RCMP are currently illegally invading Wet’suwet’en territory. They have moved in on both sides of Gidimt’en Checkpoint and at least 14 arrests have been made including legal observers, elders, and media.
Watch and share the urgent call-out for support made by Sleydo below and take action! (Watch the video update)
“This is Sleydo over here on Cas Yih Yintah. The RCMP have moved in this morning on Gidimt’en Checkpoint. CGL is enforcing their own injunction order.
They started this morning on both ends of the blockade at 63 with a bunch of heavy machinery, chasing somebody with a …
The states that claim they kill innocents ‘by accident’ or ‘unintentionally’, or because ‘the terrorists shield behind them’, are also the ones that keep killing innocents
by Jonathan Cook / November 19th, 2021
An “honest mistake” is buying your partner the wrong perfume or copying someone into an email chain by accident. It is not firing a drone missile at a car, killing 10 civilians – and doing so when a small child was clearly visible moments earlier.
And yet, a supposedly “independent” Pentagon inquiry this month claimed just such a good-faith mistake after US commanders authorised a drone strike in late August that killed an Afghan family, including seven children. A US air force general concluded that there was no negligence or misconduct, and that no disciplinary action should be taken.
NATO, the U.S. Government, and all other “neoconservatives” (adherents to Cecil Rhodes’s 1877 plan for a global U.S. empire that would be run, behind the scenes, by the UK’s aristocracy) have been treating Russia, China, and Iran, as being their enemies. In consequence of this: Russia, China, and Iran, have increasingly been coordinating their international policies, so as to assist each other in withstanding (defending themselves against) the neoconservative efforts that are designed to conquer them, and to add them to the existing U.S. empire.
It’s that crucial scene near the end of The Dead Zone. Johnny Smith (Christopher Walken) has just bungled an assassination attempt, the bullet from his rifle missing Greg Stillson (Martin Sheen), a ruthless and ambitious presidential candidate. In panic and fear, Stillson wrenches a small child from the grasp of his mother and holds the boy before him as a shield to any other bullet that might follow.
Today, in Texas and elsewhere, children are held aloft by pretentious adults. It’s meant to appear as a protective act, and it is, but …
The role of the parliamentarian, historically, is one of service. The desire to hold two jobs, or more, suggests that such service is severely qualified. In the quotient of democracy and representation, the MP who is ready to tend to the affairs of others is unlikely to focus on the voter. I represent you, but I also represent my client who so happens to be parking his cash in offshore tax havens. I represent you, but I am moonlighting as an advisor for an armaments company.
This condition has become rather acute in the British political scene. While a backbencher earns …
COP26 reaffirmed what has been obvious from the beginning: the Northern colonial and capitalist states most responsible for creating the climate crisis are unwilling to place people before profits in order to address the planet’s looming ecological collapse and humanitarian catastrophe.
We need justice. But that word — Justice! — despite all of the philosophical pontificating from John Locke to John Rawls, is a concept incompatible with the rapacious civilizational logic of a colonial/capitalist system based on self-interest, greed, and social Darwinism. Yet, without a firm commitment to the institutionalization of a just world order in which the gifts of mother-earth …
The revelation, a few years ago, that the US National Security Agency (NSA) has been conducting mass surveillance on millions of Americans has reignited the conversation on governments’ misconduct and their violation of human rights and privacy laws.
Until recently, however, Israel has been spared due criticism, not only for its unlawful spying methods on the Palestinians but also for being the originator of many of the technologies which are now being heavily criticized by human rights groups worldwide.
Even at the height of various controversies involving government surveillance in 2013, Israel remained on the margins, despite the fact that Tel …
Is this what Canada’s prime minister Justin Trudeau meant when he told Indigenous leaders:
It is time for a renewed, nation-to-nation relationship with First Nations peoples, one that understands that the constitutionally guaranteed rights of First Nations in Canada are not an inconvenience but rather a sacred obligation.
With our Haudenosaunee allies, we enforced our ancient trespass laws and have permanently closed access to our territory. The Morice Forest Service Road has been destroyed and access to Coastal Gaslink is no longer possible.
We are upholding our responsibility to defend our sacred headwaters and put an end to the destruction of the Yintah.
Members of the Gidimt’en clan ordered all Coastal GasLink employees to leave the Wet’suwet’en territory in the interior of British Columbia on Sunday in a move the company said contradicts a court order.
Starting at 5 am Sunday, the clan told workers they had eight hours to “peacefully evacuate” the area before the main road into the Lhudis Bin territory was closed at 1 pm.
Of all the speeches and political grandstanding at the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Glasgow (COP26), the words of Mexican President, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, were the most profound and least hypocritical.
