httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Heb9BXjYcII
Police charge at peaceful G20 demonstrators singing “O Canada”
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Category Archives: Current Events
Quote of the Day
“Prime Minister Stephen Harper has hailed an agreement among G20 leaders at the close of their Toronto summit on a Canadian-led plan for industrialized nations to slash their deficits in half within three years.” CBC News
Paul Krugmam, on the other hand, warns that the lack of stimulus spending may mean a Third Depression.
There’s a very notable precedent from 1937-38: President Roosevelt was convinced by conservatives to rein in New Deal spending before the economy had fully recovered, which caused a second serious recessionary dip.
Meanwhile, if Harper is boasting about this, then he owns it. But be aware that the Americans explicitly warned of the likelihood of a double-dip recession by this route.
However, you may take comfort knowing that the wealthiest percentile of the population — including the masters of the universe responsible for the collapse of the financial markets two years ago — will be just fine. No penalties. No new taxes. No, the cost of their folly is being fully loaded off onto the millions upon millions of innocent bystanders who’ve already been looted. Now, thanks to deficit-slashing, we can expect extensive cutbacks in social spending — health care, education, unemployment benefits — as further punishment for our woes.
And it’s a Canadian initiative, as Harper goes out of his way to remind us.
Judy Rebick: Police Stood By While Black Bloc Smashed Windows
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7iaG1H0pDxY
After the jump, some unfortunately very shaky amateur video confirming what Rebick says.
Was the “Miami Model” Used in Toronto?
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6h3nCoNvldk
Police surround and then attack peaceful protesters in Toronto. In just about every video like this I’ve seen, they very quickly target people filming the event.
Catherine Porter of the Toronto Star explains.
Frye on police power:
But in an atmosphere of real fear and real suspicion the police must become both more efficient and more tolerant if they are to be of any use in defending democracy. Otherwise, they will be not only unjust to individuals, but dangerous to their own community. (Canadian Forum 29, no. 346 [November 1949]: 170)
Were the Violence and/or the Arrests Staged? [Updated Again]
June 26, 2010 A protester is overcome by the smoke after attempting to put out a fire in a police car at Queen Street West near Spadina during a protest of G20 Summit are held in Toronto. TORONTO STAR/STEVE RUSSELL
Eyewitness reports are circulating that, first, riot police allowed about 50 to 100 Black Bloc protesters to run amok in downtown Toronto for two full hours, even leaving three police cruisers abandoned at different locations to be torched; and, second, they then used the violence as a pretext to arrest hundreds of peaceful protesters and to deny them access to legal counsel. In other words, vandals were left to smash windows and torch police cars and the violence was then associated with those who had been peacefully protesting.
Judy Rebick’s roundup of eyewitness accounts here.
Video of riot police charging a peaceful crowd singing the national anthem here.
New York Times story here.
Village Voice story here.
Steve Paikin of TVO was witness to some of this and will apparently talk about it on his show tonight at 8, according to a recent tweet from him.
A collection of Paikin’s tweets on police brutality upon peaceful protesters and a journalist from The Guardian here.
Given that police provocateurs have been caught out before disguised as “anarchists,” it raises the question: Did anything like this happen here?
Stories providing a history of police agents passing themselves off as Black Bloc here, here and here.
Quote of the Day
Matt Taibbi on David Brooks on Michael Hastings on General Stanley McChrystal:
” . . . . Brooks drags us all to the same dreary place that every conservative columnist eventually goes to in these discussions of sourcing and secrecy and attribution. He regurgitates the tired idea that the press lost its sense of patriotism after Vietnam and Watergate and began reflexively searching for political scalps with gotcha headlines – instead of working collegially with power to sift through the “kvetching” to sit on embarrassing but irrelevant stuff while revealing to the public the few truths it needed to know. Here’s how Brooks put it:
Then, after Vietnam, an ethos of exposure swept the culture. The assumption among many journalists was that the establishment may seem upstanding, but there is a secret corruption deep down. It became the task of journalism to expose the underbelly of public life, to hunt for impurity, assuming that the dark hidden lives of public officials were more important than the official performances.
This is a load of crap. It’s bad even by Brooks standards.
Yeah, we have a press corps that goes after “impurities” these days, but you know what kind of impurities they’re after? They’re after Monica Lewinsky’s dress, they’re after gay blowjobs in train stations, they’re after governors who like high-priced escorts and televangelists who like to do meth with male escorts. And yes, they go after that stuff with an Inquisition-like intensity nowadays, but that has nothing to do with Watergate and Vietnam and everything to do with the media business turning into a nihilistic for-profit industry every bit as amoral and bloodless as oil or banking or big tobacco.”
