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Fringe Minority, Eh? TK Partners News2Share take a balanced look at the Canadian protests

In the above video, TK Partners News2Share do a fantastic job of doing what the conventional press mostly hasn’t done with the “Freedom Convoy” story, asking the right questions about who’s participating, what their concerns are, and how the event is being received on the ground.

As Ford Fischer demonstrates in his narration, the protesters are a mix of people who see themselves as politically liberal, and politically conservative. There are some whose objections seem to be purely about mandates. “I’m double-vaccinated,” says one speaker. “To think… I will show my papers to buy a sandwich? Hell, no!”

For others, the issue is the vaccine itself:

“They said, ‘Get your booster…’ If it doesn’t work once, it doesn’t work twice, maybe it’ll work the third time. You know who does that? Gamblers. People who play blackjack!”

The scenes outside the Super Bowl, meanwhile, look quite different. Although trucker protests have gathered steam in too many countries around the world to count by now, the U.S. version has so far failed to produce the large numbers Canadians have seen. The News2Share footage also shows a crowd that looks and sounds different from the ones in Ottawa.

Stories like the Freedom Convoy are exactly why we like the idea of having Ford and his shooters just let the cameras run for a while at heavily covered events. The idea is to let audiences watch longer pieces of footage with minimal contextualization, so they may draw their own conclusions. Hopefully, News2Share’s pictures from Ottawa and L.A. shed some light.

An earlier version of this story contained an extraneous quote at the bottom of the page. TK apologizes to readers, and to News2Share, for the error.

Protesting Permaculture: the last five weeks and the last five decades

November 29, 2021

Protesting Permaculture: the last five weeks and the last five decades

On Saturday 13th and 20th November, my partner Su Dennett and I joined others from central Victoria travelling by train to the “Kill the Bill”/anti-lockdown/anti-mandate protests in Melbourne. This essay documents the experience, and reflects on the relationship between permaculture and oppositional activism over more than 40 years.

David with his historic permaculture banner at the November 13 rally in Melbourne. Photo from Reignite Democracy website collection.

I also want to highlight the opportunities for permaculture activism in a time of a pandemic to help those in need who have the capacity and motivation to increase their personal, household and community autonomy, resilience and connection to nature. This should be independent of their beliefs, and certainly without the judgemental othering that has accelerated with Covid. In the process, I believe we will all learn to live more lightly on the earth in consideration of fair share and the future.

I was raised in a family at the front lines of the battle to “Stop the War” (in Vietnam). Consequently, as a primary school kid, I knew what it was like to be ostracised as a “commie traitor”. Later, I found my opinions progressively adopted as a symbol of the “generation gap,” also characterised by sex, drugs and rock and roll. If the war had lasted long enough, I knew I would face the prospect of going underground or burning my draft card and doing time.

David’s first demonstration (in pram) cropped from photo of Fremantle May Day march 1956 from Venie Holmgren’s ASIO file (released to public archives in 2016)

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Divestment Movement’s Big Month

November 17, 2021

The decades-long push to get large investment funds to pull their money from destructive oil, gas and coal has made several major leaps forward in the past month. One of the biggest occurred Oct. 18 when the Ford Foundation, a nonprofit built on profits from the combustion engine, announced it would divest its endowment from fossil fuel companies.

The foundation also promised to invest in renewable energy companies and funds that “address the threat of climate change and support the transition to a green economy.”

Fossil fuels represented a relatively small percentage of the Ford Foundation’s total investment portfolio, but even a fraction makes a huge difference when you’re worth $16 billion.

That’s a point activists and community organizers have been making with increasing regularity over the past decade. And their growing success shows that collective voices for change can make a difference.

“Most people don’t have an oil well in their backyard, but everyone lives near some pot of money,” says climate activist Bill McKibben. “And so the climate fight has come to college campuses, to church denominations, to union halls with pension funds. It’s made the abstract very real for millions of campaigners.”

McKibben first advocated for fossil-fuel divestment in 2012 as a way to “revoke the social license of the fossil fuel industry.”

Today that goal seems even more relevant.

