Monday, December 28, 2009

The Streets or the Ballot Box?

A New Year is almost upon us. Good luck to all of you, for you will need it. Who knows what 2010 will bring? Certainly not the restoration of "normality." The system seems incapable of reforming itself, which means change, if there is to be any significant change, that is, can only come from below – in the work places, in the neighborhoods, in the streets. (But doesn't it always come that way?)

(For a glimpse of what 2010 will probably be like see Dmytry Orlov and

Jim Kunstler


The rulers seek to demobilize us, as a means of immobilizing us. They want people to cease to act, to no longer go on strike or take to the streets. But such attempts have a way of coming back on them. When the workers rise up, the system's supporters are at a disadvantage. They are much less likely to get in the streets, in opposition to the revolt, than the workers who are in revolt. They believe the passive-ist ideology of their masters. Then there is the authoritarian character structure they have imbibed since birth, which encourages passivity. The authoritarian character is notable for being submissive, cowardly, sheep-like, fearful and weak. These are the last qualities on earth to encourage self-activation. Obedience is also part of the authoritarian conditioning and is a handy tool for the masters. The sheep will cheerfully do whatever they are told. But the masters have to tell them to act. In the era of the democratic facade they don't wish to be too obvious in whipping up a lynch mob against trade unionists or environmentalists.

Hate radio and TV stirs up the sheeple, it is true. If all the hate radio and False News fans were to act upon their beliefs, we would be living under a reign of terror. But, thankfully, most of their hostility is expended verbally, or on abusing their spouses and children, and rarely gets to the level of public action.

The rulers attempts to mobilize their base in an extra-parliamentary manner occurs when they are so threated by reform they take the fascist movement out of their tool box. But even then, the workers are not conquered by right-wing mobs, but by the army. We have the example of Chile where the so-called middle class protests were miniscule in comparison with the workers actions. It was the military that crushed them, not the flock of violent sheep. So too, strikes are not broken by thugs, who the workers send packing, but by state terrorism.

The ballot box is the perfect place for cowards. They can, without fear of response, vote for governmental bullies who will then carry out the attacks for them. There will be no pay-back for their votes. In the streets and workplaces, on the other hand, they risk a thrashing. The ballot is their territory, the streets are ours.


Monday, December 21, 2009

New Movements In Latin America

About a year ago I wrote about the growing anarchist movement in Latin America. Since that time new developments have occurred and I have also become aware of other groups. There is a definite tendency for individual organizations to amalgamate in new, larger federations. All the organizations listed are serious – into involvement with popular movements and the working population. While the tendencies might differ all are into an organized and programmatic approach.

Argentina

http://www.redlibertaria.com.ar/

http://www.osl.org.ar/

http://www.libertario.org.ar/home.html

Bolivia

http://www.oars.tk/

Brazil

http://www.farj.org/

http://www.vermelhoenegro.co.cc/

Chile

http://voznegra.entodaspartes.net/

http://feluchile.blogspot.com/

Colombia

http://www.redlibertariapmk.org/

Ecuador

http://www.hijosdelpuebloec.blogspot.com/

Mexico

http://colectivoautonomomagonista.blogspot.com/

http://www.nodo50.org/cipo/

http://vocal.lahaine.org/

http://opar.ideosferas.org/

http://congresolibertario.blogspot.com/

Peru

http://uslperu.blogspot.com/

Uruguay

http://www.nodo50.org/fau/


Syndicalists


http://resistenciaclasista.wordpress.com/


http://prensafob.blogspot.com/


http://www.labatalladelostrabajadores.blogspot.com/


Tuesday, December 15, 2009

The Smoking Gun of the Drug Wars?

Always “follow the buck” I say. I have long believed that the people who are most shrill in their denunciation of treating addiction as a health problem and of decriminalization have some financial reason to be in favour of the black market in drugs. It is also obvious that with the illegal drug trade running in excess of $300 billion per year, the usual suspects – the bikers and mafia – must be bit players only. Someone else is raking in the bulk of the cash. Mike Ruppert claimed it was the banking system, laundering the drug money through front companies and injecting it into Wall Street. Now those who are on the take, dismiss Mike as a “conspiracy theorist” , but they will have a lot more trouble dismissing the following:


Drugs money worth billions of dollars kept the financial system afloat at the height of the global crisis, the United Nations' drugs and crime tsar has told the Observer.
Antonio Maria Costa, head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, said he has seen evidence that the proceeds of organised crime were "the only liquid investment capital" available to some banks on the brink of collapse last year. He said that a majority of the $352bn (£216bn) of drugs profits was absorbed into the economic system as a result.
This will raise questions about crime's influence on the economic system at times of crisis. It will also prompt further examination of the banking sector as world leaders, including Barack Obama and Gordon Brown, call for new International Monetary Fund regulations. Speaking from his office in Vienna, Costa said evidence that illegal money was being absorbed into the financial system was first drawn to his attention by intelligence agencies and prosecutors around 18 months ago. "In many instances, the money from drugs was the only liquid investment capital. In the second half of 2008, liquidity was the banking system's main problem and hence liquid capital became an important factor," he said.


