Updates from June, 2010 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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“A Taste of South in the Global North”Demonizing Democracy in Canada By Anita O?urlu
29 June, 2010 — The B u l l e t Socialist Project • E-Bulletin No. 378
They never “opened fire” but by Canadian standards the public got a shock – a well-thought out theatrical performance – Southern style! “This only happens in places like Mexico,” one protester told me. Helicopters circling the city 24 hours a day, snipers on roof tops, the liberal use of pepper gas, rubber bullets, police on horseback, university campuses and private home raids and arrests (900 and counting), beatings (men and women, young and old of all colors including “white”), intimidation, transportation shut-downs… The list goes on. You know it well! While the Integrated Security Unit might have been slightly milder on the beatings, the rest was standard practice, so much so, I could warn my less experienced comrades what was about to come and it usually came, minutes later!
20,000 March in Protest
A protester who came all the way from Iran for the event, said jokingly, “Even God is a capitalist,” when the rain poured down on us for most of the day. By 11:00h on Saturday almost 20,000 protesters from a cornucopia of groups, along with the Ontario Postal workers, Hamilton Steel workers, Sudbury miners (on strike for over a year now), Oshawa and Ottawa autoworkers, CUPE (Canadian Union of Public Employees), university employees, students and professors, militant Ethopian and Somalian groups, together with an array of leftist groups, gathered at Queen’s Park in the heart of Toronto (approximately 10 to 15 blocks from where the Summit was well under way at the Toronto Convention Center in the financial district). All had two objectives. First, to make our voices heard. Second, to get to the fence (near the site of the Summit). As predicted, neither happened! A well-planned, coordinated effort on behalf of the Integrated Security Unit (ISU) (trumped up name for police) to protect the ruling class together with the bourgeois media made sure both objectives were terminated.
People First Rally – June 26, 2010. -
InI
Military Resistance 8F16 30 June, 2010: Contradictions
Military Resistance 8F16.pdfContradictions:
How The Big Media And The Politicians Spun The Rolling Stone Story To Protect Obama By Focusing On McChrystal And Hiding The Most Important Parts Of What The Reporter Wrote:“The Very People That COIN Seeks To Win Over – The Afghan People – Do Not Want Us There”
“So Far, Counterinsurgency Has Succeeded Only In Creating A Never-Ending Demand For The Primary Product Supplied By The Military: Perpetual War”
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G20 Exposes Ontario ‘Martial Law’ & G20 Roundup for Monday afternoon
28 June, 2010 — The Real News Network
G20 Exposes Ontario ‘Martial Law’
Paul Cavalluzzo: Ontario Public Works Act removes probable cause & right to free and peaceful assemblyReal News journalist attacked at G20
TRNN’s Jesse Freeston, one of the members of media attacked or arrested at G20Paikin on police attack against peaceful protest
Steve Paikin, veteran Canadian journalist, describes arrest and beating of Guardian newspaper journalistNo right for freedom of assembly says 500 arrests
Howard Morton: There is evidence the police infiltrated “Black Bloc” and should have known their plansG20: Interview with Toronto Mayor David Miller
Paul Jay asks mayor Miller about arrests on Friday and Saturday in Toronto -
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TORONTO G-20 – THE SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME
28 June, 2010 — The Real News Network
Are extraordinary police powers and cuts to social safety net the G-20 plan for the future?
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InI
Mud and Hope in South Hebron
26 June, 2010 — The Only Democracy?
Ezra Nawi, after a day in the mud
Bi’r el-’Id — There’s a strange beauty in the viscous black mud that comes up from the depths of the earth, from the bottom, or somewhere near the bottom, of the well we are cleaning in Bi’r al-’Id. Bucket after bucket of it, lifted by pulley from down below, straggles to the surface, where we unload it and pour it out on the rocky escarpment. Its texture changes remarkably over the long morning hours from a watery top layer to heavy, shiny dark loam to a granular, sticky brown. It has a strong smell, like the sulphurous mud from the Dead Sea (not very far away) that people smear over their bodies for healing. Yehuda says the Palestinians of Bi’r al-’Id should bottle it and sell it at the airport: “Sacred Mud from the Sacred Desert.” There’s no end to it. The buckets go down and up, down and up, heavier each time; the rope attached to the pulley is now caked solid with mud, and the escarpment has turned into a mire. Amiel, Dolev, and Danny are down in the dark recesses, filling the buckets alongside Haj Isma’il. Suddenly Ezra arrives—he was released from jail only a few days ago—and immediately lowers himself, like Spider Man, down the shaft. You can’t stop him. When they emerge hours later, they are black troglodytes, covered with mud from head to toe; and we, too, working the buckets above ground, are splattered, encrusted, soaked.
