The tie that binds: Kinder Morgan and Justice K.M. Affleck

And just what is this tie that binds Justice K.M. Affleck and Kinder Morgan?  Why, the injunction, of course.  Like the one Justice Affleck handed out to Kinder Morgan on March 14, 2018 in order to shoo citizens away from protesting the trans-mountain pipeline on Burnaby Mountain.

‘On Burnaby Mountain’ has a musical ring to it.  It sounds like the title of a bitter- sweet country song.  But in reality what is happening there is just all bitter.  When the protesters gather there to try to protect the mountain they are handed Justice Affleck’s injunction.   This piece of paper annuls the protester’s right to freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of equality under the law and the right to a fair trial.  All of this just in one or two pieces of paper?  This bit of paper being handed to an unknowing protester is capable of destroying all of the legal rights due every citizen under Canadian law?  Absolutely.  That’s why Justice Affleck and most of his brothers (that’s what judges call each other: brothers) issued the injunction in the first place.   To make the citizen protester helpless before the court.

Why do the BC judges do this?  To protect corporations from the anger of citizens who want the destruction of our earth and waters stopped. There is no other reason.  Justice Affleck did not have to give out the injunction to Kinder Morgan.  He could simply have told Kinder Morgan that if protesters were bothering their operation to call the police or the RCMP.  The police would then come, arrest the protesters, stand them before a judge, and a date would be set for their trial.  As the citizen protesters have obviously committed some kind of an infraction of the law, which is coded in the criminal code, as all legal infractions are, the citizen protester is afforded his and her legal rights under the law of the land.  But no.  Environmental protesters are placed into a special category, one that requires that all their legal rights be suspended.  This is the secret, unspoken agreement between our BC judges and corporations who claim and are granted, more rights than real citizens.

I would say to the protesters, yes, continue with the protests on the mountain but send some of the protesters into the city.  Why the city?  Because that’s where the judges are giving out these injunctions.  The justices of British Columbia should be picketed.  In front of the Supreme Court of British Columbia in Vancouver.  A protest line there would be fruitful.  It is judges like Justice Affleck who unfailing serve their unspoken alliance with the corporations.  Instead of telling corporations to call the police when annoyed by citizens, they give out injunctions.  This makes protesting citizens legally trapped and helpless before the court, instead of confident of their rights under the constitution and the criminal code as all other citizens are.   And this is the main reason, in my opinion, that is hastening the environmental destruction of BC land and waters. And where is our honourable David Eby, the Attorney General, on this?  Next time.

When Smoke Gets in Your Eyes

 

Don’t like it?  It’s at dangerous levels?  The smoke of burning wildfires is being brought to you courtesy of the BC justice system.  What a stupid thing to say, you might respond, if anything, it’s brought to us because something is wrong with logging practices coupled with climate change. Yes, those reasons, too.  Climate change is upon us and the frantic clear-cutting of public forests has created their own micro climates of tinder-dry forests and tree farms. The refusal by logging companies to clear out brush on their licenses by  employing systematic controlled burns ( as BC Indigenous Peoples did) certainly contributes to climate change and to the smoke from the burning untended forests we are currently experiencing. 

Another contribution to the wildfires in my opinion was the destruction of an early, active and effective environmental movement by grassroots people in BC (think Clayoquot) by an elitist take over by “professionals”.  The elitist leaders made a devil’s bargain with the BC government that if the government would preserve a large swath of land called the Great Bear Rainforest (and to be fair, it is a large swath of land) there would be no more “wars in the woods”.  In other words, give us this and you can do whatever you like to the rest of BC public forests. The result is the smoke and ash we are now all swallowing and coughing up.  But to the main point.

 

The crucial point is the legal framework that has allowed all of this environmental damage to happen. It is the complicity of the BC court system, including the Attorney Generals and the Crown, but specifically the BC judges who are supposed to serve us.  If these BC legal entities weren’t colluding with the logging corporations everybody (young and old alike) who could, would be outside these last days of August enjoying the sunshine and fresh air. This court collusion is so obvious and so predictable that I unabashedly call it corruption.  I am not accusing the justices of taking bribes from the logging companies, but honestly, the way the judges unfailingly serve the logging corporations they may as well be taking bribes.  They protect the corporations from the people by denying the people free speech, free association and fair trials for the ones who protest the destruction of our land.  How do they do this?  By giving out injunctions to any logging corporation who asks for one.  And it is these injunctions that prevent protesters from ever getting a fair trial.

These injunctions make the protester guilty of disobeying a court order (Contempt of Court) instead of being able to bring a defense of why they did what they did. The judges will only consider whether or not a judge’s order was disobeyed.  That’s it.  The judges don’t give a tinker’s dam about any protester’s reasons.  The irony is that the judges don’t have to give out the injunctions in the first place.  They have a choice of which legal process to apply, arrest by injunction, or arrest by the Criminal Code.  Of course they chose the injunction route in order to satisfy their CEO friends, and not the people.  The police in all other situations apply the Criminal Code and are supposed to take care of people who are causing a commotion and then it is simply a police matter. The people causing a commotion would be arrested and brought to trial.  But this would be a real trial and an accused’s reasons, under the law, must be listened to.

