From June 25-27, Canada will host the G8 and G20 Summits. These events present a unique opportunity for Canadians from all walks of life to make their voices heard. It is a moment for Canadians to join collectively, with people across the globe, to tell the Canadian government and world leaders that in these troubled times: people deserve better!

Some of the key issues labour wants addressed are:

Global Economic and Financial Crisis

In September 2008, the global economy crashed and while the banks are on the road to recovery, working people continue to bear the heaviest burden of the down turn. Unemployment is soaring, pension funds are evaporating and workers are suffering huge cuts in personal income.

Canada’s politicians may be claiming a period of recovery but for the majority of countries worldwide, the situation is still dire. In the North and South, millions of people have lost their savings, their livelihoods and their homes, and women, youth and migrant workers are particularly vulnerable.

Development and Poverty

In 2000, all 192 United Nations member states pledged to meet eight Millennium Development Goals by 2015. These goals assign targets to reduce poverty and hunger; provide universal primary education; promote gender equality; reduce child mortality; improve maternal health; combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases; ensure environmental sustainability; and create a global partnership for development.

The crisis is fast extinguishing hope of achieving the Millennium Development Goals and nationally agreed development objectives, especially in low-income countries, where the International Labour Organization estimates that 100 million men and women have fallen into absolute poverty in the last year.

In Muskoka, the G8 priority must be to set a path, through the accountability framework, towards addressing the gap between stated commitments and necessary actions to put the MDGs back on track. With just five years remaining until the MDG target date of 2015, the summit will mark a critical moment for G8 governments to take stock of progress and make an all-out effort to address the most glaring gaps and shortfalls in reaching their targets.

Climate Change

The immediate impacts of climate change will target the poorest and most vulnerable people. It will certainly also have effects on employment. Measures taken to combat climate change, in particular those aiming at reducing greenhouse gas emissions, while crucial, will require important transformations in the world of work, and generate opportunities and challenges for workers and trade unions.

Trade unions are committed to call on all governments, in priority, those in developed countries and major economies in the developing world, to firmly commit to emission reductions.

Women take the lead

Women will gather at the Sir John A MacDonald statue on the south part of the Queens Park lawn, to give voice to the impact of G8 and G20 decisions on women. Take the lead for maternal health with full reproductive rights, for an end to women’s poverty, for women’s equality at home and globally!

People First!
We Deserve Better!

This family friendly event is for all supporters. Invite all your friends to come to the rally and march this summer.

The march will begin at Queen’s Park and head south on University Avenue to as far as permitted, then heads west to Spadina Avenue, then heads north to College Street, then heads east back to Queen’s Park.

By Darius Mirshahi

Recently, a few people decided to set fire to an Ottawa branch of the Royal Bank of Canada, completely gutting it. Nobody was injured, and they posted a video of this action online, stating their reasons for taking such a bold action; primarily RBC’s financing of the Tar Sands and sponsorship of the 2010 Olympics.

Since then there have been various responses. Some politicians and police officers are calling this destruction of property “terrorism.” The corporate media is hyping up the threat of violent protesters while ignoring the ongoing violence and devastation being caused by their advertisers. Some high-profile activists are trying to distance themselves from this action, and are even going so far as to publicly denounce it, fearing it alienated the average citizen from their causes, and that their privileged positions in society might be threatened.

But the average citizen doesn’t feel much pain for corporate property, especially banks. Banks are being burned all over the world at an ever-increasing rate as the poor are forced to pay for the global financial crisis created by the greed of the rich. Only the rich mourn the loss of banks, the rest of us know banks are the biggest thieves of all. They lend us made up money at high interest rates, and then evict us from our homes when the corporations they bankroll outsource our jobs. They invest in anything financially profitable no matter how much environmental damage or human suffering it causes.

That said, this particular act of sabotage is the first of its kind in the current struggle against the tar sands’ and definitely an escalation in the tactics activists have used against Royal Bank. For the past several years Royal Bank branches from coast to coast have had dozens of windows smashed in, their locks glued, and multiple ATMs sabotaged, all while a public above-ground movement organized all types of protests, disruptions, direct actions and awareness campaigns to draw attention to Royal Bank’s investments.

Royal Bank of Canada continues to be the largest financier of the tar sands, even though it is causing death and disease to the indigenous communities downstream, and is the most environmentally destructive industrial project in the world. Obviously they don’t mind enriching their stockholders, but the moment someone sabotages one of their banks in response it is condemned as terrorism and labeled extreme. The double standard is blatant.