“Lesbians Who Look Like Justin Bieber”
It’s Gay Pride Week and Canada Day’s coming up, so what better time to draw your attention to the website, Lesbians Who Look Like Justin Bieber — which, the site itself explains, “is EXACTLY what it sounds like.” Lesbians who look like Justin Bieber, by the way, are called “biebians.”
Sun TV News: What We Know (Updated with Further Detail)
Clockwise from upper left: Mulroney, Peladeau, Teneycke, Harper
What we know is not promising.
Former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, who lied about his business dealings with convicted influence-peddler Karlheinz Schrieber, who took $300,000 in cash from Schrieber without declaring it, and who then demanded 2.1 million tax-payer dollars in compensation for a slander now known not to be slander, is on the board of directors of the Sun News parent company, Quebecor. More recently, Mulroney has also improperly lobbied cabinet ministers on behalf of Quebecor.
Pierre Peladeau, CEO of Quebecor, is an “ultra-conservative” whose Sun News division is in the doldrums and hasn’t turned a profit for some time. He is attempting to have the CRTC convert his money-losing Sun TV of Toronto into a Category 1 — or “must carry” — cable news station, which means that cable service providers across the country must make it available to subscribers and to pay for it even if they don’t want it and their subscribers don’t watch it. In other words, Peladeau wants to turn his unprofitable news division into a cash cow by way of a right wing news channel for which there is no demonstrable demand and whose income is guaranteed to the tune of tens of millions of dollars a year from cable subscribers who may want nothing to do with it.
Stephen Harper is apparently in on the scheme. We know that he secretly met with Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes in March 2009 and that he subsequently met with Peladeau, who’s also had access to at least three other high ranking cabinet ministers. This fact alone is staggering in its implications. A sitting prime minister evidently using his position to facilitate the creation of a right wing news channel to serve as the propaganda arm of his government — and do so, moreover, at public expense. Are there even words to describe this? Perhaps one: Cheney-esque.
Kory Teneycke, former communications director for Stephen Harper, is now vice president of development for Quebecor Media. Teneycke was also present at the March 2009 meeting of Harper with Murdoch and Ailes. This completes the circle. Teneycke is . . . Well, just consider these remarks on his Facebook page, as reported by Bruce Cheadle of the Canadian Press:
He lauds Glenn Beck, Fox’s anti-government conspiracy theorist, and makes note of a National Enquirer headline about “Obama Cheating Scandal.”
“The Enquirer has a remarkably strong track record on these stories of late… Tiger Woods and John Edwards. We shall see …” writes Teneycke.
And his edgy, controversial humour shines through: “To the pot heads who keep sending me crazy, profane emails: I hope (imprisoned pot activist) Marc Emery enjoys group showers as much as he enjoys pot. Three cheers for the DEA.”
Wow. “Lauds Glenn Beck,” promotes an “Obama Cheating Scandal” from the National Enquirer, and — in a particularly crude and mean-spirited comment — says of Canadian Marc Emery, now in U.S. custody, “I hope he enjoys group showers.” Geez, I wonder what that’s code for? This is a man with a lot of power and money and influence. This is how he talks about fellow citizens who have nothing like his advantages? Disgusting. (Note that Emery paid both provincial and federal taxes on his marijuana seed business totalling $600,000 before the Harper government turned him over to the DEA in May.)
Finally, Teneycke is now claiming that the association of Sun TV News with Fox News is just “critics throwing stones.” That’s a bald-faced lie. Teneycke himself has apparently been saying for years that Canada needs a Fox News, a sentiment that has been echoed up and down the line by other conservatives. Senior Sun News columnist Peter Worthington recently drew the same analogy between Sun TV News and Fox News. Sun TV News is to be Canada’s Fox News, and that’s evidently been the plan of all of these players all along.
If you haven’t already done so, take a look these two articles, here and here.
Video of the Day
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2EXDmnNPw0
The recently applied cap on the Deepwater Horizon leak was removed yesterday, releasing oil into the Gulf at an even faster rate.
[Update] The cap was replaced today, but not before an estimated further million gallons of crude gushed into the Gulf.
Peter Worthington on Sun/Fox News
The Dean of Sun News reporters, Peter Worthington of the Toronto Sun, cites Fox News as the template for Sun TV News. He’s presumably not one of the “critics thowing stones” that Kory Tenyecke complains about. As reported by the Canadian Press:
Peter Worthington, writing in The Sun, part of the Quebecor Media empire, welcomed the Canadianized Fox News channel. “Unless one views Americans as mostly mindless, rightwing nutbars, since around 2002 Fox News has dominated rival channels and has earned the title ‘Fair and Balanced’ that once went to CNN,” he said.