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Corporations Have No Use for Borders
What happened to Canada? It used to be the country we would flee to if life in the United States became unpalatable. No nuclear weapons. No huge military-industrial complex. Universal health care. Funding for the arts. A good record on the environment.
But that was the old Canada. I was in Montreal on Friday and Saturday and saw the familiar and disturbing tentacles of the security and surveillance state. Canada has withdrawn from the Kyoto Accords so it can dig up the Alberta tar sands in an orgy of environmental degradation. It carried out the largest mass arrests of demonstrators in Canadian history at 2010’s G-8 and G-20 meetings, rounding up more than 1,000 people. It sends undercover police into indigenous communities and activist groups and is handing out stiff prison terms to dissenters. And Canada’s Prime Minister Stephen Harper is a diminished version of George W. Bush. He champions the rabid right wing in Israel, bows to the whims of global financiers and is a Christian fundamentalist.
"Our solidarity should be with activists who march on Tahrir Square in Cairo or set up encampamentos in Madrid. These are our true compatriots." (photo: Pascal Marchand)
The voices of dissent sound like our own. And the forms of persecution are familiar. This is not an accident. We are fighting the same corporate leviathan.
“I want to tell you that I was arrested because I am seen as a threat,” Canadian activist Leah Henderson wrote to fellow dissidents before being sent to Vanier prison in Milton, Ontario, to serve a 10-month sentence. “I want to tell you that you might be too. I want to tell you that this is something we need to prepare for. I want to tell you that the risk of incarceration alone should not determine our organizing.”
“My skills and experience—as a facilitator, as a trainer, as a legal professional and as someone linking different communities and movements—were all targeted in this case, with the state trying to depict me as a ‘brainwasher’ and as a mastermind of mayhem, violence and destruction,” she went on. “During the week of the G8 & G20 summits, the police targeted legal observers, street medics and independent media. It is clear that the skills that make us strong, the alternatives that reduce our reliance on their systems and prefigure a new world, are the very things that they are most afraid of.”
The decay of Canada illustrates two things. Corporate power is global, and resistance to it cannot be restricted by national boundaries. Corporations have no regard for nation-states. They assert their power to exploit the land and the people everywhere. They play worker off of worker and nation off of nation. They control the political elites in Ottawa as they do in London, Paris and Washington. This, I suspect, is why the tactics to crush the Occupy movement around the globe have an eerie similarity—infiltrations, surveillance, the denial of public assembly, physical attempts to eradicate encampments, the use of propaganda and the press to demonize the movement, new draconian laws stripping citizens of basic rights, and increasingly harsh terms of incarceration.
Our solidarity should be with activists who march on Tahrir Square in Cairo or set up encampamentos in Madrid. These are our true compatriots. The more we shed ourselves of national identity in this fight, the more we grasp that our true allies may not speak our language or embrace our religious and cultural traditions, the more powerful we will become.
Those who seek to discredit this movement employ the language of nationalism and attempt to make us fearful of the other. Wave the flag. Sing the national anthem. Swell with national hubris. Be vigilant of the hidden terrorist. Canada’s Minister of Natural Resources Joe Oliver, responding to the growing opposition to the Keystone XL and the Northern Gateway pipelines, wrote in an open letter that “environmental and other radical groups” were trying to “hijack our regulatory system to achieve their radical ideological agenda.” He accused pipeline opponents of receiving funding from foreign special interest groups and said that “if all other avenues have failed, they will take a quintessential American approach: sue everyone and anyone to delay the project even further.”
No matter that in both Canada and the United States suing the government to seek redress is the right of every citizen. No matter that the opposition to the Keystone XL and Northern Gateway pipelines has its roots in Canada. No matter that the effort by citizens in the U.S. and in Canada to fight climate change is about self-preservation. The minister, in the pocket of the fossil fuel industry like the energy czars in most of the other industrialized nations, seeks to pit “loyal” Canadians against “disloyal” Canadians. Those with whom we will build this movement of resistance will not in some cases be our own. They may speak Arabic, pray five times a day toward Mecca and be holding off the police thugs in the center of Cairo. Or they may be generously pierced and tattooed and speak Danish or they may be Mandarin-speaking workers battling China’s totalitarian capitalism. These are differences that make no difference.