A report from the World Meteorological Organization on Oct. 25 revealed that greenhouse gases hit an all-time high last year. This follows a report from the UN Environment Programme that found world governments still have plans to blow way past their Paris Climate Accord commitments and keep extracting fossil fuels —

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

A Surefire Cure For Despair

December 4, 2019

A Surefire Cure For Despair

“I can’t go on. I’ll go on.”
~ Samuel Beckett

Sometimes it just gets to be too goddamn much. You just finished a soul-draining argument with a family member who insists that Putin controls all major world events because that’s what the TV said so it must be true, then you check the poll numbers for the upcoming elections in the US and UK and you see your favorite candidates just don’t have the kind of numbers they’re going to need, the latest revelation that the US and its allies deceived the world about what’s happening in Syria has been completely swept under the rug by the establishment news churn, Bolivia has been taken over by US-backed Christian fascists, and now you’re watching Mike Pompeo’s stupid asshole face spouting some made-up bullshit about Iran that you know the news media will never hold him accountable for.

And it’s just too goddamn much.

To become oppositional to the status quo is to enter into a long-term relationship with despair. It’s not a monogamous relationship; you’ll have the occasional affair with anger, a fling with fear, a rendezvous with rage, and every once in a while even a brief tryst with triumph. But you always end up drunkenly stumbling home to bed with the old ball-and-chain despair.

Every time you think you might have the bastards on the ropes, every time you see a shining crack in the cage, a glowing glitch in the matrix, it’s quickly covered up by some gibberish about Russia or empty shrieking about Donald Trump, and then everyone’s herded along into the next authorised imperial narrative.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

There Are Things Worth Fighting For, And Fates Far Worse Than Death

November 6, 2019

There Are Things Worth Fighting For, And Fates Far Worse Than Death

Activism in the liberty movement often requires a painful examination of details. We look at political and economic trends, identify inconsistencies in the mainstream narrative, point out inevitable outcomes of disaster or attempts at collectivist power, and ask – “Who benefits?” Ultimately, the analysts and activists with any sense of observation come to the same conclusion: There is a contingent of financial elites embedded within the political world and the corporate world that have a specific ideology and malicious goals. They create most geopolitical and economic crisis events using puppets in government as well as influence in central banking. They then turn the consequences of these events to their advantage.

This group is identified by their intent as well as their associations. Their intent is utter dominance through globalism to the point that national borders are erased and all trade and governance flows through a single one-world edifice that they seek to control. As Richard N. Gardner, former deputy assistant Secretary of State for International Organizations under Kennedy and Johnson, and a member of the Trilateral Commission, wrote in the April, 1974 issue of the Council on Foreign Relation’s (CFR) journal Foreign Affairs (pg. 558) in an article titled ‘The Hard Road To World Order’:

“In short, the ‘house of world order’ will have to be built from the bottom up rather than from the top down. It will look like a great ‘booming, buzzing confusion,’ to use William James’ famous description of reality, but an end run around national sovereignty, eroding it piece by piece, will accomplish much more than the old-fashioned frontal assault.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

10 reasons the Gilets Jaunes are the real deal

February 11, 2019

10 reasons the Gilets Jaunes are the real deal

Image soiurce here.

We live in a world where democracy is a threat and freedom is a punishment, where you can’t tell a turd from a diamond, where 5G is trumpeted even as it threatens to kill us, where the prevailing ethos is buyer-beware and where anyone against warmongering and eternal war is smeared and painted as a monster.

Who do you believe? All the things you felt certain about Democracy, liberty, the right to free speech, television news, all these things are not only being undermined, in reality, they are being thrown in your face. Democracy in the Nazi-controlled Ukraine, moderate jihadi rebels, no democracy in Russia or Venezuela, despite the fingerprint tests on voters and the voting booth cameras, and this voice saying they’re fair elections and a dozen saying what about France isn’t that democracy and twenty other voices say they’re not and right-wing groups going off in the streets and chemicals in your food and forgetting to turn your wi-fi laden house on before you rush to another meeting or charge your phone, and, and…well…I got lost just writing it.

Keeping you busy, that’s what Neo-Liberalist empire does, and amidst it all, you’re meant to be an active citizen stuffed with social capital, capable of an opinion on any topic at the drop of the hat.

Ontological security, everybody needs it, but right now it’s in short supply especially in big metropolitan cities. No wonder people are confused and afraid, walking backwards into the future, stuck knee-deep in mud dreaming that somehow, through some miracle, everything will, “Please!”, return to normal.

So amidst this Tower of Babble, let’s resolve one conundrum for you.

Here are ten reasons the Gilets Jaunes (unlike US sponsored colour revolutions) are the real deal, by which I mean the direct expression of the people of France.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Yellow Vests Becoming World Wide Movement

January 4, 2019

Yellow Vests Becoming World Wide Movement

The Yellow Vest Movement that began in France, is spreading. It appeared also in Belgium and it spread to Canada as well. The French arrested the leaders of the Yellow Vest Movement calling them an anti-government charging them for organizing an unauthorized protest, as authorities adopt a tougher approach to try to curb the demonstrations. During the weekend of December 15th, mimicking the Yellow Vest movement in France, protests have formed all over Canada. These are peaceful protests, unlike in France, but they have continued every weekend in various cities such as Toronto, Halifax, Edmonton, Saskatoon, Calgary etc, especially in Alberta and Saskatchewan.

