The Dominion - 59

Issue #59

dru — Tue, 12 May 2009 14:43:17 +0000

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May 2009

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The Edge

Moira Peters — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 05:37:53 +0000

the edge white and small.jpg

Valentine's Play

Maya Rolbin-Ghanie — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 06:06:04 +0000

Reflections from a women’s bathhouse

As we step past frosted glass doors into a small, well-lit foyer, my heart is pumping. The sound of excited voices through a second set of doors leaves me wondering what to expect. Feeling exhilarated by the space and slightly flushed by two glasses of wine, I notice my palms are clammy. This is my second time at Shedogs Bathhouse.

An older, very butch lady meets my friend and me at the front window. While taking IDs and tickets, and offering towels, she relays the rules: respect, consent, confidentiality. Allowing our entry through the interior set of doors, she directs us to room four, where we can change and leave our belongings. All the lockers are taken because it is a full house tonight.

My only question, “Have we missed the fisting workshop?” is met with, “Starts in 10 minutes.”

The veneer of security is understandable. Bathhouses have long been targeted as hotbeds of homosexual activity. In 2000, Toronto police raided Pussy Palace, a women's bathhouse night at Club Toronto. Police, almost all of them male, entered the establishment and walked around, taking the names and addresses of some ten women and questioning volunteers.

Traditionally, gay bathhouses are places where men can go to have sex with other men, regardless of sexuality or social status. Bathhouses for women are much more rare. Twice a year the local Halifax men’s bathhouse, Seadogs, hosts a queer ladies' night for woman-identified people. Tonight is the ladies' Valentine's Day bathhouse.

Room four is one of many small rooms off a long, dimly lit corridor. Each is equipped with a small bed, wall-to-wall mirrors and a handful of condoms and little lube packages scattered like candy on the clean, white sheets. In one room there is an erotica-reading party, while others are occupied by lovers. We are told that the rooms on the main floor have a “doors-open policy.” Private rooms are in the basement; ten dollars for a key.

After stripping down to our underwear in room four, we continue down the hallway. Guests are asked to change upon entry, which can be interpreted any way we like. Others don bathing suits, lingerie, tops, bottoms, or nothing at all. In the hallway someone passes us wearing only a harness. The sauna, hot tub and showers are all occupied by lounging ladies soaking up the steamy air and sultry sights.

Down a narrow stairway at the back is the basement. It consists of an open hallway, more small rooms, and an S&M dungeon where tonight’s workshops are taking place. Tonight there is a fisting demonstration.

The volunteer lies in a sling in the small dungeon packed with eager learners. Self-identified “Sex Geek” Andrea Zanin is gloved with black latex, promoting safer sex as she offers her tips and techniques. We learn that typically, fisting does not involve forcing a clenched fist into a bodily orifice. Instead, all five fingers are kept straight and held as close together as possible, then slowly inserted into a well-lubricated vagina or rectum. Once insertion is complete, the fingers either naturally clench into a fist or remain straight.

”It may seem extreme, but fisting is in fact one of the most intimate and sensual kinds of penetration two people can enjoy,” Zanin encourages, while caressing her eager volunteer.

I am told by a friend that the volunteer had met Zanin only 20 minutes before the workshop. She had attained the position during a Bathhouse planning meeting because of a deep enjoyment of extreme penetration and fisting. An obvious fan of public play, the volunteer appeared relaxed despite the 40 of us eagerly crowded around her. She gives in to her pleasure, allowing all to observe an intimate display between strangers.

The Bathhouse is filled with women of all makes and ages who appreciate and are affectionate with one another. Halifax is a small city and all the faces here are familiar. Admittedly, running into the lady who sat next to me at last night’s organizing meeting, or the waitress at my local coffee shop, is a bit of a rush. However, regardless of these relationships we all seem to be able to transcend the barriers built in our daily lives in order to create a safe and positive sexual space for ourselves and each other.

For me, participating in this space fulfills different needs: on one level it is purely sexual; on another it is deeply social; on another level it fulfills the need to resist. Our daily lives are controlled on many levels. Society tells us what and who to desire. These desires are then commodified and sold back to us through a plethora of bodily products. Through challenging our comfort levels and pushing our own boundaries we are able to regain some semblance of a collective power—the power of femininity, of raw pleasure and fluid desire.

The air is alive with intrigue, which for some leads to kisses, touching and even hot sex. And everyone is allowed to watch.

Jill fights the right in Halifax and works to oppose capitalism and all forms of oppression.

Seadogs

Why protest Vancouver's 2010 Olympics?

dawn — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 06:16:26 +0000

Standing up to the global system makes change possible

There are many reasons to protest the Olympic Games. It is a multi-billion dollar industry run by an elite clique that sells the five rings to the highest bidder, using sports as a commodity and a platform for corporate advertising. Their main goal is profit, in collaboration with their partners: government, local organizing committees, and corporations (construction, real estate, tourism, TV, and media, as well as sponsors).

The Olympics have a long history of association with fascists, colonialists, and authoritarian regimes (i.e., the 1936 Hitler Olympics, the 1968 Mexico City Olympic massacre, and the 2008 Beijing Summer Games). Since the 1980s, they have displaced over three million people and contributed to massive increases in homelessness (as we’ve seen in Vancouver).

Massive construction projects associated with the Olympics, from venues to infrastructure, result in both widespread environmental destruction and huge public debts. As part of security operations, police, military, and intelligence agencies receive millions of dollars for new personnel, equipment, and weapons — strengthening the creeping police states we see around the world and further eroding our alleged 'freedoms' and civil liberties.

Some naysayers ask: Why protest, since protests don’t change anything, and the Games are going to happen anyway? Their questions are based on the apparent futility of protest.

To begin with, protests are but one tactic used by social movements. They help raise awareness and mobilize people. The US black civil rights movement started out as small protests and grew into a mass campaign of civil disobedience. This forced the government to enact reforms and desegregate the South. Protests weren’t the only activities carried out by the civil-rights movement. They also organized forums, held workshops on legal rights, registered black voters, and printed newsletters.

Protests and civil disobedience were what made change both possible and necessary, because not only did they draw international attention to racism in the US, they also made it impossible for the apartheid system in the South to go on as it had before. By the 1970s and ’80s there were black mayors and chiefs of police; today, there is a black president.

People who say protests don’t change anything don’t know history. Those who say the Olympics can’t be fought don’t even know their own local history.

Over the last three years, the anti-Olympic movement has forced the Vancouver Organizing Committee (VANOC) off the streets, to the point where it no longer holds large, public ceremonies (as it did in 2007). Anytime the organizing committee does have events, it requires a large policing operation to secure them. This is because we have successfully used direct action to disrupt Olympic events.

The effectiveness of direct action and protest can be seen in the struggle for social housing in Vancouver. This campaign increased in 2006 when the growing ranks of homeless began to become a major political issue, linked to Olympic-related construction, gentrification, and tourism.

By the fall of 2006, housing and anti-poverty groups were having large, noisy protests and began occupying empty hotels. Over two dozen people were arrested, many of them members of the Anti-Poverty Committee. These actions raised the profile of homelessness and dislocation.

Since 2007, various levels of government, along with VANOC, have had to respond with measures to limit the loss of low-income housing units, and to appear as though they are addressing the issue. By 2008, the homelessness crisis, along with the Olympic Village fiasco, determined the outcome of the Vancouver civic election.

Homelessness became a public issue because people organized, educated, and agitated for change. Without the political pressure exerted by protest groups, without community resistance, the situation for the poor and the homeless would be far worse than it is today.

Why protest 2010? Because as history shows us, the limits of tyrants are set by those whom they attempt to tyrannize.

Gord Hill is a member of the Olympic Resistance Network and maintains No2010.com. He is also an artist and carver. A version of this article previously appeared in the Georgia Straight.

Eagleridge Bluffs

Did Canada Help Dismantle Sri Lanka’s Peace Process?

Stuart Neatby — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 22:00:28 +0000

"Collective grief" of Tamil community paralyzes Ottawa

OTTAWA–Canada’s 300,000-strong Tamil community, the largest Tamil diaspora on earth, has been mobilizing for months in major cities in Canada to draw attention to the dire situation in Sri Lanka.

