical Sensitivity) and EMF sensitivity are discussed in detail in the material available by googling Dr. William Rae, the American Academy for Environmental Medicine, and specifically from http://tis-hq.eh.doe.gov/chem-safety which is the web access to the U.S. Department of Energy. The article there is by Lucinda Grant published in 1997 entitled "Microwaves imitate pesticides".
14. EMFs and their harmful effects on the immune system of humans and animals is comprehensively presented in a long articled by O. Johansson of the Karalinska Institute in Sweden published in Pathophysiology in 2009. It can be downloaded from the website of EarthCalm.
15. The various sources for which countries have outlawed or initiated regulatory protection can be found on www.safeschool.ca , by googling Magda Havas, the organization Care, and accessing the January 2011 journal called Environmental Science and Technology, and www.communities.cana.com
16. On Germany curtailing the use of CAT scans see Globe & Mail, April 3, 1009.
17. The European Union's report from the European Environmental Agency of September 15, 2009 can be downloaded by googling them.
18. The advisory given by the UK Department of Health to text instead of put the cell phone to your head was published widely; my source was The Telegraph, March 11, 2011. Go to www.telegraph.co.uk/journalists/martin-beckford
19. The report showing that "smart meters" are not safe and were not put through the mandated regulatory hoops was published on February 18, 2011 by Sage Associates of Santa Barbara, CA, U.S.A/. and is entitled: "Addendum: Assessment of Radiofrequency Microwave Radiation Emissions from Silver Spring OWS-NIC514 Model Wireless Electric Meter". Go to www.stopsmartmeters.wordpress.com and/or omahoney@epri.com to get a copy of the report and associated materials.
20. The May 2007 Canadian Human Rights Commission report (2 parts – one on the medical condition, the other on Canada's legal obligations) on MCS/EMF sensitivity and relevant case law etc. can be downloaded by goggling its author Margaret E. Sears or by going to the Human Rights Commission website and searching for "Environmental sensitivities Report 2007".
21. To find a research study on how the EarthCalm protective technology for your home works, go to EarthCalm's website and download it. Title: "Quality of Life Research Testing of EarthCalm Protective System."

Helke Ferrie is a medical science writer who lives in Alton. She runs Kos Publishing Inc., a publisher dedicated to the politics of medicine.
Visit www.kospublishing.com
or reach her at helkeferrie@gmail.com

... And furthermore Bill C-4 is inconsistent with Canada's treaty commitments

2011-06-18T10:31:00.010-05:00

[I am not the only person in Canada who is disappointed to the very edge of despair by the Conservative Government. The legislation Jason Kenney discusses in this email willfully blocks the escape of desperate people from authoritarian regimes, ecological disasters, and poverty. Is it just me or could the tone of the email message below be described as vicious, and snide?]

Hello friends,

As promised our Conservative Government re-introduced legislation last night to combat human smuggling and prevent human smugglers from abusing Canada’s immigration system. With our strong stable national majority Canadians can trust that important legislation like Bill C-4: Preventing Human Smugglers from Abusing Canada’s Immigration System Act will not be blocked by out of touch opposition parties. I am proud to be part of a Government that is delivering on its commitments. Please feel free to let me know what you think.

Sincerely,

Hon. Jason Kenney, PC, MP

Minister of Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism

[My response:

Dear Jason Kenney,

Thank you for requesting my response. I want to be clear that I am very disappointed by the Conservative Government's lack of compassion for refugees. There are in Canada people painted with every colour from the spectrum of racism, but your Government is representing the interests of those from the most bigoted and ignorant terminus of that spectrum. Bill C-4 flows from the confluence of systemic racist privilege and racist panic. It's poison. In my opinion, this fear, which your Government uses to fuel its progress, is delusional and paranoid.

I must assume that your professed pride is a cynical communications tactic, which - among other things, I imagine - makes you seem ignorant to your opponents. Do you imagine it endears you to the working class? Their underestimation of your cunning likely gives you some political leverage. I do not underestimate your cunning. I know you and your colleagues are brutal and want to govern by leaving people helpless and bludgeoning them into humiliated submission. Bill C-4 is one step toward your goal.

How dare you draw upon us as citizens to enable this legislation? How dare you all do this in our names, on this land, to these people? If this continues, you can expect to find more than the power of my voice, but the power of my whole identity, standing in the way of the engines of your supremacy.

I want Canada to be a welcoming and safe sanctuary for people who flee authoritarian government, ecological crises, and poverty elsewhere. It is not a crime to run for your life!

etc.]

Maternal and fetal exposure to pesticides associated to genetically modified foods in Eastern Townships of Quebec, Canada

2011-05-26T19:13:00.005-05:00

Another interesting study to add to the small mountain of evidence that so many people say doesn't exist:

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=MImg&_imagekey=B6TC0-526MS20-3-1&_cdi=5156&_user=458507&_pii=S0890623811000566&_origin=&_coverDate=05%2F31%2F2011&_sk=999689995&view=c&wchp=dGLbVzb-zSkzV&md5=5076f82d67cd61b85091d9a7ba493bcd&ie=/sdarticle.pdf

If you can't access that, well, try clicking on the label below my original blog post for other interesting science on the human health effects of genetically engineered crops. Fascinating.

Protect Lake Ainslie

2011-04-24T16:45:00.003-05:00

At the request of my mother, I just sent this letter to the Cape Breton Post and the Chronicle Herald:

Dear Editor,

I am a Plant Science Ph.D. Candidate at McGill University, but my family has lived for 7 generations on Cape Breton Island. Although Nova Scotian politicians and environmental regulators likely stand to profit personally by allowing the hydraulic fracturing project near Lake Ainslie, we must encourage them collectively to put an end to the project. There are dangers of which people do not seem to be aware.

Hydraulic fracturing, a.k.a. fracking, is a procedure used in the extraction of natural gas and oil. A mixture of water, sand, and chemicals is injected into natural gas wells, or coalbeds, under high pressure. Fracking fluid loss to the surrounding formation through the walls of the fracture, and poroelasticity effects associated with the compression of the formation, establish an advective transport regime within the formation and displace the fluids that are initially distributed within the formation, which is to say that fluid displacement initiated by fracking has the potential to mobilize contaminants - including those contaminants occuring there prior to fracking. This process should not be going on near residences that use wells for drinking water. Fracking contributes to groundwater contamination with methane in some instances and proprietary chemicals, among them methanol, formaldehyde, ethylene glycol, hydrochloric acid, and sodium hydroxide. A wide variety of chemicals, the identities of which are not publicly available, are used in fracking fluid, for fluid viscosity, inhibiting corrosion, and limiting bacterial growth. Most of the chemicals known to be involved in this procedure pose a threat to public health.

Companies will probably choose, within an environmental impact statement, methods and procedures that appear to be benign, however they may not actually use the chemicals or methods they popularize. The concerned public must be aware that any research fracking industrialists refer to ought to include the direct monitoring of water wells, and it should not be limited to any one specific type of drilling, and it should address the effects in many substrates.

A large volume of back-flow fluids, on the order of hundreds of thousands of gallons per well, according to the EPA, are brought to the surface during drilling and production. Back-flow fluids are typically stored in on-site pits, which may or may not be lined and in any case will most likely not be covered, depending on what regulations or standards this project chooses to follow. It needs to be said that the standards and enforcement regarding oil and gas waste disposal are not adequate to ensure any kind of proper performance.

Thanks in part to the film GASLAND, by Josh Fox (www.gaslandthemovie.com) fracking is widely known to pollute ground and surface waters. It is known to have adverse effects on water quality and public health. However, it may also trigger earthquakes. This claim is not new and attention to it has been renewed following the earthquakes at Cleburne, Texas - the first in the town's 140-year history. Dr. David Oppenheimer, a seismologist with the U.S. Geological Survey, was quoted in the August 2009 "Global Monitor" section in POWER Magazine, affirming that the fracking processes could certainly generate seismic activity.

I hope the people of Cape Breton Island read what I've written here and learn more about fracking themselves. We all have to put an end to the destruction of the island for ephemeral profit.

Respectfully,

(etc.)

We have a task before us which must be speedily performed.

2011-03-10T22:33:00.003-06:00

We know that it will be ruinous to make delay. The most important crisis of our life calls, trumpet-tongued, for immediate energy and action. We glow, we are consumed with eagerness to commence the work, with the anticipation of whose glorious result our whole souls are on fire. It must, it shall be undertaken to-day, and yet we put it off until to-morrow; and why? There is no answer, except that we feel perverse, using the word with no comprehension of the principle. To-morrow arrives, and with it a more impatient anxiety to our duty, but with this very increase of anxiety arrives, also, a nameless, a positively fearful, because unfathomable, craving for delay. This craving gathers strength as the moments fly. The last hour for action is at hand. We tremble with the violence of the conflict within us, - of the definite with the indefinite - of the substance with the shadow. But, if the contest have proceeded thus far, it is the shadow which prevails, - we struggle in vain. The clock strikes, and is the knell of our welfare. At the same time, it is the chanticleer-note to the ghost that has so long overawed us. It flies - it disappears - we are free. The old energy returns. We will labor now. Alas, it is too late!

We stand at the brink of a precipice. We peer into the abyss - we grow sick and dizzy. Our first impulse is to shrink from the danger. Unaccountably we remain. By slow degrees our sickness and dizziness and horror become merged into a cloud of unnamable feeling. By gradations, still more imperceptible, this cloud assumes shape, as did the vapor from the bottle out of which arose the genius of the Arabian Nights. But out of this our cloud upon the precipice's edge, there grows into palpability, a shape, far more terrible than any genius or any demon of a tale, and yet it is but a thought, although a fearful one, and one which chills the very marrow of our bones with the fierceness of the delight of its horror. It is merely the idea of what would be our sensations during the sweeping precipitancy of a fall from such a height. And this fall - this rushing annihilation - for the very reason that it involves that one most ghastly and loathsome of all the most ghastly and loathsome images of death and suffering which have ever presented themselves to our imagination - for this very cause do we now the most vividly desire it. And because our reason violently deters us from the brink, therefore do we the most impetuously approach it. There is no passion in nature so demoniacally impatient, as that of him who shuddering upon the edge of the precipice, thus meditates a plunge. To indulge, for a moment, in any attempt at thought, is to be inevitably lost; for reflection but urges us to forbear, and therefore it is, I say, that we cannot. If there be no friendly arm to check us, or if we fail in a sudden effort to prostrate ourselves backward from the abyss, we plunge, and are destroyed.

- from the Imp of the Perverse by Edgar Allan Poe

Voices

2011-02-21T21:22:00.001-06:00

Voices is "an important virtual coalition of organizations and individuals formed precisely in reaction to the Harper government’s attacks on civil society organizations"

The link: http://www.voices-voix.ca

HONDURAN REGIME IMPUNITY WATCH

2011-02-18T18:11:00.001-06:00

[via Macho :|]

Rights Action, February 18, 2011

"Following the March 2010 round [of "free" trade discussions], Canada concluded that, among the CA4 countries, Honduras offered the best opportunity to conclude a free trade agreement in the short-term," according to information on the website of the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade."

CANADIAN GOVERNMENT TRYING TO SIGN "FREE" TRADE AGREEMENT WITH ILLEGITIMATE, POST-MILITARY COUP REGIME IN HONDURAS

BELOW: An article from Embassy Magazine about how the repressive, undemocratic regime in Honduras offers the "best opportunity" for Canada to sign a bi-lateral "free" trade agreement

Over the past year, Rights Action has distributed numerous articles documenting concerted Canadian government efforts to 'legitimize' the post-military coup regime of Honduras, ignoring well-documented State repression, so as to further Canadian corporate & investor interests (mining, maquiladora sweat shops, tourism, etc) in Honduras.

Most governments of Latin America do not recognize the Honduran regime! - that came to power through the June 28, 2009 military coup that violently ousted the elected government of President Zelaya.

Honduras remains excluded from the Organization of American States! - due to the obviously illegal and brutal military coup.

WHAT TO DO?

Rights Action believes Canadians should strongly oppose the position of the Canadian government vis a vis Honduras:

* Because it serves to 'legitimize' the repressive, undemocratic regime of Honduras, and weaken the aspirations of the Honduran people who are courageously struggling for the restoration of democracy and the rule of law and for the re-founding of their State and society,

* Because it promotes the "free" trade model of economic development that prioritizes the desires of global corporations and investors at the expense of the real development needs of a majority of Hondurans, and

* Because 'legitimizing' the repressive regime of Honduras should be seen as counter to long-term "Canadian" interests rooted in respect for global human and indigenous rights, environmental well-being, democracy and the rule of law.

· Please re-publish this information, citing author and source

· To get on/ off RA's listserv: www.rightsaction.org

· What to do: see below

FOR MORE INFORMATION, ENGLISH & ESPANOL:

Karen Spring, Rights Action, in Tegucigalpa, spring.kj@gmail.com

Annie Bird, Washington DC, 202-680-3002, annie@rightsaction.org

Grahame Russell, Connecticut, 860-352-2448, info@rightsaction.org

* * * * * * *

HONDURAS: CANADA OFFER REGIME LEGITIMACY THROUGH POTENTIAL BILATERAL TRADE DEAL

http://embassymag.ca/page/printpage/honduras-02-16-2011

By Anca Gurzu, Embassy Magazine, Ottawa, February 16, 2011

Canadian and Honduran officials are meeting this week in the Central American capital of Tegucigalpa for a round of free trade talks-and, for the second time, officials from El Salvador, Guatemala and Nicaragua will not be at the table.

For the past 10 years, Canada and the four Central American states had been involved in back-and-forth trade talks marred by slow progress and delays. But Canada and Honduras have now dropped the other countries from negotiations, focusing instead on bilateral talks.

While some of the other countries, notably Nicaragua, has lamented the decision, experts say Canada must work with willing partners - in this case, a post-coup Honduras that is trying to gain more political legitimacy in the hemisphere.

Official negotiations between Canada and the four Central American countries, known colloquially as the CA4, were launched in November 2001 and 10 rounds were held until they officially stalled in February 2004, largely due to disagreements over agricultural products, textiles and labour rights requirements. Another factor has been changes in government in the region.

The CA4, along with the Dominican Republic, inked a deal with the United States in 2005 before meeting with Canadian officials to discuss re-launching talks. Since then, there have been unofficial visits and meetings, and an 11th round was finally held in Ottawa in February 2009, followed by another in March 2010, but no agreement was reached so Canada and Honduras decided to continue alone.

["BEST OPPORTUNITY"]

"Following the March 2010 round, Canada concluded that, among the CA4 countries, Honduras offered the best opportunity to conclude a free trade agreement in the short-term," according to information on the website of the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade.

Canadian and Honduran officials met for their first official bilateral trade negotiating round in December in Ottawa, and the meeting in Tegucigalpa this week follows "an ambitious schedule," according to a press release. Honduran Ambassador Sofia Cerrato was out of the country and not available for an interview. However, the move was met with mixed reaction from officials from other CA4 ambassadors.

Canadian officials informed the other three Central American states in November 2010 about plans to pursue bilateral trade talks with Honduras, said a displeased Nicaraguan Ambassador Francisco Obadiah Campbell Hooker in an interview from Washington on Feb. 14. "I don't know whether the move came from Honduras or not, but what we do know is that we were negotiating as a bloc and to our surprise, Canada decided it would sign off, really, with Honduras," he said. "We feel this is negative for the strengthening of the Central American integration process."

But Guatemalan Ambassador Georges de la Roche, the dean of the Central American ambassadors, described the bilateral talks between Canada and Honduras as "nothing unusual." "If a country within multilateral negotiations finds more cohesion or level ground with one country, it's not out of the normal for that country to go ahead with the other country on a bilateral basis," Mr. de la Roche said.

The other three countries are still holding meetings, both as a group and bilaterally, he added. Caitlin Workman, spokesperson at the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, also wrote in an email that "Canada's negotiations with Guatemala, Nicaragua and El Salvador are continuing." They have found common ground, while we are still looking for that common ground and we will find it," Mr. de la Roche said of Honduras and Canada.

LOOKING FOR LEGITIMACY

Carlo Dade, executive director of the Canadian Foundation of the Americas, said that the understanding in the region is that Nicaragua, which a member of the ALBA bloc, is in fact the reason the talks have stalled. "One key issue with free trade agreements is that you can only dance with someone who wants to dance," Mr. Dade said. "If a country like Honduras steps up and says 'we are serious and we will put resources in this,' then it makes sense to prioritize this country."

