h/t Waterbaby
That's very good, isn't it? "Kinder Morgan has solved the NIMBY problem by taking the backyard".
I also liked his debunking of the attempt to de-legitimize protest itself - the argument that "protesters undermine the rule of law by claiming to speak for the whole community".
Hey, here's one now from the senior editorial board of the Vancouver Province!
Mountain mob don't speak for the rest of us
The Province senior editorial board wonders why the protesters are available to protest in the middle of the day and aren't at work "generating taxes", and whether the protesting "clever university professors" understand where their salaries come from.
My personal fave here - Are their tents made from oil products? Oh, the hypocrisy!
This one is akin to the argument that First Nations should only have 'preferential fishing rights' if they are restricted to using 14th century tools.
But then of course the protesters don't speak for you, Province editorial board, because you're already speaking for your editorial partner CAPP, the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers.
And a bang up job you're doing of it too - introducing Postmedia stories that "CAPP needs to bring to the forefront of Canadian consciousness".
Last month, backed by its major shareholder New York hedge fund GoldenTree Asset Management, Postmedia added to its stable of CAPP-promoting opportunities with its purchase of Sun Media and 175 more newspapers and websites across Canada, including the 24 Hours daily. At left is the before and after effects of the buyout - just another day of tarsands-friendly media concentration in your backyard.
Fun story : Seven years ago, Texas Governor Rick Perry was pushing to build the Trans-Texas Corridor, a quarter-mile-wide swath of truck-only toll lanes, railway lines and multiple traffic lanes rolling from Mexico to the Oklahoma state border. The prime bidder was Cintra SA, Macquarie Infrastructure Group's partner in the Ontario Highway 407 ETR 99 year lease, of which Australia's Macquarie is the largest shareholder.
To many Texan ranchers and farmers, Perry's superhighway just looked like a royal pain in the ass and opponents of privatizing roads came out against it in the thousands. All up and down the proposed route, ads and editorials critical of the proposal ran in the local newspapers. Macquarie bought those local newspapers out. All 40 of them.
.
Update : Carol Linnitt : Canada’s Petro-Politics Playing Out on B.C.’s Burnaby Mountain
Meanwhile on BC's Burnaby Mountain, RCMP act as Kinder Morgan's private security force, protecting a foreign corporation against the municipality of Burnaby and the people protesting in a public park who actually live here.
Updates from Burnaby Mountain
19 comments:
This is a top notch site.
Thanx a million times.
Ya Alison it is all about money they do not care about the earth and environment that keeps them alive...
http://www.halcyon.com/arborhts/chiefsea.html
http://www.barefootsworld.net/seattle.html
What is more fitting in today's world? We should read and reread Chief Seattle's words...
http://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/10/20/last-tree-cut/
"Canada, the most affluent of countries, operates on a depletion economy which leaves destruction in its wake. Your people are driven by a terrible sense of deficiency. When the last tree is cut, the last fish is caught, and the last river is polluted; when to breathe the air is sickening, you will realize, too late, that wealth is not in bank accounts and that you can’t eat money." circa 1894 and 1972!
um um um...
When will people wake up? I can live on solar and wind energy and eat fine from my garden we need to quit being dependent on governments and corporations...
Words of wisdom "Let it be"
http://www.stevenredhead.com/Native/quotes.html
It's a very good speech, Mogs, even if it was written by a Texas screenwriter named Ted Perry in 1971. You can read his account of how it came to be attributed to Chief Seattle here.
In the 70s we understood the peril to democracy posed by concentration of ownership and significant cross-ownership in Canada's mass media. In the interim we dropped the ball and now have a thoroughly concentrated, corporate media cartel with the predictable results we foresaw in the 70s.
A healthy democracy must have an informed electorate and that demands a mass media that is as broadly owned as possible to ensure access to the greatest range of opinion across the political spectrum delivered by the greatest number of voices.
The Green Party alone advocates for the breakup of the media cartel through compulsory divestiture. The Liberals and New Democrats seem just fine with the status quo.
Excellent work, as always, Alison. Thanks!
" Anonymous Anonymous said...
It's a very good speech, Mogs, even if it was written by a Texas screenwriter named Ted Perry in 1971. You can read his account of how it came to be attributed to Chief Seattle here.
22/11/14 10:47 am"
Ya anon you are anonymous and how about this that is close to my heart are you gonna dis it to?