I Googled this story – not a single US or Can paper seems to have picked it up. Hmm. Wonder why? Don't want to blow your scam?


This story is from the Guardian and brought to my attention by Rusty Idols.

Saturday, December 12, 2009

Child Trafficking and Pedophilia in British Columbia

Given that authoritarian hierarchies, such as those found in the corporate and governmental spheres, tend to attract psychopathic and narcissistic personalities, given that many (most) in authority hold those beneath them in utter contempt, given that their life's “work” consists in bullying and exploiting those weaker than themselves, a tendency toward pedophilia should come as no shock. Indeed, one ought to be surprised if the wealthy and powerful did not have this tendency.

The following article exposes pedophilia among the powerful, and the attempts at cover-up here in BC.



Child Trafficking in Beautiful British Columbia

By Kevin Annett

www.hiddenfromhistory.org

In April of 1994, two lawyers, Renate Auger and Jack Cram, are dragged from a Vancouver courtroom, assaulted, and eventually disbarred after naming two Supreme Court judges as participants in a child prostitution ring based in the elite Vancouver Club at 915 West Hastings street .

A 1998 report by UNESCO on International Child Trafficking names Vancouver as one of three major centers for child prostitution in the world, along with Bangkok and Rotterdam.

In the early hours of October 14, 2000, an aboriginal reporter named Noel watches as two children no older than eight are loaded into a stretch limousine on the Squamish Indian reserve and driven to the back door of the Vancouver Club. Noel waits for hours, and when the children emerge, he tries to speak to them, but is assaulted from behind and his tape recorder disappears.

In the fall of 2001, an investigator named Rob Nicholson publishes a book entitled “Stolen Innocence”, in which he documents extensive child trafficking and pornography by social workers, lawyers and policemen connected to the Ministry of Children and Families (MCF). Nicholson proves that the MCF continually places foster children in homes of known and even convicted pedophiles.

On March 12, 2006, a woman named Annie Parker tells the author that she had been abducted by Vancouver policemen and used in something called “The Hooker Game”, in which both women and children are drugged and filmed while being sexually assaulted and sometimes even killed.

A war of terror on the innocent is going on as you read this, not far from your home, under the trendy façade of Vancouver’s happy image. Yet it is a war hidden from most people, and nowhere to be seen in the consciousness and agendas of “progressive” minded people in Vancouver.

Carol Martin is an aboriginal woman who works as a crisis counselor at the Downtown Eastside Women’s Centre in Vancouver . To her, the abduction and trafficking in children is just an extension of what her people have been suffering for centuries.

More of our children are being taken from us every day, and put in white foster homes where the abuse is just as bad as it ever was in residential schools. Every day we hear cases of the government placing little kids in homes of pedophiles and abusers. Nothing’s ever done about it. And even our own kids are being criminalized by the system at a young age, to give cops the excuse they need later to pick them up and abuse them. That’s all got a name: genocide.”

Rudy James is a Tlingit native elder from Alaska who helped preside at the first independent Tribunal into Indian residential schools, held in Vancouver in June of 1998. At this event, Rudy heard first-hand testimonies from survivors of child trafficking in B.C.

I was shocked when I heard how widespread the child trafficking is in many of the northern Indian villages” Rudy described shortly after the Tribunal.

We had two separate groups of Indians tell us that their chiefs and councilmen at two villages near Bella Bella and Powell River were actively trafficking local children to wealthy Americans and Canadian military personnel. This was happening apparently with the full knowledge of the local RCMP detachment in both towns, and in one case, even clergymen from the United Church were involved.”

The word on the street is even more explicit. Marion is a middle aged sex trade worker who is a veteran of “the stroll” along east Hastings street , where disappearances are a common occurrence. For years, she has watched as children are procured according to a well-organized and protected system involving wealthy predators.

The going rate for a young child is $1500 these days. Foreign tourists will ask for a young virgin, of either sex, and the younger the age, the more they’re willing to pay. It’s watched over by the Vancouver cops, who get a cut. But it’s run by an international network; Vancouver ’s just one spoke in the wheel. I hear it’s got a direct tie to Thailand and the child sex trade there.”

Don’t expect any police or legal intervention to stem or even investigate such child abuse and trafficking in B.C. According to Rob Nicholson, the Attorney General’s office is itself implicated in this organized pedophilia.