Furthermore, in light of the recent political crisis in Honduras, the move is not surprising, Mr. Dade said. "It would be part of an attempt of Honduras to get back on the political map after the situation there," he said. Honduras became the focal point of the ideological battle that has erupted in the hemisphere over the last decade when leftist president Manuel Zelaya, who was threatening to run for an unconstitutional third term, was removed in coup d'état in 2009.

[Rights Action correction: Shame on Anca Gurzu who here repeats, unquestioningly, the often-repeated lie, used to 'legitimize' the brutal military coup, that President Zelaya was trying to run again for the presidency. This was false in 2009, and remains so today. Furthermore, president Zeyala was in his first term in office, which is all the Honduran constitution permits.]

After months of international efforts to bring stability back to the Central American country, the political crisis drew to a close after elections that led to the inauguration of Porfirio Lobo as the new Honduran president in January, bringing a centre-right conservative administration to power. However, several leftist countries have refused to recognize Mr. Lobo's government.

[Rights Action clarification: Anca Gurzu uses and manipulates the word "leftist" in his article to cast dispersion on certain governments. The vast majority of Latin American governments do not recognize the government of Honduras. Honduras has not been re-admitted to the Organization of American States. Moreover, the United Nations, the Organization of American States and most governments of Latin America do not accept the legitimacy of the November 2009 "elections".]

The search for greater political legitimacy is probably Honduras's key driving factor in pursuing bilateral trade talks with Canada, said Philip Oxhorn, director of the Institute for the Study of International Development at McGill University. "Since the coup d'état and the controversial election, Honduras has been isolated by most of Latin America, so they are looking for allies," he said. "They would gain the most from reaching an agreement with Canada, it would grant them more legitimacy from Latin American."

At the same time, Canada is signalling the legitimacy of the Honduran government by holding these talks, said Mr. Oxhorn, who researches Latin American comparative politics. "It's clear that Canada would know that this is how it would be perceived and would understand that's one of the things Honduras would want and would inevitably get," he said. "If Canada wants any kind of free trade agreement with [the CA4], this is the easiest kind for them to negotiate." Like Mr. Dade, Mr. Oxhorn said the most likely partner to "have dragged its feet" in the CA4 trade talks is Nicaragua.

But Ambassador Campbell said Nicaragua is interested in obtaining greater access to the Canadian market, especially through exports of textiles and beef products, and also pointed out Canadian companies are already investing in Nicaragua, especially in the fields of mining and energy.

According to Ms. Workman, bilateral trade with Honduras more than doubled in the last decade. In 2010, Honduras was the second largest recipient of Canadian exports among the Central American Four countries. Exports totalled $40.7 million in 2010.

Canada appears to have the strongest trade ties with Guatemala: exports totalled $90.8 million last year, down from $112 million in 2009, while exports to El Salvador and Nicaragua stood at $36.2 million and $40 million respectively in 2010.

Key Canadian interests in Central America include telecommunications, goods and services, environmental equipment and services, value-added processed foods, automotive goods, and construction equipment, and services, according to the government.

[Rights Action observation: Interestingly Embassy Magazine does not mention extensive Canadian mining interests throughout Central America.]

"A free trade agreement with Honduras will open a new market for Canadian exporters and level the playing field for Canadian businesses against competitors who already have or are seeking preferential access to the Honduran market," Ms. Workman wrote in an email.

Mr. Campbell said he has not heard about any of the other CA4 countries wanting to cancel negotiations. "But I would imagine that everyone is looking at their options and analyzing the implications and consequences taken with respect to Honduras," he said.

[By Anca Gurzu, agurzu@embassymag.ca, http://embassymag.ca/page/printpage/honduras-02-16-2011]

* * *

CANADIAN GOVERNMENT OFFICIALS:

Please send letters of concern to your own member of parliament, and to other government officials:

Lawrence Cannon, Minister of Foreign Affairs

509-S Centre Block, House of Commons, Ottawa, ON, K1A 0A6

cannol@parl.gc.ca

Dean Allison

163 Confederation Building, House of Commons

Ottawa, ON K1A 0A6

Tel: 613-995-2772

Allison.D@parl.gc.ca

Carmen DePape (Clerk of the Committee) - Ask Ms. DePape to distribute your letter to all Committee Members:

Sixth Floor, 131 Queen St., House of Commons

Ottawa ON K1A 0A6

FAAE@parl.gc.ca

INTERNATIONAL TRADE MINISTER

Peter Van Loan

Room 157, East Block

Ottawa, Ontario, K1A 0A6

Tel: 613-996-7752

vanloan.p@parl.gc.ca

CANADIAN EMBASSY FOR HONDURAS

Canadian Consulate in Honduras

PO Box 3552, Tegucigalpa, Honduras

Tel: (504) 2232-4551

tglpa@international.gc.ca

Canadian Embassy in Costa Rica (For Business and Commercial Affairs & where Honduran Ambassador is based)

Attn: Cameron MacKay (Canadian Ambassador)

PO Box: 351-1007, Centro Colón, San José, Costa Rica

Tel: (506) 2242-4400

sjcra@international.gc.ca

* * * * * * *

TAX-DEDUCTIBLE DONATIONS

To make a tax-deductible donation for community based organizations in Honduras' pro-democracy movement working to eradicate poverty and exploitation and to re-found their nation-state, make check payable to "Rights Action" and mail to:

UNITED STATES: Box 50887, Washington DC, 20091-0887

CANADA: 552 - 351 Queen St. E, Toronto ON, M5A-1T8

CREDIT-CARD DONATIONS: http://rightsaction.org/contributions.htm; or go to: www.rightsaction.org. (Credit card donations can be done anonymously)

FOR DONATION OF STOCK: contact info@rightsaction.org. (Stock donations can be done anonymously - have your stockbroker contact info@rightsaction.org)

Rights Action's EDUCATION OPPORTUNITIES & MATERIALS

EDUCATIONAL DELEGATIONS

TO HONDURAS (MARCH 19-27): "HONDURAN PEOPLE'S PRO-DEMOCRACY MOVEMENT, in resistance to the post-military coup regime". CONTACT: Karen Spring (spring.kj@gmail.com)

TO GUATEMALA (APRIL 17-23): "INDIGENOUS COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT, ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE & HUMAN RIGHTS * versus * MINING COMPANIES & IMPUNITY". CONTACT: Grahame Russell (info@rightsaction.org, 860-352-2448)

TO HONDURAS (MAY 14-22): "HONDURAN PEOPLE'S PRO-DEMOCRACY MOVEMENT, in resistance to the post-military coup regime". CONTACT: Karen Spring (spring.kj@gmail.com)

TO HONDURAS (JUNE 28 - JULY 5): The Alliance for Global Justice is organizing a delegation to Honduras. We'll be hosted by the FNRP and led on the ground by Rights Action's Karen Spring. CONTACT: AFGJ@AFGJ.org, 202-544-9355 x1

SPEAKING TOURS

IN USA (MARCH-APRIL 2011): "FROM CONQUEST TO COUP - INDIGENOUS & AFRODESCENDENT PEOPLES IN HONDURAS: 519 Years in Resistance to the Conquest, 580 Days (as of January 21, 2011) in Resistance to the Military Coup". Rights Action announces two speaking tours of representatives from Honduran Indigenous and Afro-descendent (Garifuna) organizations - Ofraneh & Copinh. CONTACT: Annie Bird (annie@rightsaction.org, 202-783-1123)

SPEAKERS

On an on-going basis, Annie Bird & Grahame Russell (Rights Action co-directors since 1995) are available for speaking engagements in Canada and USA, showing slides and documentaries, and speaking about:

* the pro-democracy, anti-military coup movement in Honduras, and its implications for the Americas, south, central and north

* indigenous and community resistance to environmental and health harms and other human rights violations caused by gold and nickel mining (Goldcorp Inc. in Guatemala & Honduras; HudBay Minerals in Guatemala; Pacific Rim in El Salvador), hydro-electric dams (the infamous Chixoy dam in Guatemala; the pending Xalala dam in Guatemala) and other mega-"development" businesses

* on-going struggles in Guatemala to achieve justice for the genocide, massacres and disappearances of the 1970s, 80s and 90s

* widespread community-based work and struggle for "another world is possible and necessary"

CONTACT: Grahame Russell (info@rightsaction.org, 860-352-2448); Annie Bird (annie@rightsaction.org, 202-783-1123)

STUFF FOR SALE

FILM: "All That Glitters Is Not Gold"

"All That Glitters Isn't Gold" (60 minutes), by Steven Schnoor, documents the stories and resistance of community members residing near and harmed by Goldcorp's "San Martin" open-pit, cyanide-leaching gold mine in Honduras' Siria Valley. CONTACT: info@rightsaction.org

FILM: "THE BUSINESS OF GOLD in Guatemala: Tale of a Conflict Foretold"

"The Business of Gold in Guatemala" (50 minutes), by Gregory Lassalle, documents the struggle and resistance of the Mayan-Mam people of San Miguel Ixtahuacan against the Canadian company Goldcorp Inc, and the harms and violations caused by its "Marlin" open-pit, cyanide-leaching mine. CONTACT: info@rightsaction.org

BOOKS: "CODE Z59.5: There Is Only One People Here" & "The Never Ending"

"Code Z59.5" (2010) and "The Never Ending" (1993), by Grahame Russell, are self-published books of diary excerpts (comments, facts, quotes, stories, etc.) from the 1990s and 2000s, related to the author's work in Central America, Mexico and North America, in defense of human rights, in promotion of a caring and just global economic development model. CONTACT: Grahame Russell (info@rightsaction.org, 860-352-2448)

BOOKS: "RECOVERING OUR HISTORICAL MEMORY" & "OUR CULTURE IS OUR RESISTANCE"

"Recovering Our Historical Memory", a photography-based book by Jonathan Moller, is about Guatemalan populations displaced by the conflict. It is a visual testimony to Guatemalans working for truth, memory & justice, and for reconciliation for the victims of the violence. "Our Culture is Our Resistance", by Jonathan Moller - It is said that the bones of the dead tell no lies. In Guatemala, every clandestine cemetery that is dug up, every bone that is recovered from Mother Earth speaks of the people who were massacred; the bones speak of crimes against humanity, of genocide committed by the Army against the indigenous population. The photographs speak of this and they also show the face of life, hope, redemption, and demands for change. CONTACT: Katy Troyer (katytroyer@gmail.com) or Jonathan Moller (jonas@igc.org)

* * * * * * *

* Please re-publish this information, citing author and source

* To get on/ off RA's listserv: www.rightsaction.org

* More info: info@rightsaction.org

the new wikileaks location

2010-12-03T13:51:00.003-06:00

Wikileaks can now be found here:

An email to Francis Scarpaleggia

2010-11-20T11:24:00.002-06:00

Hello,

I am not certain whether or not I have written to you before regarding Bill C-49 specifically. I am very worried about it, particularly because of stories like this one from the gay and lesbian news: http://www.xtra.ca/public/National/Human_smuggling_bill_no_help_to_queer_refugees-9456.aspx

So, whether or not I already petitioned you, this is such a serious situation that it warrants my writing to you again.

It is not illegal for people to do whatever it takes to escape the violence of systemic and state-sanctioned oppression. People have to sneak out of places secretly, often because their lives are in danger! Canada must not treat refugees as if they are criminals. Please take whatever action you can to support a more welcoming process for people who escape to Canada!

I am afraid that Bill C-49 may fall short of Canada’s international human rights and refugee protection obligations and will result in serious violations of the rights of refugees and migrants. The Bill must be withdrawn by the government or defeated at Second Reading. Similar legislative reforms should only be reintroduced if consistent with Canada's international human rights and refugee protection obligations.

Sincerely and Respectfully,

Two things

2010-11-12T08:11:00.002-06:00

How long has it been since I posted two things on one day?!

Here is the link to the David Suzuki Foundation's petition, to "Help prevent an oil spill disaster in the Gulf of St. Lawrence":

http://action.davidsuzuki.org/st-lawrence

"The Gulf of St. Lawrence is a unique ecosystem that sustains several coastline communities and rich biodiversity. Tell the federal government to protect the Gulf of St. Lawrence from oil and gas development and prevent disastrous spills."

AND

This article helped me understand why the mining ethics bill was defeated in the Canadian Parliament:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/mining-industry-lobbied-nine-of-24-mps-who-helped-kill-ethics-bill/article1795614/

Petition to Ban Hydraulic Fracturation in Nova Scotia

2010-11-09T16:58:00.000-06:00

I highly recommend this petition:

http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/banfrackingnovascotia/

Glyphosate-Based Herbicides Produce Teratogenic Effects on Vertebrates by Impairing Retinoic Acid Signaling

2010-10-19T13:35:00.002-05:00

by Alejandra Paganelli, Victoria Gnazzo, Helena Acosta, Silvia L. Lopez, and Andres E. Carrasco

here's the link to the pdf: http://pubs.acs.org/doi/pdf/10.1021/tx1001749

... tell me if you can access that or not. Or not.

Dear Darrell Dexter,

2010-10-04T16:52:00.000-05:00

I am given to understand that there are only 11 days before the Government of Nova Scotia begins to actively encourage the slaughter of coyotes for their pelts. I hope I am mistaken, I hope that by the time this message reaches you, the proposal will no longer be considered worthy of any kind of serious consideration. Have you not heard any coherent counter-arguments? How about the fact that basing any policy on instigating an animal's mistrust and fear of humans is purely monstrous? This, at a time when human beings are invading every remote corner of Nova Scotia with clear cutting and open surface mining!The government's plan does not belong as part of a healthy or good relationship with non-humans, it could not be considered as part of a healthy, necessary, eco-centric paradigm. The proposed cull is the kind of idea that inhabited the empty and rotten skulls of our poor misguided forefathers.Do you seriously believe the coyotes to be at fault in these stories of “attacks”? Haven't you considered how the human beings are the perpetrators of misbehavior? Your reaction, and the documentation that your office has circulated, seems hysterical – completely unreasonable - to the extreme. You ought to publicly retract your position, because this plan can only embarrass you and your office in the future.Your reply letter refers firstly to “experts in wildlife management agencies in other jurisdictions”. In such case, perhaps you can reveal to me where in North America has a cull of coyotes proven to be effective in the control of the animals? Aren't you aware that programs of culling, everywhere that such projects have been undertaken, have resulted in increased litter sizes and overall population increase? It is a strategy that other places have long ago abandoned, owing to its dismal failure. You refer to “aggression towards humans by all potentially dangerous wildlife” and, as such, I need to suggest that your office study the Animal Behaviour literature. I insist that many of these encounters are not the product of animal aggression, at all, but the product of ignorant and bumbling human beings.You office distributed a form letter which reads “The Province of Nova Scotia has taken the aggressive coyote situation seriously, and considered many options for addressing this matter” How can you say that you have “considered” anything? Culls have never worked! It seems to me that you have done nothing but listen to the braying of gun and hunting advocates and lobbyists. Your response letter particularly alarmed me, given how noteably abnormal Nova Scotian coyotes are, compared to their less wolf-like cousins in the prairies, if indeed you intend to investigate all reports of “overly bold, or other abnormal behaviours”! Please note, that would include all behaviours of Nova Scotian coyotes. They are special, unique in the world, new, and intelligent creatures. They are strong and they are survivors. Human beings need to study and be educated on how to interact intelligently with them.You wrote also that you “will institute a $20 incentive for every coyote pelt sent to market by fur harvesters during the regular trapping season.” And that's really what it's all about, isn't it? They will pay you for licenses, and you will pay them for pelts. I see NO science behind the regulation of hunting in Nova Scotia. (Just as the government of Newfoundland perused none of the science while instituting decisions that produced the collapse of the cod fishery.)As long as you are making decisions based on political reasons, and not scientific reasons, you may as well stop the charade that anything you do is based on Reason. The decisions of your office are not based on Reason. They are based on petty profits. You are only fuelling public hysteria, and distancing people from the Earth, which they must now at least begin to appreciate, study, and understand. I have no doubt that you can only be successful at increasing “the rate of negative experiences/ interactions for coyotes with humans,” and furthermore, I think that that is the most disgusting, sickening reason for a policy that I have ever heard.

Pakistan Floods

2010-08-11T16:27:00.001-05:00

From Kyla Pasha

We're trying to gather a relief shipment for flood affected people from Kot Addu. A camp has been established by a local organization, Hirrak (www.hirrak.org) to house and feed 3-4,000 people. We'll be sending what we can gather and buy from Lahore in the next two days. They urgently need tents, foodstuffs and clothing. Please contact me (0300-819-0098) or Sarah Suhail (0321-846-4729) if you can help.

Friends abroad, this is a way to donate money which will make a direct impact without the overheads of an international ngo/organization. Please contact directly if you'd like to donate from abroad. There will be a continuing need for many months to come.