Unlike the day-to-day dealings of RBC, burning an empty building is not terrorism. The arson in Ottawa was simply a signal of frustration and genuine anger against the violence and injustice caused by RBC. Affected communities have been pleading for years with Royal Bank to stop funding the ecocidal tar sands to no avail. RBC shareholders have been confronted on the issue multiple times as well, and have continued with their business- as-usual. They cannot plead ignorance any longer; they are now deliberately desecrating this planet in the name of profit.

An RBC going up in flames blew away any chances that RBC could continue hiding its acts. Thousands of people who might not otherwise have cared are now interested in the motives of this attack. They want to know the “what and where” and naturally need to know the “why and who.” This is a classic example of propaganda by the deed. All it took the vigilantes was a camera, a computer, a getaway car, and some homemade incendiaries to send their message out to millions, and explain why RBC deserved it.

Now millions of people not only know some truth about the tar sands, but understand that there is militant resistance to this ecocidal project. Even though no actual violence has occurred yet, aboveground activists who’ve been organizing against RBC can use the famous civil rights line “those who make peaceful revolution impossible, make violent revolution inevitable.” Activists engaged against the tar sands may now take more radical action because nothing less than firebombing a bank is considered the extreme element of the movement. These types of actions open up space for others to escalate their tactics while still remaining ‘moderate.’

However, we must all still be very wary of outright military conflict with the state and corporations. After all, they are the ones with actual militaries, nuclear arsenals, and super-prisons. During times of social unrest, there is a concentrated effort to push pro-revolutionaries underground towards clandestine militancy in order to isolate them and cut them off from aboveground support networks.

Divide and conquer is still their tactic. Their goal is to have an isolated underground that atrophies as it becomes more clandestine, and an easily managed above-ground that is non-confrontational, ineffective, and disempowering for participants. They want nothing more than aboveground and underground activists to attack each other over tactics than actually developing diverse strategies in which all types of actions reinforce and support each other’s efforts.

My words are not enough to create change, but neither is their fire. Militant clandestine actions are a dead end without support from a broader social movement. The most effective social movements are decentralized and diverse, offering the widest range of activity, and points of entry to participants. If our movements are ever to succeed we must use every tool in the toolbelt. The forces we are struggling against sure are, and they have a much bigger belt.

For a world without banks, for diversity in struggle.

Brand new video from radical hip hop mc’s Test Their Logik, just in time for the G8/G20 in Huntsville and Toronto.

On May 20, 2010, at the Steelworker’s Hall in Toronto, Canada, and in advance of the G8 (June 25, Huntsville, Ontario) and G20 (June 26-27, Toronto) summits, the Toronto Community Mobilization Network (TCMN) http://g20.torontomobilize.org/ held a press conference: Top 10 Reasons to Oppose the G8/G20.

“The mobilizations in June are concerned with our ongoing struggle for social justice,” says Sharmeen Khan of TCMN. “The attendees of the G8 and G20 summits represent the interests of a wealthy few and are responsible for creating policies and institutions that destroy communities and the environment.”

The Toronto Community Mobilization Network consists of grassroots organizations, people of colour, indigenous people, poor and working class people, women, queer, and disabled people.

TORONTO COMMUNITY MOBILIZATION NETWORK (TCMN)
Themed Days of Resistance, June 21-24
Days of Action, June 25-27
http://g20.torontomobilize.org/

2010 PEOPLE’S SUMMIT
Building a Movement for a Just World, June 18-20, Toronto
http://peoplessummit2010.ca/section/2

The stricken waters in the Gulf of Mexico span the coastlines of four states, with the mouth of the Mississippi River in Louisiana and Florida’s Pensacola Bay the worst affected, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

NOAA officials are working to keep oiled seafood off the market – which is well-known for its shrimp and oyster supply as well as being a rich source of crabs and fish.

“There should be no health risk in seafood currently in the marketplace,” Ewell Smith, executive director of the Louisiana Seafood Board said in a statement.

More than a billion pounds of fish and shellfish were harvested by fishermen in the region in 2008, according to government figures.

Eleven BP workers were killed after an explosion on April 20 that sank the Deepwater Horizon oil rig and lead to the massive oil spill.

Click on image to view online PDF.

For printer-friendly PDF, please click here. Feel free to print and distribute to your heart’s content.

By Darius Mirshahi

As young people, we already know we’re fucked. We’ve been robbed of a future by our elders who consumed it. The last few generations have taken every resource imaginable and extracted it at an ever-increasing rate. Blind to the world around them they planned our obsolescance like the products they designed for the dump. Now everything is unbalanced and we’re coming to a tipping point. We already see the consequences everywhere. Depression economics, ecological catastrophes, violent and oppressive social relations. Their poisons have logically spread beyond our rivers and land into our bodies and minds. It’s in the air we breathe, its broadcasted on the airwaves, it’s all pervasive, and always present. They dug us into a coffin and we must escape it. This will be no small task. It demands the radical re-organization of humanity and a total re-evaluation of our relationship with our ecological support systems.