When I said goodbye to Amiel almost five months ago, he said, “We will meet in the spring, and when you get back, things will be the same here, just a little worse.” But actually in some ways they’re a lot worse. The continuing struggles against the occupation, on the ground in the territories, take their usual grim course, but inside Israel hardly a day passes without some new and sickening jolt.
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InI
Military Resistance 8F15 29 June, 2010: Americans Puking Up The War
Americans Puking Up The War On Afghanistan:
“Their Sons And Nephews Have Come Back From Repeat Tours Full Of Doubts As To The Possibility Of Victory, ‘Whatever That Is,’ As We All Now Say’”
“A Plurality Of 48 Percent Now Say Ending The War In Afghanistan Is A More Important Goal Than Winning It”
“46 Percent Of Respondents Think America Is Losing The War In Afghanistan (26 Percent Say The Military Is Winning)” -
InI
IHH Report on the Killings on board the Mavi Marmara
29 June, 2010 – Free Gaza
On May 31, 2010, the six ships reached 75 miles away from the coast of Israel. We constantly reiterated that we were traveling in peace and carrying nothing but humanitarian and construction aid to the people of Gaza. At around 3:00 am, the battleships were still following us along with nearly 30 zodiacs that surrounded the flotilla in international waters.
At 4:10 am, messages from the ship, Define stated, “Mavi Marmara, all of the boats and ships are approaching you.” Shortly after, when most of the participants were performing their morning prayers, pursuit boats carring masked, armed soldiers came alongside the boats. At least 10 Israeli soldiers were in every boat. As they tried to get onboard, they began shooting. Then we heard sounds that were similar to gas bombs. The third sound was the constant sound of machine gun fire. At the same time, military helicpters full of armed soldiers rappeled down, shooting as they descended.
This operation was hostile from the very beginning, directed towards killing and killing as many as possible. Israeli soldiers did not open fire on the ships as a warning. They opened fire to kill. The first two people on board were shot in the head, killing them instantly.
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Europe’s Fiscal Dystopia: The “New Austerity” Road to Financial Serfdom By Prof. Michael Hudson
25 June, 2010 — Global Research
Massive Cutbacks in Public Spending
Europe is committing fiscal suicide – and will have little trouble finding allies at this weekend’s G-20 meetings in Toronto. Despite the deepening Great Recession threatening to bring on outright depression, European Central Bank (ECB) president Jean-Claude Trichet and prime ministers from Britain’s David Cameron to Greece’s George Papandreou (president of the Socialist International) and Canada’s host, Conservative Premier Stephen Harper, are calling for cutbacks in public spending.
The United States is playing an ambiguous role. The Obama Administration is all for slashing Social Security and pensions, euphemized as “balancing the budget.” Wall Street is demanding “realistic” write-downs of state and local pensions in keeping with the “ability to pay” (that is, to pay without taxing real estate, finance or the upper income brackets). These local have been left unfunded so that communities can cut real estate taxes, enabling site-rental values to be pledged to the banks of interest. Without a debt write-down (by mortgage bankers or bondholders), there is no way that any mathematical model can come up with a means of paying these pensions. To enable workers to live “freely” after their working days are over would require either (1) that bondholders not be paid (“unthinkable”) or (2) that property taxes be raised, forcing even more homes into negative equity and leading to even more walkaways and bank losses on their junk mortgages. Given the fact that the banks are writing national economic policy these days, it doesn’t look good for people expecting a leisure society to materialize any time soon.
The problem for U.S. officials is that Europe’s sudden passion for slashing public pensions and other social spending will shrink European economies, slowing U.S. export growth. U.S. officials are urging Europe not to wage its fiscal war against labor quite yet. Best to coordinate with the United States after a modicum of recovery.
Saturday and Sunday will see the six-month mark in a carefully orchestrated financial war against the “real” economy. The buildup began here in the United States. On February 18, President Obama stacked his White House Deficit Commission (formally the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform) with the same brand of neoliberal ideologues who comprised the notorious 1982 Greenspan Commission on Social Security “reform.”
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MichaelKenny
Roll back three centuries of the Enlightenment? The poor old EU and its euro! As if setting off the Icelandic volcano wasn’t bad enough! Now the enlightenment goes up in smoke! The resaon why the neo-liberal gurus are so hysterical over the EU reaction to Wall St’s attack is twofold. On the one hand, by reducing debt, the EU is depriving Wall St of the weapon with which it attacked Greece and with which it intended to attack other Member States. On the other, American voters, particularly conservatives, are undoubtedly going to demand the same thing in the US, which will largely destroy the American Empire (and thereby Israel). That was blowback the banksters probably didn’t foresee!