Ginger Goodwin Memorial Day

I went to Miner's Memorial Day in Cumberland  this
June 27th. There were over 200 people there, mainly
from the unions, the NDP and the Communist Party.
We had a ceremony at Ginger Goodwin's grave
and Gord Carter, a Cumberland singer/song writer
sang about Ginger and
the miners.  I met IWW members from Vancouver,
Victoria and Portland. The Portland Wob laid some flowers
on Miner's Row,   a mass grave of miners
too badly burned to be recognized.  Also met a group
of young socialists from Fight Back.

Later we had a supper in a hall next to the Cumberland
Museum and there was a lot of good music. My friends
Jim and Janette and I even got to do the Ginger Goodwin Song,
a poem that I had found and that we set to music.

All-in-all a fine time and made a lot of contacts

For More info on Ginger Goodwin See
 http://www.carpentersunionbc.com/Pages/gingergoodwin.html 

Denial

My father was frightened of his father,
I was frightened of my father,
and I am damn well going to see to it
that my children are frightened of me.

—King George V (1865–1936)

The abused child attempts to keep its sanity by denying what is happening to it. Over time this denial strategy becomes a habit, a way of dealing with all unpleasantness, or what the person deems unpleasant situations. Later in life, as a mature adult, an abused person who has not developed a level of self-awareness, will claim a happy childhood, denying the oppressive reality of their upbringing. It should be noted, that no effort was spared upon the part of religion and authorities to force this denial situation upon the child. Religion taught people to "honour their parents" whether they were brutes or not, and the authorities dismissed children's pleas as fantasies, or worse attacked the victims in turn. (As in "How could you say such a thing about your father you horrid child!") At every turn, reality was attacked and a fantasy world was imposed upon the individual. (1)

Anyone who has spent any time working for peace, environmental sanity or worker rights will be confronted by individuals for whom no amount of evidence or logic will convince. Virtually nothing will make them change their minds. Their beliefs are not based upon rational thinking. I suggest that one candidate for the source of their infuriating irrationality is denial. They find comfort or protection in their beliefs, the way the abused but unaware take solace in their fantasy of a loving childhood.

Such people find it difficult to admit that racism exists and that they too might harbour racist views. Global warming and peak oil are too mind boggling, too demanding of change in set ways, it is easier to pretend that the Iraq War was justified than face the prospect of presidential war crimes and so forth...I suggest that many, if not most of the supporters of the New Right or what ever you want to call it, are people who have suffered infantile trauma in authoritarian, and therefore abusive, family relations. At any rate this would be a good research topic.

1. This would partly explain the popularity of treacly, nostalgic, sentimental songs, novels, poems, pictures and movies years ago. Especially those that went on about the "joys" of childhood, school, or "Mum and Dad."

For further reading, I suggest The Politics of Denial and For Your Own Good by Alice Miller (or anything else by her for that matter.

The Importance of the Illegal Drug Trade

According to the 2005 United Nations World Drug Report, the value of the global illicit drug market for the year 2003 was estimated at US$13 billion at the production level, at US$94 billion at the wholesale level, and US$322–$400[5] billion based on retail prices and taking seizures and other losses into account.

From Wikipedia "Illegal Drug Trade"

The Transform Drug Policy Foundation also states that The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) has made several attempts to put a figure on the value of the global drug market. In its 1997 World Drugs Report the UNODC estimated the value of the market at US$400bn.^[1] This estimate has been widely used by the media and law enforcement agencies but has come under criticism from some experts as being far too high.

The economist Peter Reuter has suggested that an inflated figure has resulted from a confusion between turnover – which may run into hundreds of billions – and international trade which is far lower, because most of the added value is within the borders of consumer countries.^[2] An international trade worth 400 billion would put drugs alongside arms and oil amongst the world's biggest traded good. The more likely trade figure is nearer (and probably under) 100 billion – more comparable with the global trade in textiles...

In a seminar paper by Francisco E. Thoumi, published by the Transnational Institute, Thoumi says that an unpublished study by Peter Reuter for the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) resulted in an estimated range between US$45bn and US$280bn.^[3

The point has to be made that whether the figure is $100 billion or $400 billion it is a lot of money and the gangs cannot account for more than a fraction of it. The rest has to be somewhere else and the most likely set of suspects are the people who are already handling billions of dollars such as the offshore money laundries connected to "legitimate" financial institutions or the folks who already have a history of involvement in high-level drug trafficking, namely the CIA. See http://www.wakeupfromyourslumber.com/node/6712

Opposition to any reform of the drug laws is understandable. The people most vociferous in their support for the so-called War on Drugs are the people, or are associates of the people, who profit from the drug trade at the higher levels. The insane opposition to cannabis decriminalization also makes sense in light of this. Pot is the physically harmless competitor of all those profitable dangerous drugs and pot decrim could also lead to people wanting a saner approach to coke and smack usage. All of which would put an end to that easy cash flowing in and out of the financial system.