Alberta has long been known as the oil province of Canada and is highly commodity driven. With NDP (New Democratic Party) preventing the expansion of the TransMountain Pipeline
from Alberta’s Edmonton to BC’s Burnaby after the project has already been approved by the federal government back in 2013, many people are unemployed. With oil in Western Canada
(Western Canadian Select) hitting $11.43 a barrel in November, companies simply cannot afford to stay in business. Combining this with the announcement that the price of vegetables
increased 4%-6% as of January 1st, it’s no wonder that many Canadians are frustrated.

This is also apparent as Calgary voted a resounding NO on a bid for hosting the 2026 Winter Olympics on November 13th. An estimate of $5.11 billion was announced with additional extra
costs which were never disclosed, people voted no to the increase the taxation in order to pay for it. The wrong event at the wrong time and people simply can’t afford to foot the bill.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Why France’s Yellow Vest Protests Have Been Ignored by “the Resistance” in the U.S.

January 4, 2019

Why France’s Yellow Vest Protests Have Been Ignored by “the Resistance” in the U.S.

“”The rich are only defeated when running for their lives.”

— C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins

In less than two months, the yellow vests (“gilets jaunes”) movement in France has reshaped the political landscape in Europe. For a seventh straight week, demonstrations continued across the country even after concessions from a cowed President Emmanuel Macron while inspiring a wave of similar gatherings in neighboring states like Belgium and the Netherlands. Just as el-Sisi’s dictatorship banned the sale of high-visibility vests to prevent copycat rallies in Egypt, corporate media has predictably worked overtime trying to demonize the spontaneous and mostly leaderless working class movement in the hopes it will not spread elsewhere.

The media oligopoly initially attempted to ignore the insurrection altogether, but when forced to reckon with the yellow vests they maligned the incendiary marchers using horseshoe theory to suggest a confluence between far left and far right supporters of Jean-Luc Mélenchon and Marine Le Pen. To the surprise of no one, mainstream pundits have also stoked fears of ‘Russian interference’ behind the unrest. We can assume that if the safety vests were ready-made off the assembly line of NGOs like the raised fist flags of Serbia’s OTPOR! movement, the presstitutes would be telling a different story.

It turned out that a crisis was not averted but merely postponed when Macron defeated his demagogue opponent Le Pen in the 2017 French election. While it is true that the gilets jaunes were partly impelled by an increase on fuel prices, contrary to the prevailing narrative their official demands are not limited to a carbon tax. They also consist of explicit ultimatums to increase the minimum wage, improve the standard of living, and an end to austerity, among other legitimate grievances.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Courage Before Hope: A Proposal to Weave Emotional and Economic Microsolidarity

December 20, 2018

Courage Before Hope: A Proposal to Weave Emotional and Economic Microsolidarity

Or: What To Do in the Last Decade of the Anthropocene

I’ve spent most of the past 2 years travelling with my partner Nati, trying to discover what is the most strategic & wise action to take in a world that seems to be accelerating towards collapse. After an enormous amount of consideration, I have a strategy that feels good enough to engage my will and commitment. This document is a statement of intention. All going well, it’s where I want to invest my productive energy for the next 7 years or so.

I’m developing this plan in three phases:

Phase 1 is a lot of conversation and contemplation.
Phase 2 is this writing and re-writing process. Writing in public forces me to fill in the gaps in the argument, and to make my assumptions explicit.
Phase 3 is where you come in as a reader and collaborator. If you feel struck by this proposal, I’d love for you to improve my thinking with your feedback. The best possible response will be for other people to run related experiments in parallel.

The proposal is very simple. But this is, I hope, the simplicity on the far side of complexity. The design elements come from 7 years of thinking & doing in the Loomio Cooperative and Enspiral Network.