Montrealers or other people in North America. Contact indu_vashist@hotmail.com for sending money from here.

Some things you need to see re: seals on Sable Island

2010-07-12T22:00:00.003-05:00

These were just brought to my attention:

http://www.thecoast.ca/RealityBites/archives/2010/05/26/how-to-kill-220000-seals-on-sable-island-the-dfo-plan

http://www.thecoast.ca/halifax/sable-islands-cod-killer/Content?oid=1708783

You see, as I don't live in Nova Scotia anymore, I keep up to date on the news there, but there's a bit of a time lag :S

When you're finished reading, you must check out my favourite website: http://www.greenhorsesociety.com/

The G20 Legal Defence Fund Needs Your Help!

2010-07-05T19:23:00.002-05:00

by movementdefence

We need donations to support those arrested at the G20. You can support the detainees’ legal costs and help alleviate some of the other costs of navigating the court system, and help us keep organizing. We will be distributing the funds to those with the most need, prioritizing those still in custody on serious charges.

From June 25-27, elites from the world’s most powerful economies met in Huntsville and Toronto to draft policies to further exploit the environment and people, bolstering the systems that sustain colonialism, wars and displacement. Tens of thousands of people mobilized in a historic weeklong convergence in opposition to these policies.

Daily demonstrations highlighted struggles for Indigenous sovereignty; environmental justice; migrant justice; an end to war and occupation; community control over resources; gender justice; and queer and disability rights.

Over $1.2 billion was spent on security, the most in G20 summit history, which paid for a dizzying array of weaponry and nearly 20,000 police—plus a security fence that turned Toronto into a fortress to host a select few and a police state to terrorize the rest of us.

Nearly 1,000 people, protesters and bystanders alike, were detained—the largest mass arrests in Canadian history. They were held for long periods in makeshift cages in deplorable conditions, most without timely access to legal counsel. Many had been simply caught up in massive police sweeps of public areas. Others were woken at gunpoint while sleeping. Others were picked up at their homes. Some of those arrested are still in custody. Fifteen face serious charges. Many of these are long-time community organizers.

We need to support all of those arrested during the G20 summit. We must continue to mobilize and build greater solidarity among our communities. An important part of this will be supporting our courageous allies still in detention.
To donate via PayPal go to: g20.torontomobilize.org (link is on right hand side). Make sure to put 'G20 legal defence' in the "Add special instructions for the Merchant" section.

Transfer funds or send a cheque c/o OPIRG York:transit number 00646institution number 842account number 3542240

Cheques (payable to OPIRG York, with 'G20 legal defence' on the subject line) can be mailed to:Toronto Community Mobilization Network360A Bloor Street WPO Box 68557Toronto, ON M5S 1X0

Thank you for your help. Together we will create a just world that places people and the environment before the profits of corporations and the political elite.

In solidarity,
Toronto Community Mobilization Network

From: William.Blair@torontopolice.on.ca

2010-06-28T09:01:00.009-05:00

Sent: June 27, 2010 8:15 PM
To: Timothy Schwinghamer
Subject: Re: 650 good people arrested

Criminals must be held accountable for their actions.

William Blair
Chief of Police
Toronto Police Service

Timothy Schwinghamer
To "william.blair@torontopolice.on.ca"
2010.06.27 19:55
Subject 650 good people arrested

[The actual real email referred to only 650 people arrested, but at the time I sent it, in fact approximately 850 were being detained. I cut and pasted a little to make this letter from John Hilary and the Movement Defence Committee, and others.]

Dear William Blair,

On the 13th and 14th of June 2009, 150 anti-regime protesters were arrested in raids in Iran, while another 200 were arrested in protests. In 2 days, 350 arrests in the context of people actually trying to overthrow the government.

In Toronto in the past 48 hours, approximately 650 people have been arrested now, in raids and protests with the stated goal of opposing the government's agenda on a particular question.

As an invitation-only club whose membership was literally drawn up on the back of an envelope, the G20 never laid any claim to legitimacy. Now it is also in danger of losing any credibility as a forum for global economic governance. Its failure to address any of the structural problems that caused the financial and economic crises of the past three years has certainly not gone unnoticed in Toronto, let alone its complete refusal to deal with the challenge of climate change.

You appear to have lost control of your ‘prisoner processing center’, denying arrestees meaningful and timely access to counsel while beating and arresting those peacefully protesting their detention outside.

Despite assurances to the contrary, only a handful of people have been released, including those held for many hours without charge. Arrestees are given incorrect information about the bail process they will be subjected to, and friends and family members gather hours early at the courthouse, located far from the city center and inaccessible via transit. Lawyers calling in are told that there is no one available to make decisions, or wait for hours at the detention centre, only to be denied access to their clients. A lot of people are in custody, and of course the vast majority of any charges will disappear, yet the cell doors remain shut.

You have to make this stop. Let everybody go, especially Amanda Hiscocks and Leah Henderson, who are good young women. They defend social justice and the environment all the time, they've made protecting the Earth and the poor their life. Please do not make any of the anti-G20 protesters pay bail.

Sincerely and Respectfully,

Dear Francis Scarpaleggia,

2010-06-26T17:08:00.003-05:00

I am one of the many people who are bitterly disappointed by the measure enacted by the Ontario government allowing for a police and guards to search, ID and arrest without cause. Ontario’s Public Works Protection Act (PWPA) seems to violate the people's constitutional rights. This is serious and sinister.

On June 2nd, 2010, the Ontario provincial government cabinet met secretly to pass an act which allows the police to arrest anyone who refuses to identify themselves or agree to a police search at the G20. The PWPA was not debated in the legislature, nor was it made public knowledge until now, several weeks after it passed.

Please denounce this type of secretive and anti-democratic policy.

Sincerely and Respectfully,

[me]

If you don't know what the G20 is, well, Naomi Klein recommended this article:

Making both ends meet

John Ibbitson, Tara Perkins.
The Globe and Mail. Toronto, Ont.: Jun 19, 2010. pg. F.1
2010 CTVglobemedia Publishing Inc. All Rights Reserved.

When the G20 gathers in Toronto next week, it will be a kind of homecoming: The expanded group of leaders from Western and developing nations might never have existed, and certainly not in its current form, without a long, determined push from Canada. For the first time, John Ibbitson and Tara Perkins go behind the scenes of a dramatic diplomatic success story

Paul Martin sat in Lawrence Summers' spacious office in the Greek-columned U.S. Treasury building in Washington, searching in vain for a piece of paper. With none in sight, the two men grabbed a brown manila envelope, put it on the table between them, and began sketching the framework of a new world order.

It was April 27, 1999. For the past five years, the global economy had shuddered under a string of massive debt defaults - first in Mexico, and then in Southeast Asia and Russia.

In each case, Western leaders and bankers responded by prescribing harsh fixes, throwing one developing economy after another into recession.

As crisis followed crisis, Mr. Martin, then Canada's finance minister, became convinced that major developing nations had to be given a voice - not just an ultimatum - when it came to discussing their place in the global economy. But in the capitals of Europe and the corridors of Washington, the answer was always the same: It's our club, and there are no vacancies.

Or at least it was the same answer until that April day when Mr. Martin visited Mr. Summers, then Bill Clinton's nominee for treasury secretary, to press his case. He argued that they couldn't keep imposing solutions on developing countries. The G7 had to be expanded - at least at the finance-ministers' level.

Mr. Summers quickly agreed. But that was the simple part. Much thornier was the issue of who would be admitted to the club.

With the manila envelope in hand, the two began jotting down countries. China, India, Brazil, Mexico - these were obvious choices. So was South Africa, the biggest economy on its continent. But who else?

"I felt very strongly that it had to be the regional powers," recalls Mr. Martin. "Larry felt that, and then he also had geopolitical concerns. I would love to say we sat down and ran the numbers on whose GDP was bigger, but we didn't. We both had a pretty good perspective on where things lay. And you didn't have to have the statistics to know which country was pretty important."

Thailand was the nexus of the Asian banking crisis, but Indonesia was more influential in the region. Indonesia in; Thailand out. Chile was tempting, because it was democratic and well-run, but Argentina was a bigger player. Argentina got the seat. Saudi Arabia was strategically important and a good friend of the United States. The Saudis would get an invite.

So it went until they had compiled a working list of roughly 20 countries - literally, a back-of-the-envelope blueprint for what would become, today, the most powerful forum on economic and political matters in the world: the G20.

When the G20 convenes in Toronto on June 26, it will mark the culmination of a long, and unlikely story, one that began with an annual gathering of finance ministers and evolved into a semi-annual meeting of world leaders from 19 nations (yes, not 20 - see sidebar for the inside story). Collectively, they represent 70 per cent of the global population and 90 per cent of the global GDP.

The G20 enters its second decade with enormous potential but many unanswered questions. The world will watch as these leaders try to carry on the task of shepherding a fragile economic recovery: As a group, they have the power, but can they wield it?

Still, the meeting this month is only possible because a Canadian finance minister convinced leaders of the G7 consortium of developed nations to become a larger, more inclusive group. There has never been a proper accounting of how the G20 came to be: the struggles that led to its birth; the early failure of Paul Martin to convert it from a finance ministers' club into a leaders' forum; and then the sudden recognition, at the height of an economic crisis, that Mr. Martin's idea was one whose time had come.

Present at the creation

In May of 1998, Mr. Martin hosted a dinner for Anwar Ibrahim, because he thought Malaysia's finance minister had something vital to say. The soft- and plain-spoken man's message galvanized the senior figures in Finance, the Prime Minister's Office and the Privy Council Office who were in the room.

The lessons, rules and prescriptions that applied to many developed nations, he told them, were not necessarily applicable to the developing world. How could Malaysia raise taxes, as the International Monetary Fund was demanding, when the country had only just managed to create a tax system, and no one would be able to pay the taxes the West was demanding?

"It was simple stuff, but it made you realize that you really need to understand these people and have them at the table and understand what is going on in their economy," remembers Terrie O'Leary, who was Mr. Martin's chief of staff at the time. Creating that kind of understanding became, for Mr. Martin, a crusade.

Meanwhile, contagion was spreading throughout global markets. The shocks of the Mexican peso crisis sucked Argentina and Brazil into its wake. The Asian financial crisis stretched from Thailand to South Korea. And Russia's ruble crisis threatened to disrupt the increasingly intertwined economies of Europe and the United States.

"It was clear that the plain, ordinary regulatory apparatus that we had internationally was not working very well," recalls David Dodge, who was Mr. Martin's deputy at Finance, and later governor of the Bank of Canada.

Yet change, at first, was tentative. At meetings of the G8 (which is what the G7, a gathering of finance ministers, becomes when it's a meeting of leaders and Russia joins in), developing-world leaders were invited to attend as guests.

Along with Mr. Martin, Gordon Brown, then Britain's Chancellor of the Exchequer, was a strong proponent of giving the emerging nations a voice. There were two obvious ways: Reform the International Monetary Fund, and expand the G7/G8. They decided to split the jobs.

The British would concentrate on the notoriously unwieldy IMF. "It was too formal, there were too many people," recalls Gordon Thiessen, who was Governor of the Bank of Canada through the currency crisis and the forming of the G20. At a typical IMF meeting, "There must have been 500 people in the room. ...There used to be little wars about who was going to get chairs."

Canada, meanwhile, would train its efforts on the G7/G8.

"What you had was really very Eurocentric ... and it didn't make a lot of sense," says Robert Rubin, who was Mr. Clinton's treasury secretary before Mr. Summers. Five of the eight members were European: Germany, Great Britain, France, Italy and Russia, balanced by the United States, Japan and Canada.

Negotiations over the G20 pitted the Anglosphere nations against the Continent. The Germans and the French, in particular, feared that additional members would dilute their influence on the world stage.

"The French were so annoyed," recalls Ian Bennett, now president of the Royal Canadian Mint, but then an associate deputy minister, who did much of the legwork in establishing the forum. "They hated it."

But deteriorating economic conditions overpowered the dissent. On Sept. 25, 1999, just five months after Mr. Martin and Mr. Summers sketched out their vision of an expanded group of finance ministers, the G20 was officially unveiled - with Mr. Martin as the inaugural chair.

Mr. Rubin argues that the Americans were as committed to the idea of the G20 as Canada was, though he describes Mr. Martin as a "very strong voice." But there was an important reason for handing the reins to Canada: The U.S. didn't want to be seen as dictating to the Europeans.

"There was a sense that this would be better if it wasn't a completely American initiative," says Mr. Thiessen. "So Paul became the guy who was front and centre, and Canada more generally, in organizing this."

Canada, of course, had its own stake: This nation entered the G7 in 1976 more or less by accident - the Europeans wanted to add Italy, and the Americans agreed on the condition that Canada be admitted as well. But by the late 1990s, if any country was bumped out to make way for China or India, Canada could be among the first to go. With the G20, the country was firmly anchored, and Canada's role in helping forge it gave it special prominence.

But along with that status, Mr. Martin also inherited the sensitive, and often tortuous, task of helping guide the final selection of inductees. There were howls from some countries that were not invited, especially, of course, in Europe.

"If you give more to some people, somebody has to give something up," explains Mr. Rubin. "But that didn't sit so well, in particular with some of the smaller countries."

Jim Peterson, who was then a secretary of state under Mr. Martin, recalls walking into the finance minister's office and hearing him yell down the telephone: "Once and for all, Holland is not getting on the G20, and that's all there is to it!"

Breakthrough in Montreal

To placate the chagrined Europeans, the first meeting of the G20 finance ministers took place in Berlin in December, 1999. The ministers talked about exchange rates, the impact of government debt on national economies, and the mixed promise of globalization, but things went badly - Germans and Canadians struggled over who was really in control, and the meeting was awkward and inconclusive.

Part of the problem was that the new arrivals had been accustomed to sending large delegations to international gatherings, with outcomes scripted in advance. But Mr. Martin wanted a more informal and effective environment, in which only finance ministers, deputy finance ministers and governors of central banks would be allowed in the room.

When it came Canada's turn to host the G20 ministers in Montreal in 2000, Mr. Martin hatched a scheme. First, he phoned each of his Western counterparts with a blunt message: This would not be a meeting of the G7 ministers and some guests. Everyone would have an equal seat at the table: "We're now the G20, period," he repeated over and over. "There is no G7 at this meeting."

Then he called Mr. Summers and South Africa's finance minister, Trevor Manuel, to warn them he was going to talk about agriculture. Africa and the U.S. were (and still are) at odds over agricultural exports. The Americans wanted the Africans to drop tariff barriers to their manufactured goods, yet refused to drop tariffs against African agricultural imports.

"I said: 'Guys, I'm going to raise the issue of agriculture,'" Mr. Martin recalls. "'I would like you guys to really have at each other.' And they did, magnificently. Manuel was terrific, and so was Larry, and that really set the tone. All of a sudden there were no-holds-barred discussions."

Mr. Summers, who is now Barack Obama's Director of the National Economic Council, remembers that debate. "Paul really did force, as chair, the acknowledgment of elephants in rooms," he says. "He was very good that way."

"That was Paul Martin's great success," agrees Mr. Thiessen. "We actually had ... debates going across the table. It was one of the best international meetings I was ever at."

Canada further strengthened its role by hosting the third meeting in November of 2001. India had been supposed to play host, but in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, no one wanted to fly that far; the Americans refused to go overseas at all. So the club met in Ottawa, where the ministers developed an action plan to combat the financing of terrorist organizations - something the smaller group of developed countries could never have done on their own. The G20's legitimacy grew.

Gradually, the G8 leaders began to concede, at least implicitly, that their own small club was becoming unfashionable. At Evian in 2003, French President Jacques Chirac invited 11 Third World nations to discuss development.

James Wolfensohn, who was then the head of the World Bank, was there, and recalls a moment that presaged a changing of the guard, involving Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil.

"President Lula, in a very charming way, said: 'Listen, you guys, it's very good of you to invite us here. But maybe you should hold next year's meeting in Rio, so that you can get used to the fact that in five or 10 years time, four or five of you are not going to be here.'"

'I go to too many meetings already'

By 2004, when Mr. Martin became prime minister, he wanted the G20 to become more than a forum for finance ministers to co-ordinate support for the global economy. He wanted to expand it, on the model of the G8, to include the leaders of developing countries. The new gathering would supplement, not replace, the G8. It could meet regularly or on an ad-hoc basis. It could be based on the G20, or there could be additions or deletions.

Countries outside the G8, not surprisingly, were eager from the start. On Dec. 11, 2003, the day before he was sworn in as prime minister, Mr. Martin met in Ottawa with Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao. In January, 2005, Mr. Martin visited India to discuss the idea with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, who had complained publicly about being invited to attend G8 meetings like a supplicant before his betters. Brazil's Mr. da Silva had echoed the protest.