“There is a collective grief amongst the Tamil community in Canada right now,” says David Poopalapillai, national spokesperson for the Canadian Tamil Congress (CTC). In recent months this "collective grief" has brought sections of at least two Canadian cities to a standstill.

Since Sri Lanka’s military captured the port city of Kilinochchi, a stronghold of the rebel Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in the country’s northern region, the death toll within the mostly Tamil region has risen to alarming levels.

In response, Tamil-Canadians have organized fasts, parliamentary meetings, vigils, protests, and acts of non-violent civil disobedience to draw attention to what many see as a campaign of deliberate killings of Tamil civilians by the Sri Lankan government. This campaign included a march of more than 45,000 through downtown Toronto on January 30, the biggest march in Canada against an international conflict since Israel’s bombardment of Lebanon during the summer of 2006.

These actions form one of the largest and most coordinated acts of international solidarity in recent Canadian history.

On March 16, activists formed a human chain around busy streets surrounding Toronto’s Union Station, bringing swathes of the downtown core to a halt. Smaller demonstrations have taken place in most major Canadian cities.

Last Tuesday, April 7, in tandem with similar actions in England, Norway and other international communities, busloads of Tamil-Canadians converged upon Ottawa, arriving from Toronto, Montreal and elsewhere.

After a rally on Parliament Hill, approximately 500 protesters broke off into several coordinated groups and proceeded to squat several intersections in Ottawa’s small downtown throughout the afternoon and evening.

Rush hour traffic was largely brought to a halt.

Demonstrators, many of whom waved flags bearing the emblem of the LTTE, continued to block the intersections until 7:30 pm, when they were pushed back by police to the corner of Wellington and Metcalfe streets in front of Parliament Hill.

There they have remained, their numbers swelling to thousands over the Easter weekend.

“Our community is dying there, it’s going to be wiped out if we let this happen,” said Kumughan Nallarhenm, who drove from Toronto to Ottawa with his family last week to protest in front of parliament. “So I cannot sit idly reading at my home or going to the office.”

Nallarhenm’s sentiments were shared by most of the Tamils who have clogged Wellington Street in front of Parliament Hill over the last week. Many either have family in Northern Sri Lanka or know individuals trapped in the area.

Sahabthan Jesuthasan, a student at York University and member of the Coalition to Stop the War in Sri Lanka, has several family members in Kilinochchi.

“When the government ‘freed’ the area, we stopped hearing from them. We found out later that their house had been shelled and bombed,” he explained, adding that the lack of independent monitors in the most heavily affected areas of the conflict have made identifying the whereabouts of his relatives impossible.

“What’s worst is not knowing what happened to them. Nobody knows what’s going on.”

Until very recently, Canada has played a small role in Sri Lanka’s conflict.

Sri Lanka’s civil war began in 1983, following the destruction of many Tamil-run businesses during riots by Sinhalese nationalists on the eve of local elections. Tamils responded at first with non-violent protests, which were largely ignored by the Sri Lankan government. The LTTE subsequently managed to harness the frustrations of the country’s Tamil minority. Since then, violence on both sides has been responsible for over 70,000 killings along with other human rights abuses over the course of the 27-year war.

Assassinations of political leaders and bombings of heavily crowded urban areas have become a characteristic of the conflict. Prior to January, the LTTE had managed to function as a quasi-state entity in several northern cities, operating courts, tax administrative offices and even a bank.

A peace process, brokered by the government of Norway, began in 2002. By 2006, in the midst of already fragile negotiations, Sri Lankan president Mahinda Rajapakse began a concerted international public relations campaign focused upon casting the LTTE as the main barrier to peace.

Backed by former US Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for South Asia Donald Camp, the campaign overlooked the Sri Lankan government’s own history of discrimination of ethnic Tamils and its funding of paramilitaries in the North. The campaign included the launching of a pro-government website modeled after the Tamil website tamilnet.com.

Canada was the first country to respond to this campaign, following the advice of lead editorials by the Globe and Mail and the National Post.

The newly-elected Harper government officially placed the LTTE on its list of terrorist organizations in April 2006. Then Minister of Public Safety Stockwell Day announced that LTTE supporters were “not welcome” in Canada during the press conference announcing the ban.

“The LTTE’s repeated use of violence,” said former Foreign Affairs Minister Peter Mackay, “is unacceptable and seriously calls into question its commitment to the peace process.”

Mackay made no mention of any use of violence carried out by the Sri Lankan government over the course of the civil war. The ban was followed by several RCMP arrests of Canadian citizens, who were alleged to have aided in fund raising for the LTTE.

No such actions have been taken to censure other nationalist elements in Sri Lanka, such as the Buddhist National Sinhala Heritage Party, which many international observers credit with pushing the Rajapakse government to adopt a more hard-line nationalist vision.

Subsequent to Canada’s decision, the EU placed the LTTE on its own terror list in May 2006.

In June 2006, the peace talks collapsed. The Rajapakse government began a renewed offensive against the Tamil Tigers. Despite UN calls for a ceasefire, the Sri Lankan government resumed its military campaign early this year.

This campaign has included aerial and artillery attacks of so-called “safe areas” into which civilians fleeing the conflict have been sequestered.

UN Human Rights chief Navi Pillay has estimated that 2,800 civilians have been killed since January, although some have claimed the toll has reached 3,500.

The Sri Lankan government has barred entry of journalists and humanitarian organizations such as the Red Cross into the region. UN officials have warned for months of a food crisis in the northern region that may affect hundreds of thousands of people. It is estimated that between 150,000 and 190,000 civilians have remained in the inappropriately named “safe areas.”

"Sri Lanka's so-called 'no-fire zone' is now one of the most dangerous places in the world," said Brad Adams, the Asia director for Human Rights Watch, in a recent report.

“What actually happened was that the LTTE ban brought about by the Canadian government and also by other governments gave a strong boost to the Sri Lankan government to go for a military solution,” says Poopalapillai.

Poopalapillai said that Canadian Tamil organizations were not consulted prior to the LTTE ban.

The CTC, along with other Tamil organizations, have called upon Canada to impose economic and political sanctions upon Sri Lanka, and to remove its consular officials from the country until a ceasefire is declared. Many in North America have also begun a legal campaign to declare an injunction against a $1.9 billion International Monetary Fund loan to the Sri Lankan government. Many Tamils believe that part of the loan would be used to finance the Sri Lankan government’s war effort.

The international protests have begun to have an effect.

The Sri Lankan government declared a two-day ceasefire over the Easter weekend, and both Conservative Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon and the leaders of the NDP and Liberal parties have made statements in recent days calling for stronger action to support a ceasefire.

Organizers say the protests, which have included several hunger strikes, will continue until Canada adopts a major shift in its policy towards Sri Lanka.

Stuart Neatby is a former managing editor of The Dominion.

Tiger and Tower

Tamils protest parliament

Through Canada’s Rez Zone Looking Glass

Moira Peters — Sun, 12 Apr 2009 06:37:03 +0000

Israeli Apartheid Week

KUTENAI TERRITORY, TURTLE ISLAND–Divining the past can be difficult, especially when your crystal ball is a bit smudged; it’s not all shooting fish in a barrel. In this fifth consecutive year of an international effort to call attention to the nature of the relationship between the Israeli state and Arab Palestinians living within and without that or any state, a question has been stirring at the margins of permissible thought.

What would a Canadian Apartheid Week look like? American Apartheid Week? Mexican Apartheid Week? An Apartheid Week for every nation state in the so-called Americas? Except for Bolivia, of course. After the last Bolivian national election, the new President said that Bolivia would no longer be needing a Department of Indian Affairs because the Indians were now the government.

As an Indigenous person, I ask myself if there is some level of hypocrisy going on in Canada if progressives demonstrate against Israeli state actions while continuing to enjoy the benefits of living in an entire hemisphere of apartheid, at home on native lands. Why not do both at once? And while we’re at it, why not join in with an international movement to guarantee the right to life for Jewish folk no matter where they are located?