I intend to start a new community as a sibling or cousin of Enspiral: about 30 to 200 people supporting each other to do more meaningful work. Our method will focus on getting people into “crews”, small groups of 3-8 people that start with emotional intimacy and get to economic intimacy. There’s a sequence from psychological safety to shared ownership of productive assets. The larger community functions mostly as a dating pool for people to find their crew-mates.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Flight from Nature

December 20, 2018

The Flight from Nature

A couple of weeks ago one of my readers pointed me to an op-ed piece on climate change by Canadian journalist David Moscrop, titled “It’s time for climate change defeatists to get out of the way.” If you’ve watched the slow-motion train wreck of climate change activism for more than a year or two, you already know Moscrop’s song well enough to sing it in the shower, but I think the attitudes enshrined (or, better, embalmed) in this piece and its many equivalents are worth another look. There’s something moving down below the surface of the rhetoric; follow where it leads, and you come close to one of the deep roots of our present predicament.

Moscrop’s essay contains all the usual ingredients, and all the usual omissions, of a good standard tub-thumping climate change diatribe. He starts out sounding like a Puritan preacher—sinners in the hands of an angry Gaia!—but shifts almost at once to talking about feelings: his feelings, of course, and those of the people who agree with him. They’re anxious, he tells us. They’re grieving. They’re depressed. They’re despondent. And of course it’s all the fault of those horrible people over there, those “cowards or selfish monsters or wretched social liabilities willfully closed off to the reality of imminent doom,” who are deliberately keeping climate change activists from saving the world.

Then, of course, comes the call to arms—to “ignore, marginalize, and defeat” those horrible people over there. “That means protests,” he tells us. “That means lawsuits. That means trying to convince deniers or holdouts with our reasons. That means shouting them down at town halls if giving reasons fails.” It means, to be precise, exactly those things that climate change activists have been doing over and over again for the last twenty years, with a noticeable lack of success.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Extinction Rebellion’s Direct-Action Climate Activism Comes to New York

December 16, 2018

THE EXTINCTION REBELLION’S DIRECT-ACTION CLIMATE ACTIVISM COMES TO NEW YORK

THE NEW YORK CHAPTER of Extinction Rebellion held its first planning meeting on Thursday. Incensed and terrified by the accelerating climate crisis, activists gathered in Manhattan to discuss how they might replicate some of the successes the direct-action group has had in the United Kingdom.

In London, less than a month after Extinction Rebellion activists blocked roads, occupied bridges, lay down in the street and got arrested to draw immediate attention to the climate crisis, Mayor Sadiq Khan declared a climate emergency, vowing to do “everything in our power to mitigate the risk” of climate catastrophe. Coincidence? Greg Schwedock doesn’t think so.

“That was unthinkable before the Extinction Rebellion,” Schwedock told a standing room-only crowd gathered in a Manhattan co-working space on Thursday night. Dressed in office gear and “Rise and Resist” sweatshirts, accompanied by their children and at least one dog, the attendees came together with the hope that a New York chapter of the group might have similar success in sparking a response commensurate with the dire crisis.

“Getting a million people to D.C. isn’t enough. We need to escalate,” said Schwedock, who emphasized that the group will take the path of disruptive, attention-grabbing civil disobedience, rather than just marching and chanting about the importance of climate change. “We’re not the ‘Extinction Yell About It.’”

The explosive growth of the Extinction Rebellion — which began in England with the support of a group of academics just a few months ago and already has 190 affiliates on five continents — is fueled by the ballooning ranks of people around the world who are frustrated, alarmed, and depressed by the failure to tackle the accelerating climate disaster.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Six Recent US Antiwar Demonstrations Your Rulers Don’t Want You Talking About

November 14, 2018

Six Recent US Antiwar Demonstrations Your Rulers Don’t Want You Talking About

A friend told me yesterday that he hadn’t seen an antiwar protest in America in ten years. It was a sincere comment; he genuinely hadn’t seen any coverage on any peace activism in his country during that time. And of course he hadn’t; it is mainstream media’s job to distort public narratives in favor of the war-hungry plutocratic class which owns the media outlets. But I’ve actually been noticing a lot of antiwar activism lately which, while often far from the spotlight of mass media attention, has given me much hope for the future.

It is true there was a noticeable lull in vocal demonstrations against military violence since George W Bush left office, largely due to mainstream US partisan dynamics. Mainstream liberals supported Obama, so they avoided bringing attention to his continuation of Bush’s policies of mass murder, while mainstream conservatives ignored the Obama administration’s violence since they focused on attacking him as a weakling and a terrorist sympathizer, and of course had no ground to stand on for any criticisms of warmongering after supporting eight years of Bush. Some antiwar activism did happen in the US during that time, but not much.