“My country right or wrong,” G.K. Chesterton once wrote, is on the same level as “My mother, drunk or sober.”
Our most dangerous opponents, in fact, look and speak like us. They hijack familiar and comforting iconography and slogans to paint themselves as true patriots. They claim to love Jesus. But they cynically serve the function a native bureaucracy serves for any foreign colonizer. The British and the French, and earlier the Romans, were masters of this game. They recruited local quislings to carry out policies and repression that were determined in London or Paris or Rome. Popular anger was vented against these personages, and native group vied with native group in battles for scraps of influence. And when one native ruler was overthrown or, more rarely, voted out of power, these imperial machines recruited a new face. The actual centers of power did not change. The pillage continued. Global financiers are the new colonizers. They make the rules. They pull the strings. They offer the illusion of choice in our carnivals of political theater. But corporate power remains constant and unimpeded. Barack Obama serves the same role Herod did in imperial Rome.
This is why the Occupy Wall Street movement is important. It targets the center of power—global financial institutions. It deflects attention from the empty posturing in the legislative and executive offices in Washington or London or Paris. The Occupy movement reminds us that until the corporate superstructure is dismantled it does not matter which member of the native elite is elected or anointed to rule. The Canadian prime minister is as much a servant of corporate power as the American president. And replacing either will not alter corporate domination. As the corporate mechanisms of control become apparent to wider segments of the population, discontent will grow further. So will the force employed by our corporate overlords. It will be a long road for us. But we are not alone. There are struggles and brush fires everywhere. Leah Henderson is not only right. She is my compatriot.
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74 Comments so far
Show AllDo you think any one in any other country would give up their jobs to unite with the US on anything? Do you think the people of China or Mexico are ready to lay down their lives like we did here for unions, bargaining, 40 hr work week, safety on the job, minimum wage, and to get rid of child labor (which is what the American laborer is really fighting - child labor)? I don't think they are. We fought for all that only to have it co opted by cheap/crack labor from over the BORDER.
what seems to have been true all along is now getting more true. our mission in life is living our highest truth - come what may. to not play the games of society, but to live as a citizen of the earth - of the universe. as one who is comfortable resisting what passes for normal. comfortable being an outlaw.
and in it for the long haul.
Conservatives are the enemy
I'd call them "reactionies" since their mission is not to conserve what was good of the past, but to return to a time when the ordinary people had virtually no rights at all. Here in the USA that was the "Gilded Age" of the 1880's on to about 1910 or so. A good example of that sort of thinking was the Titanic. Lifeboats enough for the 1st class passengers, lifejackets for everyone else. The wealthy never have to worry about the cost of health care, but ordinary working people here in the USA do. No doubt the Canadian upper class objects to paying higher taxes so everyone in Canada can have health care. Much the same applies here in the US which is why we've never had universal health insurance here in the US. The rich being more powerful here than they are up there in Canada. However, the Republicans here in the US have never "accepted" Social Security and Medicare (limited to seniors and the disabled here in the US). And I'm sure your wealthy conservatives hold the same viewpoint in Canada as ours do here in the USA. And given the opportunity, they will attempt to do it...
I call them Regressives.
Just as in the USA , the two traditional Governing parties are Corporatist parties. There really no substantive differences between the two.
Worse then that however, is the NDP is rapidly becoming the same moving its policies to the right so as to solicit and garner that Corporate support. Everytime there a risk of a Left Wing party coming to party, the Corporations warn that they will pack up and move their operations elsewhere.
You can NOT HAVE a functioning Democracy when the MEANS OF production and sources of jobs and livelihoods are put into the hands of the "Investor class".
If we design a system where we MUST LABOR on the behalf of another entity so as to obtain food water and sustenance then that entity has too much power over the individual.