But within the G8, it was another story. Its supporters pointed out that the club had been doing a pretty good job of containing inflation, managing exchange rates and essentially guiding the global economy for more than two decades.

Mr. Martin recalls that when he dined with Junichiro Koizumi in Tokyo two days prior to his India visit, the Japanese prime minister's view was, "Okay, I will go along with this, but let's do it for one meeting and we'll see if it works."

The British were onside, but the French preferred a G13 that would include only China, India, Brazil, Mexico and South Africa.

Mr. Martin pointed out that this would leave the Muslim world outside the door.

As for the Americans? "I go to too many meetings already," George W. Bush reportedly told Mr. Martin, though Mr. Martin himself doesn't recall that statement.

Indeed, even Mr. Martin felt jet-lagged, shuttling between APEC and the G8 and the UN General Assembly and the Commonwealth and the various hemispheric forums. But Mr. Wolfensohn, the former World Bank head, maintains that "meeting fatigue" was a red herring. The G8 members, apart from Britain's Gordon Brown, simply didn't want to let anyone else in.

"They didn't mind getting advice from 20 finance ministers," he says, "but if you broadened that to include 20 leaders, that was a different proposition."

With Mr. Martin himself increasingly distracted by domestic political alarms, hopes for a G20 leaders' forum withered. But after his defeat at the hands of Stephen Harper in January of 2006, Mr. Martin revived the campaign, relentlessly raising the subject in speeches and in foreign meetings. To some, he was becoming tiresome.

"With this obsession over the [G20], he's starting to turn into the tedious drunk at the global village tavern, rattling on about the glory days when he and Larry Summers saved the world economy from near-ruin," an Ottawa Citizen columnist wrote on Nov. 1, 2008. "He needs to give [it] a rest."

Two weeks later, the G20 summit was born.

Riders on the storm

November, 2008: Investment banks were failing or being bailed out throughout the United States and Europe. Markets were in free fall and home foreclosures skyrocketing. Credit was paralyzed because no bank trusted the survival odds of any other bank. Businesses couldn't get loans. The world was in clear and present danger of plunging into a depression that could rival the Great one.

George W. Bush was the lamest of lame-duck presidents, marking time until the inauguration of Barack Obama, yet he had to act if the American economy were to be rescued and the global one preserved. He needed to convene a meeting of world leaders, to co-ordinate a global response to the crisis. But who should he invite? Luckily, a ready-made solution was sitting on the shelf: Paul Martin's G20.

"If you didn't have that model, it probably would have been very difficult," Robert Rubin believes. "Because you needed to get [world leaders] together very quickly."

The first expanded G20 summit - one that gathered political leaders, not merely finance ministers - convened in Washington on Nov. 15, 2008, leading to agreement on "closer macroeconomic co-operation" - which meant that every country in the G20 would pump billions (in some cases, hundreds of billions) of dollars into their economies, while guaranteeing the solvency of their banks.

It worked. There was no new Great Depression, and some countries - the big emerging ones, especially - even managed to avoid a recession. The meeting was so successful that G20 leaders convened again in London and in Pittsburgh in 2009. In Pittsburgh, the leaders "designated the G20 to be the premier forum for our international economic cooperation," Bye-bye, G8.

Not overnight, of course. While many, including Mr. Manuel, who is still a minister in the South African government, believe that "the club is fading," others still question the G20's legitimacy. After all, none of the world's other nations authorized it to speak for them. Yet no other organization properly recognizes the emerging economies that are, in many cases, larger and healthier on some levels than those of the old powers. Mr. Wolfensohn predicts the G20 will grow in strength with every passing year.

Of course, with this increase in influence, there's also an increasing struggle for power within the group itself. Observers expect some fault lines to sharpen in Toronto next week.

Nevertheless, Mr. Summers' voice is tinged with pride when he recalls the day George W. Bush called the leaders of the G20 to Washington: "I showed my wife and my kids - I still had a G20 windbreaker and a little G20 carrying case from Paul's meeting in Montreal," he recalls.

"And I said: 'I was part of starting this, along with Paul Martin, and look what's happened to it now.'"

John Ibbitson is The Globe and Mail's Ottawa bureau chief. Tara Perkins is the Financial Services reporter for Report on Business.

***

Welcome to the G20 - seating for 19

The G20 is actually misnamed, and for a reason: to keep outsiders outside.

In the weeks leading up to the first summit in 1999, the fate of two countries on the G20 list became increasingly uncertain.

"Indonesia was given a place in the beginning but it wasn't actually issued an invitation until they got rid of Suharto," explains John Kirton, a political scientist at the University of Toronto who is writing a book on how the G20 works. Ultimately, the Indonesian dictator was pushed aside, a move Prof. Kirton suggests the G20 helped bring about. He believes Korea's inclusion in the G20 helped entrench democratic reforms there as well.

Nigeria was not so lucky. Its initial invitation was delayed until the political situation there stabilized.

"By the time they got to be democratically good enough, France had gotten a view that the second African should be Egypt," says Prof. Kirton. "So from the beginning, there was this missing second seat for Africa, which still has not been cashed in - in part because the Africans themselves can't come to consensus on who it should be."

Which is why the G20 actually includes only 19 countries. (In the end, the European Union was invited to take the 20th seat. But its presence is largely symbolic.)

"They were going to call it the G19," Ian Bennett, then an official in Finance under Paul Martin, remembers. But during the discussions in Washington leading up to the announcement in September of 1999, "Larry [Summers] looked at Martin, and Martin said, 'We should call it the G20.'

"The Americans said: 'Why would you call it the G20?'

"And we said: 'Well, if you call it the G19, someone will want to come in and make it 20.

" 'But if you call it 20, that will make it harder for others to come in.' "

John Ibbitson

Benil's farm website

2010-06-25T14:38:00.001-05:00

Check out Benil's farm!

http://www.lafincamarketgarden.webs.com/

Need to read SIPRI's 2010 summary

2010-06-20T10:09:00.004-05:00

I'm posting this here because of Canada's high rank as a country of military industry

http://www.sipri.org/yearbook/2010/files/SIPRIYB10summary.pdf

Judge Rules that Canadian Ambassador Slandered Documentary Video Maker

2010-06-19T09:43:00.000-05:00

More regarding Canadian mining companies in Guatemala:
http://www.schnoorversuscanada.ca/

Amy Goodman, and so much more...

2010-06-16T09:48:00.002-05:00

I was surprised to see Maher Arar at Amy Goodman's keynote speech - in english - at the french Amnesty International meeting here at McGill. Now I know why. You can watch her speech here:

http://prism-magazine.com/category/video/

2010-04-04T19:51:00.002-05:00

a link to the Montreal Anarchist Bookfair website -> http://www.anarchistbookfair.ca

"We Made a Devil's Bargain": Fmr. President Clinton Apologizes for Trade Policies that Destroyed Haitian Rice Farming

2010-04-02T08:53:00.011-05:00

"We Made a Devil's Bargain": Fmr. President Clinton Apologizes for Trade Policies that Destroyed Haitian Rice Farming

... I wish I had this on hand when Gurdhev Khush was talking about how making rice cheap was a good thing. A fellow Ph. D. candidate pointed out that we could have asked Dr. Khush how the approximately 300 cultivars of rice that he bred contributed to the cheapening of rice, exactly? I wonder if Dr. Khush would have a plausible answer.

My understanding of history is that the cheapening of commodities has long been a colonial strategy. Many small-scale and potentially environmentally-friendly economies are agriculturally-based. Farmers need to ask high prices for their products. Low prices, including the low prices caused by competition with international food aid, drive the farmer out of business (and into poverty). If anybody knows about that, especially regarding the history of this economic strategy as used by the British Empire and the Americans, maybe you could post a reply here and fill us all in.

At Dr. Khush's lecture, I was extremely & viscerally disappointed to hear one of our own McGill professors pipe up with the tired complaint regarding people who worry about diminished biodiversity. I want to emphasize that this professor is a good man, and kind to his students. But this professor exclaimed that, by adding genes to rice, they are increasing biodiversity. I hope that he was actually & insincerely pulling Dr. Khush's leg a little, and intentionally revealing him to be a puppet of corporate-capitalist interests. Oh, but I'm afraid the McGill prof's comment was meant sincerely, judging by the silent but agreeable head-nodding going on when he said it. That was quite sobering. I am worried about diminished biodiversity because there used to be perhaps hundreds of thousands of varieties of rice grown in India, for example, and now there are a mere handful.

So, by all means, leave a reply if you understand how World Bank's structural adjustment agreements (and even perhaps loans from the good people at Grameen Bank?) demand the use of particular transgenic rice cultivars, with their attendant fertilizer & pesticide regimes.

& Dr. Khush seemed quite insistent on the necessity for adequate testing before the release of transgenic cultivars. I thought that was nice, but really, here in Canada we have had what's called Substantial Equivalence, which meant that any medical testing at all was unnecessary, for a while. Maybe the new laws regulate with more care. If you know anything about that, please feel free to post a reply. (While you're at it, check out Bill C-474).

P.S.
I'm copying and pasting the following article from a PAN email. I am certain the economic concerns, and the environmental grievances of the activists and farmers, are legitimate: "On April 12, more than 1,000 farmers joined activists from across Asia at the main gate of the headquarters of the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in Los Banos, Philippines, calling for dissolution of the Institute. Inside, IRRI was celebrating 50 years promoting Green Revolution technologies in the region. The international activists are linked in the Year of Rice Action campaign, including Pesticide Action Network Asia and the Pacific and the Asian Peasant Coalition. The campaign, which culminated with the march on IRRI, has worked to raise awareness of the plight of small-scale, rural rice farmers whose livelihoods have been threatened by the imposition of industrial agriculture. The group points out that although the Philippines, as IRRI's hosting country, has access to the technology that the Institute has developed, the country remains the world's largest rice importer.
Despite its public mandate to protect the world's rice germplasm, IRRI is currently revising its intellectual property policy to favor agrochemical companies in order to make the material in its collection more profitable. "Pesticide poisonings (estimated at 25 million occurrences involving agricultural workers per year), environmental and health calamities, soil degradation and major pest outbreaks, such as brown plant hopper infestations, continue to haunt farming communities across Asia because of the increasing use of fertilizers and pesticides that IRRI's modern rice varieties require," said Clare Westwood of PAN Asia and the Pacific. "With IRRI's 50th anniversary, we farmers continue to ask why we remain poor in spite of the supposed beneficial technology that IRRI is promoting? Why have we been forced to use costly pesticides and fertilizers that have led to the high cost of production? Why can farmers no longer exchange seeds?" stated Wilfredo Marbella, convener of RESIST! Agrochemical TNCs during an "Asian Peoples' Tribunal" which was held in Quizon city to try IRRI. "A world without IRRI is a world free of monopoly over rice varieties and deaths and diseases caused by agrochemicals they promote," the alliance declared."

P.P.S
Let's watch "Nero's Guests": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cPa6AomH1Ao

Look! The Arctic!

2010-03-26T11:42:00.005-05:00

Hi, I just listened to some old aquaintances (http://www.shakingthetreeradio.ca/) and I'm telling you, you should listen to Episode 3. The film they mention is accessible here: http://www.isuma.tv/lo/en/inuit-knowledge-and-climate-change/look-arctic-our-submission-un-cop-15

Regarding the observation by Inuit Elders that "the sun has shifted": http://wattsupwiththat.com/

The Real Climategate: Conservation Groups Align with World's Worst Polluters

2010-03-10T10:57:00.000-06:00

Check out this rallying cry for direct action!!

The Real Climategate: Conservation Groups Align with World's Worst Polluters

Another US Activist Denied Entry to Canada Ahead of Olympics

2010-02-11T07:19:00.003-06:00

[This article is from Democracy Now, and although everybody who reads this likely watches Democracy Now anyway, I still have to repost it. I just find it incredible that all the border guards - and the police, military, etc. - play along with the unabashed pocket-lining, so to speak, that will do them personally no good. The mismanagement of resources and the fascistic silencing of dissent, which is absolutely characteristic of Olympic events, hurts everybody. I pray that my favourite goddesses and gods - you know who you are - will take action on this!]

... another US activist has been blocked from entering Canada to cover the Vancouver Winter Olympics. John Weston Osburn of Salt Lake City says he was detained, searched, and denied entry after trying to cross over into Canada.

John Weston Osburn: “I was kind of expecting to get—I was expecting to get kind of shook down, but I wasn’t expecting the type of just—the animosity and just the humiliation. Even though it was only two hours, it was a really unsettling experience, because they made me well aware that I had no rights and that there was no one there to protect me.”

Osburn’s ordeal comes days after Canadian border officials blocked Chicago radio journalist Martin Macias from entering the country because he was planning to spend a week documenting anti-Olympic protests.

2010-02-05T08:34:00.004-06:00

Two groups that caught my attention all over again this morning:

The Baikal Environmental Wave

and

Breaking The Silence

Working link to Wade Davis lectures

2010-01-31T14:01:00.004-06:00

Hi, here is the working link to the Wade Davis CBC Massey lectures. N.B., chewing on candied ginger will ameliorate the feelings brought on by listening!

http://www.cbc.ca/ideas/massey/2009/episode-1.html

Why We Resist the 2010 Winter Olympics

2010-01-20T07:17:00.003-06:00

The Olympics are not about the human spirit & have little to do with athletic excellence; they are a multi-billion dollar industry backed by powerful elites, real estate, construction, hotel, tourism and television corporations, working hand in hand with their partners in crime: government officials & members of the International Olympic Committee (IOC).

10 Reasons to Resist 2010

1. Colonialism & Fascism
The modern Olympics have a long history of racism, from its early founding members (i.e., Pierre de Coubertin, a French Baron who advocated sports as a means of strengthening colonialism) to recent IOC presidents. The 1936 Berlin Olympics empowered Hitler’s Nazi regime. Both the 1988 Seoul and 2008 Beijing Summer Games helped legitimize authoritarian regimes in Asia. The 1968 Mexico City Olympics (where over 300 student protesters were massacred by soldiers, days before the Olympics began) also helped legitimize state terror. IOC President Avery Brundage, an infamous US racist and Nazi sympathizer, didn’t even acknowledge the massacre. But when two Black US athletes raised their fists in a Black power salute on the medal podium, he had them immediately stripped of their medals and ejected from the Games! Another well-known fascist IOC president was Juan Antonio Samaranch (IOC president from 1980-2001), a former government official in Franco’s fascist regime in Spain.

2. No Olympics on Stolen Land
BC remains largely unceded and non-surrendered Indigenous territories. According to Canadian law, BC has neither the legal nor moral right to exist, let alone claim land and govern over Native peoples. Despite this, and a fraudulent treaty process now underway, the government continues to sell, lease and ‘develop’ Native land for the benefit of corporations, including mining, logging, oil & gas, and ski resorts. Meanwhile, Indigenous peoples suffer the highest rates of poverty, unemployment, imprisonment, police violence, disease, suicides, etc.

3. Ecological Destruction
Despite claims to be the “greenest Olympics” ever, and PR statements about ‘sustainability’, the 2010 Olympics will be among the most environmentally destructive in history, with tens of thousands of trees cut down & mountainsides blasted for Olympic venues in the Callaghan Valley (near Whistler) & the Sea-to-Sky Highway expansion. In the summer of 2007, a record number of black bears were hit on the Sea-to-Sky Highway, with at least 11 dying (attributed to loss of habitat). Massive amounts of concrete used in construction have also caused millions of Salmon to die in the Fraser River, where tons of gravel are being mined to make concrete.

4. Homelessness
Since winning the 2010 Winter Games in 2003, Vancouver has lost over 850 units of low-income housing; during the same period, homelessness has increased from 1,000 to over 2,500. It is estimated by 2010, the number of homeless may be as high as 6,000. Since the 1980s, Olympic Games have caused the displacement of over 2 million people (Fair Play for Housing Rights report, 2007). In Seoul 1988, some 750,000 poor were displaced, in Atlanta 1996, over 30,000, and for Beijing in 2008, an estimated 1.5 million have been displaced. Yet still today Olympic officials talk about ‘sustainability’ and ‘Olympic legacies’!

5. Criminalization of the Poor
To ‘clean out’ the poor and undesirables, Olympic host cities routinely begin a campaign to criminalize the poor. In Vancouver, the city has launched Project Civil City and new by-laws to criminalize begging for money, sleeping outdoors, etc. It has also included hundreds of thousands of dollars for increased private security (i.e., the Downtown Ambassadors). New garbage canisters on streets make it more difficult for the poor to gather recyclables, and new benches make it impossible to lay down. These measures fit with government plans to remove poor downtown residents to mental institutions, “detox centers” on former military bases, and the ‘fly-back’ scheme by police to return persons wanted on warrants in other provinces. This is nothing less than a process of social cleansing!

