lancecore: politics

cultureofresistance:

Resistance fierce as oil sands battle shifts to British Columbia

Claudia Cattaneo, Apr. 25, 2012, via @Native_NewsNet

VICTORIA — During the past few months, the main front in the fight against development of the Alberta-based oil sands has moved to British Columbia. It’s a situation the western-most province is uncomfortable with and an expansion it’s unmotivated to defend.

The aggressive push by the oil sands industry and the Alberta and federal governments to open a new market for Canadian oil through shipments from the West Coast has been met by equally forceful resistance starting at the Alberta-B.C. border.

Anger has escalated since the start of public hearings in January into the Northern Gateway pipeline, proposed by Calgary-based Enbridge Inc., interrupting years of friendly relations between the neighbouring provinces, particularly on energy development.

Indeed, condemnation of the pipeline through B.C.’s rugged north and its associated oil tanker traffic has erupted into the type of popular revolt that is becoming a B.C. mainstay — from the campaign against the harmonized sales tax to the fight to preserve the Great Bear Rainforest and the moratorium on oil tanker traffic and offshore drilling.

[…]

(Source: anonymissexpress, via humanformat)

cultureofresistance:

Naomi Wolf, 5 April 2012, via @MClarissa

Bagram airbase was used by the US to detain its ‘high-value’ targets during the ‘war on terror’ and is still Afghanistan’s main military prison. Photograph: Dar Yasin/AP

The discussion continues today at 12pm ET (5pm UK time) when Naomi Wolf takes your questions about her column. Join us for an hour long live chat about the supreme court, strip searches and sexual humiliation.

In a five-four ruling this week, the supreme court decided that anyone can be strip-searched upon arrest for any offense, however minor, at any time. This horror show ruling joins two recent horror show laws: the NDAA, which lets anyone be arrested forever at any time, and HR 347, the “trespass bill”, which gives you a 10-year sentence for protesting anywhere near someone with secret service protection. These criminalizations of being human follow, of course, the mini-uprising of the Occupy movement.

Is American strip-searching benign? The man who had brought the initial suit, Albert Florence, described having been told to “turn around. Squat and cough. Spread your cheeks.” He said he felt humiliated: “It made me feel like less of a man.”

In surreal reasoning, justice Anthony Kennedy explained that this ruling is necessary because the 9/11 bomber could have been stopped for speeding. How would strip searching him have prevented the attack? Did justice Kennedy imagine that plans to blow up the twin towers had been concealed in a body cavity? In still more bizarre non-logic, his and the other justices’ decision rests on concerns about weapons and contraband in prison systems. But people under arrest – that is, who are not yet convicted – haven’t been introduced into a prison population.

Our surveillance state shown considerable determination to intrude on citizens sexually. There’s the sexual abuse of prisoners at Bagram – der Spiegel reports that “former inmates report incidents of … various forms of sexual humiliation. In some cases, an interrogator would place his penis along the face of the detainee while he was being questioned. Other inmates were raped with sticks or threatened with anal sex”. There was the stripping of Bradley Manning is solitary confinement. And there’s the policy set up after the story of the “underwear bomber” to grope US travelers genitally or else force them to go through a machine – made by a company, Rapiscan, owned by terror profiteer and former DHA czar Michael Chertoff – with images so vivid that it has been called the “pornoscanner”.

Believe me: you don’t want the state having the power to strip your clothes off. History shows that the use of forced nudity by a state that is descending into fascism is powerfully effective in controlling and subduing populations.

The political use of forced nudity by anti-democratic regimes is long established. Forcing people to undress is the first step in breaking down their sense of individuality and dignity and reinforcing their powerlessness. Enslaved women were sold naked on the blocks in the American south, and adolescent male slaves served young white ladies at table in the south, while they themselves were naked: their invisible humiliation was a trope for their emasculation. Jewish prisoners herded into concentration camps were stripped of clothing and photographed naked, as iconic images of that Holocaust reiterated.

One of the most terrifying moments for me when I visited Guantanamo prison in 2009 was seeing the way the architecture of the building positioned glass-fronted shower cubicles facing intentionally right into the central atrium – where young female guards stood watch over the forced nakedness of Muslim prisoners, who had no way to conceal themselves. Laws and rulings such as this are clearly designed to bring the conditions of Guantanamo, and abusive detention, home.

[…]

Guardian: How the US uses sexual humiliation as a political tool to control the masses

(Source: anonymissexpress)

mclobsters:

Stephen Harper’s Conservatives dislike Canada. They reject much of what the rest of the world values and praises about us — our respect for cultural, linguistic and racial diversity; our sense of social responsibility towards one another; our support for collective as well as individual rights; our history of common institutions and programs specifically designed to buffer citizens, regions and provinces from the vagaries of uncontrolled market forces; our honoured international role as a moderate middle power and the originator of international peacekeeping.

For proof of the low esteem in which our current government regards Canadians and their country, look no further than Thursday’s federal budget, the first where the Conservatives could fly their true colours thanks to the “strong, stable, majority Conservative government” frequently bragged about by the prime minister.

Resources are to be exploited as fast as possible. Concern for the environment and the rights of aboriginal and other citizens are a distant second. Food safety is to be left to the food manufacturers, drug safety to the pharmaceutical industry, transportation safety to the transport industry. In the new, “liberated” marketplace, self-regulation is the mantra. When it comes to matters of human health and safety, individuals and families will be largely on their own.

jakke:

Inside meetings of la Francophonie and the G8, Mr. Harper has personally inserted himself – or instructed Canadian diplomats to insert themselves – to block resolutions even mildly critical of Israel, including references to the settlements. Mr. Harper has thus isolated Canada from its traditional allies such as the United States, Britain and France.

After last fall’s UN General Assembly meeting, Israel announced new settlements. Barack Obama’s administration criticized the move. So did the European Union. The German Chancellor personally phoned Mr. Netanyahu and asked him to desist. Canada said nothing.

At that UN meeting, Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird wrote his own speech, an over-the-top effort laced with fiery rhetoric supporting Israel and damning its foes. Mr. Baird, on becoming the minister, had informed his department that he didn’t want to hear from experts there because he and the government had already fixed their positions on Israel and the Middle East.

[…]

Should Israel attack Iran’s nuclear installations – an attack Mr. Netanyahu will be discussing next week in Washington – he can assume complete support from Mr. Harper. The Canadian Prime Minister has already portrayed Iran in the worst possible light, using language that parallels the most hard-line rhetoric within Israel. He even suggested Iran might use nuclear weapons should they be constructed, as if the Iranians were completely suicidal.

Yup, that’s where we’re at now. Canada wasn’t always like this (among other things, we have a free-trade agreement with both Israel and Palestine) but at this point the government has this bizarrely obsequious attitude towards Israel wherein our national Middle East policy is whatever the Israeli government says it should be. 

I’m not sure whom the target audience is here. On first glance you’d imagine it’s Jewish voters, but I really don’t think the marginal benefit of totally letting Israel call the shots (as a change from the previous strongly pro-Israel policy) could be that great, as the subdemographic of Jewish voters who are impressed by that sort of thing is not only relatively small but also probably already votes Conservative. And polling shows that the regions with the most Jewish voters are sliding back towards the Liberals, anyway. 

Going to assert that the target audience is more likely evangelical Protestants within the party who want to see as pro-Israel an outlook as possible, because they are working off the American narrative that somehow the State of Israel is innately pro-white evangelical Protestant and therefore deserves support (or something). At any rate, it’s seriously unimpressive.

Nailed it.