Any nation state that allows a Corporation or one small group of people to countrol its resources and its "means production" is not democratic and becomes Authoritarian.
Governments that put the welfare of the Corporation and Investor class and the Banks above the welfare of the people are NOT of the people.
Maybe we ought to rename Canada "Hudson's Bay Company", and the USA " British East India Trading Company". The HBC and the BEITC. These royal corporate entities have a longer history of existance (INCLUDING their current, covert, existance) than the nationstates that supplanted them. These are really the SAME two factions at war with each other; the nations vs the royal chartered corporations. Actually, the economic royalists have given up the HBC to a common "department store" existance. These corporate creeps "change suits" on us all the time (the BEITC is now the inter-alpha group of financiers; creators of wallstreet & the eurozone...a powerful, though dying, empire).
"Maybe we ought to rename Canada "Hudson's Bay Company", and the USA " British East India Trading Company"."
That would be the most honest depiction of what we have become.
Global problems require global government. Corporations, digital communication technologies, international finance, global environmental degradation--none of these respect national boundaries. National governments, no matter how powerful, cannot enforce the rule of law on the global level. We must move toward a democratic world government, with world courts, a world constitution, global law enforcement and, most importantly, a global bill of rights protecting and enhancing the civil, economic and environmental rights of all world citizens. If we don't, corporations will continue to rule the world and control the politics and politicians of individual nations.
The other reason we so need global government is that a world democratic government can outlaw warfare and hold individual leaders of nations (and non-state terrorists) accountable for political violence. By demanding that nations resolve conflicts and disputes in international and regional courts, we can replace WAR with LAW--the only thing that can actually do so. All the peace marches in the world will not eliminate warfare until we do so with international law ratified by the nations of the world. No nation can be secure from war until ALL nations are secure from war.
Globalization cannot be stopped, it is evolutionary in nature and the world is increasingly interconnected via our communications and transportation technologies, international culture and finance. Local problems should be handled by local government, national problems by national governments, and global problems by global government. Our political and governmental institutions have to catch up--and this means global governance.
Jerry Gerber
www.jerrygerber.com
An example of 1% in Brazil - 7000 people who, having no land built on an empty lot in the town of Pinheirinho (?) in Sao Jose dos Campos the state of Sao Paulo and had been living there for 8 years. The court decided to evict them in a 'reintegration of possession'and the hundreds of minimal homes ('roofs') were destroyed. A reporter covering it had to take himself off camera because he started to cry seeing just one family with a 2 yr old - now without options. In Portuguese - but the sight should be seen.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejv6QvRz4bo&feature=endscreen&NR=1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=jl9kRVvhM1I
I made a 30 minute short film about the G20 summit in Toronto. It's called "Police State Canada" ('Provocation and police terror and the G20 summit in Toronto'). Americans who think of the RCMP has a bunch of helpful lads saving women from waterfalls will be in for a shock. The film also shows the dynamic between provocateurs (usually described as "anarchists" by the media) and police terrorism against protesters as a whole. The cops in Toronto were particularly vicious. Video can be seen here --
http://metanoia-films.org/police-state-canada/
In a speech Thursday to the Davos World Economic Forum, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper pledged that his Conservative government will pursue a “transformative” big business agenda—austerity and tax cuts, radical regressive changes to public health care and pensions, and deregulation. In short, a social policy counter-revolution.
...Harper’s assertion that “jobs” are his government’s “number-one policy priority” is a transparent lie. Under the capitalist system that Harper so unabashedly promotes, all of socio-economic life is subordinated to big business’ pursuit of profit. The aim of his government is not to create jobs, but to maximize profits and investor returns by removing all regulatory restraints on capital, shifting an ever-larger portion of the tax burden onto working people and eliminating what remains of the rights workers wrested from big business and their governments in the great social struggles of the last century.
During the past year, Europe’s governments, whether openly right-wing or social-democratic, have implemented brutal austerity measures in the face of massive working class opposition and have increasingly resorted to authoritarian methods to do so.