6. Impact on Women
Events such as the Olympics draw hundreds of thousands of spectators and cause large increases in prostitution and trafficking of women. In Vancouver, over 68 women are missing and/or murdered. Many were Native, and many were reportedly involved in the sex trade. In 2007, the trial of William Pickton occurred for six of these murders, and he is to be tried for an additional 20 more. In northern BC, over 30 young women, mostly Native, are missing and/or murdered along Highway 16. The 2010 Olympics and its invasion of tourists and corporations will only increase this violence against women.

7. 2010 Police State
Some 12,500 police, military and security personnel are to be deployed for 2010, including Emergency Response Teams, riot cops, helicopters, armoured vehicles, etc. The RCMP plan on erecting 40 km of crowd-control fencing along with CCTV video surveillance cameras. Special security zones will be established to control entry near Olympic venues. For 3 weeks, Vancouver will be an occupied Police State! And once the Olympics are over, there is no guarantee many of these security measures will not remain (i.e., CCTV).
Repression also involves attacks on anti-Olympic groups & individuals, including arrests of protesters, raids of offices, surveillance, media smear campaigns, cuts to funding programs, etc., all in an effort to undermine anti-2010 resistance. This repression has already been used against anti-poverty & housing groups, environmentalists and Natives, in Vancouver.

8. Public Debt
VANOC and government officials claim the 2010 Games will cost some $2 billion. However, this amount doesn’t include the Sea-to-Sky Highway expansion, the Canada Line Skytrain to the airport, the Vancouver Convention Center, or the lower mainland Gateway Project. Including these costs, since they were necessary to win the bid and had to be completed by 2010, makes the true cost of the Games some $6 billion, which must be paid for through public debt, money that could’ve been spent on social services, housing, drug treatment, healthcare, etc.

9. Olympic Corruption
The modern Olympics are well known for their corruption, including both top IOC officials involved in bribery scandals (i.e. Salt Lake City 2002) or athletes found to be using performance-enhancing drugs (such as steroids). Yet the IOC still claims the youth need an inspiration and a “model” of good sportsmanship! Despite published reports of bribery scandals involving IOC members and host cities (i.e., The New Lords of the Rings, by Andrew Jennings), the Olympics continue to be seen as an honorable & noble enterprise, thanks to the corporate media.

10. Corporate Invasion
Government’s and business use the Olympics as a means to attract corporate investment. In BC, the Liberal government has ‘streamlined’ application processes, cut taxes, and offered other incentives to increase certain industries such as mining, oil & gas drilling, and ski resorts. This includes large increases in transport systems, including new ports, bridges, expanded highways & rail-lines. This is all part of their Investment to 2010 Strategy. The results have been dramatic, record-breaking increases in these industries, resulting in greater environmental destruction and more corporate power & influence over our daily lives.

Many of the main corporate sponsors of the Olympics are themselves responsible for massive ecological destruction and human rights violations, including McDonalds, Coca-Cola, Petro-Canada, TransCanada, Dow, Teck Cominco, etc., while others are major arms manufacturers (General Electric & General Motors).

My brother sent me this message:

2010-01-17T09:58:00.007-06:00

"among the bills 'killed' by prorogation...‏

C-353 - Mr. Atamanenko (British Columbia Southern Interior) - An Act to prohibit the release, sale, importation and use of seeds incorporating or altered by variety-genetic use restriction technologies (V-GURTs), also called 'terminator technologies', and to make a consequential amendment to another Act."

To: Minister@cic.gc.ca

2010-01-12T11:50:00.002-06:00

Honourable Jason Kenney,

Although I was made aware of his trouble some time ago, I am just beginning to learn about Alvaro Orozco. He is a young gay man who fled Nicaragua. He is seeking refugee status in Canada, primarily on the basis of sexual orientation.

Although my understanding of the situation may be out of date, I find it all extremely worthy of (your) compassion. Mr. Orozco's only option is to receive a Minister's Permit from you. Please do so.

Sincerely and Respectfully,

withdraw support from mining companies that do not respect human rights and environmental standards

2010-01-09T08:33:00.004-06:00

To: Kent.P@parl.gc.ca
cc: embajada@elsalvador.ca.org; scarpaleggia.f@parl.gc.ca; scarpf1@parl.gc.ca

Honourable Minister,

I am contacting you today to add my voice to those calling on the Canadian Government to withdraw support from mining companies that do not respect human rights and environmental standards. All over rural Canada and abroad, mining companies take advantage of Canada’s outdated and downright colonial laws (regarding mining). Wouldn’t it be nice if governments everywhere stopped enabling the destruction of landscapes, ecosystems, and communities?

I want the Government of El Salvador to ensure that the Attorney General’s Office carry out prompt investigations into the assassinations of Dora “Alicia” Recinos Sorto and Ramiro Rivera Gomez. They were involved with the Environmental Committee of Cabañas, an organization formed to educate the community about health and environmental risks of cyanide contamination from gold extraction. They were opponents of the non-operational El Dorado mine. Pacific Rim, a Vancouver-based company, wishes to reopen El Dorado, despite widespread community opposition.

Although the prorogation of parliament has pushed back committee debate on the Bill C-300 until March, please take steps to regulate the behaviour of Canadian mining companies.

Sincerely and Respectfully,

[P. S. Check out this Democracy Now video regarding these assassinations, and this video regarding the murder of Marcelo Rivera by Pacific Rim.]

to: info_leader@leader.ir; avaei@Dadgostary-tehran.ir

2010-01-08T07:17:00.004-06:00

cc: bia.judi@yahoo.com

Your Excellency,

I am contacting you to add my voice to those calling for the immediate and unconditional release of Emadeddin Baghi. Emadeddin Baghi is is a human rights defender and the founder of the Association for the Defence of Prisoners' Rights.

Please disclose his whereabouts immediately, and ensure that he is protected from torture and any further ill-treatment. Please ensure that he has access to a lawyer of his own choosing and his family. He will likely require medical treatment, as he suffers from kidney and bladder problems arising from his previous imprisonment in Evin.

Although the right to freedom of expression is infringed upon in every corner of the world, I must proclaim vigorously that, as a state party to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, Iran is obliged to uphold the right to freedom of expression!

Sincerely and Respectfully,

[etc.]

Journalists and members of these groups have been arrested recently: Association of Iranian Journalists; Committee of Human Rights Reporters; Etemad; Iranian Labour News Agency;
Khabar Online; and members of the Iranian Freedom Movement, etc.

Things I can read when my partner is far away

2010-01-06T07:08:00.005-06:00

Land and Conflict

and

Consensus for Cities

and

Consensus and Feminist Process

To: Clement.T@parl.gc.ca

2009-12-31T16:47:00.005-06:00

[This was written in haste originally intended for the Nova Scotian CBC: cbcns@cbc.ca. For more information about the history of prorogation, Max recommended the Radio Canada website to me. Maybe he meant this?]

I am emailing on behalf of my family, regarding the Prime Minister's choice to prorogue the parliament. It is totally unreasonable to prorogue the parliament twice in one year, given the many serious problems this country is facing. He must be under extreme pressure to avoid any contrary voices regarding, for example, the appropriation of unceded land for the 2010 Olympics and the torturing of prisoners in Afghanistan. It is inexcusable that the members of parliament think that they can walk away from these and the many other serious issues - energy dilemmas, natural resource profiteering, the RCMP, unemployment, etc.

Have a Happy New Year,

to:moi@idsc.gov.eg

2009-12-04T09:15:00.002-06:00

cc: egyptemb@sympatico.ca

Honourable Minister Habib Ibrahim El Adly,

Please stop the extradition of Ibrahim Zautdinovich Mankiev, a 32-year-old Russian man of Ingush ethnicity, who is at risk of being tortured and might face an unfair trial, regarding the status of his passport, if returned to Russia.

Please ensure that the authorities of Egypt disclose his whereabouts, and give him access to lawyers of his choice, his family, and any medical attention he may require. Please enact the power of your position to ensure that he is not tortured or otherwise ill-treated.

Sincerely and Respectfully,

link to Le Quéré et al. 2009

2009-11-27T12:51:00.001-06:00

"Trends in the sources and sinks of carbon dioxide" as a pdf:
http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/vaop/ncurrent/pdf/ngeo689.pdf

Sent: November 23, 2009 11:26 AM

2009-11-24T21:23:00.003-06:00

[check out the video]

Honourable Jason Kenney,

I am writing to you regarding the case of Simo Sandrine Massudom, and to demand that you immediately grant her permanent residency status in Canada. Ms. Massudom has been living in Montreal since 2006. She is the mother of two children, one of whom is Canadian-born.

The case of Simo Sandrine Massudom demands your attention because she had been granted her Permanent Residency status before originally arriving in Canada. However, Sandrine found herself in an abusive relationship with her former partner, who also happened to be her main sponsor for their family-class application for residency in Canada. As a result, like many other women all over the world, she was forced to leave her violent ex-partner and come to Canada only with her young son Ange.

When she arrived in Montreal in 2006, her permanent residency status was promptly denied because she had come without her ex-partner. Sandrine then made the legitimate decision to apply for refugee status in Canada as a woman fleeing conjugal violence. Her refugee claim was later denied, and so she has been forced to live in Canada without status. This has made accessing basic services, such as health-care services for pregnant women, and education for her six year old son Ange, extremely difficult.

Sandrine and her family have tried their hardest to make Montreal their home and to make a meaningful contribution to their community. Her and her eldest son Ange are both fluent in French, and Ange has made many friends in school in Montreal. Sandrine and the father of her newborn child are trying to build a family and a stable life in Montreal.

Threatening the mother of a newborn baby and her family with deportation to Cameroon is completely unacceptable. I therefore would urge you to immediately cancel their deportation order, and grant the family permanent residency in Canada based on their Humanitarian and Compassionate claim for refugee status.

Thank you for your attention into this important matter.

Sincerely and Respectfully,

2009-11-12T12:12:00.007-06:00

#1

(Refer to the label below.) FAO-Montreal urges Canadian authorities to use all the mechanisms at their disposal to ensure that New Gold obey the rule of law in its overseas operations, as well as at home.

To sign a petition in support of the people of Cerro San Pedro, go to
http://www.petitiononline.com/FAOmpt1/petition.html

#2

For those of you who were looking for Guerilla Composting:

http://gorilla.mcgill.ca/compostingatmcgill.htm

Alliance Romaine's Fifty Marathons campaign

2009-09-24T11:09:00.000-05:00

Running for our Rivers, is coming to Montreal Sunday September 27th 4:00pm-6:00pm, Café Fractal, Room SH-R380. 200 Sherbrooke Street West.

This will open your eyes to the controversial ways the electricity you use is produced! And what the people are doing to change that.

After 3 weeks of consecutive daily marathons, the runners are arriving in Montreal, our halfway point. As the traditional message runners of the past, they carry a message. They have accepted responsibility of relaying a message that has been given to them by the Cree of James Bay, speaking about the harmful social and environmental repercussions caused by aggressive hydroelectric development on their land. The message will be carried to the Innu on the North Shore who live with the Romaine river, the next river that Hydro Quebec wants to dam...
Coming to Montreal will mark an important moment. This message will have been successfully carried by foot for almost a thousand kilometers, to be voiced to the first large metropolis.
Speakers for the event will include Amir Khadir, MNA from Quebec Solidaire, a presentation by Fondation Riviere about their new energy campaign in collaboration with Nature Quebec, Daniel Green from la Societe pour Vaincre la Pollution will speak of local water issues, and members from Alliance Romaine. The event will be an eye opener to these important issues of Quebec energy, environment and ethics.

Sunday September 27th, at Café Fractal. Room SH-R380. 200 Sherbrooke West, corner Jeanne-Mance. 4:00pm-6:00pm.
www.allianceromaine.org

To: kenney.j@parl.gc.ca

2009-09-21T15:27:00.000-05:00

Cc: yolande.james@miss.gouv.qc.ca; vanloan.p@parl.gc.ca; soutiensheikh@gmail.com

Honourable Minister,

Seema and Sabir Mohammed Sheikh, originally from Karachi, Pakistan, were accepted as refugees in Canada in 2001. The Sheikh family has worked to rebuild a vibrant life in their Parc-Extension neighborhood of Montreal ever since. In a sudden and unexpected decision in 2007, immigration authorities revoked the Sheikh family’s refugee status. On July 14th, 2009, Seema and Sabir were forcibly separated from their children and deported to the USA. The children: Ashrah (26 years), Tayyaba (23 years), Sami (21 years), and Canadian-born Sabrina (5 years) remain in Canada, awaiting a judicial review that could grant a re-evaluation of their humanitarian claim. In the meantime, their lives are in limbo and their future is extremely uncertain.

I must ask you to do whatever you can, to ensure that Citizenship and Immigration Canada give the Sheikh family status on humanitarian grounds immediately, so they can live with dignity and security.

Sincerely and Respectfully,

"World's Last Great Forest Under Threat"

2009-09-04T09:18:00.003-05:00

World's last great forest under threat

Algonquins place bodies in front of logging machines: prevent logging until Quebec and Canada respect agreements and leadership

2009-09-01T10:17:00.000-05:00

This morning members of the Algonquins of Barriere Lake will peacefully block the machines of Abitibi-Bowater forestry workers, preventing logging in their territory until Quebec implements agreements covering forestry on Barriere Lake's lands, and the Quebec and Canadian government’s recognize the First Nation’s legitimate leadership.

“Our community has decided there will be no forestry activities or any new developments in our Trilateral Agreement Territory until the status of our leadership and the agreements we signed are resolved to our community's satisfaction,” says Jean Maurice Matchewan, Customary Chief of Barriere Lake. “The Quebec government has acted in bad faith, giving companies the go-ahead to log while they ignore their legal obligations, leaving us with no choice but to stop forestry operations until Quebec complies with the agreement. We have waited more than 3 years for Quebec to implement it."

Matchewan received no response to a letter he sent to Manager Paul Grondin of Abitibi-Bowater's Maniwaki mill on August 25, requesting that the company suspend logging operations until the governments follow through on their obligations.

“Our plan is to peacefully put our bodies in front of their machines until we get some results. We expect they may use the police, because we are used to such tactics. This is our territory and they can't push us off our lands," says Matchewan.

Canada and Quebec have refused to acknowledge the results of a June 24, 2009 leadership selection process that reselected Jean Maurice Matchewan as the legitimate Customary Chief of Barriere Lake. National Chief Shawn Atleo of the Assembly of First Nations, however, met with Chief Matchewan on August 19, to discuss the Trilateral agreement and other community concerns. The Algonquin Nation Secretariat, a Tribal Council representing three Algonquin communities including Barriere Lake, also recently reiterated their support for Chief Matchewan.

“Instead of acting honourably and cooperating with our Customary Council to implement these signed agreements, the federal and provincial governments have been working in unison to try and install a minority faction whom they can use to sign off on the cutting of our forest,” says Matchewan.

Barriere Lake wants Canada and Quebec to uphold signed agreements dating back to the 1991 Trilateral Agreement, a landmark sustainable development and resource co-management agreement praised by the United Nations and the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples. Canada has been in breach of the agreement since 2001. Quebec signed a complementary Bilateral Agreement in 1998, but has stalled despite the 2006 recommendations of two former Quebec Cabinet Ministers, Quebec special representative John Ciaccia and Barriere Lake special representative Clifford Lincoln, that the agreement be implemented. The agreement is intended to allow logging to continue while protecting the Algonquin’s’ traditional way of life and giving them a $1.5 million share of the $100 million in resource revenue that comes out of their territory every year.

Kitchenuhmaykoosib Inninuwug versus Platinex

2009-08-26T19:50:00.006-05:00

The Canadian mining company Platinex is having a go at KI territory. There is vigorous opposition. Check out http://communities.canada.com/vancouversun/blogs/communityofinterest/archive/2009/08/25/tensions-re-flare-at-ki-potential-standoff-between-band-leadership-mining-company-and-opp.aspx and http://kitelecom.myknet.org/

To: secparticular@chiapas.gob.mx; secretario@segob.gob.mx; cdh@cdh-chiapas.org.mx; presidencia@cndh.org.mx; correo@cndh.org.mx

2009-08-18T07:07:00.001-05:00

cc: civilsocietyunit@ohchr.org; oacnudh@ohchr.org; cidhoea@oas.org; mxico@international.gc.ca; info@blackfireexploration.com; info@fronteergroup.com; info@radiusgold.com; info@lineargoldcorp.com; info@newgold.com

Dear Gobernador Constitucional del Estado de Chiapas,

I am deeply concerned for the safety of Sr. Mariano Abarca and other members of communities opposing Canadian mines in Chiapas. I was just made aware that Sr. Abarca was kidnapped by armed individuals in unmarked cars as he left a Primary Public School at the municipal capital of Chicomuselo on August 17, 2009. Mr. Abarca is an outspoken critic of destructive mines in Chiapas, and was preparing to organize a regional gathering of communities affected by mining corporations. Please launch an immediate investigation into the kidnapping of Mr. Arbaca. Please take the all means and measures necessary to ensure the safe return of Mr. Abarca to his family. It is high time that you take action to halt the operations of Blackfire and suspend further developments and the sale of concessions held by Radius Gold, Linear Gold Corp, Fronteer Development Group, New Gold Inc., and any other Canadian mining corporations in Chiapas until an impartial investigation is completed.