Before the Empire, under Britain’s fading leadership at that time, declared an Israeli state in 1948, Jewish Palestinians and Arab Palestinians were living comfortably side by side. That peaceful co-existence can be traced back a long ways. As a member of Turtle Island’s Indigenous Peoples, the year 1492 stands out for me, as an important date in history. It’s an important date in Jewish and Muslim history, too: the year that Sephardic Jews and Muslim Moors were expelled from Spain. Where did the majority of Sephardic Jews flee to? The Arab Muslim Ottoman Empire, where Sephardic Jews were valued and appreciated for their skills, particularly in areas of scholarship. It was a reciprocal relationship, with Jews also introducing into Western Christian societies important Arabic knowledge in maths and other sciences.

Sad to say, but Empire has other needs. Now under US leadership, the Empire needs the Israeli state to continue relentlessly on the warpath it started down in 1948, a war of extermination against Arab Palestinians located within the region coveted by Eretz Israel. Eretz Israel is the land promised by the Hebrew Bible’s God to Abraham and his descendants through Issac and Abraham’s grandson, Jacob. This arrangement suits the Empire’s needs quite nicely, namely as a highly developed forward base for Empire’s ambitions in the Middle East. I’ll describe apartheid’s economic functions in more detail shortly, but for now suffice to say that, as long as the Israeli state follows the same exact methods practiced in Canada, the United States of America, Mexico, etc., etc., on down to and past (but now having to avoid Bolivia) then it will all work out... for the Empire.

This calculation leaves out the question of blowback against Jews, no matter were they are located. A thousand years of pogroms resulting from elites setting up Jews to be the fall guys should be enough of a history lesson, but consider the fate of Israeli Jews when Empire loses it’s regional grip. Add in Empire’s weakening of secularism within Arab states and Empire’s strengthening of fundamentalist beliefs, whether Christian, Islamic, Hindi, or Judaic, all united by the common belief that their own God has asked them to kill members of all of the others, and it looks like a sure recipe for disaster. Why would an intelligent Israeli Jew want to travel even one step further down that path?

Is anyone else confused about why the three major world religions that claim to descend from Abraham, namely, Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, all seem so intent on remaining bitter enemies, in action repudiating their own philosophies of brotherly love?

The question at hand, however, is a discussion about an international Israeli Apartheid Week. In all fairness to Israel, Zionist war mongers would have to kill hundreds of millions of Arabs, and occupy 16,430,000 square miles of Arab territory, in order to achieve parity with the apartheid system calmly proceeding, apparently unnoticed, on Turtle Island, in Canada, the US, Mexico, and so on.

An area that size would have to include all of the Middle East, plus considerable amounts of South and East Asia. A territorial expansion of that magnitude is certainly in Empire’s "New American Century" playbook, but clearly not in the cards for Israel. For an accurate comparison between Israeli Apartheid and Americas Apartheid, one must look at the historical record to make stage by stage comparisons.

Avigdor Lieberman’s call for the administration of a loyalty oath to Arab Israelis needs to be compared to the nation state of Canada’s Province of British Columbia, where new legislation is currently under consideration to legally recognize Indigenous Peoples within the boundaries of the province as human beings. Lieberman is ahead of the Province of British Columbia in that he already recognizes Arab Israelis as human beings, viciously prejudiced as his judgement may otherwise be. In BC, I’ll have to wait with bated breath, as the business community battles the Recognition and Reconciliation Act proposals, to discover whether I will become a legal person in the eyes of the law. Since Governor James Douglas' 1858 legal declaration that the lands in the new Crown Colony of British Columbia were unoccupied, Indigenous Peoples within that territory have been non-persons, especially in relation to any type of property rights, Indigenous or Canadian, a declaration still in effect at the time of this writing.

Taken in total, I’d like to suggest that Palestinian Arabs, Jews of the world no matter where located, and Indigenous Peoples of Turtle Island have common cause: surviving genocidal onslaughts. Cynical power players within Arab, Jewish, and Indigenous populations can be seen siding with Empire, no doubt prompted by a misguided sense of Darwinian notions about survival of the fittest. This individualist perspective leaves out long-term analysis, especially an analysis of long-term non-human global reactions. For instance: general environmental destruction, to name just one.

We humans have the mental, physical, emotional and spiritual capacity to turn course, change direction. The recent presidential election in the United States was a collective expression of exactly that desire, immediately subordinated to the needs of Empire. As a not-yet-recognized-as-human denizen of Canada’s Rez Zone, BC division, I’d like to humbly suggest that the solution to the apartheid problem could be more quickly advanced by a solidarity movement involving Indigenous folk, Jewish folk, and Arab Palestinian folk, against Empire in general, and apartheid states in particular.

Canada’s Indian Act and Indian Policy is the acceptable role model for Israel’s apartheid policy, and for South Africa’s apartheid policy of yesteryear. Canada’s Gaza Strip and West Bank were happening in the 1800s: mass slaughters in various colonial frontier encounters, like the Chilcoot War; forced starvation, for instance the sealing off of western prairie reserves as collective punishment after the North-West Rebellion, where up to 50 per cent of reserve populations perished; and the systematic destruction of Indigenous economic, political and social structures that was and still is Canada’s Indian Act.

When I was a child there was a large “NO TRESPASSING” sign, in English, a hundred yards from my house at the edge of Saddle Lake Indian Reserve # 125, obviously meant for Canadians to obey. Centuries of forced separation still play out in the daily lives of Cree folk and Canadian settler descendants; in small towns like St Paul, Alberta, the apartheid is so palpable you can cut it with a knife, and folks on both sides of the now-invisible barriers regularly do.

However, in spite of five hundred years of living this experience, I’d like to suggest that our common cause is much more significant than our presumed differences. This is true for any of the so-called areas of conflict in the post-modern world, where folks tend to focus on gender/sexual orientation, or race, or class, or ecology or authority. From an Indigenous perspective these are all parts of the elephant being described by blind persons as they each touch the portion closest to them. Apartheid systems are just one facet of the global control system I’ve been calling Empire.

As promised earlier, I’ll return to a brief examination of the economic function of apartheid. Apartheid serves as a necessary firewall between human beings belonging by birth to differentiated groups. Differentiated groups are brought into close physical proximity by colonial expansion, which I’ll call imperialism. Imperialism solves some of the inherent contradictions in capitalism, by expanding capital supply through primitive accumulation (expropriation of lands and resources), expansion of non-home markets, safety valve outlets for burgeoning unwanted home population, sources of lower cost labour power, and, in more advanced cases, through the creative destruction of productive property, thereby allowing a new cycle of production to begin by generally reducing previous over-productive capacities.

One problem encountered in the settlement stage of colonial expansion is that humans have the tendency to ignore the artificially imposed differentiations, and spontaneously re-group. Some sort of apartheid policy is necessary to prevent the potentially “destructive” co-mingling of plain human beings. Theories of race were invented to specifically re-enforce this artificial separation.

In Canada, apartheid is still an important social dam holding back a generalized reaction against the ongoing systematic de-humanization that I and all Indigenous Peoples inside of Canada are daily subjected to. The BC Chamber of Commerce is very concerned about the proposed new Recognition and Reconciliation Act because it threatens this apartheid relationship which allows smooth functioning of traditional colonial accumulation through dispossession. Timber. Minerals. Real Estate. Water.

At a moment in human history when the obvious contradictions of capitalism, imperialism, sexism, and ecological destruction are glaringly in-the-face of the human public, amplified by the as yet unrestricted access to information provided by communications technology, a unified pro-life choice movement may be timely.

Without the needs of Empire to sustain, there would be no need for the accumulation by dispossession facilitated by apartheid systems. Scarcity, like race, is an artificially constructed ideology that serves the purpose of Empire. Overcoming the ideology of scarcity is the next major collective undertaking facing humanity. If Jewish Peoples, Arabic Peoples, and Indigenous Peoples of Turtle Island were to unite in an anti-scarcity campaign, properly called a pro-plenty for all campaign if we remember to share, then we would see real, sudden, and dramatic change; the kind of change folks in the US thought they were voting for, the possibility of such a change that folks around the world celebrated ecstatically, on the evening of November 4th, 2008.