Like his US and European counterparts, Canada’s prime minister was prepared at the height of the financial meltdown of 2008 to put all the financial resources of the state at the disposal of the financial aristocracy, whose rampant speculation and profiteering triggered the crisis. Now, he baldly asserts that the underlying problem dragging down the world economy is excessive social spending, “too much general willingness to have standards and benefits beyond our ability, or even willingness to pay for them.”
http://wsws.org/articles/2012/jan2012/harp-j28.shtml
….and I’m with you Chris. Your articles continue to be the voice of reason, thank you.
We have stopped asking long time ago for whom the bell tolls. The powers that be (a fraction of a fraction of the one percent) have amassed an enormous amount of energy much like a heavy flywheel spinning at frightening speed; and one can sense the destructive force rendered to anything in its path.
You may remember what Gandhi said about non-violent civil disobedience: The reason his movement was successful was that he was dealing with an enlightened people. The geographic of truths were mapped out in the text of their people (colonizer) in volumes and volumes of writings – it would be just a matter of time that this manifestation would surface in the dialogue with the [other]; and it did.
Can this also be said of the powers that posses the true WMD (media propaganda) today? With the onslaught of information and its control it’s becoming more difficult to become informed – or connect the strands to the DNA of reality. The Emperium’s golden rule of divide and conquer rings ever more true and pitting the individual against is own self interest is the theorem that has few exceptions. Why would a soldier continue to fight against his own being? In wars he has nothing to gain from and everything to loose; and unlike the ones giving the orders those whom he kills harbor no ill will towards him. When will this supply line stop being the vehicle for transferring wealth in one direction while destruction and suffering along with the loss of lives in another. Even in reflection this is upsetting as it voids all the efforts of the best minds throughout the ages; and all that is good of humankind is fast diminishing like the natural resources on planet earth.
Dreams Lost in Water
No distance ever separates
Dreams and desires
No mirror ever dissolves
Reflection and water
In one's eye
What graph would you make
Of lines of thought?
The triangle of pain
Is without any angle
Countless races
Have dreams alike
But sleep and night-watch
Are never the same!
Names are forgotten
Codes alone come to mind
In nuclear setups
Dreams of radiant generations
Are smitten
By atomic explosions
Cities sink
Nuclei dissipate
Orbits dwindle
What remains
Are terra and sol
In the dance of death
God is a casualty.
A moment of brightness
In a light year
Breaking into smithereens
In a million eons
An accident - yes
But not an event
History is continuity
Broken once
Telescopic eyes, tired out, give up
Their distance watching
Lost planets
Bygone epoches
Have no interposition.
Who will look for
Flowers
In spring-fresh hands
Of tiny tots?
Who will see
Dreams
In eyes-yours and mine
In centuries to be?
No one is sure
Of things lost in water!
Naseer Ahmed Nasir
The English poet Wilfred Owen wrote a great poem about the big lie that soldiers buy into, as you were suggesting.
Here is the poem, set to music:
http://www.jerrygerber.com/dulceetdecorumest.htm
jsg
www.jerrygerber.com
Thanks Jerry.
Hedges rightly says, “Corporate power is global, and resistance to it cannot be restricted by national boundaries. Corporations have no regard for nation-states. They assert their power to exploit the land and the people everywhere. They play worker off of worker and nation off of nation. They control the political elites in Ottawa as they do in London, Paris and Washington.”
.. and “Our most dangerous opponents, in fact, look and speak like us. They hijack familiar and comforting iconography and slogans to paint themselves as true patriots. They claim to love Jesus. But they cynically serve the function a native bureaucracy serves for any foreign colonizer. The British and the French, and earlier the Romans, were masters of this game.”
....and finally, “The Canadian prime minister is as much a servant of corporate power as the American president. And replacing either will not alter corporate domination. As the corporate mechanisms of control become apparent to wider segments of the population, discontent will grow further. So will the force employed by our corporate overlords.”
And yet despite Hedges acknowledging that corporate power is essentially a 'global' leviathan empire "without boarders", there is not 1 in 100 posts, even in the most progressive alternative media that mentions empire, and not 1 in 1000 that diagnoses it properly as a 'global empire'.