What we know is this: There’s no future on this path and we’re speeding to the finish line. These are desparate times, the very survival of life on this planet, including our own, lies in the balance of the decisions we make now. Everything will flow from here.

The damage is done, the climate is not only changing, it has changed. We already live in an ecological catastrophe. But this only means that we must fight harder to save the small pockets of vibrant ecosystems that still exist. There are fools among us that still wish to pillage what little remains and it’s up to us to stop them. We cannot count on governments to do this work for us either. They have never worked for us, and have always paved the way for corporate exploitation of the earth’s resources. Politicians are bought and paid for by those who fund their campaigns. Clear-cutters, mining companies, and developers own the Canadian economy and by extension our politicians, who gladly rubber-stamp their ecocidal projects. The most important thing we can do now is directly confront the forces of industrial expansion by intervening as individuals and communities of resistance. We must create conflict with these forces every time they attempt to replace a forest with new suburban sprawl, every time they attempt to rob our mother and turn her into commodities, and every time they attempt to expand the roads and highways to facilitate larger distribution of their products.

But even this is not enough, we must dismantle the system of industrial capitalism not merely contain it. We need to reverse the process not just stall its expansion.

We need to develop sustainable alternatives to everything  we have come to take for granted in our culture. We need to realize our way of life is incompatible with life itself. We need to decontaminate our soil water and air, because even if we drastically decreased emissions we would still be breathing in toxins and living on a toxic planet. We need to dismantle the power grid, stop all mass production of energy and transition into more resilient community-controlled autonomous energy production. We need to abolish patent-laws that protect intellectual property and liberate the knowledge of sustainable alternatives. Corporations have been keeping us dependent on their inefficient and dirty technologies for decades through copyright laws.

We need to challenge the forces of social control that exist to keep us passively marching towards the nightmare they are steadily building for us on this planet. We need to reject their products, and make their entire industrial system collapse before there is a total ecological collapse and mass extinction. Species extinction is currently accelerating on this planet due to our culture of consumerism and the economic domination of this planet. The oceans have massive dead zones, most rivers have become undrinkable from dams and industrial runoff, and we live in concrete jungles, saturated in smog, where we slave away to meet our basic needs.

Another way of life is possible and necessary. We can radically change this world for the better, all we need to do is start acting on our desires and putting our ideas into practice. We can start liberating our lives, communities, and bioregions from the tyranny of the market. We can challenge the authority of governments and reclaim local autonomy. We can defend the ecosystems that are still intact while re-wilding areas that have been devastated. We can tear up parking lots, detoxify soil, and create community gardens. We can occupy and take over the existing infrastructure and run it collectively while reconnecting it to our environment by collecting rainwater, building rooftop gardens, and ripping out lawns to allow diverse plant and animal life to flourish.

We can start in the here and now. We do not need to wait for action from the powers that be. We must take action and be the power for change ourselves. The fate of the world is in our hands. We can either create resilient communities capable of surviving the collapse and defending and regenerating our ecosystems, or we can continue down the suicidal path of industrial expansion and consumer culture. It’s time to get off the fence and stand up against those who have sold out the future.

By Alric Malgraith

Philosopher Thomas Hobbes described pre-civilized life, what he called “the natural condition of man” as “nasty, brutish and short” and thus Man needs an all powerful government to suppress his natural savagery. (Hobbes 1651) This description of hunter-gatherer cultures was widely accepted in Enlightenment thinking. Only Jean-Jacques Rousseau disagreed and argued in favour of an uncivilized life, philosophically. (Rousseau 1754) Rousseau’s thinking was dismissed as romantic and “noble savage” mythology. Perhaps Rousseau was romanticizing, but through modern ethnographic and archaeological studies it can be determined that hunter-gatherers have better lives than so-called civilized people. Hunter-gatherers have more leisure time, a more egalitarian distribution of wealth and a stronger sense of community than those living in industrialized societies.

Philosopher Derrick Jensen gives an appropriate definition of Civilization in a practical sense. Civilization is “a complex of stories, institutions, and artifacts – that both leads to and emerges from the growth of cities.” He proceeds to define a city as “people living more or less permanently in one place in densities high enough to require the routine importation of food and other necessities of life.” (Jensen 2006) These definitions will be considered when the term “civilization” is used throughout this essay and the term “uncivilized” or “primitive” should not be taken as a term of offense or denigration.