I realize that it’s a bit more complicated than that, and I’ll return to economic issues later, but for now I’ve had my say about apartheid. What do you think?

Gifted with a white privilege suit on his Birth Day, Steinhauer has been slipping back and forth across the invisible boundary between Turtle Island and Canada, since 1952, in his lovely birthday suit. And this is what he saw.

Steinhauer I

Steinhauer III

Hoglet

Maya Rolbin-Ghanie — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 06:42:06 +0000

This Western European Hoglet, also known as the common hedgehog (Erinaceus europaeus), has ancestors living anywhere from the British Isles and western Europe to the Mediterranean islands and New Zealand. This earthy creature likes deciduous forests, woodlands, farmland, sand dunes, scrub, and grassy heaths for its home, occasionally ending up in suburban areas. Usually it will build a nest out of grass and leaves under a bush or amid tree roots. Prickly by nature, this nocturnal young animal will roll into a ball to protect itself against threats with its spines. While it can't see very well, this spiky little wanderer has a sense of hearing and smell that are sharp as can be. It clanks around all night, rummaging or sniffing out worms, insects, snails, and, sometimes, small snakes.

Baby Hedgehog

Art and Anarchy

dawn — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 06:45:23 +0000

Artists give the Cultural Olympiad the middle finger

VANCOUVER-As thousands of Canadian performers prepare for Olympic Ceremony auditions, a group of Vancouver artists is spreading the word. The F-word, that is.

With posters that simply read, “Fuck the Cultural Olympiad,” a recent underground art exhibit asked audiences to challenge the 2010 Games. The week-long show called Art and Anarchy used art to uncover the many perils of the looming "five-ring circus."

David Cunningham is a street performer and anti-poverty activist in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. He is an organizer of Art and Anarchy who believes community art is being co-opted to disguise capitalist plunder.

“The only opportunity [the Vancouver Organizing Committee, VANOC] has to represent itself in the Downtown Eastside is to give money to artists,” Cunningham explained. “This creates a facade of progressiveness, where they can claim to be investing in the community.”

VANOC is responsible for organizing the 2010 Games and by 2010 they will have 1,400 full-time employees. The organization's management and board of directors is composed of lawyers, former cabinet ministers, former olympians and corporate executives.

According to Cunningham, small-art sponsorships create an illusion that VANOC is helping Canada’s poorest neighbourhood. In reality, housing promises have been abandoned, the cost of living is rising, and millions of taxpayer dollars have been frittered away—all for the sake of the 2010 Games.

In the basement of the historic Tellier Towers at 16E Hastings, Art and Anarchy showcased a rousing collection of sculptures, carvings, drawings, jewelry and photography. One sculpture—fashioned from spare lumber, chain-link fence and old propane tanks—was once used as a barricade during a tent city protest.

Among the artists’ ranks was Gord Hill: a carver, comic illustrator and vociferous Olympic resistor. He chose to exhibit a selection of black-and-white drawings distributed during anti-Olympic protests. “Most of them were used in posters or leaflet graphics,” he explained in an e-mail to The Dominion.

Hill said artistic expression has the potential to unite and educate a creative community that might not otherwise seek out information. “Art contributes to a culture of resistance, which is what we’re trying to build,” he said. “It’s a way to engage people and get them thinking about the issues.”

The art in Art and Anarchy challenges the audience to become more aware of their surroundings, because the effects of the Olympics are all around them on the streets of Vancouver's Downtown Eastside.

Cunningham observed, community art is sometimes used as a physical barrier, to divide and disguise parts of the neighbourhood. “As we move closer to the Olympics, art is being placed over fences. Art is literally being used as walls.”

Thousands of artists are currently being recruited to participate in the Olympic opening ceremonies and many existing events and rising talents have been brought into the pro-Olympic fold, thanks to funding from VANOC.

First Nations rapper Ostwelve performed as part of the One-Year Olympic Countdown Celebration in February. Though he later stood by his decision to perform in protest, Ostwelve reflected on some of the hardship he faced.

“I’ve heard both sides of the story and seen friendships and life-long connections shattered by the twisted politics of the Olympics,” he wrote in a statement posted on his Facebook page after the performance. “People I considered to be mentors and friends have called me a sell-out.”

Ostwelve maintains he didn't perform for the money, but rather to criticize the 2010 Games on a world stage. “I was surprised to be able to perform there as I felt that my messages of struggle and resistance were well known,” he said. “I never did the performance for money and have always had plans to give that money back to the community.”

While Art and Anarchy is highly critical of government funding and Olympic sponsorship, Cunningham acknowledged Ostwelve’s struggle. “We just want artists to see the strategy behind their funding,” he said. “If you’re going to take the money, recognize there are larger political forces at play.”

Sarah Berman is a Masters student of journalism at the University of British Columbia and a reporter for Megaphone Magazine in Vancouver, where a version of this article was previously published.

The Green Games?

Not With Bullets or Machetes

Moira Peters — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 06:27:30 +0000

Popular resistance to Xalala Dam finds international law on its side

COPAL’AA, GUATEMALA–In a remote village bordering the Chixoy River in northern Guatemala, scores of people gather outside a wooden meeting hall. Mayan men, women and children face a video camera to demonstrate their resistance against the construction of the Xalala Dam, a mega-project promoted by the Guatemalan government which would flood an estimated minimum of 18 Indigenous villages and drastically affect many more.

The message, in the words of community activist Elena Hernández*, is clear: “I want to tell the businesses, the rich from other countries, the transnational corporations to respect our lands. We, the women, will defend our land.”

This resistance hasn’t gone unnoticed. In November, nine international corporations failed to bid on the hydroelectric project, despite estimates that the dam would generate annual profits totaling between US$100 million and US$150 million, according to Guatemala’s National Institute of Electrification (INDE).

Instead of an offer, Brazilian business conglomerate Odebrecht directed a letter to the Guatemalan government detailing its reluctance to invest. Luiz Sergio de O Ferreira, Odebrecht’s representative in Guatemala, stated in the letter that the corporation would not participate in the project due to the central government’s failure to manage local community opposition, as well as the change in the company’s financial liquidity, caused by the global economic situation.

For Mayan communities fighting for their right to control the natural resources on their land, the bidding failure was considered an achievement.

Nevertheless, the government retains its unyielding stance that the dam will be constructed, with or without immediate investment from international companies.

If it were built, Xalala would be the second-largest hydroelectric dam in the country, producing an estimated 181 megawatts of energy annually.

According to government calculations, with this energy Guatemala could forgo the use of nearly 2.1 million barrels of petroleum derivatives, avoid the annual emission of 240 tons of contaminated substances and eliminate the 100-megawatt energy deficit currently facing the county.

These statistics led the INDE to define the project as “economically viable, socially equitable and environmentally sustainable.”

If the project were to go ahead, most of the energy would likely be used to fuel more resource extraction, like mining, and be sold for export.

But according to community leader Jeremiaz Chuy*, the project is neither clean nor economical: "[The dam] is not clean because it stagnates water and kills aquatic life, contaminates water sources that people live off of and floods large extensions of forest where many animals live," he says. "And it’s not cheap when you take into account all the fertile lands and food sources that are lost. If the government calculated all of this, as well as the cost of fairly relocating all the affected families, they would find it a very expensive project."

Many of the villages that form the Association of Communities for Development and in Defense of Territory and National Resources (ACODET), are accessible only by canoe or via long, muddy jungle paths. Their inhabitants harvest corn and beans, as well as some specialty crops like coffee and cardamom on small plots of land, which they work as a family. Some of the communities are located directly adjacent to the river, which allows them to transport their crops, catch fish for their families and have regular access to clean water.

Even though the government hasn’t provided many of these communities with roads, electricity, running water or schools, it certainly hasn’t lost sight of them. The government of Alvaro Colom, like that of his predecessors, is more than aware of the economic possibilities of the region.

National and international eyes have long been focused on the oil reserves under the soil, the electricity-producing potential of the Chixoy River and the rich terrain, which could be used for producing crops for biofuels.