And there is little to no appreciation, nor discussion, that when it comes to disguising, camouflaging, and anesthetizing “all the people, all the time” to the fact that our country has been ‘captured’ and fully “Occupied” by a global corporate/financial/militarist (and media) EMPIRE that hides behind the facade of its modernized Two-Party ‘Vichy’ sham of faux-democratic and totally illegitimate government—just as surely as the Nazi Empire tried to hide behind its single-party? ‘Vichy” facade in France c. 1940—- “Nobody Does It Better” than Obama.
I was struck not only by the idiocy of the Republican’s auditioning for the 2012 contest to become the next faux-Emperor/president of this collapsing global “Vichy Empire” (which many still think of as ‘our country’), but also of the more dangerously insane and guileful lies of Obama in his SOTU (or more accurately SOTE - State of the Empire) speech, in which this consummate con-artist repeatedly used the words ‘grow’ and ‘growing’ multiple times to describe the economic trajectory of what he called, this “Indispensable Nation”, which this old ‘OKie Doke’ scammer used as both a means to further disguise the FACT that our nation has actually now been fully ‘captured’ and “Occupied” behind the facade of a global corporate/financial/militarist (and media) EMPIRE merely posing as a “Vichy” sham of faux-democratic and totally illegitimate government, and to also give a tip of his hat to international war criminal and mass-murderer of a million Iraqi children and citizens, Madeleine Not-so-bright, who coined the term.
Obama is clearly the Global “Vichy” Empire’s first choice as the world’s best deceiving cheer-leader for continuing on this path to extinction via lulling Americans into sleep.
Yes, when it comes to using “Friendly Fascism” [Bertram Gross] and “Inverted Totalitarianism” [Sheldon Wolin] as the most favorable anesthetics for fooling “all the people, all the time”, this death-star Global Vichy Empire has all the faith in the world that “Nobody Does It Better” than Obama.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OMOd1JJvwlM
Best luck and love to the Occupy Empire educational and revolutionary movement.
Liberty, democracy, justice, & equality
Over
Violent/Vichy
Empire,
Alan MacDonald
Sanford, Maine
About time people started waking up to the fact that Canada is not some kind of 'nirvana north' these days - we *used* to be somewhat better than the US, in terms of freedom and sanity, but the country started following the US down the black road about 25 years back, when the corps installed their own puppet pm, a true devotee and servant of the Money Class named Mulroney. And we haven't looked back - deeper and deeper into Mordor have we gone, with waaaaay too many people not seeing what has been happening. I think Chriss got his shocked awakening a few weeks ago when some rightwing nutcase on the "lefty" CBC called him a 'leftie nutbar' or some such thing, thus clearly exposing the 'public broadcaster' for the scummy servants of power they have morphed into. I penned a short essay about these things recently, oddly enough with the answer to Chris's question as the title - What Happened? http://www.rudemacedon.ca/what-happened.html . For those interested.
Another excellent article by Chris Hedges. Yet, once again, he misses center target. Large-scale, republican democracy is working perfectly. It always has. The mob will hand over their liberty and freedom in exchange for the promise of prosperity and security nearly every time. As is demonstrated every election cycle, the hordes of urbanites that elect their masters are slaves to their own fears. In today's ultra-civilized world, mega-corporations deliver the illusions of wealth and safety the vast majority of people crave. Simply put, most people, especially city-dwellers, DO NOT want liberty nor freedom, they want predictable routines and comforting rituals.
"Simply put, most people, especially city-dwellers, DO NOT want liberty nor freedom, they want predictable routines and comforting rituals."
Not sure that they don't want freedom or liberty so much as their taking it for granted.
Canada contributed the uranium for the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs....we are the US wing man on every conflict/plunder. We like to think we are not part of the military industrial complex but that is like our neighbours watching someone get beat up in our front yard and turning away and going into their house to rob them. By our refusal to speak against war and by following others to war many have died so we are part of it.