Communities in Mexico hold the right to free, prior, and informed consent for any and all mining operations on their territories. Mine opponents have the right to carry out their activities without any restrictions or fear of reprisals, as set out in the UN Declaration on the Rights and Responsibilities of Individuals, Groups and Institutions to Promote and Protect Universally Recognized Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms.

In any case, please do whatever you can to protect the human rights of communities facing Canadian mining projects and the human rights defenders working on mining issues in Mexico.

Sincerely and Respectfully,

Natives blockade northern Manitoba dam project

2009-08-14T12:33:00.006-05:00

[I have stolen this story from CBC. I'm posting it in part to continue the Wuskwatim label posted earlier. I encourage those of you in Quebec to sign up for the upcoming marathon being organized by Alliance Romaine http://allianceromaine.org/.]

Members of an Indian band are blocking access to a $1.3-billion hydroelectric development project in northern Manitoba.

Some members of the Nisichawayasihk Cree Nation near Nelson House, Man., have blocked construction access to the Wuskwatim Dam project, a 200-megawatt generating station that is being built by Manitoba Hydro at Taskinigup Falls on the Burntwood River.

A spokesperson for Manitoba Hydro says the group is allowing people to walk through the barricade, but stopping vehicles from passing.

The protesters claim Manitoba Hydro is not living up to an agreement to provide jobs to members of the local band, claiming at least one-third of workers should be from the local area. Manitoba Hydro said there are about 300 aboriginal workers at Wuskwatim, of which about 44 are from Nisichawayasihk.

Hydro said it does not believe the protest is sanctioned by the chief and council of the Nisichawayasihk Cree Nation. The dam is being developed as a joint venture between Manitoba Hydro and the Nisichawayasihk band. The project is the first time the Crown-owned power utility has entered into an equity partnership with a First Nations community on a generating station project.

Construction of the dam and generating station, about 800 kilometres north of Winnipeg, is due to be completed in 2011.

New Evidence Confirms the Nutritional Superiority of Plant-Based Organic Foods

2009-08-07T08:29:00.002-05:00

Someone said to me recently that organic food is not about nutritional superiority, it's about living with the land in a way that's possible in the long-term. However:

http://www.organic-center.org/science.nutri.php?action=view&report_id=126

To: mayor@guelph.ca

2009-07-30T08:11:00.002-05:00

cc: administration@guelph.ca; peter.cartwright@guelph.ca; christine.billings@guelph.ca; karl.wettstein@guelph.ca

Dear Mayor,

I am writing this letter because of the ongoing destruction in Guelph of the most valuable farmland and most specieis diverse ecosystems in Canada, i.e., Carolinian forest. You must do everything you can to put an end - once and for all - to the irresponsible conversion of natural space.

I am given to understand that Peter Cartwright came up to the HCBP site to deliver a notice for eviction of the protestors camping there. The people were charged with trespassing. In my opinion, it is the ongoing use of natural spaces in Canada for industry and development that ought to feel the weight of the law, and definitely not the people who do us all a favour by trying their best to protect the land, upon which, ultimately, we all depend.

Although I am in Montreal, at McGill University, safely conducting research in a lab, my heart is with the defenders of the land. I wish I could stand with them. I hope that you will sympathize, and do everything you can to stop the eviction of these protestors.

The Jefferson Salamander, an endangered species, inhabits the HCBP site. I know that concern for the wellbeing of living things rarely actually infringes upon the progress of industry in Canada. But in this case, I sincerely hope it does.

Respectfully Yours,

The Other Side of AIDS

2009-07-29T08:05:00.002-05:00

Have you ever seen the movie "The Other Side of AIDS?" If so, please feel free to leave a comment. I don't know what to make of it.

Frente Amplio Opositor

2009-07-22T12:42:00.003-05:00

This is a different FAO, the Frente Amplio Opositor, besides the one you might typically hear me talking about, i.e., the Food and Agriculture Organization. I'm posting this link because they are opposing near/open surface mining. I would like to see such activity stopped within Canada, as well.

http://faomontreal.wordpress.com/

Forget Shorter Showers

2009-07-11T19:26:00.002-05:00

Why personal change does not equal political change
by Derrick Jensen

WOULD ANY SANE PERSON think dumpster diving would have stopped Hitler, or that composting would have ended slavery or brought about the eight-hour workday, or that chopping wood and carrying water would have gotten people out of Tsarist prisons, or that dancing naked around a fire would have helped put in place the Voting Rights Act of 1957 or the Civil Rights Act of 1964? Then why now, with all the world at stake, do so many people retreat into these entirely personal “solutions”?
Part of the problem is that we’ve been victims of a campaign of systematic misdirection. Consumer culture and the capitalist mindset have taught us to substitute acts of personal consumption (or enlightenment) for organized political resistance. An Inconvenient Truth helped raise consciousness about global warming. But did you notice that all of the solutions presented had to do with personal consumption—changing light bulbs, inflating tires, driving half as much—and had nothing to do with shifting power away from corporations, or stopping the growth economy that is destroying the planet? Even if every person in the United States did everything the movie suggested, U.S. carbon emissions would fall by only 22 percent. Scientific consensus is that emissions must be reduced by at least 75 percent worldwide.
Or let’s talk water. We so often hear that the world is running out of water. People are dying from lack of water. Rivers are dewatered from lack of water. Because of this we need to take shorter showers. See the disconnect? Because I take showers, I’m responsible for drawing down aquifers? Well, no. More than 90 percent of the water used by humans is used by agriculture and industry. The remaining 10 percent is split between municipalities and actual living breathing individual humans. Collectively, municipal golf courses use as much water as municipal human beings. People (both human people and fish people) aren’t dying because the world is running out of water. They’re dying because the water is being stolen.
Or let’s talk energy. Kirkpatrick Sale summarized it well: “For the past 15 years the story has been the same every year: individual consumption—residential, by private car, and so on—is never more than about a quarter of all consumption; the vast majority is commercial, industrial, corporate, by agribusiness and government [he forgot military]. So, even if we all took up cycling and wood stoves it would have a negligible impact on energy use, global warming and atmospheric pollution.”
Or let’s talk waste. In 2005, per-capita municipal waste production (basically everything that’s put out at the curb) in the U.S. was about 1,660 pounds. Let’s say you’re a die-hard simple-living activist, and you reduce this to zero. You recycle everything. You bring cloth bags shopping. You fix your toaster. Your toes poke out of old tennis shoes. You’re not done yet, though. Since municipal waste includes not just residential waste, but also waste from government offices and businesses, you march to those offices, waste reduction pamphlets in hand, and convince them to cut down on their waste enough to eliminate your share of it. Uh, I’ve got some bad news. Municipal waste accounts for only 3 percent of total waste production in the United States.
I want to be clear. I’m not saying we shouldn’t live simply. I live reasonably simply myself, but I don’t pretend that not buying much (or not driving much, or not having kids) is a powerful political act, or that it’s deeply revolutionary. It’s not. Personal change doesn’t equal social change.
So how, then, and especially with all the world at stake, have we come to accept these utterly insufficient responses? I think part of it is that we’re in a double bind. A double bind is where you’re given multiple options, but no matter what option you choose, you lose, and withdrawal is not an option. At this point, it should be pretty easy to recognize that every action involving the industrial economy is destructive (and we shouldn’t pretend that solar photovoltaics, for example, exempt us from this: they still require mining and transportation infrastructures at every point in the production processes; the same can be said for every other so-called green technology). So if we choose option one—if we avidly participate in the industrial economy—we may in the short term think we win because we may accumulate wealth, the marker of “success” in this culture. But we lose, because in doing so we give up our empathy, our animal humanity. And we really lose because industrial civilization is killing the planet, which means everyone loses. If we choose the “alternative” option of living more simply, thus causing less harm, but still not stopping the industrial economy from killing the planet, we may in the short term think we win because we get to feel pure, and we didn’t even have to give up all of our empathy (just enough to justify not stopping the horrors), but once again we really lose because industrial civilization is still killing the planet, which means everyone still loses. The third option, acting decisively to stop the industrial economy, is very scary for a number of reasons, including but not restricted to the fact that we’d lose some of the luxuries (like electricity) to which we’ve grown accustomed, and the fact that those in power might try to kill us if we seriously impede their ability to exploit the world—none of which alters the fact that it’s a better option than a dead planet. Any option is a better option than a dead planet.
Besides being ineffective at causing the sorts of changes necessary to stop this culture from killing the planet, there are at least four other problems with perceiving simple living as a political act (as opposed to living simply because that’s what you want to do). The first is that it’s predicated on the flawed notion that humans inevitably harm their landbase. Simple living as a political act consists solely of harm reduction, ignoring the fact that humans can help the Earth as well as harm it. We can rehabilitate streams, we can get rid of noxious invasives, we can remove dams, we can disrupt a political system tilted toward the rich as well as an extractive economic system, we can destroy the industrial economy that is destroying the real, physical world.
The second problem—and this is another big one—is that it incorrectly assigns blame to the individual (and most especially to individuals who are particularly powerless) instead of to those who actually wield power in this system and to the system itself. Kirkpatrick Sale again: “The whole individualist what-you-can-do-to-save-the-earth guilt trip is a myth. We, as individuals, are not creating the crises, and we can’t solve them.”
The third problem is that it accepts capitalism’s redefinition of us from citizens to consumers. By accepting this redefinition, we reduce our potential forms of resistance to consuming and not consuming. Citizens have a much wider range of available resistance tactics, including voting, not voting, running for office, pamphleting, boycotting, organizing, lobbying, protesting, and, when a government becomes destructive of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, we have the right to alter or abolish it.
The fourth problem is that the endpoint of the logic behind simple living as a political act is suicide. If every act within an industrial economy is destructive, and if we want to stop this destruction, and if we are unwilling (or unable) to question (much less destroy) the intellectual, moral, economic, and physical infrastructures that cause every act within an industrial economy to be destructive, then we can easily come to believe that we will cause the least destruction possible if we are dead.
The good news is that there are other options. We can follow the examples of brave activists who lived through the difficult times I mentioned—Nazi Germany, Tsarist Russia, antebellum United States—who did far more than manifest a form of moral purity; they actively opposed the injustices that surrounded them. We can follow the example of those who remembered that the role of an activist is not to navigate systems of oppressive power with as much integrity as possible, but rather to confront and take down those systems.

Here is the working link to Justice for Missing & Murdered Indigenous Women

2009-06-10T16:16:00.002-05:00

http://missingjustice.mvmnt.ca/

reposted: Toronto Teen Still Sits in Prison

2009-06-07T09:06:00.004-05:00

The Story of Omar Khadr
By JOSHUA AINSLIE

Prior to July 2002, everybody who knew the young Omar Khadr identified him as a Canadian. He liked BMWs, basketball and action movies. He named a visit to the Metro Toronto Zoo among the best memories of his life. His father earned a master's degree from the University of Ottawa, and his grandparents owned a bakery on Toronto's Eglinton Ave. But, like the children of Canadian diplomats, Omar had a father whose work took the family overseas for long stretches of time.

When the gangly 15 year old was found crying in the remains of a bombed-out hideaway in Afghanistan in July 2002, politicians and media outlets refused to recognize Omar as a true Canadian, absolving the country of any responsibility for securing him a fair trial. According to his family, history was rewritten to avoid an uncomfortable truth.

"We were Canadian," said his older sister Zaynab of their time overseas, "it was hard to miss that."

So, did pundits and spin-doctors simply erase a Canadian child's past, to avoid risking uncomfortable relations with the United States?

Born into a family of two Canadian NGO workers, Omar was widely known as his mother's favorite child. Married to a workaholic and grieving the death of a young son, she latched tightly onto the 16- month-old Omar.

In 1992, 7-year-old Omar was living with his family just beyond the Dundas West subway station and attending first grade at the same Mississauga private school where all his siblings were enrolled. But his single-income family's sole earner was bedridden at Sunnybrook Hospital following an accident in Afghanistan, and so the Khadrs moved into a small apartment in the deteriorating neighborhood at the intersection of Bloor and Lansdowne.

Eventually,Omar and his family followed their father back to an orphanage he had built in the refugee camps surrounding Peshawar. Enrolled at the Ansar Scientific Institute, a private school that taught foreign families in the region, Omar found himself fortunate. As a Canadian from a devout family, courses such as English and Religion proved very simple, and he quickly excelled. "He was one of those students who worked hard, he liked his sciences," his sister Zaynab recalled, "though he didn't like math very much." During summer vacation, the family would often return home to Scarborough.

Like the rest of his family, Omar found that his father's frequent travels left him well- versed in local languages. In addition to English and Arabic, he also learned to speak Pashto while in Peshawar and picked up Dari from the refugees who filled his father's life.

After the Afghan Civil War had largely ended, Ahmed moved his operations from Pakistan into Afghanistan itself. Preferring that his children remain in the accredited Ansar Institute, Ahmed arranged for Omar and his siblings to be home-schooled for the next two years, returning to Peshawar to write their exams each semester.

When Omar's mother and older sister returned to Canada, Ahmed sent them a letter containing a cassette tape, on which he explained how Omar had transformed himself into a domestic caretaker in their absence, proving himself "very handy and very helpful."

The year before he was taken prisoner, Omar was virtually indistinguishable from any other young teenager. A fan of sports cars, Omar attended the February 2001 Auto Show at the Toronto Convention Centre with his cousin and younger brother. After passing over the Nissans and Volkswagens in favor of the Lamborghinis and Ferraris, the group got their photograph taken standing in front of the Batmobile. "We're fans of the Batmobile," Zaynab boasted, pointing to her brother's deadpan expression as she explained that he doesn't smile for cameras.

Even in Guantanamo, Omar speaks openly about some his favorite movies; Hollywood films like Die Hard, Harry Potter and Braveheart. "Who doesn't like Harry Potter?" laughed his sister, adding that watching Braveheart was a "family tradition" in their household. While overseas, Omar and his siblings would amuse themselves by going to the marketplace to purchase pirated DVDs. "We'd get the movie over there the day it came out...very cheap, maybe half a dollar," Zaynab recalled, proud of the purchases.

In November 2001, as the Khadrs joined the caravan of fleeing Afghans heading for the relative safety of Pakistan's mountainous border regions, Omar's brother Abdurahman was captured by the Northern Alliance. Not long afterward, Zaynab took his other two brothers, Abdullah and Abdulkareem, to Islamabad as she sought medical attention for her own daughter. Omar was now alone at home with his mother and his 10-year-old sister.

In the spring of 2002, Omar's father, Ahmed Khadr, listened as his 15-year- old son explained his loneliness neither classmates nor siblings surrounding him anymore and how he felt humiliated when his mother forced him to dress as a girl to avoid being targeted by Pakistani security forces. The elder Khadr offered his teenage son a compromise: He could move into a group home for young men if he promised to still check in regularly with his mother. The only son who had never been allowed out of his mother's sight, Omar quickly agreed to the deal.

A month later, a family friend approached the Khadrs and explained that he had some Arab colleagues staying at a small farm a few miles outside Khost who needed a translator to interact with the locals. Since Omar spoke both Dari and Pashto, it was agreed that he could serve as their translator and guide. "We had an orphanage in Khost," Zaynab explained, "so my brother knew the area."

It wasn't long before the teenage expatriate found himself in trouble. Although there weren't supposed to be any American soldiers in the area, Special Forces were drawn to the Arabs' homestead after one of them made a phone call that piqued suspicions, and a shootout between Omar's new colleagues and the Americans followed.

After the homestead was reduced to rubble by aerial bombardment and a pair of Apache helicopters, the soldiers entered and picked their way over the dead bodies. A sudden spray of bullets crashed against the walls around them and a grenade appeared, arcing toward the soldiers from a small corridor. Sgt. Christopher Speer fell, fatally wounded by the blast.