Chief Joseph "I am tired; my heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever. no ever" you think this is bullshit?
http://www.inthebeginning.com/articles/joseph.htm
Now look at Grant MacEwan fine historical documentary and tell me again we are all wrong who see the truth...
Consequently, a few years back the CPPIB had its largest stake of equity tied up with an Australian toll-booth operator...
DFP
Media not doing a very good job of explaining this all started when Kinder Morgan started cutting down trees in the conservation area of a public park and the city of Burnaby issued them with a stop work order which KM had overturned in BC Supreme Court.
If we weren't all under the heel of province-size and Canada-size governments the people of Burnaby could simply vote "no" themselves to Kinder Morgan.
Perhaps the protestors should be protesting big government.
Cocoabean : Sincere question - I'd be interested in hearing your ideas on how to break up/reduce big government.
Anon@11:12 : I know you meant MSM but here's an excellent column from Carol Linnett at DeSmogBlog on how we got here - no legal democratic way for citizens of BC and Burnaby to respond to KM.
Anon@5:30 : I just recently learned how said toll booth operator makes money by going bankrupt at it.
Mogs, Anon@10:47 : At this point I'm not sure it matters which tribe, which century...
Mound : Years past the NDP was very big on combating media concentration and it's in their constitution. Certainly it has done them considerable damage given the extent to which media has in the past and continues to this day to ignore them. Couldn't find anything about it on official Lib Party site.
As Fagstein has often pointed out - the media concentration ship has sailed.
btw - The best thing about that dumbass Province editorial is how every single comment under it gives them shit for writing it.
Alison, just a few thoughts.
Localization, downsizing and democratization is going to have to occur as big, unwieldy centralized systems increasingly break down under funding pressures, public resistance, debt levels, crumbling tax bases and increasing un- and under-employment.
We could be preparing, both as individuals and communities. Becoming more self-reliant, debt-free and generalist on an individual level. By trying to rein in costs, decrease the powers of all governments, de-centralize the provision of services on a community level.
For a start, what's the point of having a municipality at all if all the important powers - in this case control of non-private land and what is done there - are denied it?
Local governments are far closer to the people, far more accountable and they get an earful in a way that provincial and federal politicians never do.
Why not hand over policing, road maintenance, garbage, recycling, education and such to local government? De-fang the big government beast...even the taxation necessary to pay for those services should be carried out by locally-accountable people.
Victoria, New Westminster and others all formerly paid for, hired and operated their own police forces. With a concurrent reduction in the provincial and federal powers of taxation, none of this need cost more, either.
(Personally, I would like to see the senior levels of government out of the "minimum wage" enforcement business too, so that all local services could be contracted out.)
But the main point that if local government had supremacy Kinder Morgan would be OUT of Burnaby altogether...
"http://pro.moneymappress.com/MMRBSLG39/PMMRQ967/?iris=252778&h=true"
If this CIA guy is right it is coming sooner than we think, Cocoabean that we have to become regionally and community independent and self sustaining.
And Alison it is the human tribe in this century is trying to throw off the human and corporate greed we as a species have never succeeded so far.
Let us hope for our grandchildren we succeed and you my friend are doing a wonderful did I say wonderful enough of informing the GP [General Populace with some humor and stuff thrown in, but that is your right and might may I say I congratulate you on your courage carry on…
From my heart to you, mogs.
Heart back atcha, Mogs, and thanks for yet another terrifying end of the world as we know it link!
Cocoabean : I would agree that localization of power and resources is both good and inevitable, but worry that further fragmentation of our sense of greater community in Canada as evidenced in law would likely encourage more damaging short-term interests to prevail locally.
If local government had supremacy, as you suggest in Burnaby, would they not be at a serious disadvantage against the third largest energy corporation in the world accompanied by, say, a private army?
Lorne, Mound : I'm probably leaving this note here too late for either of you to see it, but I notice we comment on each other's blogs more frequently now and I take this as a sign that at least among the few remaining frequent bloggers of whatever loose party inclinations, ideas have finally triumphed over ideology.
Alison hopefully the CIA guy is just another salesman and everything will continue on level?
But with out Harper...
"What's happened thus far is that apparently people have been arrested (on Burnaby Mountain) on the basis of an order that refers to some other piece of property," Judge Austin Cullen said, prompting laughs and jeers from the courtroom's crowded public gallery.
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