Lopez Obrador raged against the “technocrats and neoliberals” – world leaders who hold the future of humanity in their hands. This was a direct reference to leaders of the powerful countries that “increase their fuel production, at the same time that they hold summits for the protection of the environment,” while arriving in Glasgow on private jets.
Indeed, hypocrisy continues to define what is meant to be a …
A friend in Montreal, whose partner is a teacher, recently messaged me:
My wife, who sat through the Grade 4 virtual Remembrance Day activity organized by the school board described what it was like: The students watched two soldiers walk around a military base giving a tour. This included tanks. … A student asked if they use the tanks. The soldiers stumbled a bit and the spiritual animator intervened and said ‘we don’t ask soldiers about whether they use weapons or shoot people’. The soldier intervened and got upset. He said something to the effect of ‘no soldier joins the army …
The UK government’s Behavioural Insights Team helped to push the public towards accepting the COVID narrative, restrictions and lockdowns. It is now working on ‘nudging’ people towards further possible restrictions or at least big changes in their behaviour in the name of ‘climate emergency’. From frequent news stories and advertisements to soap opera storylines and government announcements, the message about impending climate catastrophe is almost relentless.
Part of the messaging includes blaming the public’s consumption habits for a perceived ‘climate emergency’. At the same time, young people are being told that we only have a decade or so (depending on who …
Since the annual U.S. Veterans Day holiday honoring military veterans was just observed on November 11, it seems more than appropriate to suggest the creation of a U.S. Victims Day, just as in a similar effort at truth in labeling, the Defense Department should be renamed the Offensive War Department.
For the victims of American terrorism far outnumber the American soldiers who have died in its wars, although I consider most U.S. veterans to be victims also, having been propagandized from birth to buy the glory of war, not the truth that it’s a racket that serves the interests of the …
One of the most controversial fixes for global warming is the use of woody biomass, cutting trees, burning trees to achieve “carbon neutral” status in the worldwide battle to conquer climate change/global warming.
The term carbon neutral (which is not the same as zero carbon and not a scientific term) when used to distinguish a plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions really means this: “Someone else, at some other time, removes carbon, so I can emit more.” (Quote by Dr. William Moomaw, IPCC co-author of several reports)
Wood pellet manufacturing listed as carbon neutral has become a huge growth business throughout the …
Refugee crises are often manufactured by governments. They can be done at the source: war, famine, rapacious institutions. They can also be manufactured by the refusal of governments to accept those seeking asylum, sanctuary and refuge.
The latter is very much in evidence in Europe: governments of the European Union are staring down desperate humans keen to travel into the EU; Belarus, engaging in its own form of mega-trafficking, has become a conduit for the movement of asylum seekers and migrants fleeing from Iraq, Syria, Yemen and Afghanistan.
Despite being granted Belarussian visas at considerable cost, many being initially housed in government …
In these posts I try to highlight how our social, cultural and political structures are rigged to reflect the interests of an economic elite and maintain their power. Because the forces that shape those structures are largely invisible – we mainly notice the people and buildings inside these structures – the way power operates can be difficult to describe and to understand.
To use a familiar analogy, we are like a fish that cannot see the water in which it is submerged. Water completely orders its life: how it swims, that it swims, the limits of where it …
A US military spokesperson has defended a series of strikes on civilians in Syria, which killed 80 people including women and children, claiming they were in self-defense and that no disciplinary measures were necessary.
The US military found itself at the center of controversy after the New York Times reported that it had covered up a 2019 strike on Syrian civilians which left at least 80 dead. After the report went viral, US officials finally acknowledged the casualties in a statement and claimed that 16 of those killed were allegedly Islamic State fighters and 4 were civilians.
This morning [14 November], we upheld our laws and issued a mandatory evacuation order for all pipeline workers trespassing on our territory. We are enforcing the eviction order from January 2020, where Wet’suwet’en Hereditary Chiefs representing all clans of our nation stood together and removed Coastal GasLink from our lands.
We will never abandon our children to live in a world with no clean water. We uphold our ancestral responsibilities. We continue to protect our yintah and invite all of our supporters to join us on the ground or to take action where you stand.
As the world prepares to depart 2021 and head into 2022, it is clear that the United States is a declining economic power and that China continues its rapid upward trajectory. While homelessness and poverty sully the debt-laden US, China has eliminated extreme poverty. What is the American response to economic disparities domestically? Institute a guaranteed minimum income? Andrew Wang who trumpeted such an income was rejected as a candidate by the Democratic Party. The Dems also pulled the rug out from under the social-democratic candidate Bernie Sanders who had promised medical care for all and to alleviate student debt. …
Words can provide sharp traps, fettering language and caging definitions. They can also speak to freedom of action and permissiveness. At COP26, that permissiveness was all the more present in the haggling ahead of what would become the Glasgow Climate Pact.