Turning the corner, an American soldier shot the lone surviving gunman and then spied the Canadian teenager with his back to the noise, kneeling in pain against a shrub. Raising his rifle, he fired two shots into Omar's back.

Although the Special Forces' report following the firefight stated that the dead man had been the one to throw the grenade, the military overseers stated that, with all the other occupants of the compound now dead, the United States would lay the blame on Omar and seek life imprisonment for the Canadian youth at Guantanamo Bay.

"They want him to suffer for the rest of his life for a crime nobody even believes he committed," Zaynab said angrily. While she admits it's possible he may have thrown the grenade, she points to crimes committed by other Toronto youth. "It's not like he just went into a shop and shot somebody," she said.

When asked, while still in prison, about his plans for the future, Omar replied that he wanted to become a doctor. "It says a lot," his sister whispered, reflecting on the past six years. "Working for charities and helping people" is a future she and her family would love to see for their beloved brother. A Canadian college in Alberta rose to the challenge last year, announcing that they would offset all tuition costs for Omar to attend post-secondary education.

But as Omar's hopes of attending medical school fade, they are replaced by the very likely scenario that he will spend the rest of his life in detention.

As Stephen Harper, then leader of the Canadian Alliance Party, summarized on the day the capture was announced in 2002, Omar represents something "dangerous to the Western alliance." And so he rots in a foreign prison, sacrificed on the altar of Canada-U.S. relations.

To: info@gg.ca; CBSA-ASFC@canada.gc.ca; harper.s@parl.gc.ca; Strahl.c@parl.gc.ca

2009-06-01T08:25:00.008-05:00

cc: crowdj@parl.gc.ca; nevila@parl.gc.ca; lemaym@parl.gc.ca

Honourable Governor General,

I am contacting you because I am appalled that Akwesasne is being blockaded by both American and Ontario police. The Kanien'kehaka (Mohawk) community of Akwesasne is currently blockaded on both sides of the border, owing to the community’s legitimate defiance of the order to have Canadian Border Services Agency (CBSA) be allowed to carry lethal weapons.The concern of the Akwesasne community is completely legitimate. In fact, most people in Canada would certainly agree, that the employees of the CBSA are not the kind of people we want carrying guns. They are infamous for their abuse of power and quite likely to kill people (innocent or not) if they are armed.The Canadian police must respect the fact that indigenous people should not have to abide by the artificial division of land that belongs rightfully to the original inhabitants!

Please take action to acknowledge the indignity suffered by Akwesasne. It is high time that decisions be made to officially recognize that the profit of Canadian industries is founded upon the expropriation of land and natural resources that rightfully belong to the First People.

Please take action on this issue.

Respectfully yours,

To: fiscalia@minpec.gov.ec

2009-05-22T14:05:00.002-05:00

Cc: mecuacan@rogers.com

Subject: Protect Joel Vicente Zhunio Samaniego, Wilmar Fernando Mejia Reinoso, and Etelvina de Jesus Misacango Chuñir

Dear Prosecutor,

Please take action immediately to protect the lives of Joel Vicente Zhunio Samaniego, Wilmar Fernando Mejia Reinoso, and Etelvina de Jesus Misacango Chuñir. Their lives have been threatened by a government official. Etelvina was brutally assaulted in her home. They are members of organizations that are part of the Coordinadora Nacional por la Defensa de la Vida y la Soberania. They were targeted due to their legitimate protest against a meeting being held between the province's representative of the national government, some local farmers, and representatives of a gold mining company from Canada, which is operating in the area without a license.

So I must ask you to order an investigation. I must remind you of your obligation as set out in the UN Declaration on Human Rights Defenders, to recognize the legitimacy of the activities of human rights defenders and their right to carry out their activities without obstacles or fear of reprisals.

Sincerely and Respectfully,

Post Montreal Anarchist Bookfair Links

2009-05-20T08:24:00.010-05:00

The links below are thanks to http://www.landismoreimportantthansprawl.com/. I've already referred you to some of them, but I figure there's really zero harm in citing them twice:

www.inthewake.org/b1int1.html
http://www.risingtidenorthamerica.org/
http://www.rootforce.org/
http://www.resistanceisfertile.org/
http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net/
http://www.oilsandstruth.org/
http://www.massextinction.net/
http://www.iucnredlist.org/
http://www.stopgreenwash.org/
http://www.rhizomecollective.org/
http://www.openfarmtech.org/

And the Annual Eco Prisoners Update.

This year I am again more than somewhat disgusted by the kinds of actions that we are calling ecodefense. A friend of mine explained it well, she told me that these kinds of actions, e.g., burning some SUVs, were easy for American urban kids to identify with. I could say that their half-assedness and ineffectivity make my blood boil. On the other hand, those who have taken these actions will likely be remembered as heroes, if the future is impoverished by today's capitalism. In the nearer future, I hope to see a list of the many rural people who are in jails in Canada, owing to the unbroken historical record of heavy handedness on the part of the RCMP and Canadian police upon the real ecodefenders: the inhabitants of the land who block logging roads and resist natural resource industries. It is high time for the law to respect people who defend the land. Industrial activity runs amok in the out-of-sight-out-of-mind woods. Clearcutting and strip-mining are rubber-stamped by Canadian environmental regulators.

Marie Mason (or visit http://supportmariemason.org/)
Daniel McGowan
Eric McDavid
Jeff Luers (or visit http://freefreenow.org/)
Michael Sykes
Leonard Peltier (or visit http://www.whoisleonardpeltier.info/ or http://ourfreedom.wordpress.com/)
John Graham (or visit http://ourfreedom.wordpress.com/)
Jonathan Paul
Briana Waters
Nathan Block and Joyanna Zacher
Grant Barnes
Tre Arrow
The SHAC 7
Jacob Conroy
Lauren Gazzola
Joshua Harper
Kevin Kjonaas
MOVE
and Mumia Abu Jamal, of course.

The hopeful contenders

2009-05-01T07:32:00.002-05:00

[check out this list. I am under the impression that social change happens according to the design of the group who can mobilize the most resources. Right? So, do you think these humble alliances can mobilize material resources to counter the movements of transnational monoliths?]

http://www.cban.ca/Resources/Topics/GE-Crops-and-Food/Alfalfa/Signatories-to-No-to-GMO-Alfalfa

Somali "Piracy" Advocated by Knaan on YouTube

2009-04-15T07:21:00.002-05:00

The link below is for those of you who are not aware of the ecodefensive quality of the recent actions taken by so-called Somali "pirates".

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrwgiprDBtA

Eerie grafitti in Montreal

2009-04-12T09:36:00.001-05:00

www.flics-assassins.net

To: cefranco@presidencia.gov.co

2009-03-20T07:24:00.001-05:00

Cc: bogota@defensoria.org.co; valle@defensoria.org.co; nubia.camargo@fiscalia.gov.co; pgaleano@fiscalia.gov.co; brodriguez@mij.gov.co; direccion@policia.gov.co; Rehum.mecal@policia.gov.co; mission.colombia@ties.itu.int; asuntosdefensoria@defensoria.org.co; misiondecolombia@yahoo.com; centrale@misioncolombia.ch

I am writing with regards to the March 6th murder of Alvaro Miguel Rivera in Cali, Colombia. Alvaro was the representative of Colectivo Tínku, a member of Planeta Paz, and the Polo Rosa.

As a signatory to many international human rights declarations and treaties, it is Colombia's obligation to ensure that human rights violations are fully investigated and perpetrators are brought to justice. Alvaro Miguel Rivera's murder is a clear violation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, both of which have been signed by Colombia. This crime violates fundamental rights enunciated in the Constitution of Colombia.

Moreover, the Yogyakarta Principles on the application of international human rights law in relation to sexual orientation and gender identity specify that, “Everyone is entitled to enjoy all human rights without discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation” and that states should, “adopt appropriate legislative and other measures to prohibit and eliminate discrimination in public and private spheres on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity” (Principle 2).

At a regional Level, the recently approved Resolution AG/RES-2435(XXXVIII-O/08) on “Human Rights, Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity” in the framework of the Inter-American System of Human Rights, also signed by Colombia, directs its government to take all concrete and necessary actions to avoid human rights violations that people suffer person because of their sexual orientation and gender identity, especially if they are human rights defenders or LGBT activists.

Finally, the Inter-American Commission of Human Rights in its Communication dated March 12, 2009, condemns the murder of Miguel Alvaro Rivera and requests that the state of Colombia makes a full and fair investigation into the crime and punishes the perpetrators.

Please take a stand and condemn this particular crime publicly. As people in positions of power, it is up to you to do everything possible to ensure that similar crimes are not repeated in the future. Please protect the rights of your citizens, regardless of sexual orientation, gender identity or gender expression. I trust that you will give this issue the attention it deserves.

Sincerely and Respectfully,

Timothy Schwinghamer
21111 Lakeshore Road
Ste Anne de Bellevue QC
H9X 3V9
Canada

To: pm@pm.gc.ca

2009-03-15T09:31:00.001-05:00

CC: Ignatieff.M@parl.gc.ca
Subject: Tristan Anderson

Dear Stephen Harper,

Tristan Anderson (38 years old) is near death in an Israeli hospital. He was shot in the head with a tear gas canister at a nonviolent demonstration in the West Bank town of Na’leen, protesting the wall the Israelis are building to isolate the West Bank.

Are you capable of launching a full, impartial investigation of the shooting of Tristan Anderson? He is an American citizen. In any case, Canada ought to respond to the ongoing Israeli violence against unarmed demonstrators. As the Prime Minister of a peace-loving country, you could make some intervention at this time to demand real concessions from the Israelis and push for a true resolution.

I hope my appeal to your basic virtues is effective. I wish it didn’t have to be said, but: human beings should not be treated this way.

Please do not retain any dispassionate ambivalence toward the slaughter of civilians,

To: michael@michaelignatieff.ca

2009-02-18T17:27:00.006-06:00

Subject: Omar Khadr and the need to fund research in organic agriculture

Dear Michael Ignatieff,

I am emailing you tonight to convey my family's thanks. We are joyfully anticipating your raising of the case of Omar Khadr in the company of the visiting American President. Please do whatever you can to get Omar back to Canada and into some kind of rehabilitation program. It seems to me that it is only to retain a friendly, safe, and happy relationship with the USA that Canadians have allowed Omar to stay in the Guantanamo prison. He has been and is physically ill, in tortured misery. It ought to be a crime to keep a young man in such misery. His being there is a weight upon every person in Canada, and an evil that degrades the nation. I hope I have conveyed our sentiments adequately, and I hope you take action on this issue immediately.

I have another reason to email you tonight. I was among the many, diverse attendees at the recent Guelph Organic Conference. While I was there, I spoke to Dr. Ann Clark. Her scholarship in the field of organic agriculture has been central in the organic movement in Canada. However, Dr. Clark told me that she would have to retire soon. She said that there simply wasn't any money for scientific research into organic agricultural techniques. At this time in our history, Michael Ignatieff, how can this be? How is it that – when our whole civilization is threatened by climatological crises – such an excellent and necessary scientist would be passed over? I hope that you will do what you can to push forward the necessity of funding toward the sciences that actually could enable people in Canada to live with ecological consciousness.

Good night,

Timothy Schwinghamer et al.
21111 Lakeshore Road
Ste Anne de Bellevue QC
H9X 3V9
phone: 514-398-2291

To: cm-skm@hub.nic.in; governorsikkim@yahoo.co.in; governor-skm@nic.in

2009-02-16T15:04:00.002-06:00

cc: golden_hope@hotmail.com

Hello,

In the evening of February 7th, 2009, the Sikkim police arrested 41 anti-Panan Hydropower protestors from the Lepcha Reserve of Dzongu. The protestors were taken to the Mangan police station.

I strongly protest such an action by the Sikkim government. The arrest of these protestors violates the Fundamental Right to Freedom of Expression enshrined in the Indian Constitution. These were exclusively peaceful protests, which are legitimate, since heavy construction activities are going on at the Panan project without all the requisite clearances.

I am given to understand that, owing to the special powers enjoyed by the District Magistrate of the North District, and in the absence of any Resident Judge, the police custody of the arrested protestors could be extended to a week.

I demand the following actions by your office and the Sikkim government:
1. Unconditional release of the arrested;
2. Stop construction activities at the Panan project until all clearances are obtained; and
3. As per the demand of the ACT, review both Panan and Teesta IV projects.

Sincerely and Respectfully,

APARTHEID IN CANADA

2009-02-10T06:27:00.006-06:00

Frontline voices of Indigenous resistance on Turtle Island

SUNDAY, MARCH 1, 7 p.m.
1455 de Maisonneuve West, H-110
near Guy-Concordia metro
Wheelchair accessible.
Event is free.

This special panel features frontline Indigenous activists who are resisting the destruction and displacement of their lands on Turtle Island (occupied "North America"). Speakers include:

Elizabeth (Tshankuesh) Penashue
Innu elder from Nitassinan (Labrador)
Elizabeth was born and raised into a traditional hunting and trapping family whose way of life was devastated by the flooding of their lands and the destruction of hunting equipment. Elizabeth has raised awareness andresisted the militarization and appropriation of Innu territory by NATO low-level military flying exercises out of Goose Bay over land that the Innu use for hunting and fishing. She has also opposed the further development of the Churchill River to power mainly settler communities in the south.

Judy Da Silva
Anishinabekwe from Grassy Narrows, northwestern Ontario. Judy is the mother of 5 children, fighting to protect the way of life of the Anishnabe people. She is active in resisting the environmental devastation and destruction of the land, animals and people, by logging and mining companies and the provincial and federal governments. She is currently involved in an environmental contaminants study of three northwestern Ontario Indigenous communities.

Introduced by Laith Marouf of Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights (SPHR). Laith has visited and worked in solidarity with various First Nations across Turtle island and has lectured on the similarity of the struggles forself-determination here and in Palestine. For the past decade he has organized with SPHR and currently is the Branches Coordinator at the National Office of the organization.

I Love American Barriers To Trade

2009-02-04T20:46:00.005-06:00

I rarely post just how I feel about things. But I’ve heard so much “Canada opposes American protectionism” that I just have to write something to the contrary.

I live in Canada, and I support American protectionism. I am anti-trade. I am an enemy of the global market economy. I believe in bioregionalism and localized, small-scale economies. In this regard by all means refer to my “How to” post of October 4th, 2005.

I think that American protectionism is a big step toward the protection of the Boreal forest in Canada. The recent softwood lumber dispute was portrayed conventionally as a slight against Canadians by the big American forest industry. However, abominable wreckage is done to forests in Canada to feed American markets. There’s nothing dignified or professional about the forest industry in Canada. It is done in ways that are illegal, but the weight of the law never lands on the natural resource profiteers. In Canada, the weight of the law only ever falls on the people who try to defend the forest.

The Boreal Forest (just in case you have not yet been made aware) is a very large factor that contributes to the regulation of the global climate. Furthermore, it is the habitat of many beautiful animals and medicinal plants. I believe in the conservation of the Boreal Forest.

I believe in small-scale, sustainable forestry like that done by Nathan Keeshig on the Bruce Peninsula. Nathan takes extraordinary care of a forest that maintains – to the trained eye – its old growth dignity.

I hope that American protectionism will be the beginning of the end for natural resource piracy in Canada. The strip mines on Cape Breton Island and the Tar Sands in Alberta all have to stop.

That’s all for now. I hope you get me. Good night.

A couple of neat links

2009-02-03T21:18:00.002-06:00

Check out http://downtoearth.org.in/

and

Check out http://www.themohawkfarmproject.com/

Roberta Keesick needs our help

2009-01-28T12:37:00.003-06:00

In early June, 2008 news that Grassy Narrows First Nation’s demand that industrial logging on their territory stop was met when Abitibi-Bowater announced that they would not be seeking a licence in the Whiskey Jack Forest. However the struggle is not over. While the chainsaws have stopped at Grassy Narrows, persecution of those that assert their traditional rights on the land has not ended.

Roberta Keesick, a Grassy Narrows clan mother, trapper, blockader, and grandmother, is facing charges in Red Lake Ontario for building a trappers' cabin on her traditional family lands without a Provincial permit. She has been a tremendous force in the grassroots struggles at Grassy Narrows to reclaim traditional land and assert the right of self determination. The act for which she now faces criminal charges is part of a process of reclamation and revival for Grassy Narrows where people are using the land on their territory as their ancestors have for generations; it is a critically important piece of the work that is being undertaken by the people of Grassy Narrows to empower themselves and to sustain their families, revive their culture and heal their community—this access to land is crucial for the healing of First Nations, and it is this right that is being challenged by the court with the charges that have been brought against Roberta Keesick.