Today, there is a complex negotiation at work between the government and the economic elite to exploit these resources. But according to the communities in resistance, these plans don’t consider the Maya people's plight.

Throughout Guatemala there is a growing movement to propose alternatives to mega-projects, like community- or municipality-run, small-scale hydroelectric dams to meet local energy needs.

Nonetheless, mega-dams are being promoted as the panacea that will supply regional needs, the needs of a rapidly growing mining- and resource-extraction industry, and make Guatemala a net exporter of energy as part of Plan Mesoamerica, formerly known as the Puebla-Panama Plan.

Worries about the effects of energy mega-projects led 144 communities in the Ixcán region to hold a community referendum in April 2007. The referendum was about the proposed Xalala Dam and oil exploration in the area.

Of the 21,155 participants, 89.7 per cent rejected the project, according to official data provided by then-municipal Mayor Marcos Ramirez.

Indigenous communities are legally guaranteed the right to consultation processes by the Guatemalan Constitution and Convention 169 of the International Labour Organization. But the Constitutional Court of Guatemala recently declared that these consultas are “legal, but not binding.”

Activists aren’t so easily discouraged. “This time we are here not with bullets or machetes,” proclaims community activist Pablo Garcia*. “We are here with the laws we know can defend us.” This tactic represents an important step for a region that suffered from high levels of state-sponsored repression during Guatemala's brutal armed conflict that resulted in the death of more than 200,000, primarily Indigenous, people.

The international community seems to agree. Recently the United Nations Committee to End Racism and Discrimination (CERD) directed a letter to President Colom asking for an official response to claims presented by a human rights group regarding three key cases dealing with natural resources in Guatemala, including the Xalala Dam.

In their letter, CERD likened the Guatemalan government's lack of respect for the communities' popular referendum and their promotion of harmful mega-projects in Indigenous regions to institutional racism.

The Xalala Dam project was conceived in the 1970s, during the 36-year armed conflict. In the early 1980s, the now-infamous Chixoy Dam was constructed with the backing of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

In order to construct the Chixoy Dam, the Guatemalan army massacred 444 of the 791 Indigenous residents of the village of Río Negro. Survivors and their families have yet to receive any compensation for the damages inflicted by the state to clear the way for the Chixoy Dam.

To this day, affected towns have received little of the development promised to the region by the INDE and the principal funders when the project was getting off the ground. The residents of Río Negro were relocated to a town eight hours from their farmland and most are unable to pay for access to the water and electricity they were promised. Communities that would be affected by the proposed Xalala Dam fear a similar outcome.

In November, when community members denied land access to INDE engineers looking to conduct final geographic studies, INDE representatives returned in a low-flying helicopter. In a region that is heavily scarred by the armed conflict, this action provoked fear and frustration.

Further concern surfaced when President Colom announced in December that the military base located in the Ixcan’s municipal seat would be strengthened in order to recover territories that have been occupied by drug traffickers in the region.

Additionally, new military bases will be installed around the Northern Transversal Strip, where there are plans to put in a highway connecting Mexico with Guatemala’s Atlantic Coast.

According to Colom, “We are working so that Xalala will be constructed as Chixoy was. We have an offer for financing, and it will pay for itself.”

Community members worry that this statement indicates a remilitarization of the region. Colom's statement also alludes to the possibility the dam will go forward as a public-private partnership.

It is expected that the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) will play a role in funding the Xalala Dam, which requires an initial investment of $350 to $400 million, according to Alberto Cohen, President of INDE.

As a promoter of Plan Mesoamerica-related projects and so-called clean energy alternatives, the IDB has openly stated its eagerness to fund hydroelectric initiatives in Guatemala.

Community leaders worry that government institutions will begin to divide the resistance by offering strings-attached development projects to the region. In a region where the 2008 United Nations Human Development Report indicated a poverty rate of 84.7 per cent, organizers worry that the people could easily be bought.

“We don’t need compensation. Our struggle, our organization, doesn’t have a price. The money that they could give us wouldn’t last forever. God willing, we will have the courage to not accept preconditioned development projects,” stated Hernandez.

Last December, the Guatemalan government contracted the National Electricity Commission of Mexico to begin carrying out feasibility studies for the dam. The future of the project is uncertain, but the resistance to this and other mega-projects is strong.

More than 30 other municipalities throughout Guatemala have exercised their right to territorial sovereignty and carried out referendums that reject various forms of resource extraction and energy projects on their lands.

“Article 169 of the ILO and the Universal Declaration of Rights of Indigenous Peoples are two machetes we can use to defend our rights, but we have to know how to use them!" says Gonzalo Diaz* of the Catholic Church’s social branch. "Someone who doesn’t know how to use a machete ends up cutting himself.”

*Names have been altered upon request of interviewees.

Carrie Comer is currently working for the Network in Solidarity with the People of Guatemala and is based in Guatemala City.

Xalala Dam consulta kids

Xalala Dam consulta line

The Revolution Will Not Be Destabilized

dawn — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 06:45:42 +0000

Ottawa’s democracy promoters target Venezuela

As the country closer geographically, economically and militarily to the US than any other, Canada has often seen her foreign policy aspirations circumscribed by the whims of the world's lone Superpower.

Part of the 'hidden wiring' of the US-Canada relationship is premised on the belief that there is a role for Canada in places where the US carries a lot of counter-productive baggage. New records obtained by The Dominion show just how actively intertwined Canada's foreign policy is with the US-led 'democracy' promotion project in Venezuela.

Successive Canadian governments, beginning with Paul Martin's Liberals and gaining momentum under Harper's Tory minorities, have pushed full steam ahead with efforts to expand Canada's democracy promotion efforts globally. Canadian leadership in the regime change and military occupation of Haiti (2004-present) gave rise to a renewed emphasis on Canada as an emerging power, an idea fomented by the Harper government.

Democracy promotion is seldom discussed in the Canadian public sphere, even though it has been the subject of a multitude of federal-level conferences, reports and parliamentary hearings over the last five years. Over that same period, Canada has increasingly been integrating its instruments of democracy promotion with those of the US.

During his presidential campaign, Barack Obama quietly pledged to increase funding for the controversial National Endowment for Democracy (NED), despite scaling back the rhetoric used to describe continuing US aims to promote global, Western-style democracy. Obama has already fulfilled this pledge.

His Omnibus Appropriations Act allocates $115 million for NED's operations, increasing by $35 million the amount requested by Bush for 2009. All told, the requested 2009 budget for US democracy programs is the highest ever, at $1.72 billion. By contrast, Canada spent upwards of $650 million on democracy promotion in 2008.

The NED was formed in 1983 as a new tool to advance US foreign policy and business interests around the world. Nominally independent, NED receives the majority of its budget from Congress and each of its grants must be approved by the US State Department.

“One of the NED's first major successes...was helping to overthrow the Sandinista government in Nicaragua,” wrote journalist Bart Jones in his authoritative biography of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. According to Jones, a couple of decades later, “the NED was rapidly infiltrating [Venezuelan] society in a way reminiscent of the Nicaragua experience.” Channelling money and resources to opposition NGOs has been a prime strategy of the NED in Venezuela.

Following a short-lived coup d'etat against Chavez in April 2002, Venezuelan-American attorney Eva Golinger and investigative journalist Jeremy Bigwood obtained a treasure trove of documents through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. These documents, released in conjunction with Golinger's 2004 book, The Chavez Code: Cracking US Intervention in Venezuela, exposed the NED's active role in the attempted subversion of Venezuela's democracy.

One of several Canadian NGOs whose activities are complementary to those of the NED is the Canadian Foundation for the Americas (FOCAL). Established by the Mulroney government in the 1990s, FOCAL is almost entirely dependent on government funding and is accountable to parliament.

A 2004 evaluation of FOCAL conducted by the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade Canada (DFAIT) and the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) stated:

Stakeholders from every sector, and from the academic community in particular, indicated that FOCAL is already perceived as 'the right arm of the government,' echoing the perspective and beliefs of its funding bodies, rather than a truly independent, non-governmental organization.