The fact that illegal drugs – and the massive sufferring associated with this black market - may be second only to the arms trade, or at least as large as textiles, points out the decadence of the contemporary economic system. War and drugging people as the biggest sectors of the economy shows a system in profound decay..

Canada Confesses To Part of Its Crimes Against First Nations People

CANADA CONFESSES PART OF ITS CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY –THERE HAS FINALLY BEEN AN OFFICIAL APOLOGY FOR ‘MURDER”, RAPE…

MNN. June 11, 2008….SODOMY, PEDOPHILIA, GERM WARFARE, STERILIZATION, MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS AND WHO KNOWS MAYBE EVEN NECROPHILIA OF INDIGENOUS CHILDREN IN ORDER TO “STEAL” OUR LAND AND RESOURCES. nThis is a start. Now we have to deal with other big issues, sovereignty and resources.

Our people were kidnapped and held hostage for three to four generations. Genocide is taking children away and killing them. It was only a small part of a bigger story of “gangsterism” and greed. Don’t be fooled! That evil program is still in full swing. Canada has no intention to stop. They continue to drive us off our land, to criminalize us, incarcerate us and to refuse to return control of our land and resources to us.

We don’t like being lied to. Saying “sorry” doesn’t cut it. Canada practically admitted to “murder” and theft in the first degree. While Prime Minister Harper was reciting his apology in the House of Commons, a permanent injunction was being granted to the city of Brantford to stop us from going onto our own lands to stop illegal development and to bring in the army if necessary. What forked-tongued two-faced hypocrisy! Anywhere else in the world when a people are threatened with military force, it is a “declaration of war”.

Every Canadian benefited from these crimes against humanity. They came her from Europe with empty hands. Stephen Harper said, “We are planning to move on”. This means that the perpetrators of these heinous crime have to be prosecuted in the international courts. More important, Canada is bound to the original relationship as “visitors” to our land who made promises to live peacefully under the Two Row Wampum Agreement. We are the land and resources owners and they have to negotiate with us to extend their stay.

Our future is tied to the Kaianereh’ko:wa, the law of Onowaregeh, Turtle Island. We cannot “bury the hatchet”! Planned murders of our children by the church and state cannot be pardoned anywhere. Canada broke international law to which they are bound.

At this moment illegal deals are being made by the government and its puppet band councils to deceive the people. Fraud and corruption is used to privatize under NAFTA every unsurrendered river and stream in British Columbia to send our water to California.

Is this desperation because Canada and the U.S. or someone is trying to keep the colonial scam going? Canada absolved the churches of responsibilities. The program to murder school children and to put them in unmarked graves was not random. All the churches , Catholic, Anglican, Presbyterian and United, stepped up to the plate to do dirty deeds for the state. It was part of the “pogram” to remove us completely to claim Onowaregeh, Turtle Island. What kind of special education does it take to forget that it’s wrong to kill kids?

Harper admitted they did not know our culture, our traditions and did not respect our basic human rights. They still don’t. Now that they have clearly admitted to being “busted”, shouldn’t the genocide stop?

The colonizers must respect our sovereignty, identity and culture. To start, they must stop all uranium and diamond mining, clear cutting and contamination of our environment. Stop trying to put us away in jails and holding cells to punish us for protecting the environment. Every single piece of Turtle Island, our resources and possessions must be returned to us so we can regnerate the natural beauty and health of Turtle Island.

Nothing is going to change if they can help it. To stop racism and lies the true history has to be taught in every school. Our education and language programs have to be improved. Clean water and decent homes have to be provided to all of us. All the elements that work together to demoralize our young people and incite them to commit suicides have to be stopped.

Canada is going to put up a monument as a symbol of this apology. Take down those hideous monuments to the true murderers of our people like Champlain, Humphrey Gilbert, Laverendrye, DeDenonville, Amherst and other scoundrels. Towns are still named after these mass murderers. Get rid of that depiction of the tied up Indian in bondage on the Clock Tower of the Parliament Buildings. We cannot rebuild our nations on monuments or empty words. Real reconciliation means restoring the traditional homelands and resources of the various Indigenous people who have been dispossessed. Anything less is a farce.