Roberta’s trial date is in the spring. While they have found her a lawyer who will donate his services, he needs his costs of travel, and filing documents with the court, covered. These costs will be approximately $4000. She is seeking donations for a legal defence fund. The assertion of rights on traditional land is one of the most important components of the ongoing struggle for Indigenous rights. This case has the potential to set an important precedent; Indigenous people have a right to traditional land use on their traditional territories. This case represents an example of the way that governments disable First Nations from sustaining and empowering themselves. Roberta Keesick’s actions—the building of a trapping cabin on her own family’s trap line—is a perfect example of how people from Grassy Narrows are asserting their rights through the straightforward actions of living an Anishnabe life. It is of the utmost importance that any and all of us who are concerned with Indigenous rights and the well being of First Nations communities, support the grassroots struggles at Grassy Narrows and in other communities and to support Roberta Keesick in her struggle to simply live her life on her land. Please donate generously.

To make a donation to Roberta Keesick’s legal defence fund you can send an email money transfer to Leah Henderson: leah.m.henderson@gmail.com With the security question: what is your favourite flower

Answer: sunflower

You can also email the above email address to find alternative ways of donating (i.e., cheque, cash, etc.)

Green leader takes up land rights case of Que. First Nation

2009-01-10T07:28:00.003-06:00

http://www.calgaryherald.com/news/Green+leader+takes+land+rights+case+First+Nation/1152640/story.html

Canadian Lakes and Streams at Risk of Being Converted to "Tailings Impoundment Areas"

2009-01-09T06:37:00.000-06:00

http://www.cbc.ca/canada/story/2008/06/16/condemned-lakes.html

To: master@xinjiang.gov.cn

2008-12-05T17:31:00.001-06:00

Dear Chairman,

Please do everything within your power to guarantee that Mr. Abdushukur Qurban is not tortured or ill-treated while he remains in custody. Mr. Qurban ought to have access to his family, legal assistance of his choice and any necessary medical treatment.

You must make a clear distinction between activities which involve the peaceful exercise of civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights and those that would be internationally recognized as criminal acts. As such, you must either charge Mr. Qurban with an internationally recognizable criminal offence or release him. Please ensure that everyone in the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region is able to exercise their fundamental human rights regardless of race, religion or political opinion.

I hope that, in the near future, the independent expression of Uighur ethnic, cultural or religious identity will be free from oppression.

Sincerely and Respectfully,

The Human Health Effects of B. t. and Starlink

2008-12-05T08:31:00.004-06:00

I gathered this information a few years ago, but yesterday's questions have prompted me to post this all for public consumption, as it were:

From 2001 until 2004, a US subsidiary of the Swiss firm Syngenta allowed American farmers to plant 15,000 hectares of corn, or maize, that had been modified with an unapproved version of the B. t. gene (see Nature 434, 423; 2005).

Small batches of the unapproved seed were also exported to Europe. After Nature revealed this mistake, Syngenta claimed that there was no significant difference between the approved genetically modified corn, called Bt11, and the corn that had been inadvertently released, called Bt10. Only later did the company admit that Bt10 differs from Bt11 in that it contains an additional gene that confers resistance to the antibiotic ampicillin (see Nature 434, 548; 2005), a difference that most experts agree is of some significance. Even Monsanto says: “Rats fed B. t. corn developed kidney inflammation, altered blood cell counts and organ lesions. These and other changes suggested possible allergies, infections, toxins, anemia or blood pressure problems.”

StarLink corn was a product of the Aventis Corporation. It contained Cry9c, a B. t. protein that is heat stable and can not be excluded as an allergen. [Cry9c (MW of 68 kDa) shows some characteristics of known food allergens and relative resistance to gastric proteolytic degradation and to heat and acid treatment. It is probably a glycoprotein. It induces a positive IgE response in the Brown Norway rat and is a high IgE responder on intraperitoneal and oral sensitization (in contrast to the related Cry1Ab5 protein). It may be found intact in the bloodstream after oral feeding in a rat model.] It was approved by the EPA as a pesticide when produced for sale as an animal feed. In September 2000, it contaminated the human food supply.

Upon dry milling, the Cry9c content is reduced by 40 percent. Additional processing, such as alkaline cooking, decreases the protein content to 0.1 to 0.2 percent of the original Cry9c protein (FIFRA SAP, 2000b). This suggests a further reduction in allergenic potency; however, protein denaturation by heat or partial proteolysis may uncover new allergenic epitopes [An epitope is the part of a foreign organism or its proteins that is being recognized by the immune system and targeted by antibodies, cytotoxic T cells or both] (FIFRA SAP, 2000; Hefle, 1996 in Kuiper et al. 2001).

There was no way to easily determine if consumption of this genetically engineered protein was resulting in allergic reactions in humans. Fifty-one people reported signs and symptoms that varied from gastrointestinal illness to anaphylactic shock. These reports were entered into the FDA’s adverse events reporting system (Bucchini & Goldman 2002).

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention developed a case definition that included: a suspected anaphylactic reaction that occurred within 1 hr of product consumption, dizziness, weakness or loss of consciousness; any of the following dermatological or oropharyngeal symptoms that occurred within 12 hr of product consumption, hives, rash, pruritus, oropharyngeal tingling or swelling; any of the following gastrointestinal symptoms that occurred within 12 hr of product consumption, vomiting, diarrhea, abdominal cramping (only experienced by one individual). These symptoms were not explained by any preexisting medical conditions.

Twenty-eight of the 51 reports were consistent with the case definition (Bernstein et al. 2005). A serological test for antibodies specific to acute hypersensitivity was considered to be the safest way to evaluate whether any of these people were indeed sensitive to the genetically modified protein in StarLink. The FDA developed an Enzyme-Linked Immunosorbent Assay (ELISA) test that found no IgE [Immunoglobulin E (IgE) is the least abundant antibody subclass, i.e., isotype, capable of triggering the most powerful immune reactions. Proteins that bind IgE from people with allergies are likely to be allergens.] antibody reactivity to Cry9c in any of the serum samples. The U.S. EPA SAP reviewed these data in 2001 and concluded that the technical approach for the detection of Cry9c protein and antigen-specific [For those of us not practicing the black art, an antigen is a foreign substance, e.g., a toxin, which induces an immune response in the body, esp. the production of antibodies.] IgEs is limited and cannot resolve the issue of the presence or absence of Cry9c-specific IgE in the serum of individuals reporting adverse reactions after eating corn (Bucchini & Goldman 2002).

Raybourne et al. (2003) came to the conclusion that, “while the results do not support the likely occurrence of allergic reactions to Cry9c, such reactions cannot be ruled out, nor can the possibility that sera might react with unique glycosylated epitopes of Cry9c that might be expressed in the corn plant/seed.”

The FDA’s IgE-specific ELISA did not include the StarLink-derived Cry9c protein, but the recombinant Cry9c expressed in E. coli as an antigen. It is possible that epitopes present on Cry9c in maize may not be present in the non-glycosylated E. coli-derived protein. A specific goat serum against Cry9c was included in the ELISA, as there was no human serum available that contained the IgE antibody to Cry9c. The result is that the possibility of lack of specificity for human anti-Cry9c IgE cannot be entirely dismissed (CDC 2001b and CDC 2001c in Kuiper et al. 2001).

Literature Cited:

Bucchini, L., Goldman., L. 2002. Starlink corn: a risk analysis. Environmental Health Perspectives 110(1): 5-13
Kuiper, H., G. Kleter, H. Noteborn and E. Kok. 2001. Assessment of the food safety issues related to genetically modified foods. The Plant Journal 27(6): 503-528

Honourable Governor General,

2008-12-02T17:29:00.002-06:00

I care deeply about the ecosystems and people in Canada, which is why I am contacting you tonight. I must ask you to please allow the proposed coalition government to form. Please do not prorogue parliament.

Only a parliament in session can pass a money bill. Please do not muzzle the parliament at this time of economic crisis, when their action is necessary.

Mr. Harper does not have the confidence of the house. His decisions have been based on self-interest.

I believe that a coalition government would work well for this country.

Sincerely and Respectfully,

Alliance Romaine

2008-11-05T07:32:00.001-06:00

http://allianceromaine.wordpress.com/

Dow vs Canada

2008-10-24T16:32:00.001-05:00

[2,4-D isn't just a cosmetic pesticide, it's a monoculture lifestyle. Such enormous volumes of 2,4-D have drenched the North American landscape that it has acted as a selection pressure in the Darwinian sense. For my M.Sc. I studied a plant whose populations in North America, Eastern Europe, etc., have largely developed resistance to 2,4-D. Resistance to 2,4-D has combined with resistances to some other groups of herbicides. Some characteristics of these plants change, when the plants are herbicide-resistant mutants, e.g., the soil temperature at which they emerge in the spring.]

http://www.panna.org/files/GlobeAndMailBanOnPesticidesMayFaceNAFTAtest20081022.pdf

The New Underground Railroad

2008-10-19T08:55:00.000-05:00

IRANIAN QUEER RAILROAD FOUNDED
By Doug Ireland

A new organization, the Iranian Queer Railroad, has just been launched, modeled on the 19th century Underground Railroad that used various routes and safe houses to bring American slaves to freedom in Canada. Now, the courageous young Iranian queer organizer Arsham Parsi is doing the same thing to get persecuted LGBTers out of Iran, temporarily find them refuge in neighboring countries - especiallyTurkey - and help them find their way through the redoubtable maze of international asylum procedures until the UN High Commissioner for Refugees grants them official refugee status and so, at long last,they can only then be admitted to a gay friendly country and gain legal asylum status as refugees from sexual persecution. There are hundreds of these gay, lesbian, and transgendered Iranians languishing in stateless limbo in squalid conditions and homophobic cultural surroundings who need to be saved. To read more, click on: http://www.irqr.net/English/160.htm

To read:

2008-10-14T18:28:00.000-05:00

http://afghanwarrior.blogspot.com/

Omar Khadr and Barriere Lake

2008-10-07T07:47:00.004-05:00

Omar Khadr
[although I'm including other links in this post, I think Omar Khadr is the most important issue going on in Canada at this time. I am reminded of The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.]

http://www.bringomarhome.ca/
http://www.peoplescommission.org/

Barriere Lake
Demands, and a list of groups that have endorsed them: http://barrierelakesolidarity.blogspot.com/2008/03/mission.html
Photos of the current blockade:http://www.flickr.com/photos/31135244@N07/sets/72157607795831835/
A quick visual introduction to the community:http://www.dominionpaper.ca/articles/1947
More information on how to support the Barriere Lake Algonquins:http://barrierelakesolidarity.blogspot.com/2008/03/donations.html

GAY! October schedule of events

2008-10-01T14:58:00.001-05:00

The schedule of events, along with descriptions of the events, speakers, panelists, DJs, etc. is available here:

http://pgss.mcgill.ca/TEMP_IMGS/GOPamphletOnline.pdf

Check it out. See you there. Invite all your friends, because the events are open to EVERYBODY.

To: info@pmo.gov.bd; devasish59@yahoo.com; minister@bd.com

2008-09-26T16:53:00.000-05:00

Cc: bangla@rogers.com; bma@aitlbd.net

Dear Chief Adviser,

Rang Lai Mro, the imprisoned head of a community of indigenous Mro people in the Chittagong Hill Tracts, has a serious heart condition that requires medical attention. Rang Lai Mro is also the head of a local NGO, Mrochet, that works to improve the facilities available to the Mro people in the region. Please allow Rang Lai Mro to receive immediately the appropriate medical attention in a hospital equipped to provide specialist treatment for his condition.

I am particularly concerned, that he has been beaten by army officers in custody at the local army headquarters (Bandarban Cantonment) and is at risk of further torture.

Sincerely and Respectfully,

Ivan is not Kader

2008-09-24T13:00:00.001-05:00

I am very ashamed. After the protest today, while waiting for the Macdonald campus shuttle, I explained that I had just been to a protest. I said this to an esteemed lecturer, who I believe is the director of the Agricultural program at McGill's Macdonald Campus. Granted, I had woken up very early. And had nothing to eat or drink. But for some reason I used the name of Abdelkader instead of Ivan. God help me: Ivan Apaolaza Sancho is not Abdelkader Belaouni.

To: info@gouexecutive.net

2008-09-16T08:34:00.000-05:00

Cc: info@justice.go.ug; uhc@ugandahighcommission.com; uhrc@uhrc.ug
Subject: release Oundo George and Kiiza

Your Excellency,

Please release Oundo George and Kiiza immediately. They are currently detained without charge at Nabweru Police Post and have not been brought before a court within the constitutional limit of 48 hours. They are prisoners of conscience, who have been arrested solely for their gender identity. I am very affected by the trouble that they are in, my thoughts are with them.

I am concerned for the health of Oundo George. He is a diabetic and requires urgent medical attention for his condition.

Please tell me that Oundo George and Kiiza will not be tortured or ill-treated, and that they will be given prompt access to their families and lawyers. The Ugandan government must end the police harassment and wrongful detention of LGBT human rights defenders.

Sincerely and Respectfully,

Remember when I said "Code Pink" instead of "ACT UP!"?

2008-09-10T08:42:00.000-05:00

Well this time I said "Earth First!" instead of "ELF."

So, for the record:

Earth First! ≠ ELF

two sites to look at

2008-08-25T08:20:00.001-05:00

http://www.sindark.com/

http://ptaff.ca/

To: embassy1@embaguate-canada.com

2008-08-21T16:57:00.002-05:00

Cc: Harper.S@parl.gc.ca

Dear Mr. Francisco Villagran de Leon,

I am emailing you tonight due to my concern with regards to the August 7th murder, in Colotenango, Guatemala, of Antonio Morales. Mr. Morales was active in the struggle for the rights of Mayan people, the defense of natural resources, respect for community referendums, and (an issue most dear to my heart) resistance to open-pit mining. I hope you will instigate immediately an investigation into the death of Mr. Morales. Furthermore, I must ask you to listen to the wishes of Mayan communities: for autonomy, self-determination, and an end to large-scale mining (such as the Canadian-owned Marlin mine in San Marcos) and hydro-electric dam projects.

In the meantime, please enact your powers to protect the life of human rights lawyer Amilcar Pop, and the lives of the members of the Asociación Chrisitiana de Jóvenes. They are in danger.

Furthermore, please take what action you can to pressure Canadian extractive industries to follow the recommendations of the report on the National Roundtables on Corporate Social Responsibility and the Canadian Extractive Industry in Developing Countries.

In the memory of Antonio Morales,

Beyond Primitivism:

2008-08-19T10:58:00.002-05:00

Toward a 21st Century Anarchist Theory & Praxis for Science

Can be accessed for free here:
http://illvox.org/2008/08/16/beyond-primitivism-toward-a-21st-century-anarchist-theory-praxis-for-science/

... but was borrowed from the Anarchist Studies Journal: http://www.lwbooks.co.uk/journals/anarchiststudies/current.html

Here's the Barriere Lake Solidarity link:

2008-08-16T09:58:00.001-05:00

http://www.barrierelakesolidarity.blogspot.com/

and furthermore, another blog of note:

http://harrietspirit.blogspot.com/

Cheraq 43

2008-07-29T07:56:00.000-05:00

(Iranian Queer magazine) is available on-line with some articles in English [!!!] and Persian.

www.cheraq.net

To the Canadian High Commission in New Delhi:

2008-07-18T09:22:00.001-05:00

This letter particularly concerns the cases of Mohammad and Ali with file number B051747780. Mohammad and Ali were recognized by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in 2006 and 2007, respectively. UNHCR forwarded their case to you for quick processing, noting that this case should be treated as high priority. Mohammad and Ali completed interviews and health checkups in July, 2007. A whole year has passed and they are still waiting for your Embassy to complete their processes.

You must be aware of the perils that queer refugees in particular face in India. The Indian penal code calls for punishment of homosexuals and the Indian society is homophobic. Because of this, refugees like Mohammad and Ali deal with escalated risks. Confronting these risks often leads to mental health problems and symptoms of post traumatic stress disorder. It is essential that such individuals resettle in a country deemed safe and appropriate for homosexuals, such as Canada, as quickly as possible.

Especially at this time of imminent volatility, I support queer Iranians, and urge that you expedite Mohammad and Ali's case, because they are suffering in New Delhi and Mohammad's mental health is especially deteriorating. He has been medicated by a UNHCR psychiatrist for seven months. I am concerned about their emotional states in India, and urge you to bring them relief from their unhealthy situation. Due to the exigent circumstances especially facing queer refugees, I urge you to assist Mohammad and Ali, and help them resettle in Canada promptly.

Your timely, informed and sensitive treatment of this case will be much appreciated.

Sincerely and Respectfully,