"The US has been using Canadian and European foundations more frequently in recent years to filter funding to Venezuelan and other NGOs, and political parties that promote their mutual interests," said Golinger, whose most recent book is The Imperial Web: Encyclopedia of Interference and Subversion. "It's a way of covering up US meddling and making the sources of foreign funding for political objectives more difficult to detect. Canada has been a major ally of the US in this respect, particularly in the case of Venezuela."

Negative perceptions of the US indicate the necessity of “shifting responsibility for the [democracy] campaign to more local actors or other Western allies,” wrote Raymond Gastil, one of the theoreticians behind the US shift to democracy promotion, in 1988.

Although far from the first such instance, Canada began to adopt this notion of “responsibility” towards Venezuela in January 2005. DFAIT invited the head of a key opposition group in Venezuela, Sumate's Maria Corina Machado, to meet Ottawa lawmakers and officials, as well as to give a briefing on political rights in Venezuela.

Machado openly supported the 2002 coup against Chavez. In 2004, she was charged with conspiracy to commit treason for allegedly using NED funds to campaign against Chavez in a recall referendum organized by the opposition.

According to records obtained by The Dominion via an Access to Information request, in 2005 FOCAL's chairman, John Graham, joined Machado for a high-level meeting Washington, D.C. In attendance were former Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice and Roger Noriega. “An exchange of ideas as regards the relationships between the civil society and the governments for the strengthening of democracy in the region,” was the stated purpose of the meeting.

Shortly after Graham’s meeting with Rice and Machado, the NED approved a $94,516 grant for FOCAL to carry out democracy promotion work in and around Venezuela.

Using the NED funds, FOCAL was to commission a series of papers and organize a number of meetings in Ottawa, Venezuela and Ecuador "to discuss how to better collaborate in promoting an informed civil society that can strengthen democracy in the region."

But after Harper's Conservatives took power in early 2006, FOCAL abruptly cancelled the activities that were supposed to take place in Venezuela.

"After discussing this project with various people...[we] came to the conclusion that it was not in anybody's interest to organize such an activity while being financially associated with the NED,” reads a heavily censored memo sent by DFAIT official Flavie Major in July 2006.

"Since the project was originally drafted, the internal context in Venezuela has shifted, as has the domestic context in Canada, which could potentially alter the priority and focus of Canada's engagement in Venezuela," states a separate document obtained through a US FOIA request.

An example of the changing political context in Venezuela is the 2006 draft of the Law on International Co-operation, which limits the ability of local NGOs to receive funding from foreign governments. Although the law has yet to be enacted, Western-backed NGOs and their donors have launched a campaign to “push back” against what they describe as a “backlash” against democracy promoters in the region.

By late 2006, the Conservatives proclaimed that democracy promotion was a “fundamental part” of Canadian foreign policy objectives and “an eminently worthy and intrinsically Canadian endeavour.” One indication of the Conservative's commitment was seen in the appointment of a former NED board member as a top advisor to Foreign Affairs Minister Peter MacKay.

In late 2007, the Canadian government gave the NED $198,168 to produce a major report, which was entitled "Defending Civil Society: A Report of the World Movement for Democracy." The report attacks Venezuela for its efforts to limit Western-funded manipulation of its internal politics:

Venezuela’s would-be caudillo Hugo Chavez has a peculiar notion of democracy. His ‘Bolivarian revolution’ appears to be based on Chavista [sic] monopolizing the country’s political institutions, from an absence of parliamentary opposition to a hand-picked judiciary. In these circumstances...civil society provides the only countervailing power to the Chavista state and to Chavez’s Castroite aspirations.

DFAIT seems to have based their own talking points on Venezuela around the NED’s line. In an e-mail statement to The Dominion, a spokesperson for Canadian Minister of State for Latin America Peter Kent wrote: "Hugo Chavez has a history of weakening democratic institutions. Minister Kent is committed to furthering the government's Americas strategy, which is dedicated to promoting and enhancing democracy, freedom and the rule of law."

When asked to substantiate a claim about Chavez’s anti-democratic tendencies, Kent’s spokesperson stated: "Hugo Chavez has a history of concentrating power in the Executive which has undermined democratic institutions in Venezuela. Since taking office a decade ago, we've seen the politicization of the judiciary and harassment by government officials of the state-controlled media and NGOs."

One of the ways that Canada has tried to avoid drawing attention to its support for the Venezuelan opposition and collaboration with the NED is by carrying out activities outside of Venezuela and co-ordinating them through embassies. Indeed, such methods have a theoretical basis that Canada helped design.

In conjunction with the NED-linked Council for a Community of Democracies and the US State Department, in April 2008 DFAIT contributed $70,000 in financing to the publication of A Diplomat's Handbook for Democracy Development Support.

Canada has one of the few foreign services that trains diplomats in democracy promotion. The US Foreign Service Institute has already ordered at least 400 copies of the handbook, which aims to provide diplomats with “encouragement, counsel and a greater capacity to support democrats everywhere.”

“We have over many, many years and will continue to work with the United States in this regard in advancing our common goals, certainly to the benefit of both countries and to the benefit of the world in general,” said Canada's Consul-General in New York, Dan Sullivan, during a launch event for the handbook in early 2008.

One example of the handbook in action is Canada’s funding of the Venezuelan NGO Justice and Development Consortium (Asociación Civil Consorcio Desarrollo y Justicia). This group, which also receives funding from the NED, has made a name for itself by working to unite reactionary opposition movements throughout Latin America.

In November 2007, DFAIT gave the Justice and Development Consortium $94,580 "to consolidate and expand the democracy network in Latin America and the Caribbean" at an assembly held in Panama City in the spring of 2008. This meeting, co-hosted by the Canadian Embassy in Panama and the NED, attracted prominent members of (often NED-funded) opposition movements in Venezuela, Cuba, Bolivia, and Ecuador. It was convened in response to "the usher[ing] in [of] a new era of populism and authoritarianism in Latin America."

Flying in the face of the North American interpretation of Venezuelan democracy is the latest report by the non-partisan Chilean Latinobarometro, which shows that 79 per cent of Venezuelans polled are satisfied with their democracy.

"Venezuela has a poor image in the rest of the world...but the perception of Venezuelans is positive,” states the report. “They say they like their democracy as it is now, or, at least, much more than the citizens of other countries like their democracies which, by contrast, are not criticized by the outside world for lack of freedom and harassment of institutions.”

Colombia, Peru, Mexico and Chile are considered Canada’s strongest allies in the region and are also countries where people’s support for their government tends to be lower than it is in Venezuela. The subversion of Venezuelan democracy and the laissez-faire attitude towards the regimes of Felipe Caldéron in Mexico, Alan Garcia in Peru and Álvaro Uribe in Colombia demonstrates that building popular democracies is not the sought-after end result of democracy promotion activities.

The governments of Colombia, Peru, Mexico and Chile have already entered into Free-Trade deals with Canada and each receives high levels of Canadian outward foreign direct investment, particularly in the extractive sector.

Canadian trade with Venezuela is second only to trade with Brazil in South and Central America. Venezuela is the tenth-largest provider of Canada's considerable foreign oil needs. In 2008, Canada imported $1.36 billion worth of Venezuelan crude. The North Atlantic Refinery in Newfoundland, home of Premier Danny “Chavez” Williams, refines the oil.

Anthony Fenton is an independent researcher and journalist based in British Columbia. He has travelled to Venezuela several times. Some material in this article is drawn from a forthcoming book on Canadian foreign policy. He can be contacted at fentona[at]shaw.ca.

FOCAL document

Can You Imagine Life Without It?

dawn — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 06:42:37 +0000

Ian Connacher's "Addicted to Plastic" tracks our most persistent trash

PARIS, FRANCE–There are trips that change your life. For Ian Connacher, it was in 2005. The filmmaker took a month-long expedition with captain Charles Moore out to the middle of the Pacific Ocean to shoot a short film about plastic.

It was here, thousands of kilometres from civilization, that Connacher first witnessed the legacy of our disposable lifestyle.