Canada stage managed this performance. It was sickening to see colonial lap dog Phil Fontaine of the Assembly of First Nations accept Harper’s apology on our behalf. It was a pre-written script probably by government spinners. We were never asked if we wanted him to accept this apology or to even accept it. The supporting remarks were made by the heads of colonially funded “puppy dog” organizations that jump to their “master’s” commands.

The money being offered to some of the victims is our own money. Any profit from our lands held in trust is “blood money”. We want an economy. Stop depriving us and forcing us out of our communities. Release all our trust funds immediately. Everything that was “kicked back” to the Vatican must be returned to us. These churches that committed these atrocities have investments from our lands worth billions and have declared stock portfolios well over $100 million. Release these to us. Give us our funds that the Canadian government holds as “trust funds”, namely the “Indian Fund”, the “Consolidated Revenue Fund” and the “Contingent Liability Fund”.

All levels of government should stop issuing illegal permits for exploitation of our lands and resources. Stop using our land and resources as collateral to borrow on international money markets.

The Queen and all the other “carpet baggers” who head the corporate criminal organizations that murder, rape and pillage us and our possessions should now be prosecuted in the international court for their crimes.

Our parents were threatened with imprisonment if they did not release their children to the control of the church and state. How long does it take to forget what our children saw – other children being murdered and even being forced to help bury them. They were deliberately given contagious diseases from which many died. There was out-and-out murder of over 50,000 at the hands of teachers, priests, nuns and staff. Our children were used in experiments by German doctors in the 1930’s and then disposed of. The children were threatened to never tell anyone about it.

It was the “I Apologize” Show, with Phil in a war bonnet, with smudging, all players with their scripts in hand and an audience seated strategically around. Someone on cue even yelled from the House of Commons gallery, “Way to go, Phil. You are our leader”. This government sanctioned desperado is not our leader! The sanitized plot did not include murder, torture, sterilization, kids witnessing killings and medical experiments on them.

You, the abusers, are in dire need of healing. In Australia the prime minister apologized to the Aborigines and they now live under a form of ‘martial law’! What will happen now when the army is brought in on us as happened in 1990?

Kahentinetha Horn

MNN Mohawk Nation News

The So-called Residential Schools Apology.

A Day, and a Decade, Later: What has Changed for Us?
by Kevin D. Annett

I awoke this morning to the same familiar sounds of east Hastings street, as birdsong was smothered by traffic's din - a day after a government "apology", and a decade after a Tribunal that started everything.

Faces have come and gone in one day, and in thirty six hundred, but the same cold reality stared back at me today in the hard eyes of angry desperation of the men and women, mostly aboriginal, who share these streets, and who never rest.

Steven Harper said "I'm sorry" to these people yesterday, but he didn't look sorry as he lectured the gala throngs on Parliament Hill about the Indian residential schools. He didn't look outraged, either, as he spoke about children being ripped forever from their homes and way of life. Nor, for that matter, did any other politician who spoke to the carefully arranged crowd of natives and whites.

But there was plenty of sorrow and outrage on our streets yesterday. Somebody else had just died, a native man named Vince who had, naturally, been jailed in residential school as a kid and suffered horribly there, and every day of his life thereafter. The clusters of people who camp around Main and Hastings were discussing Vince yesterday, rather than shuffling off obediently to the official viewings of Steven Harper's "apology" arranged by the government's flunky native chiefs.

"That's one less Indian problem for the fuckers" commented Bingo, a homeless native guy who is always at the forefront of our protests outside the Catholic church that killed Vince.

"All their nice words don't mean crap. Maybe to them they do but hey, it's always been like that, right?".

Right.

As much as Steven Harper and his friends know nothing of Bingo and Vince, they could not have spoken in Parliament yesterday and garnered such undeserved praise without the two of them, and all the other suffering throngs on every mean street across Canada that residential school survivors call home.

Yesterday's Parliamentary extravaganza, in fact, was built entirely on the efforts and revelations of these survivors that began ten years ago today, in a union hall in the east end of Vancouver.

It was called the North West Tribunal into Canadian Residential Schools, and it was sponsored by a United Nations affiliate called IHRAAM. Early that spring of 1998, the late Harriett Nahanee and I invited IHRAAM to come and listen to the stories of the residential school survivors who we had been working with for two years, many of whom had - like Harriett - witnessed killings and burials of fellow students at the schools.

From June 12 to 14, twelve IHRAAM judges and a UN observer heard stories of murder, torture, involuntary sterilization and medical experimentation in west coast residential schools, from eyewitnesses: people like Belvy Breber, Dennis Charlie, Elmer Azak and Ed Martin. Exactly one reporter showed up to the event - the Globe and Mail ran a short piece about the Tribunal on June 20, 1998 - but the Tribunal was an historic first: the only independent attempt ever to document deliberate genocide by the government and churches of Canada.