The Anthropologist Marshall Sahlins reported in his book on Stone Age economics that hunter-gatherers on average spend three to five hours per day dedicated to food production. In this small amount of labour time per day, plus the occasional time spent building and maintaining tools and shelter they are able to provide all the things that subsistence requires. This is far less labour time than is required by industrialized people who often work eight hours per day or 35-40 hours per week. (Sahlins 1972) This leaves hunter-gatherers ample time for social, familial, artistic and other playful pursuits. One need only read the accounts of civilized people who have lived among uncivilized people to understand how leisurely their lifestyle was. Caribbean expert Carl Sauer gave the follow description of the lifestyle of the Arawak people, a pre-Columbian Caribbean culture; “The tropical idyll accounts of Columbus and Peter Martyr was largely true. The people suffered no want. They took care of their plantings, were dexterous at fishing and were bold canoeists and swimmers. They designed attractive houses and kept them clean. They found aesthetic expression in woodworking. They had leisure to enjoy diversion in ball games, dances and music.” (quoted in Jensen 2004) Similar descriptions of primitive cultures can be found from Africa to the Americas to the South Pacific.

Evolutionary biologist Jared Diamond has called agriculture “the worst mistake in the history of the human race.” In his paper of the same name he claims that social and sexual inequality, despotism and most diseases have their origins in the advent of agriculture. He further reports that Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert spend only twelve to nineteen hours per week obtaining food. Hadza nomads from Tanzania spend fourteen hours or less every week foraging for food. Diamond quotes a Bushman who, when asked why he hadn’t adopted agriculture like some neighbouring tribes, responded, “Why should we, when there are so many mongongo nuts in the world?” (Diamond 1987)

Central to their success from pre-historic times to the present is primitive cultures’ dedication to sharing. Hunter-gatherers have a much more egalitarian distribution of wealth than agricultural societies. This is important in that it ensures fairness and that everyone receives equal compensation for their contributions to the band or tribe. In uncivilized cultures “the importance of giving gifts and sharing is reinforced throughout life until it becomes deeply embedded within a person’s personality. Because the failure to share among many hunter-gatherers results in ill feeling because one party fails to obtain food or gifts, but also because the failure to share sends a strong symbolic message to those left out of the division.” (Kelly 1995) It was this concentration on solidarity, cooperation and sharing that led to the communitarian and close-knit tribes that developed out of small Paleolithic bands. This mutual respect in hunter-gatherer tribes explains their strong sense of community and lack of alienation.

Anarcho-primitivist philosopher and re-interpreter of the Frankfurt School’s “critical theory”, John Zerzan defines alienation as being “estranged from our own experiences, dislodged from a natural mode of being.” (Zerzan 2002) Nothing such as this is experienced among primitive cultures. Zerzan argues that this is because hunter-gatherers do not have their personal relationships mediated by technology. He believes that the full range of communication and understanding developed among hunter-gatherers through directly experiencing each others’ opinions, personalities and ideas is why tribal peoples rarely have feelings of isolation, hopelessness or exclusion. (Zerzan 2002) It is through an excess of cultural images and technological mediation that we dehumanize each other, neglect each others’ emotional needs and suffer a general breakdown in societies. In adopting civilization we lose the generally friendly communal bonds based on mutual aid that hunter-gatherers have, at least within their own tribe.

Detractors of these viewpoints will claim that these ideas are a type of positivist or reverse racism and are no more than noble savage mythology. This is a fallacy. The historical revision of how we view hunter-gatherers in not groundless ideology, but a worldview backed up by almost 40 years of new ethnographic and archaeological data which throws into question old progressivist ideas. Others will point to violence among some tribal peoples as well as the ritualized violence of the Aztecs and headhunting groups as evidence against pre-civilized peacefulness and equality. This is also easily refutable considering that the Aztecs were clearly civilized. None of the headhunting groups were true hunter-gatherers either. The ritualized domestic violence among the Yanomano of South America, as reported (and exaggerated) by Napoleon Chagnon (1968) can be explained by the authoritarian power relations and sexual divisions that developed due to their use of “slash and burn” horticulture. Domestication and control breeds domestication and control.

The vast amount of archaeological data that has been collected and vast amount of ethnographic research conducted on hunter-gatherer cultures seems more and more to support the “romantic” idea that primitive people live with a close bond to nature and each other, that they are not destitute and backward. In fact we should instead be reconsidering the merits of civilization and questioning the civilized way of life. Perhaps the question is not “Why did humans take so long to invent agriculture?”, but “Why did humans invent agriculture at all?”

With the close of the 2010 Winter Olympic Games in Vancouver, much of the media was quick to declare them a total success. This goes against the mounds of journalism produced before and during the games by the Vancouver Media Co-op, the city’s newly launched independent media center. Believing that there might be more than one answer regarding the success of the games, and one of those should come from the host communities, The Real News spoke to Franklin López, Video Producer with the Co-op, to find out more about the legacy of the 2010 Olympics for the people of Vancouver.