And, bizarrely, we’ve seen a mutation of this trend continue well into the Trump administration, with mainstream liberals herded into holding demonstrations in support of the empty Russiagate conspiracy theory. The mass media-endorsed collusion narrative has fed into an anti-Russia hysteria among Democratic Party loyalists that has been used to manufacture support for dangerous cold war escalations and an obscenely bloated military budget, while any objection to Trump’s warmongeringand advancement of longstanding neoconservative agendas has been intentionally lost in the shuffle.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Ghosts of Past Political Failures Haunt Environmental Challenges

November 14, 2018

The Ghosts of Past Political Failures Haunt Environmental Challenges

We will not solve climate change and other pressing global threats until we admit, and learn from, the repeated failures of past proclamations and promises.

The general public, the American news magazine proclaims in its cover story, ‘The ravaged environment’, ‘has been seized with such anger and alarm as to goad political leaders into proclaiming conservation of the environment the chief task of this decade’. The US president is quoted as saying this must be the decade ‘when America pays its debt to the past by reclaiming the purity of its air, its water and our living environment. It is literally now or never.’

At last! But wait. When was this? The president is obviously not Donald Trump. Perhaps Barack Obama? No, it was Richard Nixon, the date was 26 January, 1970, and the magazine was Newsweek.

It is barely stretching the truth to say that since the 1960s, we have declared each decade as the time for decisive action on the environment, and as each decade passes, we postpone the deadline another ten years. Now, as we near the end of the 2010s without the necessary action having been taken, the 2020s are shaping up to be the critical decade.

In the same year – 1992 – that I cited the Newsweek article in an essay for the Australian Commission for the Future (to make a similar point to that here), more than 1700 independent scientists issued a warning to humanity that environmental destruction required a great change in its stewardship of the Earth if ‘vast human misery’ was to be avoided. Last year, on the 25th anniversary of that warning, more than 15,000 scientists signed a ‘second notice’ warning that with the exception of stabilising the stratospheric ozone layer, humanity has failed to make sufficient progress in solving environmental challenges, and ‘alarmingly, most of them are getting far worse’.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

What Else You Can Do

November 7, 2018

What Else You Can Do

You’ve been radically misled to believe that the only thing, or the most important thing, or one of the super important things you can do is vote. Voting in a functioning democracy would be a fairly important thing to do, but wouldn’t somehow eliminate the thousands of important things that would also need doing. Voting in a broken democracy is a mildly important thing to do, for the reasons you know by heart, but also for this reason: Seeing so many people so eager to do something alerts everyone else to the fact that you give a damn.

“I’ve been waiting two years to do something!” This remark, common on Tuesday, must sound joyous to many ears. But if you study history and notice that change comes primarily from organizing, educating, protesting, marching, disrupting, disobeying, and creating things anew, and if you’ve spent the past many years trying to get more people to do those things, then all the “All I can do is vote, oh helpless me” comments may have you pulling your hair out.

There are circumstances in which you can do very little. We are moving in that direction. But we are not there. We are still able to speak, write, assemble, and agitate — and vote. I have to think that more of us would do more if we recognized the gravity of the situation. The planet’s climate can no longer be saved, but the agony can be slowed and eased. Nuclear apocalypse is closer than ever before, but can be averted. Fascism can be undone, but not without actions that extend far beyond voting.

I’m not against elections.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

UK scientists risk prison to urge action

November 1, 2018

UK scientists risk prison to urge action

Orangutans are among the most endangered ape species. Image by Erik-Jan Leusink on Unsplash

A group of British scientists and their supporters is willing to risk a prison term to press governments to tackle climate change and environmental crisis.

LONDON, 31 October, 2018 − A growing number of British academics, writers and activists say they are ready to go to prison in support of their demands for action on the environment.

Scientists are not normally renowned for their political activism, and the UK is hardly a hotbed of determined and risky protest against its rulers. But, if this group of nearly 100 British scientists and their backers is right, all that may be on the brink of changing.

Today sees the launch of ExtinctionRebellion, which describes itself as an international movement using mass civil disobedience to force governments to enter World War Two-level mobilisation mode, in response to climate breakdown and ecological crisis.

The group is launching a Declaration of Rebellion against the UK government “for criminal inaction in the face of climate change catastrophe and ecological collapse” at the Houses of Parliament in central London.

“We need ExtinctionRebellion as part of the mosaic of responses to the extremely precarious situation we now find ourselves in”

From today it promises “repeated acts of disruptive, non-violent civil disobedience” if the government does not respond seriously to its demands, and says “there will be mass arrests.”

“Now is the time because we are out of time. There is nothing left to lose.”

The group’s demands include the declaration by the UK government of a state of emergency, action to create a zero carbon economy by 2025, and the establishment of a national assembly of “ordinary people” to decide what the zero carbon future will look like.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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