COP26, or the UN Climate Change Conference UK 2021, had a mission of “Uniting the world to tackle climate change.” The tackling, however, fell rather short, though countries, in the main, were trying to sell the final understanding as a grand compromise of mature tidiness. COP26 president Alok Sharma called the outcome “a fragile win”, the outcome of …
Financial constraints indicate that Social Security (SS) has a precarious future. Ignored is that Social Security history shows built-in failures that cannot be constantly repaired. Only a National Pension Plan can provide a suitable and secure financial arrangement for retirees. Fortunately, SS already has the framework for a National Pension Plan.
Social Security’s Built-in-Failures
The reason for the potential social security dilemma is well known; revenue will be insufficient to meet the benefits for an increased senior population. From the day of its first payment, check number 00-000-001, issued to Ida May Fuller …
As if we needed any more evidence of the sorry state of our political system, the long-running battle over the ‘Build Back Better’ bill has provided it. As Senator Bernie Sanders pointed out, an early version of this bill included many proposals that would help Americans live with a sense of security. In addition, these proposals were strongly supported by the US population.
Among these many items were negotiations with pharmaceutical companies to lower the obscenely high drug prices, universal Preschool for all 3- and 4-year olds, support for paid family and medical leave, and the expansion of Medicare to include …
I stumbled across the accompanying illustration years ago, while doing research on a racial incident in Texas. It obviously grabbed my attention.
The image was published in the Monday, July 26, 1937 edition of the Brownsville Herald. The caption above it read “Spain—One Year.” It referred to the Spanish Civil War.
This artistic expression would have been evocative even without a caption; but, generally speaking, I pay attention. I knew immediately how prophetic this editorial image had been.
The illustration was created to make a point about a tragedy that was playing out. The …
The US, EU, and OAS are launching a new coup attempt against Nicaragua’s Sandinista government, refusing to recognize its 2021 elections. The Grayzone‘s Ben Norton observed the vote on the ground, and filed this report.
The natural environment has been poisoned, vandalized and trashed in accordance with the demands and values of the all-pervasive socio-economic system, and as long as it persists it is impossible to imagine the steps required to save the natural world being taken. Economic considerations and short term self-interest will continue to be applied and the devastation will continue.
Neo-liberalism is an extreme form of capitalism, like its founding ideology but darker, even more unjust and brutal. It sees every aspect of life – waterways, forests, the air, people, you name it – as a potential product to be exploited, profited from, …
by K.J. Noh and Michael Wong / November 13th, 2021
The Earth’s greenhouse-gas (GHG) concentrations are driving catastrophic climate change, and creating an existential threat to the planet. But there is a way out.
Last year, President Xi Jinping pledged that China’s carbon-dioxide emissions would peak before 2030, and that the country would become carbon-neutral before 2060.
China has a history of setting ambitious, nearly impossible goals and then achieving them –often before deadline – so this pledge is significant.
Under the Communist Party of China (CPC), Beijing has already created an “economic miracle” in transforming China into the largest economy in the world. It ended extreme poverty while creating the largest middle class …
The United Nations upper global temperature target of 1.5°C takes no account of the fact that, without the transient short-lived aerosols effect of over 0.5 to 1.0 Watt/m?², the mean global heating is nearing ~2.0°C.
It is the cumulative concentration of greenhouse gases …
He has some gall. Australia’s Prime Minister Scott Morrison, a person who finds the truth a creature best beaten, shunned and ignored, is now moving into what looks like campaign mode. At COP26 in Glasgow, he sold the world a climate change model that kept company with countries where fumes linger stubbornly, and the fossil fuels burn bravely. He made sure to do it the “Australian Way“, ensuring that emission reduction targets would not so much be met as thoroughly “beaten” without the need for taxes. He spoke of technology unproven and made assumptions unfounded.
US President Joe Biden hectored Nicaragua about their November 7 elections accusing them of “a pantomime election that was neither free nor fair, and most certainly not democratic.” Three days earlier, the US lavished a $650mil arms deal on Saudi Arabia, a monarchy where they don’t even pretend to have elections for higher office. Clearly more than democracy is at issue with the US offensive against Nicaragua.
At issue is what Biden described as “the arbitrary imprisonment of nearly 40 opposition figures since May, including seven potential presidential candidates.” An objective investigation reveals: (1) …