In the case of two convicted pedophiles, a Dr. Gossage and a Mr. Benest, a school Principal, the B.C. Attorney General’s office through a special prosecutor, Peter Leask, protected these child rapists and ensured that compliant judges imposed a media ban to protect their identities and reputations. Leask had also served as the attorney for Gossage. Such direct collusion between pedophiles and the government has gone unchallenged.” (August 2002)

According to a retired RCMP special investigator in Vancouver who requests anonymity, child pornography and trafficking is continually on the rise because of judicial toleration of violence against children, as indicated by constantly minimal prison sentences for convicted child sex offenders. To quote the RCMP official,

The unofficial policy and official practice is to look the other way when children are raped. It’s just not considered much of a crime to violate a child. That climate encourages pedophiles to act with impunity.”

With the approach of the Olympics and the influx of wealthy tourists into Vancouver, the trafficking in children will only increase. According to Carol Martin,

We’re not only going to see 5000 people made homeless by the Olympics, but a lot more women and kids disappear. Whenever the tourists show up, our people go missing.”

What is to be done?

In a culture like ours, where people are commodities and children are traditionally seen to be originally sinful, child abuse cannot help but be endemic. But what is less obvious is the fact that pedophilia in Canada is actually being organized and protected by the very institutions of state and church that pose as protectors of children.

The Catholic, Anglican and United Church of Canada, for instance, have been legally absolved by the government of any wrongdoing for the torture and death of more than 50,000 children in their Indian residential schools: a travesty of justice that nevertheless has proceeded without protest or comment from most Canadians.

Such mass indifference to a crime against humanity in our midst is more than telling. For one wonders how child prostitution, trafficking and murder can ever be eradicated from our midst when the foxes are still in charge of the chicken coop; and while the right of adults and institutions to violate and destroy innocence continues to go unchallenged and unpunished.

A Cowichan native on Vancouver Island whom I’ve known for years once told me that, before the coming of the whites, his people had a simple way to deal with anyone who harmed a child in their village.

A group of warriors assigned to the job would take the offender out into the forest, and you’d never see him again. For us, our children were sacred, and we had a zero toleration for whatever might harm them: because we knew that if the next generation was crippled, our people had no future.”

Perhaps it’s time for such simple tribal wisdom to prevail in "Beautiful British Columbia", where men with money and power continue to run amok over the lives of the innocent.

Sunday, December 06, 2009

Media Democracy In Argentina

In an effort to democratize radio and TV, which till now had entirely been in the hands of corporations, the government has passed a new law for the media. The previous law had been put in place by the fascist dictatorship, you know the one that murdered at least 30,000 people. With the new regulations, one third of media licenses will be corporate, one third public and one third for non-profit associations. This is a big shot in the arm for cooperative and community media. The corporate monopolies are whining that this extension of media freedom is actually a suppression of freedom. But we have come to expect this sort of propaganda, after all, freedom is only supposed to be for the wealthy and powerful. Note the lack of complaint from these same corporocrats during the dictatorship. To read the complete story in Marie Trigona's excellent blog, see http://mujereslibres.blogspot.com/2009/10/community-on-airwaves-end-to_4683.html


Friday, December 04, 2009

Vote For Molly's Blog!

Molly's Blog (see http://mollymew.blogspot.com/2009/12/blogging-its-that-time-of-year-again.html ) like last year, is in the running for 'Best Political Blog' at the Canadian Blog awards . I urge you to go ( http://cdnba.wordpress.com ) and vote for Molly! (And if you haven't seen the blog you ought to – it really is first rate.) See

http://mollymew.blogspot.com/

Thursday, December 03, 2009

World's Dumbest Criminals?

I got this phishing expedition sent to me. Not only was it a plain email message – no attempt to imitate Yahoo, but it was full of grammatical mistakes. (underlined)

Attn: Account User,

This is in conjunction with Gmail and Yahoo Account Users,we are having congestions due to the anonymous registration of yahoo accounts so we are shutting down some Yahoo Account and your account was among those to be deleted.We are sending you this email so that you can re-confirm your account information to enable us upgrade your account from been deleted. If you are still interested to use your Yahoo Account kindly re-confirm your account by filling the space below.

* User name: ...............................
* Password: ................................
* Date of Birth: ...........................
* Country Or Territory: ....................

After following the instructions in the sheet, your account will not be interrupted and will continue as normal. Thanks for your attention to this effect. We apologize for any inconveniences

. Warning!!! Account owner that refuses to update his/her account after three days of receiving this warning will lose his or her account permanently.

Sincerely.
Yahoo! Account Services.

Kindly reply to:



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