The North Pacific Gyre, also graphically referred to as the Eastern Garbage Patch, is a magnet for trash from around the world. The most persistent and lethal of this is plastic, in all shapes and sizes—from water bottles and grocery bags to buoys and food wrappers. Much of it originates from land, simply blown by the wind, or carried along by rivers, streams or from overflowing sewage systems. There are countless ways in which the estimated 13,000 pieces of plastic litter per square kilometre of ocean make their way out to sea. Once at large, much of it naturally accumulates on the converging ocean currents of the Gyre.

The Gyre is perhaps the most telling hallmark of our addiction to plastic. But one needn’t travel quite so far to get a sense of it. Plastic is everywhere. It is in our cars, iPods, toothbrushes and pens. Our babies suckle on it, and our food is wrapped in it. But as Connacher discovered at the Gyre, one of the qualities that makes plastic so valuable—its durability—is also what makes it so problematic once it is no longer in use.

Plastic does not biodegrade. In the ocean, however, it often breaks into miniscule bits that marine life often mistake for food. In other words, what starts on the outside of one woman’s salmon filet—in the form of wrapping—could very well end up inside the bowels of another man’s anchovy snack.

The ratio of plastic to plankton is about six to one at the Gyre. It is easy to imagine how such litter is massacring marine animals that ingest the synthetic crumbs or otherwise get entangled in larger objects, such as discarded nets or containers. But there’s more. While plastic repels water, it acts as a sponge for oil and other toxic chemicals. Animals that eat tiny oceanic pellets are in fact ingesting highly concentrated doses of toxic pollutants. Some of these are linked to the kinds of gender-bending hormone disruptions that have found male accessory sex organs in female snails.

The Gyre was a call to action for Connacher. “'Alphabet Soup' (the short) told the story of how plastic gets out to sea and how it affects the food chain. It wasn’t a happy story,” recalls Connacher. “It is impossible to clean the area. So I wanted to find solutions.”

When Discovery Channel turned down Connacher’s idea of adapting the short into a feature film, the filmmaker quit his job, took his life savings and set off on a plastic odyssey that took him to 12 countries around the world. “It was two years of not getting paid and living out of bags. But I knew that the story was compelling and needed to be told.”

The result is an 85-minute, award-winning and habit-kicking documentary. There is one information byte from the film that, like plastic, lingers. Every piece of plastic ever made, except for the small amount that has been incinerated, still exists.

As the film demonstrates, beyond much-needed radical social change, the search for solutions to the mounting heaps of plastic waste leads to two technological fixes. One: take what’s already out there and give it a new life—recycle. Two: search for alternatives to the polymer that are more earth-friendly; substances that can be naturally absorbed back into the ecosystem without putting additional strain on limited natural resources.

"Addicted to Plastic" explores many of the finest examples of recycling in the world, from cozy Patagonia jackets and hand-made Indian handbags to designer wedding dresses and railroad ties. But the limits to these solutions become palpable in India, the country that boasts one of the highest recycling rates in the world, in a scene that the filmmaker describes as one of the most horrific experiences of his life.

“There were rotting cows, hypodermic needles and, I could have sworn, body parts,” Connacher recalls. Entire families of rag-pickers subside on this garbage dump in India. “The soil was bubbling up and part of it was on fire. Pools of insects were hatching and dengue fever was known to be in the dump. And there were children running around collecting crap at the back of garbage trucks, getting paid a dollar a day.”

India also informally imports much of the world’s e-waste, under the guise of charitable donations. Computers, printers, monitors and other ever-rapidly obsolescent electronics come to scrap yard settings for recycling by hand. “You have 10-year-old girls pulling apart circuit boards and handling toxic materials,” says Connacher.

Bio-plastics, made from everything from corn to chicken feathers, make an appearance in the film. While novel forms of seemingly environmentally friendly alternatives are becoming available, habits are harder to break.

It is perhaps for this reason that Connacher is banking on kids. The filmmaker is working to get his documentary into schools and libraries. “The younger generation, they are the ones who are going to have to clean up the mess, alas. Grade six classes have sat through the whole film and asked amazing questions. That inspires me more than anything.”

And if demand cannot be capped, shrinking petroleum reserves may ultimately force civilization to kick its addiction to the material of infinite uses. Connacher recalls one kid asking, “What would the world look like without plastic?”

Carolyn Lebel is a Canadian freelance journalist based in Paris.

For further information, or to buy a copy of "Addicted to Plastic," click here.

North Pacific Gyre

Plastic Film

Land & Jail Part III

Moira Peters — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 15:00:21 +0000

Challenging the disproportionate incarceration of First Nations in Canada

TRADITIONAL TERRITORY OF SNUNEYMUXW FIRST NATION (NANAIMO, B.C.)–“It is a scandal that Chief Nottaway spent Christmas in jail for peaceful civil disobedience to demand governments live up to their responsibilities,” said Federal Green Party leader Elizabeth May at a January 7 rally in support of the jailed Customary Chief in Ottawa.

Chief Benjamin Nottaway of the Barriere Lake First Nation was sentenced to two months' imprisonment for peacefully proclaiming rights to traditional territories in Western Quebec.

In 2001, the government of Canada reneged on the binding 1991 Trilateral Agreement, a sustainable development and resource co-management agreement between Canada and the Barriere Lake First Nation.

The Algonquins of Barriere Lake First Nation are demanding that the government uphold signed agreements and the right to choose their Customary Chief and council.

In March 2008, the federal government imposed a council on the Barriere Lake First Nation and, in November, Customary Chief Nottaway was sentenced to jail.

Although the incarceration of Nottaway may be a scandal, it is not out of the ordinary in Canada. According to many Indigenous people, the disproportionate incarceration of First Nations people is part of an ongoing racist colonization process. There is a movement in Quebec to revive the traditional Native court.

In 1999, the Supreme Court judgement R. v. Gladue noted that a 1976-77 study of admissions to Saskatchewan’s correctional system “contains findings that should shock the conscience of everyone in Canada.”

The Office of the Correctional Investigator Canada reported on November 16, 2006, that whereas the number of federal prisoners in Canada decreased by 12.5 per cent, the number of Indigenous peoples in federal prisons increased by 21.7 per cent. During the same period, the number of Indigenous women imprisoned federally shot up by 74.2 per cent.

Furthermore, it reported that Indigenous Peoples were overrepresented in maximum security, placed in segregation more often than non-Indigenous prisoners, were more likely to be turned down for parole and endure longer periods of incarceration.

At Vancouver Island University's Shq'apthut (a gathering place), all Indigenous Peoples I spoke with saw racism underlying the disproportionate incarceration of Indigenous Peoples in comparison to other Canadians.

Winston Wuttunee, a Nehiyaw (Cree), identified institutionalization fostered by the Indian Residential School System and wardship as linked to high incarceration rates.

Douglas Blanchard, an advocate for the Metis Nation, pointed to the carry-over effect from the foster care system (“the child grab of the '60s”), which he sees as having morphed from the Indian Residential School program. He said many incarcerated Indigenous Peoples had gone through the foster-care system.

Auditor General Sheila Fraser found in her May 2008 report that children on reserves across Canada are at very high risk to wind up in under-funded, poorly tracked foster care.

Jaime Seaweed, an aspiring lawyer from the Kwakwaka'wakw First Nation, views the justice system as archaic and needing change. “The whole system is corrupt.” Seaweed calls for traditional healing—for everyone, she adds—restorative justice within communities and better access to lawyers.

R. v. Gladue did acknowledge the “principles of restorative justice and the needs of the parties involved.” It noted the importance of community-based sanctions for Indigenous Peoples and called on sentencing judges to take into account “the unique circumstances of Aboriginal offenders.”

"There are too many of our people in the prison institutions," Hereditary Mig'maq Chief Gary Metallic in Quebec told The Dominion.

"My life work has been in the reviving and reassertion of our ancient traditional governments and our jurisdictions," he said. "One very important area that we identified is the need to revive our Native courts to counter the newcomers' courts that have been responsible for the illegal colonization of our lands and resources, and...incarceration of our peoples during the colonization process.