But BC judges friendly relations with CEO’s of corporations are more important to them than justice, or even whether or not our province burns to a cinder.  BC judges and attorney generals must be exposed for their corrupt use of injunctions or that is exactly what will eventually happen to this province.

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Libya, Petro dollar and Canada

 

What relevance does Libya have for us Canadians at the moment?  Libya is old news.  Yes, old fake news. At least the reasons we were given for the invasion of Libya were fake. We were told that Muammar Gaddafi was a vicious dictator who was massacring his own people as he cared nothing for them, and needed to be stopped on humanitarian grounds.  The troika to the rescue!

 

The troika is composed of the US, NATO and the EU (and their banks). It was a moment of regime change for them. Nothing else would do. Never mind that it was under Gaddafi’s leadership (for 41 years) that Libya came to be considered the most prosperous state in Africa, and the most liberal. Gaddafi shared the oil revenues of his country with his people. Libya had free education (through university), free universal health care, encouraged women’s rights, considered housing an absolute right and had free electricity for all. Does that sound like he didn’t care for his people? But it wasn’t these progressive things that twisted the guts of the Troika. It was the gold and silver Libya held in its treasury. Nestling there was 144 tons of gold and a similar amount of silver. I wonder what happened to all that gold and silver after Libya was sacked.  Does anybody know or has it just disappeared like various huge amounts of cash just vanish between US military contractors?

 

Never mind.  Let’s stick to our subject. Which was Libyan gold and silver. The gold amount was half of what the UK possesses.  However, Libya was 1/10 of the population.  And besides nationalizing the oil industry, Gaddafi was in the process of uniting other African countries with a plan to switch from using the Petro dollar to using their own gold backed currency to be called the gold African dinar.  So of course this had to be stopped.  Regime change was it.  War was it.  Whatever it took to keep the Petro dollar safe.

 

We are still at war with any country that tries to ditch the Petro dollar.  And we are fed the same idiot reasons for these wars.  Venezuela?  We are told it’s a rotten country, kills it people, and the government has to be taken out on humanitarian grounds. We are to  Ignore the reports of Nicolas Maduro trying desperately to lift his poor out of poverty, of trying to provide education and health care for everyone, of trying to create jobs in the face of the racist, sexist, raw super capitalist opposition of the troika. And this same mind set is behind the present non-stop dangerous, disgusting verbiage against Russia, Iran and China by the troika press. These three countries are in the midst of not just talking about ditching the Petro dollar, but are in the process of doing it.  The US led troika wants to start bombing them but has to be a little more careful about regime change.  And unless we Canadians feel smug, still lingering under some kind of an illusion about being peace keepers, Canadians were part of the first bombing missions over Libya.  More next time.

Iraq, 9/11 and the Petro dollar

To continue following the increasingly bloody footsteps of the US imposed Petro dollar… 

 

It was shortly after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait that UN sanctions were first imposed on Iraq (1990).  There is a story line, developed from Wikileaks releases, that the US tacitly gave US approval to Saddam Hussein to invade Kuwait, or at least didn’t object to it.  Whatever, the invasion commenced.  It proved to be an incredibly stupid mistake for Iraq. Iraq lost. The war itself led to crippling sanctions, public malnutrition leading to many deaths of Iraqi children and the dismantling of the prior most progressive state in the Middle East. 

 

Iraq?  Progressive?  That poor country that was being guided at the time by a depraved monster of evil, Saddam Hussein, who deliberately killed his own people and held weapons of mass destruction that directly threatened the American state?  That’s what we were told.  But it is known, albeit little reported, that prior to the invasion of Kuwait and the resulting sanctions, Iraq was truly a model of progression.  Iraq offered its citizens free education up to and including university, universal health care, support for soldier’s families, subsidies for farmers, encouragement for women to run for public office and generous maternity leave for working women, etc.   Iraq, in fact, was a modern, secular state.  Until their invasion of Kuwait.  The issuing sanctions pushed Saddam to ditch the US dollar in favor of using Euros for oil trade so he would not have to buy US bonds in return that his country couldn’t afford.  Which sealed his fate.  9/11 was the excuse the US needed to destroy this direct challenge to the Petro dollar that could bankrupt the US economy. Iraq had to be destroyed first.

 

Only a fear of their own US economic harm could have justified the US invasion (in their minds) of a small country on the other side of the world that had absolutely nothing to do with 9/11 and had no weapons of mass destruction. What other Iraqi crime could have been committed that had to be paid for by the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children?  What could have been worth the sinking of US governance to the depths of utter depravity in order to offer up the collective, degrading, and most disgusting of lies told to the American body politic for the absolute need for the Iraqi invasion? The US government knew Iraq held no weapons of mass destruction and had nothing to do with 9/11.  But what Iraq had done to strike fear in the collective hearts of the US elite was to announce they were ditching the Petro dollar in favor of the Euro. The Iraqis insisted they could not afford to have their oil money eaten up by having to buy US bonds for the privilege of trading. They understood that when any country buys US bonds they are actually buying a piece of a massive US debt. This debt will eat up any marginal interest US bonds might eventually accrue (inflation) so why would anybody buy US bonds if they weren’t forced to?  Like Iraq, Libya tried to resist this US Petro dollar choke hold with equally devastating results.  Next time.