This single event was responsible for all of the changes and gains that have been won for survivors in the past decade, including yesterday's acknowledgment by a head of state that children did indeed die in church-run Indian residential schools in Canada. The Aboriginal Healing Fund, the first court settlements, and the Liberal government's 1999 "apology" to survivors all occurred less than a year after our Tribunal.

And yet, like Bingo and Vince, the IHRAAM Tribunal is officially ignored, and for the same reason: it does not fit into the government's plan of containment and concealment that was so evident yesterday in the House of Commons.

That plan is quite simple: to reduce the fact of genocide and mass murder to an accomodated issue of "abuse" that can be "resolved" with certain words and payments - and, in the process, to absolve the churches responsible for the crime from any responsibility for it.

A simple plan, but a potentially explosive one because of two threats: the spectre of lawsuits and scandal as more survivors came forward in the wake of the IHRAAM Tribunal; and the appearance of first my book Hidden from History: The Canadian Holocaust, spawned by the Tribunal, and then, last year, my documentary film UNREPENTANT, whose release prompted the raising of the issue of disappeared residential school children in Parliament in April, 2007.

Inspector Peter Montague of the RCMP is even more complimentary towards me. The chief smear artist of the covert operations branch of the RCMP in B.C., Montague engineered the public relations disaster known as the Gustafson Lake standoff, when unarmed Shuswap natives were assaulted by military vehicles and 77,000 rounds of fire from RCMP officers. Oddly, Montague was then assigned to the residential schools issue in 1996, after the first lawsuits began against his employer and the United Church of Canada.

Montague sent a number of undercover agents into our IHRAAM Tribunal, two of whom are still busy smearing me all over the world. But to one of these agents, who subsequently spilled the beans, Montague said,

"Kevin Annett is the one to worry about ... Discredit him and you discredit the issue." (spring, 1999)

It's strangely reassuring to see how so very little has changed in the past decade, which figures, considering how much the churches and government have to lose if they ever had to actually face the music over all those kids they killed in their residential schools. Still today, the official organs of church, state and mass media in Canada seem haunted and obsessed by me, as if I am the issue; as if I personify the massively guilty conscience of "white" Canada.

That guilt struggled to be assuaged yesterday in Parliament, and in the media orgasm that tries to convince us that the "issue" of residential schools is finally resolved. But it cannot be alleviated, any more than can the pain of Bingo, or Vince.

We are, all of us, quite missing the point: namely, that one cannot "apologize" for or resolve that which we do not understand.

To comprehend the horror and fact of the residential schools requires that we look first and last at ourselves, as we truly are: as part of a Thing that has spawned not only genocide, but planetary ecocide.

Holding up such a mirror to that truth and to my own culture has been my sole waking purpose for the past thirteen years. And, thankfully, I have witnessed over those years an amazing thing: the official wall of denial has begun to crumble, despite all the King's horses and all the King's men.

Last year, it would have been inconceivable for the Canadian media and government to be speaking almost casually about unmarked graves and dead residential school children. Yet now, even the National Post proclaims in its headlines, "Are Reconciliation and Truth Compatible?" (a slogan I've used for years now); and it's suddenly become fashionable for the press to play voyeuristically with tales of buried native children, while holding no-one in particular accountable.

More is being admitted, all the time, as the Thing's mask slips. So don't believe the Big Lie emanating from Ottawa yesterday. It's all smoke and mirrors, designed to hide the crumbling tower of colonial Canada.

Believe, instead, that Vince's time of vindication is coming; and along with it is approaching a great and terrible judgement on those masters of Church and State who like to imagine they have gotten away with their crime.

Ten years has taught me to stand aside from their world, as it topples.

June 12, 2008
......................................................................................................

Kevin D. Annett is a community minister, film maker and author who lives and works in the downtown eastside of Vancouver, on occupied Squamish Nation territory.

His website is: www.hiddenfromhistory.org

Occupy The Auto Plants!

The only way to save auto workers jobs – or minimally
their severance pay -   is to occupy the factory,
as other Ontario workers have done. Ultimately, the
workers should own and run the plants themselves.
See http://mollymew.blogspot.com/  for information on
the CAW blockade.
For another take on this issue see:
http://www.marxist.com/canada-oshawa-plant-nationalize-auto-industry.htm  

40,000 Year Old Mexicans!

There is now evidence in Mexico that humans were there 40,000 years ago. See

http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/32728/title/Footprints_in_the_ash