"The Mig'maq of our 7th District in Gaspe were fortunate in the '90s to have Dr. Bruce Clark work with us in the revival of our traditional Native court, called the Confederated Native Court, which consisted of four nations: the Mig'maq, Algonquin, Passamaquoddy and the Mohegan Nation; together we sat and deliberated on the illegal takeover of our lands and resources, and passed judgement which was titled The Confederated Native Court Judgement."

Chief Metallic says his group is closely watching the Barriere Lake First Nation case and had informed the judge and court that they “had no legal jurisdiction over unceded Algonquin territory and therefore the traditional people charged in the blockades had in fact never broken any laws when protecting their traditional territory.”

Metallic expects chicanery from the Quebec legal system, but the Confederated Native Court intends to reveal Quebec's “pretended jurisdiction” upon unceded Algonquin territory. The next step will be an impartial, third-party adjudication process in a neutral international forum to render “an unbiased ruling based on the evidence before it.”

"We will no longer be on the receiving end of their racist and foreign judicial systems that have been responsible for the illegal colonization of our peoples," says Metallic.

"Perhaps by reintroducing our Native courts we can stop the over-incarceration of our peoples within the prison system."

Read parts I and II of this series.

Kim Petersen is the Original People's Editor at The Dominion.

Benjamin Nottaway

March Books

Moira Peters — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 06:00:31 +0000

New translations by Bolaño and Storm

2666
Roberto Bolaño
Translated by Natasha Wimmer
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008

The reception of 2666, Roberto Bolaño’s latest and last novel to be translated into English, has often resembled an exercise in literary myth-making more than literary criticism. Critics have been competing for more lavish adjectives to praise 2666 ever since Bolaño’s other major novel, The Savage Detectives, gained a cult following. Now, just a few months after its release, the discussion has turned away from the novel itself and to the biographical details of the man who wrote it. Bolaño enthusiasts defend his romantic-bohemian image and viciously debate whether he really opposed Chilean President Pinochet, whether he was a drug addict, or whether 2666 was even close to complete when he died almost seven years ago.

So how did a 900-page tome by a formerly obscure Chilean nomad spark a fanatic following with English audiences? Its success has less to do with plot or genre and more to do with Bolaño’s ability to submerge his readers in hundreds of interconnected plots while he borrows from countless genres. To link its disparate parts, the novel has two thematic poles which become entangled by the end. The first narrative link—a reclusive German author who writes under the name Archimboldi—frames the first and last sections of the book. But the major backdrop is Santa Teresa, a fictitious stand-in for Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, and the ongoing mass killings of women there.

Bolaño’s depictions of rape and murder in Mexico go beyond merely graphic. They are painful to read, and that’s exactly the point. Bolaño’s political and moral outrage is expressed by forcing his readers to confront the carnage in its rawest form. There are times when every reader will pause and wonder if Bolaño is perversely enjoying the excuse to spew out lurid details that would make “true crime” fans salivate. After the hundredth continuous page describing the decomposed remains, the coroner’s report, and the known details of another teenaged victim, you’re either shocked, repulsed, or bored.

This boredom is one of Bolaño’s central concerns and it surfaces throughout the novel, starting with the epigraph from Baudelaire: “An oasis of horror in a desert of boredom.” Bolaño doesn’t expound the banality of evil; instead, evil becomes one escape from banality and poverty. Creativity and literature, as embodied by his character Archimboldi, form the alternate sort of escape. Unlike his other books, which obsessively document the creative process, Bolaño rarely details Archimboldi’s motivations as a writer. In one of several indications that 2666 is not quite a finished work, Archimboldi is left as a vague literary silhouette in a world of beauty and boredom where it seems everyone writes books, makes love, or kills people.

Bolaño once wrote: “We never stop reading, although every book comes to an end, just as we never stop living, although death is certain.” The several life stories in 2666 inevitably intersect, drift apart, and get forgotten. To digest each of these stories would require never-ending re-reads. And for Bolaño, now the most acclaimed Latin American author since Gabriel Garcia Marquez, his life and legend seem to be more vital than ever.

—Shane Patrick Murphy

The Rider on the White Horse
Theodor Storm
Translated by James Wright
New York Review of Books Classics, 2009

Theodor Storm's classic novella The Rider on the White Horse contains some meaty pearls of wisdom nestled within a portrait of Germany's sodden Northern Friesland region, but blink and you'll miss them: these flashes of Storm's perceptive strength never take precedence over his evocation of the setting. The land emerges as the focal point for Storm and the novella's characters—a rural community of no-nonsense types who would rather discuss the structural efficacy of their town's protective dykes than allow themselves the sinister distraction of philosophy.

Nevertheless, pearls there are, such as the disturbingly clear sketch of the protagonist Hauke Haien's seething drive to become the town's dykemaster:

Suddenly he felt furiously angry at those faces, and he actually reached out to grasp them, for they obviously wanted nothing better than to block his way to the very position which suited him and only him. These thoughts were never wholly absent from his mind. In such ways, in the living presence of the honor and love in his young heart, ambition and hatred grew up side by side. But they rooted deep inside him, and even Elke failed to suspect their existence.

If the heart of Storm's story offers pastoral beauty and occasional peace (albeit within a community where a catastrophic flood could strike at any time), there is a tension to be felt at its edges: the main tale comes mediated by no fewer than three mysterious narrators, layered one upon the other as the narrative slowly rolls out in the opening pages. We are offered at once a haunting ghost story and the poignant recounting of the life that produced it, a wondrous blend of fantasy and futility that spans over a century and a half and still feels remarkably contained, flanked by the North Sea's frigid depths.

—Robert Kotyk

The Vogue

Moira Peters — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 06:01:27 +0000

The Vogue Comic.jpg

The Profit Behind the Myths

dru — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 08:00:00 +0000

New documentary refutes "benevolent" Canada

A major obstacle for anyone organizing to "right" a Canadian foreign policy "wrong" is the widely held notion that this country acts benevolently on the world stage. "Myths for Profit," a recently released documentary written and directed by Amy Miller, challenges this assumption head-on.

A summary of the film reads: "The Canadian government and the military would like us to believe that we are altruistic peacekeepers helping people around the world. But is this accurate?"

After exploring how Canadians see their country, "Myths for Profit" provides an entertaining history of NATO and a brief description of Canada's peacekeeping role in the Suez crisis. The film also delves into the role played by government agencies, such as the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) and Export Development Canada (EDC), in advancing investors' interests abroad. With helpful graphics, the film discusses the Canadian arms industry, pipeline politics in Afghanistan and some of the social and ecological devastation wrought by Canadian foreign investment.

The movie is probably at its best regarding Canada's bombing of Serbia in 1999. Under the auspices of "humanitarian intervention," Canadian military jets dropped hundreds of bombs on the country, destroying infrastructure and killing civilians.

The film is not without political limitations. It discusses the drawbacks of tied aid at length, but barely mentions how Canadian aid supports US-led military endeavours and has been used to keep poorer countries within the Western sphere of influence. Aid, the film might have made clear, is largely a tool to advance geopolitical interests defined by the global elite.

When discussing the Suez crisis, popularly understood as the beginning of "peacekeeping," "Myths for Profit" could have detailed Washington's support for the UN mission, put forward by Lester B. Pearson. A better understanding of Suez would convince viewers that peacekeeping (usually) advanced Washington's interests during the Cold War, a point made in "Myths for Profit."

The political objective of the film may be too broad for an hour-long documentary, a medium that doesn't lend itself to depth. It is not clear whether the uninitiated viewer will follow all of the movie's transitions, from NATO to peacekeeping and through the reconstruction industry to Canadian mining operations abroad.

Despite these weaknesses, "Myths for Profit" is an important resource for those working for a more just Canadian foreign policy. It asks the right questions and provides a number of answers.

For a documentary with no major institutional financing, its technical quality is impressive. Often quite funny, the film's images and comics make for a highly entertaining documentary.

"Myths for Profit" is being shown across Canada during March and April.

Yves Engler is the author of the forthcoming The Black Book of Canadian Foreign Policy. To help organize a talk as part of a book tour in May or June, please e-mail yvesengler [at] hotmail [.] com.

Myths for Profit