We have never had the funding for the art that there is in the US and Europe and most of the world that is why so many artists leave.
And if you want to wait 11 months for your Grandfather's heart surgery then universal health care is great. And don't bother living on the reserve or in the prairies because it is only universal if you can get to it.
Our environmental record speaks for itself (it sux) and the crap we plan to do to the planet so the rich can get richer is so disgusting our leadership should be impeached, prosecuted and required to live on welfare for the rest of their lives on a reserve.
We like to think of our selves in the way portrayed here. Nice, polite, no one would ever think we have some of the most brutal police forces in the western world especially if you are Original to here or gay or female or poor or.... but we are just telling others that because we are embarrassed by our own behavior and like a child caught making a mess with the paint we point to the guy next to us and say "He did it", even though we are covered with the same paint they are.
All one has to do is look at our record with the people who were here first and still are here. The people who own the place. The pre Canada folks. The ones who do not need Canadian Citizenship because who they are, as the owners of the place, predates Canada. We have not been "nice" to them in any way or even humane or equal, ever!
We are on their land and yet many of them are living in poverty and squalor and not just this minute because this is when the TV decided to talk about it but for ever that we have been here and we have done far worse to them and we are again questioning whose fault that is! We are and have been pillaging their home and treating them as just another part of the environment that is in the way of "the progress" of the development of the planet into a blood sucking global capitalist plundering machine! Like asking the victim of a rape what they were wearing or asking the guy who gets mugged why he was carrying a briefcase. They are and have been living in that situation because we (lovely Canada) took their stuff and we won't share. We refuse them equity. We would be horrified if the international community suddenly looked at Canada and stopped being nice and sharing and treating us as if we were a significant people, yet entire Nations languish under our occupation! Everything you see is the spoils of war.
We are horrible tenants and the Ontario Housing Tribunal would have had the sheriff here ages ago if the First Nations and Inuit and Metis chose to have us evicted. Just look at Israel v Palestine and then at Original Peoples v Canada and you tell me the larger, longer disgrace!
For equity (just like in the case of female equity) we would have to pay our rent/due/share (not enough money in the universe) and we would not be allowed to ask what the landlord would do with it or how he is spending it either, we would just have to pay it because we owe it or be LOCKED OUT and required to pay damages. Just like any other tenants we made "lease" agreements in the form of treaty's and if we do not keep our part of the agreements they should not have to allow us to stay here. We would have to find another place someone else is already living and try to be roomies with them although our reputation as lease holders has been pretty poor and we would have a hard time getting a reference. And we would not be allowed to trash/plunder the place and stay either!
All one needs to do to see the seedy dark mean side of Canada is to look around and see the way the Original People in our city are treated by the police and institutions. The predominant institutions in this city to serve Original Peoples are churches and other NGOs using money from the government to pay street workers to spend street peoples money for them in a co dependent cycle of maintaining the status quo.
What would we do with all these social workers if rent weren't so damn high and humans could get reasonable safe secure housing, health care and the ability to grow their own food? Making a profit on shelter/food/water/..... is wrong and making heinously exorbitant profit on rent is a crime. And no First Nations person should ever have to pay rent in Canada! That is absurd. We have never had a system that worked. We left from where we were because pyramid schemes don't work for most of their members and yet when we got on the the boats we intended to pillage and plunder and profit and we have. Welcome to capitalism. No capitalist country is a good country! The great pyramid scheme from the cult leaders of the world.
Canadians like to think of our cult as peaceful but really we are just not as criminally negligent causing death as the other guy!
We would be if there were 300,000 million of us whose money could be misspent on a for profit war machine that is killing the planet!
Since corporations have usurped the traditional rights of human beings wouldn't it be a just proposition for us lowly captive citizens to reclaim parity by asserting the commensurate right of free movement among any nation state of the world; essentially invalidating the whole concept and integrity of the nation state.
The prospect of international chaos arising from acting on such a 'right' might re-invigorate the debate on so-called corporate 'person-hood'.